West of the Fields

Of snow on green branches

2011-11-05T21:49:00.000-04:00

Last Saturday snow fell thick and sudden across the Northeast, and here (Pleasantville, NY) the fall up to this point had been so mild that most of the trees still had their leaves. Still green, many of them. So the snow that came down, so early in the season, hit hard. Bernd Heinrich has a wonderful essay on the material strength of trees in his book “The Trees in My Forest,” and he points out that unlike human structures, which are generally over-engineered for any stress that might befall them, trees strike a delicate balance between their investment in durability and their investment in growth. They engineer for the normal stresses, not for the extremes. And the strain of wet snow on top of fully expanded leaves is outside their normal purview. Limbs came down everywhere, smashing power lines and cars and roofs.

The day before the storm, I gave a lecture on climate change to my intro class. One of the things I mentioned was the intensification of precipitation. More heat in the atmosphere means more energy for evaporation, leading to heavier rainfalls and more intense snowfall. I hadn’t seen the forecast when I put the lecture together. Something about this snowfall did feel strange; the way it came down so heavy and swift, and the green branches bearing the weight. The world is changing. Every day I feel the urgency of communicating this truth, and fighting the causes.

This afternoon I was out in my yard—my very own yard, in my very own house; mortgaged to the hilt but mine on paper—cleaning up the limbs that had fallen from the big oak trees out back. I had a 12” bow saw. I prefer a bigger saw, but this one came with the house, and I still haven’t had the time to get to the hardware store for a better one. I’m usually at the office late, since I am teaching two new courses and a new lab this fall. I estimate that I spend 30-40 hours a week in prep time, above and beyond the time devoted to meetings, office hours, research, and actual teaching. It is exhausting and amazing. I love my students, with their multi-colored wild hair and their artists’ sense of the world as a canvas. I love my colleagues. I love the fact that everyone I’ve met on campus, in every job, is a genuinely kind human being dedicated to the school and to making things work. It may be too early to tell, but I really feel like I belong here. Enough that I bought a house. A little tiny suburban house with a backyard full of trees and a little lake down the block, ten miles from campus and about an hour up the Metro North from Grand Central. Come visit. But you might want to wait until I have furniture.

So yes, I was out in the backyard of my suburban home sawing branches with this little bow saw, when a branch under pressure snapped back hard and hit the guard over the handle. If that little bit of steel hadn’t been there, it would have done a number on my knuckles. As it was, the butt end of the branch dinged against the guard and brought my attention squarely back to what I was doing. It got me thinking about tools and design. The best-designed tools are those that do their jobs so well we don’t notice them. The saw fits well under my hand, it balances well, it cuts through the gnarled old branches; it protects me. I got to thinking about myself as a tool, honed and shaped by 24 years of education and now almost three years of experience to teach the scientists and policy-makers of the future. Can I hold up under the unaccustomed pressure? Can I do the right thing, say the right thing, to make a difference for my students? Can I reach enough people to make a difference for the world? Yes. Undoubtedly yes. And that answer, ringing through my mind, gives me the confidence to face the coming winter and finish out the term. I am doing what I was born to do. (Also I have met someone wonderful. More shortly, when time permits.)

Big news

2011-02-06T09:28:00.001-05:00

I meant to post this yesterday, but internet connection issues got in the way. Ni modo.

We're already two weeks into the term, with 28 students. Thankfully it's a wonderful group this year; compatible personalities, hard-working, kind. Otherwise 28 would be a nightmare. As it is, it's kept me so busy that I haven't had time to sit down and make the announcement here, although I've been rejoicing on facebook for a month or so. But here goes: I have accepted a job offer. As of next fall, I will be an Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Purchase College in New York.

This all happened rather fast, and rather serendipitously. When I was at the Soltis center in the fall, having been forced out of Cabo Blanco by the storm and the bridge collapse, I got an email from the chair of the search committee at Purchase. He was trying to set up a phone interview, and only had a few time slots left. One of them happened to be during my few days off in November. If I’d been at Cabo, chances are that by the time I picked up the email it would have been too late.

I spent the first couple days of my break revising a paper for submission and studying everything I cold get my hands on about Purchase and the department. I was amused to see a new dorm building on the campus map labeled "Fort Awesome." The fateful day came, and I thought I was prepared, but the first question threw me for a loop: “Tell us a little about your background and why you’re the perfect person for this job.” I had prepared for a whole litany of questions, but not this one. I felt for a moment as if the ground was giving way, and then I answered as best I could. I was able to calm my nerves and pull myself together, and the interview got better as it went along. I enjoyed the enthusiasm I could hear in the professors’ voices. When I hung up the phone I knew it was a place that I would love to work at, but I didn’t know if they’d want me.

Fast-forward to the last few days of the term at Palo Verde, in early December. This stint at Palo Verde was particularly difficult, given the lost student and other stresses of the end of the term. It was also difficult because most of the station buildings are under construction, and thus the only place I could set up as an office space was a corner of the classroom where all the students were working. I was sitting in my corner, trying to focus on a paper about plant reproductive output, distracted by the hum of the rickety air conditioner, various conversations, and the several varieties of rap music that leaked out from student’s headphones in the near vicinity, when my cell phone rang with an unknown number. It was the chair of the search committee at Purchase, calling with a few additional questions. I dashed outside. Standing among the muddy boots on the porch of Palo Verde, swatting mosquitoes and looking out over the marsh, I tried to give a good explanation of what exactly I do at OTS. Specifically, convince him that I actually do teach university-level classes.

I guess I must have done a good job, because they invited me to campus. The next day, when our TA Daniel was headed into Bagaces for a supply run, I went along and spent a good two hours on Skype at the internet café, most of it on hold, to change my ticket so that I could fly through New York with a stopover long enough for the interview.

Fast-forward again… in mid-December I landed in La Guardia a bit past midnight and caught a taxi into town, to stay with my dear friend Morgan. (Fortunately he is a night owl; my flight was supposed to get in at 10, but snow in Atlanta messed things up). We met during the first week at Carleton, bonding over an attempt (still unrealized) to gain access to the college’s steam tunnels, and we’ve been friends ever since. It was wonderful to catch up with him and meet his fiancée, Christina. They’re well-matched in their incisive intelligence and kooky, offbeat humor.

After a night on Morgan’s couch, I felt ready to take on the city, if not the world. My visit came at a good time: Morgan has been head-hunted by a new agency, and his old job ended the week before I came. His new job started in early January. Morgan and I wandered the neighborhood, and he showed me some of the delights of Manhattan: a park with sculptures made by local children; details in the carvings on the cathedral, like the atom bomb carried by one of the four horsemen; a street fair with antiques and textiles. I bought an extra scarf; it was above freezing, but the raw wind off the ocean was enough to make my tropically acclimated self decidedly uncomfortable. We ate lunch at an Ethiopian restaurant with another Carleton friend, Cheryl, who has been working as an editor for the past ten years. Our conversation reminded me of how free we felt in our college days, gathered around a table in the basement dining hall sharing ideas and making crazy plans. For the first time in a long time, I felt the return of that excitement: the future felt broader and more full of possibility than it had in years.

Thus fortified, I took the Metro North up to White Plains in the late afternoon, where I met my future colleagues for dinner. I'd asked dozens of people for advice, but as I stepped off the train into the teeth of the first snowstorm of winter, the only thing I could remember was my friend Scott saying, "don't interview during a winter storm. I interviewed at one place during an ice storm. Nobody showed up, and I didn't get the job." Fortunately the snowflakes abated while I enjoyed Indian food (almost impossible to get in Costa Rica) and a spirited conversation with George and Ryan. George is a marine ecologist and Ryan works on land use policy, GIS, and wetland delineation. I was encouraged by their forthrightness, friendliness, and senses of humor. Working with people who love what they do and are open to new ideas is such a wonderful thing, and I'm looking forward to it.

At the hotel that night, I went over all the materials I had prepared, making mental notes of recent grants received, publications, and research interests of everyone I was scheduled to meet. The biology department at Purchase is mainly molecular and cell biology, while environmental studies covers organismal biology as well as the policy side of things.

The day of the interview dawned chilly and snow-crusted, with a bitter wind. I wrapped myself up in my multiple scarves, drank some mediocre hotel coffee, and faced the day. I wish I could remember more details of it, to offer advice to future candidates. Mainly I remember a series of enjoyable conversations with professors and administrators, and a sense that this was the right place for me. A roomful of students came out to see my seminar, even though it was the middle of their finals week, and most of them stayed for a student-led interview afterwards. They asked good questions about my work and my plans, and they came across as bright, engaged, and committed to making the world a better place—the kind of students who have inspired me to follow this career path. And I know they weren't just there for the cookies; the box was almost full at the end of the meeting.

I think maybe the secret to a successful interview is remembering why you're there: not only to impress the committee and show them that you're the right person for the job, but also to see if the job is right for you. In this case, I felt like the answer was a resounding yes.

The day after the interview I flew to Maine, where a group of friends met me at the airport in high style: they brought their instruments (fiddle, guitar, banjo, and a giant washtub bass) and played a bluegrass set by the baggage claim while they waited for my flight. I was greeted by a rousing rendition of "The Wind that Shakes the Barley" as I came down the stairs from the gate. The evening just got better after that. We stopped by the liquor store on the way back to their house to pick up a few beers, and walked into a wine tasting that none of us had known about. We sampled the wares and enjoyed an elegant spread of cheese and crackers, while another dusting of snow made magical halos under the streetlights outside. Back at their house, we enjoyed a dinner of homemade bread and soup with locally grown organic vegetables, and then a bluegrass jam session that lasted until the very wee hours on the morning.

When the phone call came, offering me the position, it was all I could do to follow the advice of colleagues and negotiate. My first instinct was to say, "I'll take it!" then and there. But I did negotiate, holding out for some equipment that will be useful in the restoration experiment and some travel money for myself and students. I signed the contract and sent it in before the end of the year.

Today is my 32nd birthday, a respectable number, although I still haven't reached the hobbit age of responsibility. (One more year!) I feel somehow more grown up and younger, at once, than I have in a long time. More grown up, because I've accepted a job that could be permanent if things work out, and I am thinking about things like mortgages and retirement plans. Younger, because in the past few months I've felt my future opening up again. Thanks to all who have helped me on this journey.

Airborne update

2010-12-12T18:34:00.003-05:00

Today's entry is brought to you by Google, which is providing free wi-fi on my flight from San Jose to Atlanta this afternoon. I'm flying to the US a bit earlier than planned, and stopping in New York for a few days for a job interview. Deep breath. More details will be posted when time permits. Suffice it to say that I survived the semester, more or less unscathed, and I am looking forward to the day when I can hang up my hat in a more permanent place.

Field update

2010-11-27T22:28:00.000-05:00

One thing about being a professor for a field course is that life is never boring. Exhausting, hair-raising at times, wonderful at times, but never boring. I came back from Peru in mid-October and spent a few weeks at home working on manuscripts and resting up. Good thing I did, I guess; I hit the ground running on November 1st and it feels as though I haven't stopped. Tonight the students are finishing up and printing their final independent project papers, and I find myself for once with a few minutes to write.

The first site we visited was San Gerardo station in Monteverde, an hour's hike into the cloud forest on the Atlantic side of the continental divide. San Gerardo is one of my favorites among the stations we visit; the forest is beautiful and the station is managed by a delightful young couple with a three-year-old son who brings cute to a whole new level. San Gerardo offers a chance to study cloud forest conservation as well as some of the basic ecology topics that we cover. Mauricio and I talked about pollination, seed dispersal, climate change, tropical deforestation, gap dynamics and the maintenance of tropical diversity, soil seed banks, and the history of conservation in Monteverde, with walks and field activities linked to almost every lecture. Clear skies in the morning gave us a view of Volcán Arenal looming over the valley below us, and in the afternoon clouds rolled in with occasional thunder.

Everything seemed to be running smoothly at San Gerardo until the third day, when an invited professor brought news of the outside world in the form of La Nación, Costa Rica's major daily newspaper. The front page was full of stories about tropical storm Tomas, which had slammed into the Pacific slope of Costa Rica, leaving bridges out, many towns without water or electricity, and dozens dead in landslides. On the Atlantic side, we hadn't even noticed a change in the weather. We were fortunate to escape from the major damage. The road to Cabo Blanco (our next study site) didn't escape it, though. When we called the main office to check on the logistics for the next segment of our trip, we found out that a major bridge and several kilometers of road on the way to our planned site had washed out. There was some possibility of getting the group in, if we hiked 5-6 km, but no way to get enough food in, and—with more rain predicted—some concern about getting the group out. Also, our planned activities at the study site were mainly snorkeling and tidepooling, and the waves were still too high and the water too murky to make either one feasible. So, plan B.

Over the phone with Erika, who had planned to meet up with the group at Cabo Blanco, we formulated a new plan. She was able to find a field station that could accommodate us for four of the five days, and Mau was able to get us an extra day at a field station near Monteverde and line up some biologist friends as invited speakers. He lived in Monteverde for years, so he's well-connected in the area. And my job? Redesigning curriculum. The field station that Erika found, the Soltis Center, is a new place built by a Texas A & M alum (much to the discomfiture of Erika, a UT graduate!) and donated to the university, at about 400 m elevation on the Atlantic slope, in forest quite similar to La Selva. Obviously, the planned lectures on marine ecosystem ecology and Pacific coast fishes were out. I didn't have my computer with me at Monteverde, since we hiked in, so I planned as best I could with the resources at hand. The minute I jumped out of the bus at Soltis and Erika handed me the backpack with my computer, I set to work. I expanded a lecture about my research into two separate talks and developed a new lecture on tropical forest succession. On the first full day at the station, while the students were in orientation walks, I visited a nearby eco-lodge and fortunately found enough secondary forest of different ages to be able to put together a field trip. I guess this is the kind of story I can tell in job interviews when they ask, "what kind of setbacks have you faced?"

After Soltis I went back to my apartment for a few days of so-called rest. It turned out to be less than restful, as I had to take care of the resurgence of the termite problem on my back porch, finish up a manuscript for submission, and review two manuscripts for coauthors along with the usual host of things that need to be done when one is home once a month. I didn't get to see any friends except Amaris, who lives right next door.

