Crazy Good Fortune Out of the Blue - 11*
A couple of weeks after our exciting Semana Santa, we decided to go to Monteverde, the cloud forest, with Paul and Barbie. They, actually, had a memorable experience of their own during the earthquake in Tortuguero. Before the earthquake, Paul told us, all the birds flew down out of the trees and huddled on the beach. And all of the snakes came out of the jungle and parked themselves on the beach, too. Then a bunch of other animals came out of the forest and waited on the beach. By the time the temblor hit, he said, he was already so spooked that the earthquake itself came as a relief.
Paul and Richard had traveled to Monteverde once before, while I was building my hexagon back in California, with a German student who had attended language school with them. He had graciously sent Richard and Paul duplicates of the photos he had taken of their trip, and he had captured one of the most outstanding series of three sequential shots that I have ever seen. The setting was a sylvan pond in the cloud forest where a lovely waterfall is splashing picturesquely into the pool. Verdant ferns crowd the banks and the water, though clouded with the rich sediment of the forest, looks cool and inviting. The first shot is of Paul from the back, wading confidently and intrepidly into the pool, his arms swinging manfully at his sides as he moves through the waist-deep water. The second shot is of Paul from the side, frozen in place, looking down in alarm in the direction of his foot which is hidden in the murky water. The third shot is a front view of Paul practically levitating out of the water (now at about knee-level) with a look of abject, primal panic on his face as his blurry arms windmill to help propel him to the bank. Something in the pond touched his foot, he told us ominously. Something big.
The drive to Monteverde proved to be a lengthy, arduous, hair-raising journey over a steep, winding road cut into the sides of rugged mountains. The road was dirt and gravel, of course, wide enough for about one-and-a-half cars and rutted into washboard. Guard rails were not even a concept, so when the jeep skittered sideways over the washboard, or we had to swerve to avoid a car hurtling toward us on a blind curve, we found ourselves skidding toward a completely unguarded drop-off of about 2000 ft.
It was beautiful, though. Thick, magical cloud forest covered the sides of the mountains, becoming richer and deeper as we approached the preserve, and the feature that gave the forest its name, a perpetual cap of cloud generated by the trees, lay snugly and smoothly over the highest peaks, like a single, perfect leaf. Even the forest canopy resembled clouds, towering cumulus-shaped columns the color of jade.
We finally arrived at the Hotel Monteverde, the fanciest lodgings in the area where we had two clean, simple rooms reserved. They even had hot water showers. It was run by a Costa Rican family who served three meals a day of wholesome, fresh foods—tropical fruits, rice and beans, fresh fish from the coast, and high quality local beef. The only drawback ended up being the beds, hand-built platforms with a sort of box fashioned on top apparently to hold the mattress in place. But the mattress rested lower than the wooden border and so when I climbed on the bed to take a brief catnap after our drive, I barked my shins quite painfully on the ledge. You might think that this would have been enough to remind me the next time I went hopping blithely into the tricky little shin-barking box that enclosed the mattress, but no. It was as if I had some bizarre amnesia that related strictly to those beds and their punishing construction so that I thrashed myself every time.
After my nap (made briefer by the throbbing in my shin bones), we cleaned up and changed into warmer clothes—Monteverde, with its constant fog and high altitude, is a trifle chilly—and then went out for a walk along the road. The area had been settled and developed by a group of North American Quakers who were fleeing the draft for the Korean War in the early fifties. They purchased a significant amount of acreage and both farmed the area and turned part of it into a park, preserving the last cloud forest on earth. All the rest have been cut down. Over the years, the park administrators have used the entry fees into the preserve to buy more acreage, so the cloud forest is growing. With enough core forest to sustain the ecosystem, denuded areas can grow back in twenty years’ time, and we saw lots of areas that were once farms or that had been logged, turning into lush, high-altitude jungle before our very eyes. It felt very heartening.
