Some day, the trail will be the same, but the world will be different.....

Monday, Late

The iguanas here are lazy. They lord over us from treetops, having nothing to do all day but digest fig leaves. The millipedes have sex all day. This occurs, day after day, nonstop. They bats do not know they are in imminent danger of extinction. They get right up in a person's face, regardless of any resemblance to Ozzy Osbourne. Poor vision. I did not bring any Slayer to see if it attracts them. Early experiments in California suggested this was the case.

I cannot get enough of walking through dark forests, stopping periodically to turn off my flashlight and loose myself in strange thoughts. The rain came down so thick that when I turned the light back on, there was a reflective sheet of water hiding me from the world. Better to use the moonlight to see on days like this. The fuzzy boundary between this world and the next blurs a great deal. One day, the trail will be the same, but the world will be different.

Parts of this place recall a dream I had, years ago, about Nepal, a place I have never visited elsewise. In my dream, which was so real I could hear monsoon rain clink thunderously against corrugated metal roofs, it was mostly dark and wet like this.

The best I can gather from repeatedly replaying the animations on geology websites, Central America was an island arc in the Pacific, off the coast of California, about 25 million years ago.
The cocos plate seems to have crammed them into their current position. Woe to the extinct South American megafauna. Strange Isthmus.

Lluvia mucho ahora

Monday Afternoon

Why doesn’t it rain indoors here? It seems like it should. The rain has rendered it obvious, now, at this soaking moment, that the Book of Genesis was written by desert nomads who simply could not comprehend large amounts of rain. Forty days and forty nights of continuous rain would produce what? Destruction?

No indeed.

Toucans.

Two species of the birds, and also, a rainforest full of toxic plants.

The logic is irrefutable. As hard as it rains, the water runs downhill. It goes somewhere else, down river and waterfall, past iguana and through gorge after gorge, taking every soluble nutrient with it. The nutrients are all locked in the plant life, just as I have been teaching every year.

Even if it pooled up, at a rate of eight inches a day/night, that would give 320 inches of freshwater. That depth of water would not inundate the globe unless the sphere were as flat as Chicago. It is barely deep enough for paddlefish. The water does not pool, though. It moves. And even after it stops raining, it continues to fall from the trees.

Toxic trees, yes. These include various species of Virola tree, the dark red resin of which is full of DMT. Two species of toucan; the keel-billed Ramphastos sulfuratus, and the chestnut-mandibled Ramphastos swainsonii.

Dendrobatiid frogs (the red one, Dendrobates pumilio) calling restlessly for mates, the guide said that the rain made them “happy”, and affirmed that the tadpoles are indeed transported to bromeliads in the canopy. It seemed a crazy notion to me before. It makes sense now. There are bromeliads everywhere. A great Curasssow, idly strolling the pavement in the morning, a strange forest turkey called a crested guan, a coven of black Trigona bees robbing a banana flower, gold-headed tanagers, scarlet rumped tanagers, collared peccaries, bats sleeping in the shade of a wilted Heliconia leaf. The mouse-sized creatures had cut the veins to produce a rain-shade for themselves. Philodendron vines everywhere, strangler figs, the Mayan tree of god, the Ceiba, reaching between this world and the next.

Feral cocoa, leafcutter ants everywhere, lemur anoles, some gymopthalmid lizard, clearwing butterflies, Heliconia butterflies, owl butterflies, and a few things so strange I am wondering if they were real. That is the unmistakable impression I got, this morning, over coffee, looking at the birds. The gold hooded tanager, the green honeycreeper, and the scarlet-rumped tanager looked cartooney to my eye.

In fact, for the first time in several years, I do not need drugs. Perhaps they would be nice, after all. I have a feeling that any random tea made from that wall of green out there would either send me to my grave or have me sitting at the right hand of Aztec Elvis.

Bullet ants, Paraponera sp., unnamed ants and spiders, walking palms, mealy parrots, agoutis, howler monkeys, and mushrooms to mention except that some were ghost white doileys and others resembled little brown baseball bats.