And then to Palo Verde. In the dry season, Palo Verde is magnificent—the hard dry wind over the grass, the wood storks winging over the marsh in slow motion like creatures lost in time, the forest bright and strange with the sunlight pounding down between the bare branches of low, sculpted trees. In the wet season, which seems likely to extend into December this year, Palo Verde is the proverbial green hell. Welters of mosquitoes descend on any exposed flesh. Sticky mud cakes itself over your boots, each step adding more layers until you lumber on Frankenstein feet. About half the trees near the station are acacias, bearing sharp thorns that house the nests of stinging ants. Bushwhacking is less than pleasant.

At Palo Verde the students do their second independent research project. I was working with three groups of students, two with relatively straightforward herbivory/reproductive allocation projects and one group that ran into all kinds of trouble. Their first project idea was to look for spatial segregation of the sexes in a dioecious tree species. (For the non-scientists out there, briefly, most plants have both male and female reproductive parts on the same individual. In dioecious [die-EEE-shuss] plants, each individual bears only male or only female flowers. In some species, it's been demonstrated that the males and females occupy different habitats, keeping individuals from competing as much with members of their own species.) It was a great idea... but of the three dioecious species that might potentially be found flowering this time of year (the only way to tell the sexes apart is through flowers or fruits), none could be found in large enough quantities to work with.

So, plan B. They decided to look at seedling distributions relative to the position of adult trees. There's a plot of old-growth forest with all the tree locations mapped, about 6 km from the station on a poorly-maintained woods road. It's passable in the dry season, but in the wet season the Toyotona got about 100 m into the forest before we came to the first downed tree. Beyond it, we could see a mudpit that looked too deep to cross. So, plan C.

We returned to the station and I helped them find a species that was abundant enough to work with, and they finally started collecting data. Of the four days of data collection, though, they had already spent one entire day in a fruitless search for dioecious plants.

Everything seemed to be running smoothly again, which I guess I should know by now is a worrisome sign. On the last day of the project, which is generally set aside for writing up papers and presentations, one student from this group decided to go back to the field and get a few last data points. She had been feeling sick, and I tried to dissuade her, but she assured me that she felt fine and would be right back. Cue the ominous music.

When she wasn't back in an hour and a half, another student from the group went to look for her. He reported finding her backpack and camera at the edge of the site and no sign of her. Imagining the worst, I told the rest of the staff what had happened and we formed a search party. With a park guard, our TA, and the other two students from the group, we headed into the forest where her backpack was. We saw puma tracks in the mud. I thought about all the possible outcomes, and it was grim. The only student death in the history of OTS occurred at Palo Verde, when a student was trapped in the rocks while trying to outrun a swarm of killer bees. We shouted her name into the buzzing green thickets. After ten minutes of searching we heard a weak answer. Still imagining the worst, we fought through the vines and stinging ants to find her, disoriented and dehydrated but otherwise uninjured. Apparently she had followed a family of coatis and lost her way back to the plot. I don't know if I've ever been so grateful to see anyone in my life.

For some reason these things always seem to happen in Palo Verde... last time here, I spent the night at the hospital with a student who had possible appendicitis symptoms, and the next day I had to explain how to conduct three-dimensional chi-square tests to a group of undergraduates on less than three hours of sleep. Fortunately they were stellar undergraduates, as is the group this time around. The students are what keeps me going.

OK, time for bed. Whatever misadventures tomorrow will bring, I'll be better equipped to deal with them after a night of sleep and a cup of coffee.

Part V, the last

2010-10-30T17:01:00.005-04:00

After a few hours on the river, we ended up back at Puerto Infierno, which was resolutely not living up to its name. Even the second-growth forest around the docks and the souvenir stand looked full of promise and mystery, and the green shade under the mango trees was delicious. We caught a taxi back to Puerto Maldonado and found a halfway decent hotel, and set out to explore the town.

About half the streets of Puerto Maldonado are paved. The others, in the dry season, throw off a constant fine grit that adheres to everything, kicked up by the constant passage of motorbike taxis. The town is at the confluence of the Tambopata and the Madre de Dios, and John took me down to a park overlooking the two rivers. Blaze-orange pylons, strung with flags like a used car dealership, mark the place where a bridge will soon be built over the Madre de Dios, the last link in the Interoceanic Highway across South America. This bridge will be the floodgate for illegal logging, illegal gold mining, settlements, poaching—the end of wilderness. I had heard about the project, but seeing it first-hand, so close to completion, struck me like a physical blow. It was hard not to see those bridge pylons as gallows. I feel at once so fortunate to have seen this part of the world while it was still wild, and so desperate to do something to keep it that way, and so powerless. People need livelihoods: if it comes to a choice between cutting the last tree and letting my family starve, I know what I’d choose. And who am I to impose my developed-country values on other people who are struggling to survive? But it seems such a desecration to see that forest, that primeval, ageless, self-renewing miracle, give way to gas stations and fast-food restaurants and the craziness of more-more-more that infects our society. I think about that moment of joy, alone in the canoe. That’s what wilderness gives us and no city will ever provide.

One other story that comes back to me now as I write this: the first night at the lodge, when we were exploring the dark forest. So many marvelous creatures came to light, and such diversity; entomologists are good at spotting the small and often startlingly beautiful denizens of the world. John told me about a group of students he had brought to the lodge some years ago. He asked them, “why are there so many different kinds?” This question, in some form, has been asked by scientists and philosophers for centuries, and we still don’t have a good handle on it. But one of the students answered, “porque se puede!” Because it’s possible. As good an answer as any. And as good an answer, I suspect, as we will ever have.

This trip has given me much to think about. Hope and beauty, and the sense of transcending the limits that I imagined around me. And at the same time, the sense that time is running out for the Amazon forest. How is it possible to balance personal happiness in the face of such an impending loss?

This was something that John and I spent a lot of time talking about. He has suffered his shares of slings and arrows, and ended up, I think, the happiest nihilist I’ve ever met. He doesn’t have much hope for humanity in the long run, but in the short run he has a keen appreciation for the wonder of being alive. On the way out to the lake, we stopped to look at the nest of a harpy eagle, now abandoned. He said the female had been seen at the nest calling for a mate for several years without success, and then she vanished. Harpy eagles are hunted here, for no good reason. (One of the guides had told us that a friend of his had killed one, at a logging camp where they were working. He said the bird was the size of a child. He had kept one of the talons, but he lost it somewhere.) John and I started talking about life and love and loss, there in the forest under the empty nest, and to my embarrassment I found myself crying. Thinking about the harpy eagle, the bad decisions in my past. He touched my shoulder. “Life is beautiful,” he said gently. “Look around you.” And it was. And it is.

Part IV: A tapir, almost...

2010-10-29T19:05:00.003-04:00

After dinner John, Jon, and I hiked out into the forest to see colpas, mineral-rich areas where all kinds of animals gather to get nutrients that are scarce elsewhere in the forest. The most famous colpas are the clay banks where parrots and macaws gather, usually along rivers, but the flat-ground colpas in the forest are impressive to see as well. As we headed off into the dark forest, the trees around us buzzing with hidden life, I wondered what we would see. The night before, walking near the campsite, we’d found John’s favorite snake, Imantodes (cat-eyed snake), a slender, striped nocturnal snake so tranquilo that it puts up with being handled and photographed. Non-venomous, of course!

The first sign of a nearby colpa was a fine spatter of gray mud over all the leaves on the trail for nearly 100 meters. “Peccaries,” John said, pointing out how the leaf litter was churned up and muddy. These were white-lipped peccaries, larger and reportedly more aggressive than the collared peccaries at La Selva. They move in larger groups, too; up to several hundred. We had smelled them in the forest the day before—a heady, thick rotten-garlic funk even less pleasant than the old-gym-sock odor of the collared peccaries.

The peccary tracks led us to the first colpa, the source of the gray mud spattered over everything. The colpa was an open mud wallow, puddles of soupy gray denuded of vegetation by the constant passage of large mammals. The cloven footprints of peccaries stippled the banks. A hint of their scent still clung to the vegetation, and an overpowering odor of mammal urine rose out of the mud. We spotted footprints of a few species that had passed by after the peccary herd: coatis, something that might have been a medium-sized cat, and the unmistakable three-pronged track of a tapir. The name of the lake, Sachavacayoc, means “place of the tapir” in Quechua (well, a hybrid of Quechua and Spanish; sacha = wild, Quechua; vaca = cow, Spanish; yoc = place, Quechua). I’ve never had the chance to see a tapir in the wild—footprints and scat, yes, but never the beast itself. I had high hopes.

We decided to walk out to the next colpa, further down the trail. John, walking ahead, spotted something in the underbrush. He motioned to me and Jon to follow. Something large went crashing away, and John hissed, “Tapir! Tapir!” I strained my eyes to follow the beam of his headlamp, but it was gone before I could spot it. We heard the noise as it hot-footed up the ridge and out into the night jungle. So I guess I still haven’t seen a tapir in the wild, but I came close.

On the way back to camp, we spotted a lovely little owl perched on a branch above the first colpa. If the small mammals are as partial to the place as the large ones, it must be good hunting.

After eating a few more Brazil nuts for the road, we walked back to the lodge on the riverbank on another glorious day—sunny but with an occasional cool wind out of the understory, and birds and butterflies gloriously alive everywhere. I delayed our start for a while, trying to take a picture of one particularly gorgeous butterfly near the water’s edge, with brilliant blue wings and a maddening tendency to close them in response to my camera shutter. But I finally managed.

The last day that I stayed at the lodge, John had some work to do preparing for the group’s arrival and sorting his insect samples, so I went for a hike by myself. I walked out to Lago Condenado, the old oxbow lake filled in with reeds where we’d almost seen an anaconda. It was late afternoon, and the jungle filled up with a quiet golden light. Monkeys chirped back and forth in the high branches. At the lake, I stepped into the dugout canoe. John had made it look easy to paddle one, but it was anything but. For someone who grew up on the Maine lakes, maneuvering featherweight 17’ Old Towns with a featherweight paddle, this was a new experience. The boat, built out of a single hollowed trunk with the edges shored up with planks, must have outweighed a tapir, and the paddle, solid wood carved out of a thin buttress, probably weighed a good few kilos itself. Clearly, the dip-and-swing method was out. But I had watched John’s technique (and watched him have a good laugh at one of the guides, who didn’t know how to “remar como un peruano,” zigzagging his way across the cocha by switching sides with every few strokes of the paddle). I copied what I could remember: keeping the blade of the paddle in the water always, turning it sideways to move it forward and then turning the flat of the blade to draw water, and making a little outward flick at the end, like a more active J-stroke, to keep the boat moving more or less in the right direction. I wasn’t elegant, but I managed.

Somewhere in the middle of the oxbow lake, watching the sun go down behind the Mauritia palms, I was overcome by a feeling I haven’t had since I stood on Katahdin almost a decade ago: peace, joy, pride in my accomplishments. A deep and abiding contentment. The feeling that whatever has transpired has been worth it, to bring me to this place. The last golden light was touching the reeds at the water’s edge, lending them the fragile, transient, hopeful green the of first new beech leaves unfolding in spring, and the sky overhead was pure and limitless, a color without name. Macaws flew over and hoatzins in the bushes croaked out their prehistoric hosannas. I was in the middle of the Amazon, by myself in a canoe in the middle of an oxbow lake in the wilderness. As long as I live I will remember this.

Early the next morning we had to leave. The Tambopata was flowing blood-red from eroded clay upstream. I tossed my duffle bag into the boat and took one last look back at the lodge. Who knows if I will ever be back. Two weeks earlier, I never would have imagined being there at all. But something has changed in me, this trip. Suddenly I feel again that everything is possible, that the only limits to what I can accomplish are the limits I set for myself.

Part III, in which we meet the giant anaconda

2010-10-26T22:42:00.003-04:00

We hiked into the forest to spend two nights at another oxbow lake, miles from anywhere, camping on a thatched-roof platform close to the water. When we arrived, guides from another lodge were just leaving with their group of tourists, and they told us about an enormous anaconda hauled out on the far bank, apparently digesting a large caiman. John and I jumped into a dugout with two Peruvians, Jon and Isaac, to go look for it. We paddled stealthily along the lake margin, under tall stately Mauritia palms. I saw something that looked to be the right color for an anaconda, hauled out on the bank, but my first thought was that it was far too large to be a snake. I could feel my brain undergoing an odd sort of rearrangement then, redefining the mental category “snake.” It reminded me of the first time I saw a giant sequoia in California, when I was 16, driving up a mountain road with my parents. We had come around a bend in the road, and up ahead I could see that the road curved again to go around… something monumental, colossal, columnar, shaggy brown, that my brain slowly expanded the category “tree” to make room for. And so it was for this anaconda, something so far outside my previous experience of snakes as to necessitate that shift.

The part we could see of the anaconda was at least five meters, and its tail trailed off, hidden under palm leaves. It must have eaten recently; a bulge in its body about two meters long and almost as thick as the palm trunk beside it indicated the final resting place of a hapless caiman. Jon and Isaac edged the canoe up beside it so we could take photos. I was nervous about getting too close; I had seen an anaconda about a quarter the size of this one take a nasty chunk out of Franklin in the serpentarium in La Virgen de Sarapiquí. (As my mother later remarked, that snake was a good judge of character.) But this wild anaconda on the bank of an oxbow lake miles from nowhere was more interested in basking and digesting its prey than in taking a chunk out of anybody, and gradually we brought the canoe closer. Eventually I stepped out on the half-submerged palm log that served as a convenient jetty, and got probably closer than was wise in the interest of photography. But you only live once.

At sunset, we went to look for monkeys. John heard them from halfway across the lake: squirrel monkeys, whistling and chattering in the treetops. “A waterfall of monkeys,” he said, and it truly was. Squirrel monkeys travel in troops of several hundred, and they bounced through the canopy one after another just like their namesakes. A troupe of brown capuchins, maybe 30, followed after them. Monkeys are magical to see in the wild; their little faces, so expressive, almost human and yet so alien; their fluid movement through the trees. We watched them climb up into the Mauritia palms to spend the night, going hand-over-hand up the vines like sailors climbing ratlines.

We woke up in the gray light of 5 am, the forest coming alive, and bolted our morning Nescafe. Down to the dock again, and a quick paddle over to the far end of the lake as the sky went from opaque gray to pearly silver-pink. The macaws were just waking up in their treetop nests and heading to the forest for the day. We watched flocks of them go overhead, always in pairs, arguing back and forth in their cackling voices like bickering couples. One pair stayed around their nest in a hole at the top of a palm snag, popping in and out of view, muttering, and preening each other. A light mist rose out of the water, vanishing as the sun came up.