Not surprisingly, Monteverde has become a mecca for tropical biologists of every stripe. Students of hummingbirds, bromeliads, orchids, frogs, lizards, ferns, tropical mammals—every type of creature imaginable—all flock to Monteverde. In fact, one of Richard’s mother’s ex-students from the University of Arkansas was engaged in the research for his PhD in herpetology here, and we planned to look him up. As we walked along the misty, tree-lined road, we encountered one of the locals, an older man with the wonderfully romantic name of “Wolf,” who looked like something out of The Last of the Mohicans. He stopped and greeted us, then pointed out a quetzal perched in a nearby tree.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with this bird, let me tell you, it is one of nature’s most exquisitely beautiful and fanciful creations. They’re about the size of a big robin, but there the resemblance ends. The head, back, and wings of the bird are iridescent emerald. Its breast is covered with blazing vermilion plumage, as luminous and florid as rubies. And swooping down from the body are several exuberantly long tail feathers, some green, some the purest white on the planet, an arctic white, a dazzling, brilliant, Platonic white. The main emerald-colored tail feather even has a whimsical curl at the end, like the scroll of a violin. They’re the national bird of Costa Rica, and the currency in Guatemala is named after the quetzal. Their tail feathers were highly prized among the indigenous peoples of Central America, and one could certainly see why.
We thanked Wolf for drawing our attention to the quetzal, then continued on our way. I focused on the amazing bird songs that floated down through the canopy: one had a lilting, haunting melody of three consecutive notes that for some reason made me want to burst into tears; another, the three-wattled bell bird, sounded two resonant, chiming tones at once, something I’d never heard before. But then I caught a noise that brought me up short. It was a spooky sound, a creepy sound, a very, very eerie sound. It’s almost impossible to describe, in fact. The closest I can come is that it resembled the sound you might imagine Bigfoot making during some secret, UFO-related ritual.
“What is that?” I asked.
“That weird sound?” said Richard.
“Yeah.”
“Howler monkeys.”
Aha. Aptly named. Their call was amazingly loud. We never saw them that visit, though. We heard them several times, but the canopy is so high (as tall as a skyscraper) and the forest so dense, that, back then, unless you could find a way to get into the upper canopy as some graduate students and researchers did, at much peril, there was a great deal of the forest that you never even caught a glimpse of. And this is where most of the life of the cloud forest takes place. (Today, there are zip lines and platforms that make the upper canopy accessible to tourists.)
We reached the preserve and started off on one of the trails. It became clear right away that we did not have the right footwear; we needed rubber boots with crampons. The forest generated its own rain every day, and water vapor swirled around when it wasn’t raining, so the clay-rich soil was slicker ’n greased owl shit, as Richard observed.
Moreover, whoever developed the park didn’t seem to think that switch-backs were necessary to build into the trails, so the trails simply shot straight up the sheer mountainsides, and then plunged back down the other side. No matter how hard we tried not to, every one of us slipped and fell on a steep, luge-chute-like path, gullied out and slimy as hell, then rocketed down the incline on our butts like we were riding a slide at a water park. Richard and I were wearing hiking boots that laced tightly around our ankles, so going uphill, we did all right; but Barbie and Paul were wearing running shoes, and every time they took a step, the sticky, gloppy mud grabbed onto their soles, letting go only at the very last part of their stride, making a squelching, sucking, whoopee-cushion sort of noise. Once Paul walked out of his shoes and we had to fight with the mud to get them back.
When we came to a hanging Ficus vine, dangling temptingly before us and promising a much safer way to navigate down a slippery slope, we seized upon the opportunity. We’d all grown up watching Tarzan movies—who wouldn’t want to swing on a big, thick, sturdy vine in the jungle? I decided to go first, and that chivalrous Richard, wanting me to have the best and longest ride that I could have, put his hands on my waist, pulled me back, and then gave me a push.
Ohhh, it was fun! It was a gas! There I was, swinging on a vine in a cloud forest, like Tarzan. The wind rippled through my hair, I was sailing in a graceful arc, and … I was heading straight for the trunk of an extremely large tree. There was nothing I could do to stop or change course. Fortunately, since I saw it coming, I thrust my foot out in front of me and bounced off the side of the trunk. When I let go of the vine and dropped to the ground, it went swinging back to where Paul, Barbie, and Richard all stood waiting for their turn.
“Wait!” I shouted, as soon as I picked myself up. “That vine! It’ll slam you right into—”
But it was too late. Barbie had grabbed the vine, Paul had grabbed Barbie and given her a mighty shove, and Barbie was sailing through the air just as I had, the wind rippling through her tresses, her body poised serenely.