An old stoner trick-If the washing machine is full, or too expensive-dry the clothes instead. Most of the unpleasant volatiles escape in the air. In fact, one washer was full, and the other accepts only alien currency. As I write this, lukewarm laundry cools on the bed. I stare at a pastiche of second-growth whatnot near the river. This morning, the guide told me that part of La Selva, near the Rio Puerto Viejo, used to be a Cocoa Plantation. Fungal disease wiped out the crop, year after year, taking most of Costa Rica’s enthusiasm for the crop. Some of the trees are still there, but most have been removed to speed up the process of ecological succession. I see at least one chestnut-mandibled toucan, and hear the sound of the river. On this side of it, a hill covered with ferns, Paleocene-style, making me wonder as to its origins.

Birds and lizards nest alongside each other amid the clay banks of the trail. Like Vegas, the forest does not sleep, making me pause to budget my energy. I am about to go out alone.

Holy Christ! More cool birds. And another two, nearly sideswiping my head from behind as they flew by. The animals here seem either totally oblivious to humans (mating millipedes, Trigona) or nonchalantly curious. None of them look like they have ever seen a rifle. Or a jaguar.

More. What will my brain retain, and what will regress into that dark velvet land I visit as I sleep?

Fate Deliver Me

12/16/07 Sunday

Central America is a lot like California…those parts of California that slip between the cracks in the sidewalk and hide amid the faux stucco walls….only much more so. That little hint of tropical flora/death metal Indio biker/eight children jaywalking in heavy traffic so distinctive of East LA explodes here like a symphony of multicolored/chicken in the street/big dirt parking lot pipebombs.

My ride from San Jose was an exercise in trusting the gods of fate to deliver me, unharmed, dreamlike, over waterfalls and through cloud forests, past ten dozen stray terriers and six times as many pollo y cerveza stops. My Spanish is terrible. Given that the main autopista is closed, it is amazing I made it here at all. I remember a clumsy communication regarding that matter, and two hours of wondering where the hell I was going. All this time, strange fields of coffee, zebu cattle, misty slopes.

I exchanged garbled bits of dialog with my driver, Ronnie, and pretended not to be on the verge of carsickness.

Costa Ricans drive like lunatic pirates. It is a shared sense of lunatic piracy that delivers them from one place to another, usually unharmed. We did see an inconvenient-looking car wreck along the way. Later, a tiny ambulance bound for rescue action. Jesus adorns the back of busses here.

The rainforest smells like potting soil. It is so thick with interesting birds that they stud the branches like bad theme wallpaper. Just a few hours ago, a snowstorm,. Now lluvia, gentle and soft.

Later that night.

Fireflies at night, the kind that like second-growth forests in Central America, haunt the path from the cafeteria. They emit single, bright flash, no J-shaped trajectory, and are very bright. Toads, crickets, their sounds are everywhere through the rain. Earlier, under the bridge, a cluster of collared peccaries, tiny rufus-tailed hummingbirds, a chestnut billed toucan. How this vegetation must regenerate (I was told, days later, that this forest was a cow pasture less than twenty years ago). Jan, why do I appreciate you so much more at moments like this? Absence makes the heart grow fonder.

What I am not telling on 12/16 is that, after a beautiful walk home from dinner, I open the door to my room and find an older, Danish couple, sitting on both beds, in their pajamas. This was less surprising that you might think. Earlier that day, about the time I wrote the first entry, I checked into my room, Zompapa 1. Actually, I let myself into Arriera 1, with assurances from the guard that it was “el primero puerta”. It was, for the second block of buildings. Somehow, with some jiggling, which comes natural to any occupant of an old house, I let myself in to the wrong room. Seeing it already occupied, and having read the OTS guide, I knew that if things were crowded, I would have to share a room. I had a lot of trouble figuring out which side of the room the other person wanted, presuming that they did not know they would share the room when they moved in, days ago. I claimed a bed and tried to settle the place in the most innocuous manner possible.

Just before I wrote that second entry, I moved my stuff out of the last room, hastily trying my key here and there, till I found my own room. Alone, and not on a couch at the reception, or sharing a bed with a lovely, but irked Danish woman in starched Pajamas, I fell asleep to the sound of rain.