In mid-morning we took a walk through the forest on the far side of the cocha in tierra firme forest, the area above the periodic rainy season floods. On the high terraces, Brazil nut trees spread out their tall and elegant silhouettes above the rest of the forest. They are emergent trees, some of them edging towards 50 m tall (165 ft) and nearly 2 m (6 ft) in diameter. Some of these trees have been estimated at >1000 years old. I always feel reverent in the presence of trees that venerable, especially when they are also lovely to look at. And delicious to eat—we found a few old seed pods on the ground, which John hacked open with his machete to reveal the seeds nested inside. Fresh Brazil nuts are nothing like the ones they sell in stores, roasted and salted within an inch of their lives. Right out of the shell, in the middle of the forest, they taste heavenly, like fresh coconut or sweet corn right out of the garden. We gathered a few to take back with us.

Back at the camping platform, we spent the afternoon in a fruitless attempt to fish for piranhas. Apparently the last group of guides had hidden fishing poles near the camping platform, but they hid them so well that our repeated searches turned up nothing. Well, we found a few poles and a bit of monofilament line, but no hooks. It would have been a matter of two hours, probably, to hike back to the main lodge and get some, but we were feeling lazy and MacGyver-ish in equal parts. Jon found a length of wire somewhere and hammered it into a hook shape with his machete. John cut down some paca, with its hook-like barbs, and I tried to rig up something from one of the smaller branches. We baited our improvised hooks with bits of leftover chicken skin from the previous night’s dinner. The bait vanished in short order when our hooks were dropped into the murky water, but the fish were so stealthy we couldn’t even feel them nibbling. Smart piranhas. We were reduced to a dinner of boiled pasta with no sauce except ketchup, and the sempiternal Nescafe.

Next up: a tapir! or at least its disappearing hind end…

Crazy adventure, part II

2010-10-25T19:10:00.004-04:00

So this was how I found myself, after a frantic two days at home writing job applications and a couple days of travel, trundling down the red clay road to Puerto Infierno in the back of a taxi with a Dutch entomologist who I’d known for a little over a week.

Fortunately he turned out to be a nice guy, and the place we visited turned out to be even more beautiful than pictures could convey. The lodge was set back from the bank of the Río Tambopata, a couple hours upstream from Puerto Infierno, a complex of thatched huts set around a soccer field with paths leading back into the forest. Oropendolas and caciques, nesting in the palm trees above the lodge, emblazoned the air with their bizarre warbling songs. Nearby, a few cleared areas (chacras) close to the river held bananas, plantains, carambola (star fruit), pineapple, and other crops. And the forest… on my first trip to Peru we mainly stayed on the river, and I had only a few short walks into the jungle. I also knew nothing about botany at the time. This time, I could really appreciate the diversity of what was around me—one of the richest forests on earth, with ten times as many species in a hectare (c. 300) as in the entire British Isles (33).

Close to the lodge it was mostly secondary forest, dominated by an aggressive species of climbing bamboo in the genus Guadua, locally called paca. “I guess I have a love/hate relationship with paca,” John commented dryly as he hacked through the umpteenth fallen tangle of it with his machete. It would be probably more of a pure hate relationship if he wasn’t studying a genus of flies that happens to breed on the cut stems. I helped him set up Malaise traps in a couple places near where we’d cut up a bunch of paca clearing trails, and he got some good specimens.

Further back from the river, the secondary forest gave way to old-growth lowland tropical forest: giant buttressed trees festooned with vines and lianas; palms and small trees filling in the understory; the muted calls of birds and insects filtering down, blending into one stillness. All the green in the world. It was the end of the dry season and leaves crackled underfoot. As dusk drew on, fireflies lit up the understory with traveling flashes of golden light.

We walked in the forest every day and most nights as well. I realized I’d never spent much time in the forest at night in La Selva—I had always considered it an advantage of working with plants, in fact, that one can study them by daylight. But there is much to be said for the forest by night. We spotted kinkajous, a mouse opossum, many species of frogs, and a few lovely little tree snakes. We saw several species of tarantulas, although, to my lasting regret, the fabled Bolivian blue-leg (the size of a dinner plate, and sounding almost too much like a Harry Potter monster to be believed) never materialized. (Pictured: the also charmingly-named pink-toed tarantula.) Molting katydids, milky pale and alien-looking before their skins hardened, hung from the undersides of leaves. The sounds are different at night, too; more urgent and layered.

On our second day at the station, a cold rain settled in. (It does get cold, surprisingly cold, in this part of the world—air masses moving down off the Andes can bring the temperature down to 6° C; 42° Fahrenheit). We were running low on food, too. The rain apparently made the road to Puerto Infierno impassible—no surprise there—and the planned shipment wouldn’t arrive. Fortunately there was plenty in the chacras. John ventured out to check his Malaise traps and returned with a load of green plantains, avocados, and carambola. Two of the Peruvian guides went fishing in the late afternoon, when the rain let up, but they returned with three tiny fish, the largest about the size of a deck of cards. We made an excellent meal of patacones with guacamole and fresco de carambola. And half a bite of fish.

We hiked out one afternoon to the nearest oxbow lake, mostly filled in with reeds and vegetation. John paddled a dugout canoe through the narrow channel between reed beds. I watched macaws fly over in formation, their elegant long silhouettes contrasting with their raucous, obnoxious calls. Near the channel, hoatzins stalked about the bushes looking and sounding like something out of the Mesozoic. From around one bend we saw a ripple crossing the channel that looked like an anaconda—if it was a caiman, the head would have been visible—but we couldn’t paddle fast enough to get close before it vanished into the reeds.

Coming up next: anaconda!

The latest crazy adventure, part I

2010-10-23T21:58:00.004-04:00

The proverbial road to hell is paved with good intentions. The (quite literal) road to Puerto Infierno is not paved at all, except for about 100 meters where it joins the (also unpaved) back streets of Puerto Maldonado; it’s carved out of red Amazon mud between walls of jungle, and must be entirely impassible when the rains come. But perhaps I should explain how I came to know this.

I guess the story really starts back at the beginning of September, when I was at Las Cruces Biological Station with the course. September is generally a slow time for research at Las Cruces. Besides the USAP group and the usual complement of retired bird enthusiasts, the only people at Las Cruces were a pair of German researchers, Alex and Anke, studying wood anatomy. They were wonderful people with infectious good spirits, and their quirky sense of humor exactly matched mine. Every night after dinner, if I didn’t have an evening lecture, I would linger at the table with them exchanging stories and crazy ideas.

One night—I’m not sure how we got started—we were talking about our favorite animal sounds. I made an impression of my all-time favorite, the tree frog Smilisca baudinii, a distinctly un-froglike, flapping, nasal “mep-mep-mep.” They were in stitches, and refused to believe it was a real animal sound until I sent them this link. After that, every time we met they would greet me with “mep-mep-mep!”

Fast-forward to the end of September, one slow Sunday at La Selva Biological Station. A pair of researchers showed up a few minutes after reception closed. Both were tall men, one with a blond ponytail and one with short dark hair. I marked them instantly as entomologists by the obviously well-used butterfly nets tucked into their packs. I was sitting in front of the comedor grading papers, and a few of my students were nearby studying—this was a couple days before midterms.

The blond guy asked a student, “usted trabaja aquí?” But he’d picked the wrong girl, one who didn’t speak a word of Spanish. (Hopefully she does by now; the students are in week 3 of their homestay at the moment!)

I stepped in to introduce myself ask if I could help. This was how I met John, a Dutch entomologist on a year-long sabbatical in South and Central America. The other researcher, Alessio, was an Italian Lepidoptera enthusiast on vacation.

“Oh, are you Susan?” John said. “Then I have a message for you.” And he managed a quite passable imitation of Smilisca baudinii: “mep mep mep…”

I doubled over laughing. It turns out that John had met Alex and Anke while he was traveling in Santa Rosa, and had a great time with them as well. I decided that anyone who got on well with those two would be worth knowing, and so I sat with John and Alessio at dinner. Their company proved entertaining. The next evening I sat with them again. Afterwards, John was uploading photos to facebook, and he showed me some images of the site where he works in southeastern Peru: wild rivers and oxbow lakes, all kinds of wildlife, thatched huts at the edge of the jungle.

“I’d love to go back there,” I said. I was in Peru for three weeks when I was 17, and that trip changed my life in a lot of ways. For one thing, I don’t think I would have hiked the AT if I hadn’t gone. But that is another story.

“Come, then,” he said. “I’d be happy to show you around. You can stay at the lodge for the researcher rate.”

“But when?”

“Next week. I have a group coming in on the 16th, but before that I’ll be at the lodge getting set up. You should come. It would be fun.”

“Next week? That’s crazy! That’s…” I made some calculations. My break would start on the afternoon of the 3rd. I still had three job applications to finish, along with the interminable grading. I tried to put the thought out of my mind, but that night I couldn’t sleep, thinking about the Amazon and that oxbow lake in John’s pictures. I got up early and looked at plane tickets. There’s a direct TACA flight from San Jose to Lima, and there were still a few tickets for a halfway reasonable price.

At breakfast the next morning I marched over to the table where John and Alessio were finishing their coffee. “John, I want to go with you to Peru!” At this point, mind you, I had known him for less than three days. He laughed about as hard as I had at his “mep-mep-mep,” but then he grinned and said, “excellent.”

To be continued...

Wouldn't you go to the Amazon with this guy, if the opportunity arose?

Summer Update 2010

2010-07-19T13:00:00.002-04:00

Although I've been to Panama twice now (if you count the fly-by-night, no-passport-stamp, diverted-aircraft visit in 2007), I had never been to Bocas del Toro. Situated relatively close to the Costa Rican border on the Caribbean coast, Bocas is a favorite visa run location. It's an archipelago of small islands off the low mangrove-swampy coast, accessible only by sea. Alex and I caught a 6 am bus from San José to the border town of Sixaola, stood in the steamy heat outside the dilapidated cinderblock building that houses the Costa Rican customs office, and crossed the hair-raisingly decrepit bridge over the Río Sixaola on foot (word to the wise: don't look at the I-beams visible through the six-inch gaps in the planks. Just don't.) On the Panama side, we waited outside the equally dilapidated Panamanian customs and immigration building, then caught a colectivo taxi to the port town of Almirante and a water taxi (a launch that held maybe 20 people, packed in like sardines on the vinyl-seated cushions) to Isla Colón. About 4 pm (Panama time being an hour later than Costa Rican time), we found ourselves on the water taxi dock at Bocas del Toro. We shouldered our bags and began to walk to the hostel we'd reserved, at the far end of town.

My first impression of Bocas was the damp heat, a sticky, breathless kind of heat that seemed to slow time. My second impression was of flatness and emptiness. The island must be barely above sea level, the ground so damp that water rises up and pools in the spaces under buildings—most of them raised up on stilts for the inevitable floods—and so flat that the water in the ditches has nowhere to go. The broad boulevard down from the docks looks wide enough to be an airline runway, and the few knots of people along the sides of this space designed for overflow crowds made it look even wider. There was so little traffic—only the occasional yellow-painted taxi inching along, looking for a pickup—that people walked down the middle of the enormous paved road. Brightly colored signs on all the buildings advertised food, drinks, lodging, and souvenirs, attempting to trap the few tourists that came along. Commercial real estate was jammed together along the waterfront, even built out over the water on docks and pontoons. New construction, including a giant four-story hotel, loomed everywhere. As we walked back toward the hostel, we began to see the places that hadn't fared so well. Vines draped the abandoned buildings, and rats and giant fiddler crabs scuttled in the garbage that had collected among the crumbling concrete joists.

Alex had been to Bocas four years ago—we knew it was four years, because she remembered watching the World Cup finals there the last time. Of all the restaurants and souvenir places, there were hardly any that she recognized. "There must be huge turnover," she remarked as we walked past another boarded-up building that she remembered as a good restaurant. Through conversations with locals and restaurant owners, we established that it was the middle of low season for tourism in Bocas. Most of the money gets made in the four months from November to February, and the rest of the year it's a matter of staying afloat. Alex was sure that there had been a lot more tourists in July four years ago: the boom-and-bust cycles that inevitably follow a tourism-based economy might be catching up with Bocas. Still, a crazy kind of optimism persists. The workmen finishing spot-welds on the metal structure for a high-rise luxury apartment building at the edge of town (32 units, each one upwards of $90,000) were certain that enough buyers would be found. The restaurant owners admitted that things had been slow lately, but they were sure that it would pick up again before too long. Perhaps the craziest sign of optimism I saw was a 5 x 10 meter lot near the waterfront, with knee-high grass and a half-built, already-crumbling, roofless cinderblock shack, with a sign that said "FOR RENT." Only in Bocas.

I guess I don't make it sound very appealing. There was one thing I loved in Bocas, though: the hardware stores. There must have been seven or eight of them, and we went into every one. Alex was looking for router bits and various pieces of construction hardware that are cheaper here, and I was just looking. Doing double-takes, sometimes. One of my favorite places was a hole in the wall where everything, literally everything, was piled in stacks and glass cases arranged into a maze so narrow I had to turn sideways to get past: stuffed animals, old tires, snorkels, kitchen implements, auto parts, glues and solvents, Chinese bowls, inflatable rafts, drill bits, cooking pots, fluffy comforters far too hot for this part of the world, cell phones, ramen noodles, dog collars, action figures. A fan in the corner stirred the soupy air. Nearby, down on the waterfront, was this store's polar opposite, a retail space as ostentatiously minimalist as a New York boutique, air-conditioned to a degree that made me wish for one of the comforters from next door. A glass counter ran all the way around the inside, and behind it was a very bored woman guarding the inventory, which was placed on inaccessible shelves along the wall. We peered over the counter to even see what was on offer: extension cords, off-brand soaps, jars of maraschino cherries. We didn't buy anything there. In the other stores around town, I did buy a few kitchen things I've been looking for—whisk, rubber spatula, metal veggie steamer, stainless steel pot—and a coffee mill. It's cast iron and very durable, but it must weigh ten kilos. It looks like the old grain mill my grandfather had, and I think it's even made by the same company. The saleswoman assured me that this mill will grind grain, too. If I ever find wheat berries in Costa Rica, I'll make really good bread. If I don't, at least I'll have freshly ground coffee.

