As a Lake Dies, a Way of Life Vanishes, Too
karachi, a gray fish that looked like a sardine, or pejerrey, which had big scales and grew as long as Mr. Quispe’s arm.
Some wives worked alongside their husbands, to pull the nets and do the cooking.
Fishing season began with a ritual called the Remembering. The Quispe brothers were among about 40 Llapallapani men who would pass a long night chewing coca leaf and drinking liquor.
“That night, we would ask for a safe journey, that there would be little wind, that there wouldn’t be so much rain,” Mr. Quispe, 42, said. “We remembered all night, and we chewed our coca.”
In the morning, they would toss sweets from the boat as a religious offering. Fishing season had begun.
Milton Pérez, an ecologist at Oruro Technical University, said scientists had known for decades that Lake Poopó, which sits at 3,700 meters with few sources of water, fit the profile of a dying lake. But the prognosis was in centuries, not years. “We accepted the lake was going to die someday,” Mr. Pérez said. “Now wasn’t its time.”
Lake Poopó is one of several lakes worldwide that are vanishing because of human causes. Lakes in Canada and Mongolia are jeopardized by rising temperatures.
The Uru passed down knowledge about living on and around the lake. Black birds on the horizon were a sign that fish were congregated below. They counted three winds that could help or hurt: one from the west, another from the east, and a kind of squall from the north called the saucarí, which can sink boats.
“It awakens from the north and it doesn’t calm down,” Mr. Quispe explained. “‘ The saucarí is coming,’ we’d say. ‘We can’t go into the water until it calms!’ ”
The lake offered algae called huirahuira, which seemed to relieve coughs. Flamingos were like a pharmacy: In addition to the pink flamingo fat that was used for centuries to relieve rheumatism, the feathers fought fevers when burned and inhaled. The villagers would catch and kill the flamingos in April, when the birds lost their feathers and were rendered flightless.
“We took so many of these from the lake,” said Emilio Huanaco, an indigenous judicial official, pulling out a bright pink wing. The day seven years ago that he hunted the bird, he had no idea it would be his last.
Mr. Pérez watched with alarm as several threatening trends developed, and began to understand that the lake could evaporate for good.
First, as quinoa became popular abroad, booming production of the grain diverted water upstream, lowering Lake Poopó’s level. Second, mining sediment was quickly silting the lake from below. And it was getting hotter. The temperature on the plateau had increased 0.9 degrees Celsius from 1995 to 2005 alone.
In the summer of 2014, a rotten smell hung in the air. The level of the lake was so low that when the saucarí wind hit, the gusts kicked up too much silt for the fish to survive.
“It was enough to make you cry, seeing the fish swimming dizzy or dead,” said Gabino Cepeda, 44, a fisherman who now farms quinoa. “But that was just the start. The flamingos are dead, the ducks are gone, everything else. We threw out our nets, there was nothing for us.”
Mr. Quispe and his brothers met one last time on the edge of the dead lake to perform the Remembering. They paddled out as they always had, but returned the same day because there were no fish. The eldest, Teófilo, turned to his brothers. “There is no work,” he said. “I will figure out how to make money. And I will tell you how.”
The next week, he left Llapallapani to work in a coal mine an hour’s drive away.
Pablo Flores, another Uru who left Llapallapani, starts a thankless workday before sunrise inside a mill on the edge of the world’s largest salt flat, Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni. He takes blocks of unrefined salt, grinds them down into a pile as high as he is tall, and puts them into tiny bags, earning 25 cents for each full one.
Outside the mill, it is more arduous. In the vast salt flat near the town of Colchani, where two dozen Uru have resettled, day laborers head out with shovels, gathering salt as the heat beats down on them from above and reflects up from the white expanse below.
“The Uru people aren’t made for this,” Mr. Flores, 57, said. “I’m not made for this.”
Some Uru men have left alone, sending money back to relatives who remain on the lake. But others, like Mr. Flores, have taken their families into a new world.
Fifteen Uru live in Machacamarca, a dusty town of several thousand. María Flores Ignacio and her two teenage children moved this spring into a rented apartment, a first for Ms. Flores, whose adobe home in Llapallapani was handed down through generations.
“I am living in someone else’s house,” she said.
To pay the rent, Ms. Flores makes straw handicrafts that she sells to tourists in the state capital, Oruro, at a market. There are hats, baskets, bracelets, earrings and small boats like the ones the Uru used to navigate Lake Poopó.
Mr. Flores remembered a legend, about a f lood that destroyed the world — except for the Uru, who escaped on their rafts and hid on a hilltop until the water receded. Disasters were meant to take the form of deluge, not drought, he said.
Once the mayor of his village, Mr. Flores was still known by the Spanish honorific “don” by people who knew him from that life. But at the salt mine, he feels like any other hired hand. “This is a feudal system,” he said. “I can sincerely say this is a bad place.”