The next morning dawned clear and bright, as often the clouds turned into rain overnight, drenching the forest only to build up again during the day as the sun warmed the moisture-laden air. Richard wanted to look up Alan, his mom’s former student, but since he didn’t have a phone and we didn’t know his address, we weren’t quite sure how to find him. We made some inquiries at the hotel, and they put us in touch with a guide who stopped by every day to see if any tourists wanted him to show them around the forest. He knew Alan and his partner Willow, another biologist, and told us how to get to their house.

 

We felt reluctant about popping in to see them in the morning, so we decided to try to find them in the afternoon and go for another walk after breakfast, especially with the weather so fine and the visibility so remarkable. We headed down the road once again, delighted by the sight of boys on horseback picking up the dairy cans set out by the local farmers. Two stout sticks were attached to both the front and the back of their saddles, laced together in a “V” so that the boys could hang the cans of milk by their handles and transport them to the dairy. The Monteverde dairy was famous throughout Costa Rica. In fact, the main power source for the community was based on methane gas generated from all the cow poop.

 

Three industries existed here in the cloud forest: the dairy, scientific research, and ecotourism. I haven’t been back in years, but at this time, it was one of the most peaceful, low-key places I had ever visited. I decided it must resemble rural New England in the fifties, or perhaps even the forties, even though I had never been there during that time period and wasn’t even born until 1952. Small-scale farming was being pursued successfully, and the Quaker community had embraced conservation and co-generation with a pragmatic Yankee ingenuity that served them well. They made a nice, modest living for themselves, the surrounding air smelled and felt clean, and everywhere I looked, I encountered something beautiful and harmonious, looking exactly as if it should be there, whatever it was—a split rail fence studded with beads of moss; a lush, inviting meadow dotted with plump, well-tended Holsteins; a prehistoric-looking tree fern, its fuzzy fronds sparkling with drops of dew. Most gratifying of all, the inhabitants’ impact on the environment was not only minimal, it was positively healing. They were outstanding stewards of the land.

 

We took a detour on our way to the preserve to visit the dairy, and there we bought wedges of scrumptious, chewy caramel, made that morning from fresh cream, and ice-cold glasses of milk poured from a stainless steel pitcher sitting in a refrigerated display case along with the caramel. Then we went back to the cloud forest, where we had an easier time navigating the trails since we had a bit of familiarity with them now, and on top of the Continental Divide we obtained some incredible views that stretched all the way to the Pacific Ocean. We even found some vines to swing on that didn’t have a malicious sense of humor. When noontime rolled around, we decided to go back to the hotel via Alan and Willow’s house, see if they were home and invite them to lunch.

Alan had taken Richard’s mom’s introductory anthropology class when he attended the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, signing up for the class because he thought it sounded easy. Kackie was one of those born teachers whose teaching ability derives from a deep, nurturing maternal basis, and she liked to spot troubled or underachieving students in her classes and engage them so much that they turned their lives around. She taught in a hands-on manner, offering classes in ethnogastronomy, for example, where the final exam consisted of a feast for which every student cooked some exotic dish from another culture: fried grasshoppers, stewed yucca, chocolate-covered ants, taro cakes, squid served in its own ink… The students loved these events and outdid themselves to come up with the most outrageous, creative, authentic dish they could manage.

 

Her family loved to tell the story of the day that the university called her up and asked her if she could teach anthropology classes; the main campus had mandated them to offer courses in this subject, and they hadn’t any faculty to teach them. Of course, she told them. Of course she could teach anthropology. When she hung up, she turned to her husband and said, “Dick? What’s anthropology?”

 

She went on yearly digs in Mesa Verde, taking a group of eager students along with her, camping out in dusty tents and tromping around archeological sites where her curious mind gobbled up everything it could. She struck up friendships with Margaret Meade and other notable anthropologists, even though she had only a master’s degree, and that in Christian education. She was almost completely self-taught in the beginning, although over the years, she supplemented her education with seminars and classes all over the country, eventually earning a Master’s in Anthropology.

 

Alan was one of Kackie’s “lost boys,” who had grown up without much money or privilege, in a family where proficiency in academics was anything but prized. He had been slouching through his university career when Kackie noticed him. By the time she got through with him, Alan not only graduated from UALR with an outstanding record, he went on to the University of Florida to earn his PhD in zoology, completely fired up about lizards.

 

Alan and Willow were both at home when we came to call, home being a typical weather-beaten, rustic wooden structure built by one of the original Quaker settlers in Monteverde. Alan, a Puckish-looking bearded fellow, was absolutely delighted to meet Richard, as well as the rest of us; he clearly had a soft spot in his heart for Kackie that extended to her son. Willow, his partner, was a round-faced, serious-looking young woman who studied hummingbird-pollinated plants. After inviting us in and chatting for a while, Alan couldn’t resist taking us into the kitchen where the top of a huge boulder swelled up from the middle of the floor, surrounded by floorboards cut to accommodate it.

 

“Apparently, the family had already started building their home in this location when one night a boulder came rolling down the hill and parked itself right here,” he told us gleefully. “It was too big to move so they just built around it.”

 

Clearly they had different building codes here in Costa Rica than we have in the States.

 

They accepted our invitation to lunch and accompanied us back to the hotel, filling us in on all kinds of cloud forest lore while we ate. As we knew, since these creatures were rather famous at the time, Monteverde was the sole location for a beautiful species of rare golden frog. Alan and Willow had bought a piece of land near the preserve where these golden frogs liked to mate in a huge, writhing, frenzied pile in the middle of the night, a biological phenomenon that sent Alan into a near state of ecstasy. They advised us to look out for the peccaries that sometimes charged through the jungle—more killer pigs? They told us about a rodent that lived in the forest that was about the size of baby kangaroo, something we weren’t quite sure whether we wanted to see or not. And they related the chilling story about a young biologist who had plunged to her death from the platform she had erected in the canopy in order to study the howler monkeys.

 

After lunch, we decided to go back to the preserve in the company of these two personable, knowledgeable biologists, and they proved wonderful guides, full of information about the plants that surrounded us. We learned, for example, that the strangler figs which put down the vines we’d been swinging on all morning eventually surrounded a tree with its vines and killed it. The interior, composed of the dead, rotting tree, became hollow about the same time that the fig vines had all merged in an interlacing pattern that reminded me of a latticed pie crust and that could now bear the weight of the entire fig “tree” without the host tree to support it. Alan told us about the marvelous sound the quetzals made while feeding, an exuberant “woka–woka–woka” that he reproduced with startling authenticity. And he had an amazing knack for not only spotting lizards and skinks that none of us even noticed but also managing to reach out with lightning rapidity, his arm like the darting tongue of a frog, and nab the little guys, picking them up and examining them before gently setting them down and allowing them to run away.

 

Before we knew it, the sunlight was waning and the forest was becoming dark. We parted ways with Alan and Willow at the turn-off to their house and trudged, happy and tired, back to the hotel for our last night there before leaving in the morning.

 

*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 12 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.

 

 

**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.