Another thing I liked about Bocas was the gourmet food store, where we stocked up on olive oil, curry paste, pine nuts (when my basil gets big, I can make real pesto!), and assorted other things that are pricy or hard to find in Costa Rica. I also liked the used book store. By the time we were done, though, my bag was seriously heavy.

One night we went out to the most popular bar in Bocas, an overpriced night spot called El Barco Hundido (the Sunken Boat) that features a series of docks out behind the dance floor encircling the wreck of something—not a barco, I would guess from the vaguely pickup-truck-like lines of it—lit by floodlights and surrounded by a few nervous flitting shoals of fish. "More fish show up when people start puking in the water," Alex shouted to me over the pounding music.

The bar filled up slowly. Alex and I waited out on the docks away from the speakers so we could hold a conversation. We talked about traveling—Alex in Australia, New Zealand, and southeast Asia, me in Peru and Ecuador and along the Appalachian Trail. We talked about life dreams. I think she's a lot closer to figuring hers out. We watched the hopeful fish swim up when we leaned over the water, and we laughed. When the crowd in the bar began to spill over onto the dance floor, we went closer to see if we could find anyone to dance with. Nobody was interested in dancing, probably because of our formidable height—I'm tall enough that most men in the room were about boob height on me, and she's fractionally taller—but we did get a few local guys to talk once they were well into their second bottle of rum. When we finally convinced them to dance, the music switched from meregue (danceable) to reggaetón (danceable only if one is drunker than we were at the time). Supposedly there was a band coming on later, but we stayed until 2 am and there was no sign of them.

After the requisite three days in Bocas, we lugged our bags back across the sketchy bridge at Sixaola, just in time to catch the 8 am bus to El Cruce and another one into Puerto Viejo. I spent a couple of days at La Selva, giving a plant identification workshop for this year's group of REU students, and working with a friend who wants to improve his plant ID skills. We are collaborating on a web site for tropical plant identification; you can check it out here.

The rest of the summer has been busy but uneventful. I'm working on four different manuscripts, and I was inundated with six reviews as well. Job searching continues apace, with no leads yet. If you know of a small liberal arts college looking for a plant ecologist, please let me know! In early August I'll be heading to the US for a few weeks to visit family and do another book tour with Lucy, supporting the release of the second volume of our Appalachian Trail saga. Tour dates are posted on the Stackpole Books website; click on "What's New." Unfortunately there's no way to link directly to the schedule. Here's hoping that all my readers are enjoying summer as well!

Freakish occurrence of the month

2010-07-10T23:14:00.001-04:00

... and possibly the freakish occurrence of the decade, meteorologically speaking. This afternoon about 12:30, I was trimming back a particularly intransigent and not particularly attractive vine in my patio garden, when the sky turned ominously dark—so dark that the streetlights came on—and thunder caromed off the hills. This is not so unusual; generally the storms roll in later, but the dark sky was nothing out of the ordinary. The weird part was, it got cold. Sufficiently chilly that I put my fleece on in the middle of the day, which never happens.

I finished cutting the last few stems of the ugly vine and went inside to prepare lunch. The rain started pounding the roof in a frantic crescendo. And then the sound changed, more frantic and louder than I'd ever heard rain here. I looked out onto the patio and saw that it wasn't rain after all—hailstones the size of marbles were rattling down. I went to the front door and stood there taking pictures of my barely-recognizable front lawn, with the Heliconia leaves tattered and ice pellets ricocheting off the walls. Then the hail got larger, with chunks the size of ice cubes hitting the pavement and bouncing back to where I was in the recessed doorway. I retreated toward the kitchen and nearly wiped out in a rapidly-expanding puddle coming from the patio door. A quick glance outside showed that the hail had punched giant holes in almost all of the transparent fiberglass panels in the patio roof, and the concurrent rain was rushing in. I put a towel against the door, mopped up most of the puddle, and called my landlord. Apparently his sister's house has (or had, I should say) similar fiberglass panels on the roof of almost every room, so my porch repair is somewhere down the list.

The hail continued for maybe 20 minutes, enough to leave a visible layer on the ground, all of it marble-sized or up. The trees in the neighborhood look as though they have been thrashed. And as of this writing—almost nine hours after the storm—there is still a pile of hail in the drainage ditch, radiating cold like some artifact from an alien world.

A word for the day

2010-06-08T22:04:00.001-04:00

There’s a word that keeps rising up to the top of my mind: palimpsest. The word in itself is kind of ugly, one of those forlorn orphans slumped in the corners of GRE review sessions along with pulchritude and concupiscence, but the meaning is poetic enough. I’d been thinking of the word for weeks, and one morning it showed up in my email inbox as the Merriam-Webster word of the day, and I knew that I would have to write this.

A palimpsest, literally, was a piece of parchment that was scraped down so that something new could be written on the surface, but traces of the old writing often remained. In so many of the landscapes I pass through, I have this sense of intersecting layers, but none more so than La Selva. Each time I visit there, the past wells up underneath the present. I remember my first experience there, when I was nineteen and so desperate to prove myself. On my first foray off the trail, less than ten meters into the forest, I put my hand up to brush away a clump of vines, only to find them covered in angry army ants. I swatted them off frantically and stepped back, just in time to see something large and dark slither past my boot. I took a few deep breaths and thought to myself, I will not be intimidated! and I continued the transect, though I was half-convinced that I wouldn’t survive the day. I think, in a large part, it was that stubbornness that brought me back. Stubbornness and curiosity. The challenge of finding a meaningful pattern in that wall of green.

I remember the exact curve of the trail where I flew off my bicycle, losing control on a slippery turn, and took a nasty chunk off the heel of my right hand when I flung that arm out, automatically, to break the impact of my fall. Self-defense moves that protect you on a gym floor aren’t as good at twenty miles an hour. I remember lying there on the pavement looking up through the leaves, under the waves of cicada sound, and thinking how unusual it was to just lie back and look up at the trees. All the canopies fit together so neatly. I stayed there a little while, dazed, before I could summon the energy to look at my hand. The scar’s still there; it’s one among many this place has given me.

I remember standing on the bridge one night, with the almost-full moon and a few stars just visible through the mist rising off the river. The water was a little above the banks, and I could hear it lapping at the bases of trees. It must have been November or December 2006; the Zygia longifolia along the river banks was filling the air with a dense scent of roses. I remember the feeling in my chest, tight and uncertain and at the same time overjoyed. I was in love. And there, as much as I would like to keep him out of this narrative, was Franklin. We were holding hands and looking downstream, and talking about possible futures. I could barely see his face in that light, but I could tell he was smiling.

After everything, I came back to La Selva. I had a work contract, after all, and I had loved the place before I loved him. I was somehow comforted by how little had changed, how the forest continued green and rapacious and all-encompassing, the vines longer each day and the leaf cutter ants making new trails, the dead leaves and fallen trees sinking back into the red earth so fast.

I took the job with OTS anyway, even though one of my major reasons for it was gone. I wish I could say it has been everything I hoped for. (This is not the place to elaborate. Like I said, buy me a beer.) Each year I come back to La Selva as a professor, guiding student projects and trying to keep people safe out there. Each year there are fewer people I know, and I feel less of a right to sit down at the long-term researcher table and trade stories with the veterans. I build new layers of memories: here’s where, when I was trying to teach how to recognize Fabaceae, I was upstaged by a pair of iguanas chasing each other through the trees at the edge of the river until both of them fell in the water. Here’s where a student of mine, walking in sandals in the dark the day after the safety lecture, nearly stepped on a fer-de-lance.

On my latest return to La Selva, I was working as a translator, logistics coordinator, and professor for a non-OTS group. My old friend Dennis, he of the radio-tracked fer-de-lances and famous chocolate chip cookies, is now a professor in Connecticut. I helped him organize an introductory tropical ecology course for non-majors. We spent ten days touring the country, visiting volcanos, dry forest, cloud forest, La Selva, and the beach. (Officially, according to OTS, I was on vacation.) For most of the students, it was their first trip out of the US. It was great to see this country through their eyes. They were fascinated with things I tend to take for granted, like leaf cutter ants and Morpho butterflies. It was wonderful to catch up with Dennis again, and we worked awfully well together. We enjoyed it, the students enjoyed it, and by their questions it was evident that they were learning and experiencing a lot of new things.

There was only one moment of the trip that was difficult. From La Selva, we took a side trip to La Virgen. Dennis said, “hey, we could stop by the serpentarium! I know the guys who run it.” I do, too, but the last time I saw them I arrived there on the back of Franklin’s motorcycle. For all I knew he was still there.

I protested quietly: “I’d rather not; my ex-boyfriend used to work there and he still might be around. I’d rather not see him.” But I didn’t specify which ex, and the students were enthusiastic about seeing the snakes—we’d seen a few species in the field, but none of the giant venomous ones that Dennis loves. And then I thought, why not? It’s been time enough. In the first few months after I got the email from Franklin’s wife, I wondered what I would do if I ever saw him again. Would I attack him? Would I fall back into his arms? Or would I have the strength to just walk away? I thought of all the things that I would say to him, before I finally realized that there is no way to salvage anything out of this, and nothing, nothing at all to say.

We got out of the bus and went into the entrance of the serpentarium. Dennis talked to the owner’s wife, who was taking tickets, and we headed into the maze of glass-fronted cages. It was just like I remembered, the snakes coiled like jeweled necklaces around branches or hiding under rocks. They didn’t move much; the afternoon heat was pressing down.

I heard the owner’s voice in the doorway: “Dennis, here’s a friend of yours.” Franklin was there, maybe two meters away. I looked at him and I felt—nothing. I didn’t even find him attractive. I had to say something for the sake of politeness, so I said, “como está?” The formal usted form of the verb came to my lips without thought.

“Bien,” he said. “Mas o menos.” Good, more or less. And that was it. I continued on through the displays, talking to the students and the owner’s son as though nothing had happened.

After we dropped the students off, Dennis said, “I had no idea he was working there. I’m sorry. I wouldn’t have gone.”

“It’s OK,” I said. And to my surprise, it really was. I felt better, having seen him and realized that I truly don’t care anymore. Later, when I thought about it, I was more angry than anything else: that was the person I wasted two years of my life mourning for? Why? He’s just a guy, not terribly bright or brave or even attractive, who works in a snake zoo in Sarapiquí.

For so long, he was my excuse for all the things in my life that have not gone as planned. Once I had thought that I’d have a stable job and a family by the time I turned 30; instead, at age 31, I find myself with no romantic prospects and working a job that keeps me jumping from place to place too much to have much hope of a social life. But I can’t blame Franklin for all this, or even OTS. I try not to place too much blame on myself. If there is one thing I have learned in life, it is that the universe is vaster and less kind than we like to imagine.

2010-03-31T19:08:00.000-04:00

How the months are flying. Alex came to lunch yesterday, on her way to Heredia on a hardware store run, and she exclaimed how long my hair has gotten. I realized we hadn’t seen each other since January.

Work continues apace. The last site we visited was Palo Verde, actually quite lovely in the dry season. No jabirus this year, but I did see a pair of scarlet macaws again.

The highlight of recent months was a visit to Panama, at the invitation of my colleague and friend Stefan. We organized a symposium together at ATBC last year. His flight was delayed, and I ended up giving his talk, an overview of the last 40 years of liana research, with less than an hour of advance notice. I think the invitation to Panama may have been an effort to make up for this, in which case the debt is paid in full and then some! Stefan organized a talk for me on Barro Colorado Island, one of the major centers for research in Central America (the other is La Selva). Besides inviting me to speak, he gave me a room in his house in Gamboa, cooked great meals, introduced me to many interesting scientists, and wouldn’t let me pay for a thing.

After a long but uneventful bus ride from San Jose, I wound up in the Panama City bus terminal in the dead of night. (Fortunately I had thought to bring a copy of “The Jungle Books,” which is delightful to re-read after all these years.) The first bus left for Gamboa at 5 am, and by 6 I was sitting at a ramshackle fast-food stand by the soccer field in Gamboa, drinking halfway decent coffee and watching the sun come up over the Panama Canal. Uniformed canal workers were the only other people eating breakfast; they dispatched plates of fried pork, plantains, boiled sweet potatoes, and wads of fried dough called hojaldres. When the coffee kicked in I ordered a couple hojaldres myself, and thus fortified I went in search of a payphone to call Stefan.

Gamboa is not really a town per se; it’s more of a bedroom community, though one with a longer history than most. The place was constructed for canal worker housing in the 1930s, with the lower-class housing down along the canal and the more luxurious houses for high-level canal functionaries up the hill where cool breezes keep the air pleasant. And thus it has remained, more or less, although now the fancy houses on the hill are occupied by staff scientists from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) rather than the upper echelons of the dredging division, and some of the former worker housing has been bulldozed to make way for a gargantuan plant science research facility. There’s no real town center, aside from the soccer field; no market, not even a bar. If it weren’t for canal business and science, Gamboa would vanish from the map. Fortunately, both canal business and science seem to be thriving here.

Stefan’s house is one of the luxurious houses on the hill, with high ceilings and a spacious floor plan. The houses were built of imported redwood, impervious to termites, with copper roofs, hardwood floors, and all the amenities. In the backyard is a small patch of forest including an impressively rugged and large mahogany tree. Stefan showed me a picture of a harpy eagle, released from a reintroduction program, perched in the branches of that mahogany.

The day after I arrived, once I’d had a chance to catch up on sleep, we went out to visit Barro Colorado Island. I’d been hearing stories about the island for years. There’s a bit of a rivalry between La Selva and BCI, to put it mildly, and I was eager to see what the other side consisted of. Well, all I can say is that it’s different—a vastly unsatisfying answer to those who like rivalries, but the only one I can come up with. The lab facilities and housing are a bit more up-to-date, one of the perks of being a line item in the budget rather than depending on grants. The forest is beautiful, and seems easier to work in than La Selva: a more open understory, hardly any venomous snakes, and fewer bala ants. (Apparently they are mainly active at night here, perhaps because it’s a drier forest.) The trail network seems more confusing than La Selva’s, although I only explored a tiny fraction of it. The food—well, it’s a toss-up; the corn fritters one night were great, but the cucumber-based vegetable ragout at lunch rivaled La Selva’s beans and soy chunks/low grade meat (a concoction we used to call “Alpo night”) in sheer inedibility. The social scene at BCI revolves around hard drinking, as it sometimes did at La Selva, although seldom to this extent. Perhaps it’s something about being on an island, there in the middle of the canal with no way to retreat into one’s own space. Stefan spent a lot of time there as a graduate student, but he balks at the thought of spending a night on the island now: “when that boat leaves at 3:40, and you’re not on it, it’s like the end of the world.” La Selva, as insular as it is, at least has a built-in escape valve. You can jump on a bus and be at the beach in three hours, San Jose in an hour and a half, or you can just call a taxi into town and enjoy a pizza or the humid nightlife of Sarapiquí. Something about the atmosphere of a research station, where everyone’s stress commingles, makes the ability to escape a very useful one.

