I live in Indiana, where there are no volcanoes. We have woods and cornfields and adorable squirrels, but no volcanic eruptions. I appreciate Indiana’s peaceful predictability. The weather can be nasty and tornadoes blow through occasionally, but ash and brimstone are pretty rare.

A few days ago, I spent a moment of my tranquil Indiana life trying to think of past adventures to write about for this blog. I have previously shared anecdotes of memorable moments in my life: tales of awkward kisses and severed human arms and Giant Mutant Killer Jungle Ants. (All of these anecdotes, I assure my readers, are true.) Heck, my very first post for this blog was the story of That Time I Was Attacked by a Tomato.

I was beginning to worry I had run out of interesting anecdotes for this blog—and then I remembered all the times those freaking volcanoes went off when I was a kid.

Guagua Pichincha, 1999

The Andes Mountains run right down the middle of Ecuador, dividing my homeland neatly in two. The Andes are full of volcanoes. These have a disquieting tendency to go off like bombs, showering cities in ash.

Pictured above is the Pichincha Volcano, which erupted in 1999 and blanketed Quito, Ecuador’s capital, in ash. My older brother lived in Quito at the time, and he told me all about it when he came home to visit. I lived with my family in Santo Domingo de los Colorados, hours away from Quito, and thus missed all the excitement.

We would later climb one of Pichincha’s peaks, Rucu, on several occasions. Guagua, not Rucu, is the active peak of the volcano; consequently, we never witnessed any volcanic activity during our climbs.

Climbing Rucu, back when I was a pudgy teenager.

In later years, when I lived in Quito, I survived two or three volcanic eruptions. We were too far from the volcano to see fire or sprays of lava, but we saw plenty of ash. Dash it all, did we see plenty of ash.

As a kid, I never got snow days. Snow hardly ever falls in Quito, and certainly never enough for school to be canceled. No, I got volcano days: weekdays when mounds of soft, powdery volcanic ash blocked the roads and shut down the schools. During the 1999 eruption, my brother and other Quito residents wore dust masks to keep the ash out of their lungs.

My memory is a sketchy thing at the best of times, and I don’t remember which volcanoes erupted when I lived in Quito. (Full disclosure: It took a bit of research to figure out whether the big eruption I remembered from 1999 came from Guagua Pichincha or Tungurahua.) The last eruption I recall happened when I was in seventh or eighth grade; my high school years were uninterrupted by clouds of volcanic ash.

Now that I live in Indiana, the most exciting disaster to strike is a tornado or a blizzard.

Not that I’m complaining, mind!

I’m running out of That Time I _____ posts, which is why this blog hasn’t had one since August. I don’t allow myself to make up any of these stories, so they’re in limited supply.

Since I settled last year in small-town Indiana, it has gradually dawned upon me that I probably won’t get mugged if I go out at night. Years of living in Ecuador conditioned me to be cautious. After dark, the streets in cities like Quito are not exactly the safest place.

I once fell prey to a band of thieves on the streets at night, and it was rather a dull business.

Honestly, I’m not sure whether to be disappointed or thankful the incident wasn’t more exciting. There were no knives, guns, blackjacks, nunchakus or venomous snakes. As I strolled along a sidewalk in Quito, three or four hoodlums descended upon me, ripped a silver chain off my neck and snatched some items out of my backpack.

With tremendous sagacity and presence of mind, I skedaddled.

I hailed a taxi once the thieves were out of sight. Now there’s something I need to make clear. Taxi drivers, known as taxistas in Ecuador, sometimes swindle their passengers by charging too high a fee—especially if their passengers are gringos. (There is a widespread and decidedly false notion in parts of Ecuador that all gringos are wealthy.) The best way to avoid being swindled is to keep an eye on the taximetro, or taximeter, making sure the taxista turns it on and charges not a cent more than it indicates.

Well, I was too flustered after being robbed to check the taximetro. I hopped blithely into the taxi, gave the taxista directions and sat in stunned silence. When the taxi stopped just a few minutes later, the taxista demanded five dollars.

This was ridiculous. Taxis are pretty inexpensive in Ecuador—they’re used mostly by people too poor to buy cars—and we hadn’t spent even five minutes driving.

I objected. The taxista repeated his demand. I played my trump card and threatened to summon a policeman. The taxista made a reply I’ve forgotten, but the gist was something like “Bring it!”

Tired, angry and desperate to get home, I paid the taxista. I was twice a victim of robbery that night, but it didn’t matter. I was home.

Looking back, I have to admire that taxista. Any petty criminal can snatch a necklace or a bag. It takes an artist to persuade the victim to surrender his money.

These days, I don’t worry much about getting robbed on the streets. My town seems to be populated mostly by Amish, squirrels and senior citizens, so muggings are rare.

In the jungles of Ecuador there exist enormous ants called congas. Their scientific name is Paraponera clavata, but I prefer to call them Giant Mutant Killer Jungle Ants.

These insects put the ant in giant. Not only are they freakishly large—about an inch long—but also very dangerous.

Here’s an extract from Wikipedia:

Paraponera is a genus of ant consisting of a single species, commonly known as the lesser giant hunting ant, conga ant, or bullet ant (Paraponera clavata), named on account of its powerful and potent sting, which is said to be as painful as being shot with a bullet. It inhabits humid lowland rainforests from Nicaragua south to Paraguay. The bullet ant is called “Hormiga Veinticuatro” or “24 (hour) ant” by the locals, referring to the 24 hours of pain that follow being stung.

My old man tells me congas bite their victims to secure a firm hold before stinging, and their sting can put a strong man in bed with a fever for as much as a few days.

To wit: nasty little beasts, those congas.

There’s a river in Ecuador called Río Baba: a ribbon of crystal-clear water that winds its way through the jungle. Translated from Spanish, Río Baba means Drool River. Why anyone would give it such a nasty name, I can’t fathom. At the age of nine or ten, I was baptized in this river of tranquil beauty and dubious name.

Río Baba was also the setting of my epic escape from the Giant Mutant Killer Jungle Ant.

Santo Domingo de los Colorados, the town in which I spent much of my childhood, is just a few hours away from Río Baba. My family and I sometimes visited the river for picnics, camping trips and church events.

The river runs beneath a high, steep bank, at the top of which stands a tree with spreading branches. At that point the water is only three or four feet deep. I used to wade near the riverbank, pretending to be a jungle explorer or picking up rocks and throwing them.

On one memorable occasion, as I was playing in the clear water beneath the tree, I felt a prickling on my right shoulder. I turned my head and found myself nose-to-nose with a conga.

At the time, oblivious to the ant’s sinister intent, I brushed it off my shoulder, picked it up from the surface of the water with a leaf and carried it to my old man for his inspection.

I don’t remember whether he swatted the leaf out of my hand or merely commanded me to drop it. Either way, the leaf fell to the ground—the conga holding on for dear life—and I was spared a fate worse than death.

Well, worse than death is a bit melodramatic. Being stung would have been painful, but not as bad as, say, reading Twilight cover to cover.

My old man put the conga in an empty soda bottle and later reprimanded me sternly when I tried to get a close look at it. When we got home, he drowned the ant in alcohol and pinned it to a piece of foam.

The conga was eventually given away to some missionary colleagues, and I was left with only the memory of my dangerous encounter with the Giant Mutant Killer Jungle Ant.

I was spared the pain of a conga sting. However, I did read Twilight a couple of years ago, so I guess the two experiences sort of cancel each other out.