The other night I attended a Corpus Christi celebration in Parque Calderon, Cuenca’s central square. Mostly this celebration involved quasi-official-looking Ecuadorian men setting off HUGE amounts of fireworks (and often lighting them with their smoldering cigarettes).
Specifically, a 40-foot-tall, steel-framed cross was decorated and adorned with various fireworks–spinners, shooters, you name it. Said fireworks were then ignited and proceeded to shoot out from the cross and into the blue-black night sky–but often, they headed downward, into the several-thousand-strong crowd (of which I was one) which had gathered near the structure’s base.
At one point, a man holding a newborn was brained with a bottlerocket. (And Ecuadorian bottlerockets, you should know, are big and bad and potent and extremely unpredictable.) A few particularly menacing eruptions were met with near-riotous crowds of people fleeing in the opposite direction.
The highlight of the show, though, came when an errant bottlerocket careened off course and broadsided the top of a magnificent palm tree. The dry leaves, within minutes, had burst into flame.
Shouts to call the “bomberos” (firemen) could be heard emanating from the crowd. And soon, Cuenca’s finest volunteer squadron was on the scene; they’d unfurled their hose and quashed the conflagration before you could say Dios Mio! And during the time they were attending to the scorched palm tree, I’m happy to say the fireworks continuted to be set off all around them. And the bomberos didn’t care.
The Ecuadorian approach to public safety amounts to this: it’s every man for himself. Don’t wanna get brained with a bottlerocket? Then don’t stand too close to the fireworks, idiota.