The scientific work at BCI is impressive. I miss being surrounded by a community of researchers, and it was great to be able to discuss science again with all the geeky abandon of graduate students. I learned about ongoing projects in plant-soil feedbacks; the behavior and spatial distribution of capuchin monkeys, tamanduas, and coatis; the molecular ecology of fig wasps; the effects of large mammal exclosures on seed dispersal; the developmental plasticity of tadpoles; the ecophysiology of trees and lianas… the list goes on. I met many potential collaborators on future projects, although I’m not sure I would want to be based at BCI in the long term. A few months on the island would be interesting, though, with the right crowd.

My talk was well received. I managed to pull it together, despite the craziness of Palo Verde and the usual stresses of my all-too-brief days off. Now I just need to get the manuscript finished… which is what I really should be doing now, instead of writing a blog entry!

I am back to work again on Sunday, and hoping I can find a cab driver in this excessively Catholic country who will actually drive me to the office at 6 am on Easter! Next stops: Monteverde and Cabo Blanco, both without internet. My break (April 19-23, I think) will probably be spent going through my inbox.

Various photos

2010-02-22T15:47:00.004-05:00

Another year older, and still in Costa Rica, still itinerant. All this traveling is wearing me down. I want nothing more than to settle down somewhere and live a good life, teaching and learning, eating good food, growing plants, making friendships. As a friend said to me last year, "every saddle chafes." No doubt there are a lot of people who look at my position and say, "wow, what a dream job!" No doubt, someday, I'll look back on this and say, "I wish I could be back in Costa Rica." But the truth is I'm tired of living out of a duffle bag. I realized that the longest I spent in one place last year was three and a half weeks, and that was at a friend's house.

No big epiphanies; no time to write anything profound. I have to be back on the road at 5 am tomorrow. In the meantime, here are some photos from the past few months: images of Mexico, Christmas in Maine, and forest surveys in early January at Bijagual.

November Update

2009-11-07T16:25:00.000-05:00

Hard to believe how long it has been since I last found the time to post anything here. Apologies to my loyal readers. And for the rest of you, subscribe to the RSS feed! A miscellany of ideas/updates/memories from the past few months:

1. Professoring. Already I find myself halfway through my second semester as a professor for the OTS undergraduate program. It’s been a bit easier this time—I have all my lectures written, at least, so my days off are actually days off (aside from the usual background workload of a scientist: data analysis, paper writing and revisions, reviews, etc.) I’m also more familiar with the sites we visit, which makes it easier to handle the logistics. The students this semester, once again, are motivated and fun. It’s amazing how fast the past few months have gone by.
Perhaps the biggest news, on a professional level, is that I have an important paper out in Proceedings B, dealing with the phylogenetic structure of communities during succession. Translation: how closely related are the species that occupy a site? How do the patterns of relatedness change as the forest grows back? I found some very interesting patterns, corresponding to a model of forest succession that my advisor adapted for tropical systems. I’m working with a group of collaborators right now to see whether these patterns can be found in other tropical forests during succession. The answer is yes, for two sites so far. I found collaborators willing to share data for a third site, but I’m still waiting to get the files… Anyway, having a paper in Proceedings has raised my profile considerably. I am wondering what to do with my newfound clout. As much as I enjoy the teaching and the amazing places we get to see, there are a few drawbacks to working at OTS (buy me a beer and I will tell you all about it). I am thinking about looking for a more permanent, stable, and rewarding job.

2. Good things about a small country: I went to the movies last week with my friend Claudia, a.k.a Reina Canela, to see a Costa Rican film called Gestación. I recommend it, on the slim chance that it comes to a theater near you. The acting is excellent, and if you have any curiosity about what life is like in Costa Rica this film will answer it. It captures the way people talk, the rhythms of city life, and the little details of people’s daily routines. The opening scene also took place in the same mall as the movie theater, perhaps 100 meters from where we sat, contributing to the eerie verisimilitude.

The best part, though, was when we were waiting outside the theater. The line stretched halfway down the mall, and we were pretty far back. A few spaces ahead of us was a man who looked really familiar. Claudia nudged me. “Do you see the guy next to the woman in green? That’s Ottón Solís.” And so it was—the presidential candidate for the major opposition party in Costa Rica, standing at the back of the line with his popcorn like everybody else. No security detail, no VIP status. A couple people asked him for an autograph or took a photo, but for the most part he was treated just like everybody else. I wonder whether it’s a cultural thing, or whether there is some critical size at which a country becomes insane and starts having to surround its public figures with paranoid gun-toting bodyguards.

3. Independence. I broke up with Dixon. He’s a wonderful person, but we are going in very different directions and the relationship wasn’t giving either of use what we needed..

4. Mexico, and the future of tropical forest research. I am writing this on the plane back from a very successful meeting in Morelia, organized by my former advisor, about future research directions in tropical forest ecosystems. About 60 people from all over the Americas participated, and in the course of three intense days we hashed out research agendas and planned a network of collaborators. It’s an exciting time to be working in tropical ecology. Basically, we’re trying to build a network of people who study reforestation and forest regeneration, to reach a more holistic understanding of the dynamics of human-modified ecosystems in the tropics. (Human-modified ecosystems is Robin’s phrase—credit where credit is due! It gets away from the old paradigm of human-damaged ecosystems, the idea that human impacts are necessarily bad. Again, buy me a beer and I will tell you all about it.) How, where, and why do tropical forests regenerate after disturbance? What are the social, economic, and ecological drivers of forest recovery? How can humans live in balance with tropical forests? We had a series of lively and illuminating discussions. I felt honored to be a part of such a dynamic and high-powered group of people.

The group was almost entirely bilingual. Most presentations were in Spanish with English slides or vice versa, sometimes switching within a sentence (with occasional bits of Portuguese, which I can roughly understand but have no hope of speaking). Having a multilingual crowd generated the best in-joke of the conference: one of the presenters was talking about human drivers of land use change in the tropics, and she said “drivers… No sé como se dice en español…” A voice from the back of the room called out, “choferes!” (drivers in the literal sense, like truck drivers). For the rest of the conference we made many cracks about “choferes humanos.”

After the conference, I stayed with Robin and Rob for a few days in their gorgeous rented townhouse overlooking Morelia. We made forays to nearby towns to see the Day of the Dead celebrations. The traditions are an amazing blend of Catholic symbolism and much older beliefs. In the plazas and all the cemeteries, people set up altars for the recently dead. Bright orange marigolds and purple amaranth are strewn on the ground and arranged in elaborate patterns. The altars bore crucifixes and amulets of saints, but also geometric botanical designs and spirals of the bright flowers. A young girl in Uapan volunteered to explain the symbolism behind one of the altars, which turned out to be for her sixteen-year-old cousin. The highest level had a picture of the girl and a painting of the Virgin Mary, and was covered with an arch of flowers. This represented heaven, and the arch was because she had died a virgin. The middle level was the things that the girl had enjoyed in life—a plate of spicy enchiladas, roses, a romance novel, a guitar, and sugar-crusted pan de muerto. The lowest level was sprinkled with dirt and straw, to symbolize going back to the earth. I didn’t ask how the girl had died. It seems such a wonderful way to celebrate people’s lives and acknowledge the reality of death, rather than sweeping it under the rug as we tend to in the States.

Those orange marigolds—I had seen fields of them from the plane on the way in, and wondered what crop could possibly be that color. I asked a Mexican friend for the name of the flowers: zenpaxuchil. Decidely not a Spanish name; I had to ask him to repeat it a handful of times before I could make any sense of it. It comes from Nahuatl (still widely spoken in parts of Michoacan): zenpa (death) + xochitl (flower). I wonder whether the Mari- in marigold is the Virgin Mary, and whether this is another blending of traditions… in any case, by the time I left Mexico, all those bright gold fields had been harvested and the land was again the color of cornstalks.

5. Future directions. I have been thinking a lot about future directions, especially after the workshop, but in a broader sense than just research directions. I’m getting tired of the provisional feeling of everything in my life right now: a rented house where I stay sometimes less than a week out of each month, a job with no real possibility of advancement, temporary romance. Even most of my good friends here are planning to leave sometime—ticos leaving to do graduate work in the US or Europe, gringos finishing their graduate research and going back to the States. I’m 30 years old and I want to feel like some part of my life, at least, is going somewhere.

I’ve started looking for jobs, although this seems to be a very poor year for academic openings. My ideal post, while I’m dreaming: small liberal arts college in New England. If you know of anything, let me know.

Summertime, part III

2009-08-22T17:21:00.000-04:00

After Germany, I flew back to the US to do a book tour in support of Southbounders with my sister. Somewhat miraculously, our flights arrived on time (hers from Berlin and mine from Geneva), twenty minutes apart, and we met in the airport terminal without incident. I say “somewhat miraculously” since LaGuardia was entirely closed down that day with a bomb scare. Luckily we were at JFK.

We rented a car in Manhattan and drove all over the northeast promoting the book. While it may have boosted our sales, principally the experience convinced me that I never want to be famous in the larger world! It is so exhausting to smile at people non-stop for hours, especially when one is jet-lagged. The tour did have its high points, though. We finally had a chance to meet Roger W., who was instrumental in getting this edition on the market. He and his family invited us to stay with them in New Jersey for a few days, a welcome break from the hectic tour schedule. We also, quite randomly, met up with our old friend Heald and his girlfriend at one of our appearances in Maine. They were passing through and happened to see the poster.

The highlight of the summer, for me, was the few days that I got to spend on MDI with my family. The Island in August was at its most beautiful, the hills still green and the long light over the harbors enchanting. I had a chance to go sailing with an old friend on one clear, gorgeous afternoon. The blueberries this year are twice their normal size yet still sweet, thanks to the rain in July and then a dry August. I must have eaten gallons of them. One afternoon my mother and I hiked up the Precipice Trail (just opened, now that the peregrine falcons up there have fledged), and we wandered our way down over Gorham Mountain stopping at every berry patch along the way until almost dark. We caught the bus back to Bar Harbor just in time to hear the town band in the gazebo strike up “The Star-spangled Banner.” To my surprise, I found a lump in my throat. It’s still so weird to feel proud of my country. But I did, that night on the town green, feel so much pride and hope and such a wish to return. Someday.

Dixon met me at the airport with a bouquet of red roses and the world’s sweetest smile.

Mudpots! How could I forget the mudpots?

2009-08-22T17:04:00.003-04:00

Turn the sound up. This will change your life, or at least make you smile!

A backlog of photos

2009-08-22T15:33:00.009-04:00

Finally I find myself with a few free minutes to upload photos. Going all the way back to May, we begin with photos of the descent from Rincón de la Vieja. Above treeline, distant ridges flashed in and out of view as the wind whipped clouds over the landscape. Less than a minute after I snapped this photo, the clouds descended again and it began to rain sideways. I went on down.

Below treeline the forest was a thick tangle of Clusia growing at crazy angles. Something about this forest made me feel like Hobbits might appear at any moment.

Enormous trees, mostly oaks and towering Podocarpaceae (conifers), overshadowed the path all the way down. Sadly I was by myself and had no scale model. Take my word for it: these trees are exceedingly large.

Down in the lowlands, the air in the forest was still cool, but when I stepped out into the semi-barren landscape of vents and volcanic seepages, where the brush was scarcely waist-high, the sun beat with stunning force.

At home in Heredia, a lovely white orchid was blooming in the stairwell. At night, it had a sweet clove-like fragrance.

Utah. Utah was beautiful, at least the tiny corner of it I was fortunate enough to see. Many wildflowers; patches of snow still hanging on even at the end of July. Viva la Wasatch.

And Germany. Beautiful, too, especially when threatening thunderstorms lent the Lahn River an ominous aspect. Germany was also cute, sometimes too cute. See the garden gnome photo. Oh, but I still daydream about that bakery!

The manhole cover, incidentally, is for my mother. She takes pictures of them wherever she goes.

Finally, a couple photos from the tour (us with Roger; some publicity), and then photos of the Island summer.

Summertime, Part II

2009-08-10T14:18:00.000-04:00

In the past few weeks I’ve been traveling to scientific conferences, enjoying the rarefied world of academia and coping with—if not enjoying—the attendant stress and jet lag. I even managed to look the part of an up-and-coming scientist, in a professional black jacket and skirt I found in one of the Ropa Americana stores in Heredia the weekend before I left (dry-cleaning tag still attached; sorry, Jennifer Smith!), after realizing at the last minute that all my nice clothes are in storage in Maine. Last Thursday I left Costa Rica at the crack of dawn to travel to Snowbird, Utah, to present a workshop on robust statistical methods for biodiversity estimation. Rob Colwell, one of my committee members, wrote a classic program that implements a lot of these methods, and he was invited to give the workshop originally, but he had to decline due to family commitments. He suggested me as a substitute, so there I was, filling some very big shoes. The lecture and workshop were very well-received, though.

The conference at Snowbird was a joint meeting of the Botanical Society of America and the Mycological Society of America, and the workshop beforehand was a group of fungal systematists. I think the trait that most unites scientists of all stripes is their passion for their study systems. I, for instance, will argue at great length about the beauty and conservation value of tropical secondary forests, and don’t get me started on lianas. At UCONN I knew a number of parasitologists who could wax rhapsodic about the ultrastructure of a tapeworm scolex. And at Snowbird, I met a great many fungus enthusiasts. One quote that sticks with me, from conference organizer Tom Bruns, on rust fungi: “If it’s got five hosts and two spore stages, you’ve got to respect it!” I learned a great deal about fungi and their role in ecosystems, although (the mycologists will be disappointed) I’m still not convinced that fungi run the world.