Surely she saw me bounce off that tree, I thought. Surely she knows that she needs to put her foot out to keep from plowing right into it. But as I watched with growing trepidation, it became clear that she did not have any idea what was about to happen. “Barbie! Look out for the tree!” I yelled—to no avail. The poor thing smacked right into the trunk with her entire body, which flattened against the bark, her arms and legs bent akimbo like a marionette in a skipping pose. Then, she slid slowly down the trunk and landed in a crumpled heap on the ground.
“Oh my God, are you okay?” we all cried, rushing to her aid.
She stood up. She brushed the hair out of her face. Then she marched over to Paul and socked him on the shoulder.
“Hey, what did I do?” he protested.
“He couldn’t help it, Barbie. I tried to tell you guys. That vine has a trajectory that lines up exactly with the trunk of that tree.”
She wasn’t buying it. At any rate, Paul and Richard decided to look for a vine that wouldn’t sling them straight into a tree trunk.
I was getting to know Paul better and I found him to be fairly complex. I have to admit than when I first met him, I had stereotyped him as a rich playboy who didn’t have a lot of depth. He seemed like someone who had always gotten by on his good looks and wealth, so he’d never worked very hard at anything and it showed. The profesoras at the language school would shake their heads when talking about Paul and lament that he was smart, but lazy.
He also seemed like a trouble magnet and someone who deliberately sought out sleaze. He took us out on the town in San José one night and we ended up at this creepy gambling club in a sterile, two-story office building downtown. The place had all of the charm and glamour of a run-down copy shop and the people sitting at the black jack tables reminded me of those boys who had turned into donkeys on the bad boys’ island in the Disney version of Pinocchio. Their features looked oddly exaggerated and the lines in their faces were etched so deeply they looked like canyons. We lost a whole bunch of money in a really short amount of time, had one shitty drink, and then we split. It left me feeling as if I’d stepped in dog poo and transferred some of it onto my hands and hair before realizing it. Another night, Richard was awakened to pick Paul up from the place where he’d somehow lost his keys to the jeep after two girls he picked up in a bar stole all his money.
But Paul spent a lot of evenings drinking beer and chatting with Richard and me in our little study, and even though he was not the most self-disclosing person in the world, I came to realize that he was a sensitive soul whose disaffection came from feeling deeply. Playboy that he was, he liked children and he loved animals. When he was a child and came across a hurt animal, he’d bring it home where Jane would help him to nurse it, and he had more pets than some small zoos. He treated me with an affectionate chivalry that I came to find very touching. And he shared his father’s dry wit, which he often aimed at himself. I was starting to feel very fond of Paul.
At any rate, after Paul, Barbie, Richard, and I had tramped around in the jungle a while longer, we started to feel hungry, so we headed back to the hotel. A few more runs on the luge chutes, a couple more wrestling matches between the mud and our shoes, and we were back in our cozy rooms, surrounded by the restless, mysterious clouds and the unearthly cry of the howlers.
Above: A quetzal
*Intro:
At the end of 1982, both Richard and I had been out of work for a year, despite constant looking, and the best we had been able to come up with was scrounging for odd jobs. It was an economic climate much like the one we’re in now, and we were feeling both dejected and panicked about what the future might hold for us. We certainly could never have imagined what happened next: a dream job in a dream country for a dream boss.
This is chapter 11 of the memoir I wrote about the year-and-a-half that Richard and I spent living in Costa Rica. It was quite the adventure, living with a an eccentric and flamboyant heiress** from Dallas, her elegant and erudite husband who wrote Westerns, and their handsome, bad boy son, whom Richard used to babysit. Oh, yeah, and next door resided the safe house for Eden Pastora, aka “Commander Zero,” leader of the Contras who were waging a civil war with the Sandanistas in Nicaragua at that time.
This was a particularly golden era in Costa Rica’s history, before it became “discovered,” even before the introduction of television there, really (it started coming in during the time we lived there). It was wild and exotic and magical and amazing.
So once a week, I’ll be excerpting a chapter from Crazy Good Fortune Out of the Blue until I’ve told the whole tale. I hope you enjoy these stories!
**Jane, sadly, passed away not long ago, but she left a legacy as colorful as she was. In 1984, she commissioned one of the largest environmental sculptures in the Western Hemisphere, a set of standing stones in Arlington, Texas that were designed and built by sculptor Norm Hines. Caelum Moor has been a source of enormous controversy over the years, which I’ll write about one of these days. In the meantime, feel free to Google “Caelum Moor” and see what turns up. It’s fascinating.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009