On Friday I had a chance to climb up to the ridge above the resort, passing through steep alpine meadows in full bloom. Roses and gentians, bluish geraniums, and a host of others I couldn’t name, all faintly fragrant when a wind came up the slope. Near the high ridge, patches of grainy snow were still present under the trees. I climbed slowly, fighting for the thin air at 11,000 feet and watching fat ground squirrels chase each other among the flowers. I hiked barefoot for a little bit, but the trail was mostly gravel and not so pleasant.

Saturday morning was the workshop. We had originally expected 30 or 40 people, but 70 registered and nearly 100 showed up. I didn’t get nervous during the lecture, though. I think my inner diva relishes the spotlight. The difficult part was the workshop, when participants had a chance to use the software and try out some analyses. I wasn’t sure how I would manage with that many people. Fortunately one of the postdocs on the organizing committee had worked with the program extensively, so he was able to help out, and it all ran smoothly in the end. It was very rewarding to see results popping up on everyone’s laptop screens.

The only disappointment in Utah was that I wasn’t able to meet up with my uncle Pete. He’s a fungal systematist, and I haven’t seen him in almost ten years. He was planning to attend the meeting and we were going to have dinner on Saturday, but his flight out of Alabama was delayed and we weren’t able to meet after all.

I left Snowbird on Saturday evening for a red-eye flight to New York. The plane was delayed until almost 4am, and I spent an uncomfortable sleepless night in the Salt Lake City airport, cursing the plastic chairs with arm rests that made it impossible to stretch out, the grimy carpet that I decided not to stretch out on either, and the inescapable CNN broadcast that permeated the entire terminal. I spent the next day in the JFK airport in a fog of jet lag, eventually finding my way to the Lufthansa terminal, waiting for check-in to open, and waiting for the plane to board. This being a German airline, it was perfectly on time. It was also, sadly, full of boisterous Spanish high school students returning from a trip to New York, and so I didn’t sleep on this plane either.

Thus, after two sleepless nights, I arrived in Frankfurt at 5am. I passed quickly through customs, found my way to the train station, and figured out my connections to the picturesque town of Marburg an der Lahn for the annual meeting of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation. I arrived at the conference just in time for the first plenary speaker. My own session was scheduled for the afternoon. Stefan Schnitzer, a professor at Wisconsin and an all-around good guy, had worked with me to put together a symposium on the topic of changing liana abundance in tropical forests. The theme of the meeting this year was climate change and tropical ecosystems, so it seemed natural to put together a session on lianas. A lot of new evidence suggests that lianas can respond favorably to increased drought and increased carbon dioxide levels, even to a greater extent than co-occurring trees. Data from South and Central America suggest that lianas are increasing in abundance already. Despite their relatively low biomass, lianas have a huge impact on forest dynamics. If lianas do increase with climate change, they have the potential to radically alter the structure of tropical forests, favoring soft-wooded, fast-growing trees that store much less carbon than slower-growing hardwoods. We put together a diverse group of speakers to address this topic and various other aspects of liana biology.

About an hour before the session was scheduled to begin, I checked with the conference organizers to make sure that all the speakers had arrived and loaded their talks. Everyone had—except Stefan. He was scheduled to give the introduction to the session. We’d talked a little bit about what the talk would include, and so he put me on it as a co-author, but I’d never actually seen the slides. With a sinking feeling, I checked my email, and sure enough there was a message from Stefan around midnight the night before: he was stuck in Newark and probably wouldn’t arrive on time, and did I want to give the attached talk? At this point it was 40 minutes before the session. Well, I was listed as a co-author, and didn’t have much of a choice. I downloaded the Powerpoint and found that it was 40 slides long, for a 15-minute slot. I think Stefan must talk faster than I do. I took about half an hour to cut the presentation down a bit and fix the format—the font size was screwed up on about half the slides, and some of the graphics didn’t load. My friend Luitgard Schwendenmann, bless her heart, showed me where the delete key is on a German keyboard and offered calming words of wisdom. Then I took about five minutes to figure out what to say, do some deep breathing, and vaguely wish I was religious so I could put it all in the hands of my deity of choice.

I don’t remember much of the talk, actually. People say it went pretty well. By the time my own talk came along, at the end of the session, I was on auto-pilot, in a zone beyond stress and sleeplessness. It was almost as though I was watching myself stand up there and be articulate and compelling, the diva delivering the goods no matter what the cost. I thought what happened in China was stressful. This was so much worse. Double red-eye, unexpected talk with no prep time. I’ve never been happier to be finished with my part at a conference. Stefan finally arrived during the last set of talks, so at least he got to see a few of the speakers that we invited.

The rest of the conference I’ve been hanging out with La Selva friends, attending talks, and exploring the almost-too-cute town of Marburg. The historic part of town is up a steep hill, so steep that the town has installed a public elevator. Along the cobblestone streets, many of them too narrow for cars and giving way to stairs every few blocks, narrow little houses with painted wooden beams and slate roofs stack up like Escher creations. The castle on the hilltop and the slow, green waters of the Lahn River below frame a scene that, aside from the elevator, seems to have slipped out of a book of Medieval fairy tales. Apparently Marburg had no heavy industry at the time of WWII, and so escaped unscathed. Everything has a patina of Old Europe about it—the bike paths along the river, the sidewalk cafes, the little chocolate shops and bakeries. The seal of Phillips Universitat, our host institution, bears the numbers 1527. It took me a while to resolve that as a date.

And the unbearable cuteness of everything: “German kitsch,” my sister Lucy says, “is the most kitschy of all kitsch.” (She should know; she lives in Berlin.) In the garden of the house next to the youth hostel—a brick mansion with a date in the 1700s over its door—there is a miniature mill staffed by garden gnomes. Gnomes feature heavily in the stores in the old district, along with more utilitarian ceramics, Pashmina scarves, chocolate, mysterious liquers, and all manner of postcards, all in cheery colors and impeccably tidy. The names of all the mouthwatering treats lined up in the bakery window all end in -chen, which is more or less “cute little.” Brötchen, cute little bread. Lahnstangchen, cute little pretzels. Even the way people talk is cute, the sing-song of “danke schön, bitte schön, tschüss!” (the lattermost with a curious high inflection and divided into two syllables, a sort of Teutonic “buh-bye!”).

My own extremely limited German skills are limited to bad pickup lines learned from La Selva researchers, a few half-remembered famous German poems that I learned when I studied music theory, and the remnants of a phrase-a-day travel calendar that my sophomore-year roommate gave me. The latter was probably the most useful (“Ich habe ein kreditkarte… das ist mein koffer… um wiefiel uhr beginnt das führung?” something more or less like, “I have a credit card… that is my suitcase… what time does the tour begin?”). My two most successful German transactions were buying an internet voucher at the youth hostel (“halbe stunde von internet, bitte”) and finding some wrapping paper with hearts on it. I bought some chocolates for Dixon at a charming little candy store. Next door there was a charming little store that only sold wrapping paper, apparently, much of it ancient and wrinkled and reminiscent of the paper we used to save every year from one Christmas to the next. I wondered whether people returned wrapping paper to the store after using it, and I also wondered how a place like this stayed in business. My German skills did not extend to such things, though. The attendant was a woman about half my size and nearly three times my age, with an extravagant bouffant. She asked something; I assume it was probably “can I help you?” “Ich suche papier mit herzen,” I said. I am looking for paper with hearts. Almost grammatically correct, I think, and not to be found in any phrase book. I was proud of that sentence. Most of my transactions usually ended up with me at a loss for words, and the salesperson effortlessly switching to English. At the end of my stay I could finally navigate the finer points of “ab steiβen oder zu mitnehmen” (here or to go), but any questions outside the script left me flustered. People politely tolerated my efforts. It’s hard to imagine a coffeeshop waitress in the US just smiling and switching to German for someone who says, “sorry, I have little, little English. Please talk me in little words?”

It is strange to reconcile this life—international travel, recognition, scientific dialogue—with the life I was living in Costa Rica. I’m trying to figure out my next step. I think I will stay with OTS for a few more years, assuming that OTS stays solvent, but there are times when I wonder whether that’s the right decision. I see people my age who decided to go into research postdocs instead of teaching amassing publication records I could never hope to match. And then there are other thoughts about life priorities… I would love to have a family. I would love to have a career in science, really contribute something to the field. I think it’s possible to do both, but I don’t know how. Should I wait to have children until after I have tenure somewhere? Will I even be able to? Will I have the energy to work towards tenure and also raise a family? I have a lot to think about, and a lot to talk about with Dixon. I don’t know whether our goals and priorities will match in the long run. I have to start, I guess, by figuring out what my goals and priorities really are.

Summertime

2009-06-30T23:57:00.000-04:00

… and the livin’ is, if not easy, at least fun and rewarding. Once again I have left this blog neglected for far too long. The calendar pages are turning so fast I can’t keep up. A brief update, then, on the past few months:

The semester finished in mid-May, in a whirlwind of grading. The day before the students left, we visited Rincon de la Vieja national park, where an active volcano looms over the dry forests of Guanacaste. I took four hours from my grading schedule (by staying up insanely late the night before) to be able to hike the volcano and see the mudpots. I didn’t get all the way to the top of the volcano, only to treeline. That was the interesting part (for me as a botanist, anway; geologists might beg to differ). The forests at the lower edge of the mountain are the typical dry, scrubby, thorny forests of the lowlands in that part of the country. As you go up in elevation, the trees get bigger from the moisture of the clouds trapped by the mountain. Many trees were fruiting in the middle elevations, and I surprised monkeys, parrots, and guans in the foliage. Higher up, truly enormous oaks cover the slopes. They give way to a stunted, wind-warped forest of Clusia with an understory of Geonoma palms, and then to pure Clusia clinging to the slopes with its stubby, succulent stems, and finally to low sedges that give way to bare gray rock. Up near treeline the wind whipped through the branches carrying shreds of fog and a malevolent sulfur odor that could make one imagine the approach to Mordor. The temperature dropped sharply and the rain began. (At that moment, I must admit, I thought of the White Mountains in New Hampshire). The contrast in climate between the sun-baked thorn forest down below and the barren, wind-scoured, foggy approach to the summit was truly startling. I was prepared with a rain jacket and sweater, but I saw a lot of tourists in their shorts and t-shirts on the way up, in for a rude surprise (perhaps it was this that really reminded me of New Hampshire).

After the hike to the summit—almost a run, really; I went as fast as I could to stay ahead of the crowds and be able to see as much as possible—I headed back down to see the mudpots. If you ever have an opportunity to see a volcanic mudpot, take it, even if it means traveling out of your way. Mudpots are fantastic. They occur in places where boiling water and steam bubble up from volcanic vents through muddy soil. Bubbles form slowly in the mud and pop, shooting out spurts of steaming mud with a plopping sound. Words don’t do it justice. I will try to post a video, along with some photos, when I am somewhere with faster internet. A mudpot is a perfect combination of the sublime and the ridiculous, combining funny, gross, and fascinating in proportions that only a five-year-old could truly and rightly appreciate.

Those were the highlights of Rincon de la Vieja; then it was back to grading and the final discussions. When the course ended, I missed the students a lot. What a great group of people to travel and work with. I hope they learned a lot from me. I know I learned a great deal from them.

The week after we finished the course reports and final grades, I went to Nicaragua for a few days with Alex and Steven. We visited Granada and Masaya, and made delicious mojitos with cheap Nicaraguan rum and mint and sugar we bought from a wizened old lady in the covered market in Masaya. It was good to make some new memories of Nicaragua. The only unfortunate thing about the trip was that Alex got food poisoning in San Juan del Sur, and had a very unpleasant bus ride back. She recovered quickly once she got home, though.

The first week of June I attended a meeting that my former advisor organized, with scientists who work on forest regeneration in Mexico, Costa Rica, Brazil, and Panama. We talked about future directions in forest succession research, and we came up with a series of papers that we plan to write. I can’t say too much about it now, because it’s very much in the beginning stages, but they have agreed to share data and nominated me to write a paper that could be an important advance in the field, depending on how the analysis comes out. I’m really excited about it. I have a paper in review right now that deals with the same topic, and I’m crossing my fingers that it will be accepted.

Ever since the conference, I’ve been up at Alex’s farm working on a vegetation inventory project. The forest at low elevations here is ridiculously well-studied, but the middle elevations have had much less survey work. Alex is planting a long-term reforestation experiment, and we want to have an idea of the species composition in the surrounding forests so we can compare the reforestation plots to the natural forest in the region over time. The forest here is remarkably diverse—we found 239 species in half a hectare (a little over an acre) at the back of the farm. There are many species I don’t recognize from the lowlands. Given the elevation and the remoteness of the site, it’s quite possible that there may be undescribed species out here. Most of the forests around here have been high-graded, if not clear-cut, so there’s a lot of disturbance, but we’ve also worked in some areas where we find species that are usually indicators of undisturbed forest. One of my favorites is a little palm, generally no more than waist-high, called Reinhardtia gracilis. It has windows in its leaves that make it look like stained glass.

The inventory work is fairly intense. We try to leave for the field by 7 am, and we work until it rains heavily or gets dark, running survey lines into the forest and collecting a sample of each species we find. Generally we can do about 0.1 hectare in a day, though once we managed 0.13 in a particularly nice forest, “nice” meaning relatively level and free of vines. Few forests around here are nice in that respect, though. We have worked on hills so steep that we considered belaying each other with the rope from the collecting poles. Alex and I have a great time in the forest. We have a similar quirky sense of humor, and we’ve cooked up a steady supply of geeky botany jokes and lewd anatomical descriptions of certain plants (have you ever seen the roots of Iriartea deltoidea? You would understand!) to keep each other well entertained.

In other news, I have finally started dating somebody again. His name is Dixon, and he works on the construction crew that is building Alex’s house. He is sweet and gentle and treats me like a princess. And he is certifiably single, or at least he was until we started dating. We don’t have much time to spend together, since he works something like 60 hours a week and I’m in the forest half the time, but we’ve had a great time on the weekends. Last fall I was talking to my stepdad about how to find a good man. “Pick someone who’s sweet on you,” he said. Dixon is definitely sweet on me, and I’m getting very fond of him. We’ll see where it goes.

2009-04-25T15:08:00.001-04:00

Hard to believe the course will finish in two weeks. A few notes on the last places we have visited, then. Photos will have to wait, since they are on my home computer and I am once again in the field.

At the beginning of April we visited San Gerardo Biological Station at the edge of the Children’s Eternal Rainforest in Monteverde. The reserve, a complex of cloud-laden mountaintops along the contintental divide, came about through one of those heartwarming 1980s “children save the world” efforts, in which kids from all over the globe contributed to purchase protected land. Twenty-some years later, it is gratifying to see the land still protected and the forest growing back. The managers of the field station were a family who had lived there when the area was still farmed, and they pointed out where their pastures had been. You can still see the difference clearly between the new forest—spindly Heliocarpus trees with an understory of shrubs and a few grasses—and the gnarled, moss-covered, hulking trees of the old forest. Almost all the pastures have grown in, though, and the birds are beginning to come back into the young forests. We saw a blue and gold tanager (which, if you know birds, is apparently a big deal) hopping around in the edge of the old pasture area. I went looking for umbrella birds and bellbirds, a pair of unusual and attractive species endemic to this mountain range, but I didn’t spot any. One of my students saw four umbrella birds while he was out looking for plants. Figures!

One of the best things about San Gerardo was the unobstructed view of Arenal, an active volcano that is a major tourist attraction for this part of the country. The lava flows on Arenal aren’t smooth rivers, but rather tumbling aggregations of half-molten bolders. I think the technical term is a pyroclastic flow. Visually, it looks like the mountain is full of trapped light that occasionally struggles to the surface. The view from San Gerardo was better than anything I saw in La Fortuna (the tourist trap village at the base of the volcano); at night when it was clear we could see the glint of orange lava where the mountainside broke open. Even in the day we could occasionally see puffs of smoke in lines where flaming boulders went bouncing away down the slope.

I was surprised how many clear nights we had at San Gerardo. From my limited experience of cloud forests, I had expected unrelenting gloom. This is the tail end of the dry season, though, and we only got rained on twice. The second time was on the hike out—4 km uphill with all our gear in backpacks. I was actually glad it was raining; it kept the temperature down and made the steep uphills more bearable. I was reminded of a day on the Appalachian Trail years ago, when I was hiking through the rain with the inimitable Waterfall. I’ve never liked rain very much, especially cold rain, but Waterfall had a way of seeing the best in every situation.

“Don’t the plants look happier being wet?” she said. I had to agree.

The plants at Monteverde certainly seemed happier in the rain, and the landscape, too, seemed to take on its true dimensions with wisps of fog and rain obscuring the distant mountains. It was impossible to see how far the mountains extended, impossible to see the pastures and cleared areas in the lowlands. Aside from the road—a one-lane mud track suitable only for quad bikes and intrepid horseback riders—it seemed that we were in the wilderness primeval.

Leaving Monteverde, we headed for Cabo Blanco on the tip of the Nicoya Peninsula. Cabo is closer to wilderness primeval, actually, although the scrubby, dry, vine-festooned secondary forest there is not nearly as interesting. Cabo Blanco is an absolute reserve: only researchers and a select few students ever get to see the place. When no academic groups are visiting—much of the year—the station is boarded up and left for the land crabs, racoons, and monkeys. Cabo was Costa Rica’s first national park, in 1963. At the time it was converted to park, the area was all cornfields and pastures, so the forest is not much to look at. But the park was really established to protect the shoreline and the marine areas. At low tide, rock formations make a natural lagoon that is home to shells, corals, anemones, fanworms, and shoals of colorful fish. Very few people ever get to see an undisturbed reef like this one. We even spotted a sea turtle, a small leatherback, making its ponderous way along the sea floor in the lagoon. My favorite animal was a tiny blenny, about as big around as a pencil, with a green body and rings of bright red like makeup around its eyes and mouth. Their googly eyes and oversize bright red lips give them something of a Betty Boop look.

The one drawback of being at the beach, for me, is that my skin just doesn’t tan. Aside from a few freckles, I go from white to burned faster than toasted Wonder Bread. I’ve always been more of a forest person than a beach person, partly for this reason. I was very careful to keep myself slathered with sunscreen and covered up as much as possible, even to the point of wearing long sleeves and long pants while I was snorkeling. (I’m sure it wasn’t the most attractive beach outfit—sopping wet button-down shirt and field pants—but besides the anti-burn protection it also kept me insulated in the relatively cool Pacific waters.) Despite my precautions, I ended up with a perma-freckled face.

After a short few days at home, I’ve re-joined the course at La Selva for the final stretch. I don’t feel quite as rested as I would like to be, but it’s just two weeks…

Palo Verde

2009-04-04T17:54:00.010-04:00

A post written some weeks ago, and not uploaded till now thanks to RACSA’s breakdown…

I am back in Heredia again, after a three-week stint in Palo Verde. It wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d been led to believe—the hordes of mosquitoes I recall from the wet season were almost entirely absent, the ungodly heat was tempered by a breeze, and the scorpions (large and abundant though they were) mostly kept to themselves. I think I could develop a taste for Guanacaste in the dry season. It was strange, though, to see a tropical forest with hardly any leaves. I've become so accustomed to the evergreen forests of the Atlantic lowlands. I think many people,when they think tropical forests, think rain forests. But 42% of tropical forests are dry forests, and many dry forest trees are deciduous. Hence the strange combination of blinding sun, scorching heat, and leafless trees.

Some researchers have argued that dry forests are even more endangered than rain forests. One reason is that dry forest makes great cattle pasture, and it's easy to keep it clear by burning. The trouble is that burning favors invasive, exotic species, here particularly the pernicious pasture grass jaragua (Hyparrhenia rufa), which can form stands so dense that tree seedlings don't stand a chance. Parque Nacional Palo Verde protects one of the last remaining fragments of tropical dry forest in Central America, clinging to the steep sides of limestone ridges along the edge of the Tempsique floodplain.

In Costa Rica, most of the formerly dry forest areas have been converted to giant ranches, making Guanacaste the Wild West of Costa Rica. Cowboys (sabaneros; literally "men of the savannah") on horseback are a common sight along the dirt roads, and vast expanses of ranch land with emaciated Zebu cattle stretch off as far as the eye can see. Even within the park, cattle concessions still operate, though the cattle are now pastured in the marshy river floodplains rather than the few fragments of remaining forest. I never did get a clear answer as to why there are cattle in the park; my cynical side expects that there is a payoff somewhere. According to certain factions, the cattle help keep down the cattails (Typha domingensis), another invasive species, in the marsh... but none of the scientists I met agreed with this view, and there certainly seemed to be plenty of cattails in the areas with cattle.

Aside from cattle, the floodplain marsh supports an amazing variety and quantity of water birds: ducks, herons, egrets, storks, spoonbills, rails, etc. The marsh was dried rapidly; we watched areas go from deep water to dried, cracked dirt in the three weeks that we were there. Flocks of birds congregated in ever-smaller spaces as the water receded, making their numbers stand out even more. One afternoon I was fortunate enough to spot a jabiru stork. These massive birds can stand up to 1.5 m (5 ft) tall. I stalked out into the marsh to try to get a picture of it. No luck-- they are very wary birds-- but I did get a picture of my footprint next to the bird's. (For reference, I wear a size 10-11 shoe.) Outside the marsh I also spotted a pair of scarlet macaws, my first, but once again I was not quick enough with the camera.

The marsh at Palo Verde had a somewhat otherworldly aspect, with the weirdly-shaped limestone mountains rising up all around and giant, ungainly waterfowl flapping in slow motion against the constant wind. I sometimes felt (especially before my coffee in the morning) that I'd landed on an inhospitable marsh planet from the Star Wars universe, where the only human habitations cluster around the base of mountain ranges. It would not have surprised me unduly to see Imperial Walkers approaching from the Tempisque.

In the middle of our stay at Palo Verde we took a side trip to a mangrove swamp, which really looked like something out of Star Wars. At the outskirts, the white mangrove (Avicennia germinans) formed a monospecific stand. The regularly-spaced, sandy-brown trunks looked almost too orderly, as though they'd been planted. Here's the weird part: Avicennia has aerophores, little nobbly roots that allow gas exchange in the fine, silty soil. They stick up like a congregation of miniature snorkels, ankle-high all over the forest floor. We walked towards the ocean a ways (smelling the salt and hearing distant surf above the rush of wind in the trees), and we came to the red mangroves (Rhizophora mangle). I don't imagine many people have seen old-growth mangrove trees. Hopefully my pictures (scroll down) will do them justice, but I will add a few words as well. From ten feet up they look like a forest of aspens (same gray trunks, same cheery yellow-green in their leaves as aspens in about mid-June); from among the roots they look like a crazy jungle gym. They look like they walked there. They look like they could take off any time they wanted, like the jumping trees in the E.T. book (which was so much better than the movie, by the way!)

On the way back from the mangroves we visited Megafauna Park, a collection of statues of the extinct fauna of Central America. For anyone who wants to buddy up to a gomphothere, here's your chance! It was neat to see how large some of these animals really were.

Well, this entry is long enough by far. I will upload some photos and post it before it gets any longer!

Images of Las Cruces and Cuericí

2009-02-23T09:07:00.009-05:00

OK, take 2... I am really not happy with the way that blogger uploads images, but I was on my way out the door when I posted this and didn't have a chance to fix it! Let's see if this works better...

Among the clouds

2009-02-20T18:20:00.002-05:00

I am home in Heredia for a few days, catching up on sleep and tying up loose ends. Here is an update I wrote at our last site, but never posted due to lack of internet:

We are spending the week at Cuericí Biological Station, in the montane oak forest at an elevation of 2600 m (8500 ft), with frequent hikes to higher-elevation sites. The few remnants of oak forest remaining on the high peaks of the Cordillera are lovely to behold; giant shaggy-barked trees hung with moss and often fog-festooned, with an understory of bamboo and tree ferns. When the sun is out, the landscape is inviting, but the clouds roll in inevitably, dropping the temperature and spattering occasional rain and putting a damper on my spirits. I’ve noticed for a long time that the weather affects my mood to a great degree, and the effect seems to grow even stronger as the years go by. This morning, I woke up feeling cheerful and optimistic with the sun pouring through the skylight. At mid-morning, when the cloud layer’s first tendrils whisked through the clearing and then the sky went gray, I felt gloom settle over me. I am trying to be aware of how the weather affects my mood so that I can try to mitigate the impact. Well, I’m very aware of it, but the mitigation strategies have yet to materialize. So, cloud forests: beautiful. Gloomy. And cold. Nights here drop into the 40s, and I have lost all my tolerance for it. I am working hard to muster some appreciation for cloud forests, but (as the clouds close in thicker and begin to dribble) I am once again forced to conclude that they are mostly better viewed from a distance, or for brief periods of time.

The proprietor of Cuericí, Don Carlos Solano, is a native Costa Rican whose grandparents settled the land many years ago. He used to support his family through trout farming and occasional tourists, but now he mainly hosts educational groups like ours. He is an amiable man in his fifties, I would guess, who speaks eloquently of the need to balance conservation and responsible resource use. The farm is a model of sustainable operation—he gets much of his electricity from a small hydroelectric generator at the base of his steep pasture; he has replanted forests on many of the former pastures, and he has preserved almost all of the old-growth oak forest on his land. He still runs the trout farm, which I can see through the window as I type this, but he has tried to minimize the environmental impact by composting the solid waste (when he dries down each of the ponds every four years or so) and building better retention systems to keep the fish from escaping. (Trout are non-native here, and their original introduction wreaked havoc on natural stream ecosystems.) Like so many Costa Ricans I have met, Don Carlos is working hard to make a living and to make the environment a little better. The uncharitable, seasonal-affective-disordered side of my brain, though, can’t help but wonder why anyone would want to try to make a living at these elevations at all. Even now in the purported dry season, fog, mist, and drizzle are the order of the day. I am reminded of Ray Bradbury’s Venus.

In a lot of ways, this field station reminds me of hiker hostels on the AT. The student lodging, especially, a warren of bunks upstairs in the main house, now adorned with layers of gear, detritus, and drying clothes. A basket of old Newsweeks and Christian Science Monitors completes the hiker hostel appearance. There’s even an old notebook filled with messages from people who have stayed here before, and I leafed through it somehow half-expecting to see familiar names from the trail—Pilgrim and Gollum, Porkchop, Waterfall, Blue Skies, Blade. I did find a few names I knew, the world of tropical ecology being as small as it is, but nothing like the wealth of information that a trail register conveyed. Especially in the early winter when Isis and I hiked alone, trail registers were our link to the rest of our community, and we followed the unfolding sagas of romance, injury, hardship, and humor from shelter to shelter along the trail. Ridiculous as it was, I felt a little let down to open the notebook at Cuericí and not see the familiar scrawls of GAME (Georgia-Maine) and the AT symbol.

Sometimes I miss the trail a lot. I miss the instant camaraderie that developed between hikers at a shelter. I miss the sense of belonging. I’ve had so few times in my life when I really felt that I belonged where I was. Growing up on the coast of Maine with parents “from away”, I was “from away” by default. College was the first time I found a group of like-minded people who I could share everything with. The trail was the second, and I’m beginning to fear it may have been the last. I certainly don’t belong here. For a time, perhaps, but I can’t imagine settling here anymore. Wherever I go, I am inevitably recognized as foreign, and it begins to wear on the nerves. A few weeks ago I was riding the bus from Heredia to San Pablo, and another gringa (unknown to me) got on at the next stop.

“Son como pisotes,” the driver observed. “Se ve una, se ve otra.” They are like coatis (raccoon-like rainforest animals that generally travel in groups)—you see one, you see another.

Yet another reminder, if I needed it, that I’m a stranger in a strange land. Also a rather unwelcome breed of stranger, unfortunately. Public opinion of Americans has risen slightly in the last month, but not enough to make up for a generally concealed tide of anti-American sentiment, driven more by our appetite for real estate than our political foibles. In many parts of Costa Rica, speculation has driven land prices so high that Costa Ricans can no longer afford to buy farms at all, and the only people who can are foreigners. Mostly Americans. Americans who come for three weeks and spend money are welcome, but Americans who come looking for a second home are (quite understandably) personae non grata. As someone who’s here for a few years, I occupy a somewhat tenuous area of middle ground. Sometimes I feel a bit guilty, as a foreigner here, working at a job that could presumably be filled by a tico. In order to get me a work visa for this job, OTS has to write a letter claiming that they had to hire a foreigner because there were no qualified locals. Is it true? Admittedly most of the bilingual ticos with doctorates I know are currently pursuing post-docs in the US…

Gloomy thoughts of a cloud-forest-addled brain. Maybe when I get closer to sea level I will be able to think this through and feel more like I belong here.

2009-02-09T16:07:00.002-05:00

For the past two weeks, I have been at Las Cruces Biological Station beginning my work as a professor for undergraduate study abroad courses. The job is exhausting, inspiring, overwhelming. I think I’m learning at least as much as the students are. We begin the day with breakfast at 6:30 (orange juice, gallo pinto, coffee, bread), then classes or field trips all morning and lectures at 2, 4, and 7. Time alone for reflection is a rare commodity. Mondays are our nominal day off, although I have spent most of the day catching up on correspondence, fine-tuning my lectures for next week, and helping a friend with some plant identifications.

The students are a diverse group: three Costa Ricans, two from South Africa, one from Japan, and the rest from the US. All of them are a joy to work with. They ask great questions and approach their work with determination and good humor. I was a bit nervous about teaching, but I have found that my nervousness disappears the minute I step in front of a crowd and start lecturing. It’s funny—if I had to stand up there and talk about myself I’d be tongue-tied with stage fright, but when I’m sharing information and making connections I get so engaged in the material that I forget to be nervous. I guess it’s a good thing I like teaching so much—I am pretty much overqualified for any other career!

Las Cruces in the dry season is almost preternaturally beautiful. It rains a bit at night, the morning dawns clear or with a little mist over the valley, and the days are endlessly blue except for the cap of distant clouds hovering over the summits of the Talamanca range. Part of the field station is a botanical garden, which includes the second-largest collection of living palms in the world. (My favorite: the Asian genus Zombia, with fearsome rows of spines adorning every part of it.) The manicured hillsides have gardens of bromeliads, gingers, anthuriums, tree ferns, and thousands of other plants. Venturing out of the garden, you can walk through a fragment of the remaining forest in this area. The steep slopes support stately, moss-covered trees with an understory of shrubs and broad-leaved herbs, with less lianas than the lowlands. It took me a few minutes of close observation to realize that most of the big trees here are actually oaks. With their small, unlobed leaves, they don’t look anything like the temperate oaks, but the fruits (acorns) are identical. Many are flowering now, dropping their catkins onto the forest floor.

As a tiny fragment of forest surrounded by degraded pasture land, Las Cruces is hardly the pristine rain forest that many people come to see. It’s an ideal place, though, for studying fragmentation and the way organisms persist in human-dominated landscapes. A friend of mine is engaged in a long-term project studying the movement of bats and birds between the forests and the small farms and pastures around the area. In a lot of ways, this landscape is more typical of the tropics than the places I studied in Sarapiquí. There’s a lot less natural forest remaining, the soils are much less fertile, and people have been present as a dominant force in the landscape for a much longer time. The amount of forest regeneration, and the rate at which forests come back when the land is abandoned, are correspondingly reduced. It’s a hard place to balance the necessities of conservation and human livelihoods. A few days ago, though, I had an experience that gave me a lot of hope for the future of the forest and the people here. We visited a coffee farmer, Roberto Jimenez, who is making a real effort to balance sustainability and economic viability on his 6 hectare (15 acre) farm.

We have a unit on coffee production in our environmental policy course. Some facts I didn’t realize: coffee is the #2 traded commodity on the world market, after oil. The price of coffee on the world market sometimes drops so low that it costs more to produce it than farmers can receive for their crops, yet the consumer price of coffee remains pretty high. From bean to cup, there is a markup of nearly 100x. The people who get the profits are the middlemen, rather than the farmers. Coffee production, as it’s practiced in most countries today, is a monoculture crop with huge chemical inputs. Conventional coffee processing (from fruit to bean) causes extensive soil and water pollution. I didn’t realize, either, how closely Costa Rica’s culture and national identity is tied to coffee. Costa Rica was a country of small farms, mostly producing coffee, since before its independence. Donations of coffee from farmers all over the country financed the building of the national theater in San Jose in the 1890s. Even in the idioms here, traces of this history remain. Someone who is mortally exhausted is hecho leña—literally, “made into firewood”—just like the coffee plant that has exhausted its productivity. But with the price of coffee dropping so low on the world market, many farmers have been forced to turn their land into cattle pastures—or sell out to land-speculating gringos.

We got to see an alternative a few days ago. At Don Roberto’s farm, a canopy of shade trees covers the coffee, providing habitat for birds and other animals that need forest cover. Living fences and erosion barriers protect the soil. He only uses chemicals where it is absolutely necessary, for instance in controlling fungal outbreaks. Usually he uses natural pesticides that he manufactures on the farm, based on sugar cane and distillations from native plants. For fertilizer, he relies on compost from pig waste, discarded coffee fruits, and rice hulls, along with the organic matter from the shade trees and from pruning the coffee plants. He collects methane from the pig waste as well in a biodigestor that provides nearly all the gas they use for cooking. He and about 50 other farming families in the area have founded a cooperative dedicated to environmental sustainability. They built a new coffee processing plant, based on new methods that minimize water use and compost solid waste. The cooperative markets directly to consumers, mainly in the US, in partnership with an organization called the Community Agroecology Network. Rather than selling through a middleman, direct trade allows the farmers to actually make a living wage. It’s also allowed them to return parts of their farms to the wild. Don Roberto has reforested almost 1/3 of his farm. Fifteen years ago it was all degraded pasture, and now there are trees in many areas providing shade, protecting the watershed, and allowing birds to return to the landscape. A recent study by a visiting student found 50 species of birds visiting Roberto’s property. In Costa Rica, the decision to reforest is not one to undertake lightly. Once an area has been in forest for more than 15 years, the owner is not allowed to cut it or extract wood without a lengthy permit process. (While this law has protected some areas, it’s also caused a lot of damage: rather than letting their forests survive, many people will cut them back to the ground before they get more than 15 years old so that they don’t lose control of the land use on their farms. Several of the young forests I surveyed in Sarapiquí have since been cut for this reason.) For Don Roberto, reforesting part of his farm has been an act of faith. It was so inspiring to hear him talk about what motivated him to change. Here I translate and paraphrase, but this is pretty close to what he said:

“The way I learned to farm was a destructive way, with chemicals that poisoned the earth and our families and the people who bought our coffee. In recent years we started to realize that these methods don’t work in the long run. The coffee plants produce a lot of fruit, but they die faster. Our families were getting sick. We decided to start a new cooperative based on new ideas. It’s not organic farming—the humidity here makes it almost impossible to get an organic crop to grow—but we reduce chemical use as much as we can. We use the leaf litter from the shade trees for compost. And we plant trees so the birds can come back. I love to see birds on my farm. We try to be in harmony with nature. For so long we were fighting against nature on our farms, and now we are learning that we need to work with it instead.
“I hear people talk about the third world. What is the third world? There is only one world, and it belongs to all of us. The good that we do, however small, is good for all of us. The bad things we do come back to all of us. We can’t change everyone all at once, but we can make small changes for the better, and if enough of us do, it becomes a big change.”

I wish more people thought like Don Roberto Jimenez. One of the most inspiring things here in Costa Rica is that so many people do think this way, and they are taking steps to change the world in little ways. Here is a way to start: if you drink coffee, get it here instead of Starbucks. I don’t think I’ve ever used my blog to advertise a product, aside from my own books, and I don’t intend to do it very often. But this one deserves your consideration. The profits go right to the farmers, allowing them to continue taking their own steps toward sustainability. The coffee is marvelously flavorful. When you taste it, imagine the green slopes of mountains in the distance, the shade trees full of birds, the families with enough money to send their children to school, and the forests coming back across the landscape.

Buses: the good, the bad, and the ugly

2009-01-21T23:03:00.000-05:00

Public buses are the lifeblood of the greater San José metropolitan area, feeding workers and students from the outlying areas into the city center in the morning and back out at twilight. You can get almost anywhere in the area for under a dollar, but you have to learn the system. I dedicated myself to learning the major routes last week so that I would have some idea of how to get to work and back. Indeed, I was in one of these buses going from Tibas to Santo Domingo last week when the earthquake struck and I didn’t feel it. It seems a telling mark of the quality of the bus, and the quality of the roads, that a 6.2 magnitude quake did not feel like anything out of the ordinary.

Buses vary greatly in quality. Occasionally, especially for the longer hauls, one gets a bus with seats that approach comfortable, sometimes even with leg room. Some of the runs—Heredia-San José, San José-Alajuela—tend to have more modern coaches, and the drivers occasionally turn on a decent radio station, and you can enjoy the city going past with a nice salsa soundtrack and be thankful you are not among the honking hordes trying to force their way across three lanes of traffic. At the rock bottom of the bus quality scale, unfortunately, is the Universidad de Costa Rica bus I ride to work every day. There are a number of different buses that drive this route, all painted 1970’s wallpaper colors (so at least they are easy to spot and flag down), and they are all schoolbuses of uncertain vintage, of the sort I used to ride to high school, but with about 30 more rows of seats than I ever remember in a high school bus. The consequence, of course, is that there is about 3 inches of space between each seat and the one in front of it, and for someone of my stature there is no conceivable way to get my legs into that space. Of course, most days I don’t get a seat anyway—the bus fills up in Heredia, and by the time it gets to my stop it is SRO. Barely. This morning I ended up in the rear stairwell of the bus, holding on for dear life. Generally I end up jouncing along, crammed in with the other hapless aisle passengers hanging for dear life to a bar bolted to the ceiling, and ducking for speed bumps (lesson learned the hard way). And the soundtrack in the UCR bus is pretty horrendous, too—the grinding of gears, the straining of the poor motor as it wheezes up one last hill, and for some unaccountable reason, the CB radio chatter between the drivers on the route played at ear-splitting volume on the staticky speakers. If I had been anywhere near the driver I would have asked him to turn it down, but I was stuck in among the sardines in the back.

The design of streets and intersections here continues to boggle my mind. There is a semi-major thoroughfare between San Pablo and Santo Domingo that still has a one-way bridge over the creek at the bottom. People stop and yield and honk ceaselessly, as though honking will somehow magically summon a more logical and smooth-flowing traffic pattern. The most astounding of intersections is one somewhere in Moravia or Guadalupe, one of the towns that the UCR bus travels through in its loop around the city. It’s four roads meeting in a cross-shaped intersection, but the middle road is a jam-packed, two-lane, one-way street. The other two roads, feeding into it from opposite directions, are also two-lane, one-way streets, also jam-packed at rush hour. All without the benefit of any traffic signals except for the manifestly ignored stop signs at the corners of the incoming roads. The grand strategy is to honk loudly and force your vehicle into whatever gap appears. No matter how shoddy the bus, I am always glad I don’t have to drive through there!

There is an odd sort of fatalism in the way people put up with things here. The crazy intersections, the horrible bus radio, accidents, the weather. I’ve seen people walk down the street getting soaking wet in a rain shower, carrying umbrellas in their bags. It’s as though people put their fate in the hands of a higher power, and therefore don’t really do anything to try to change it. A couple of nights ago I was in a Tibas-Santo Domingo bus, jammed in at the very front by the driver, and I noticed a large sticker on the rear view mirror: Jesus guia mi camino. Jesus guides my path. Nice sentiment, but on the rearview mirror?

Well, I don’t want to come across as one of those embittered US expatriates who lives in Costa Rica and spends all her time complaining about how backward it is here. In some ways, it’s a more forward-looking country than the US. As much as I gripe about the UCR buses, it’s pretty wonderful to be able to get anywhere I need to for under a dollar, and often faster than by car—especially in the downtown area, the designated bus lanes still move when everything else is gridlocked. I don’t know of anywhere in the US with such a cheap, efficient, and effective transportation system. Something for our new president to work on!

The adventures of the barefoot sisters

2009-01-14T22:01:00.001-05:00

[cue music] A long time ago, in what seems like a galaxy far away (before Bush, before graduate school, before the word "tranch" made its way into ordinary conversation), two sisters decided to hike the Appalachian Trail. And they decided, for reasons of their own, to hike it barefoot. Of course, most of you probably know this already. What you may not know is that the chronicle of our adventure is available at last, from a reputable publisher. Dear readers, I am proud to present "The Barefoot Sisters: Southbound," published by Stackpole Press in Pennsylvania. You can get your very own copy by clicking on the "Buy my A.T. book!" link on this page.

You may notice that the link takes you not to a bookstore, but to Campmor. I encourage you to buy it there, because a buyer at Campmor was central to the effort that made the publication of this book a reality. He found a copy of our limited-edition, self-published book, and liked it so much that he acted as our agent and shopped it around to publishers. Roger W., words are not enough to thank you for your efforts!

Smorgasbord of photos

2009-01-11T12:51:00.018-05:00

Well, it has been far too long since I have put up any photos on this site. Time to remedy that! Here is a collection of highlights going back to last June.

In the days before the earthquake, I spent a day at La Selva and a couple of very restful days at Alex's farm, Finca los Nacientes. Restful in the sense that I could forget about all the troubles and pressures of life outside, and focus on the simple tasks of planting things and building things. Alex and I built some shelves in the bodega (storage shed), while Felix, William, and Gallo (Giovanny, but everyone calls him Gallo) dug a conduit for the electric fence cable to go under the road. The tree by the road to the left is a balsa (Ochroma pyramidale) that was shorter than me when I left in August! The next day we all worked together to plant the vegetable garden. I got to meet Susan la Vaca, who, like me, is tall and blond and has funny hairs that go in all directions at the back of her neck. Apparently she was bien flaca when they got her, too, but she has fattened up since then.

Here are a few photos of my new apartment in San Pablo de Heredia. I have a little terrace out back with vines growing up the walls (Ficus pumila) and orchids. You can see the tail end of one of my sheets, drying on an ingenious rack that raises and lowers with pulleys. There are also orchids hanging up on the inside walls by the stairwell. Come visit!

It was lovely to come here in the middle of winter. When I left Maine it was six below and blowing forty miles an hour, with wind chill warnings in effect. A week earlier we had a blizzard that dumped almost two feet overnight. Fortunately it was light snow, and shoveling out the car was not too difficult, even though the banks reached over my mother's head by the end of the job! She kept smiling, as usual.

I think my flight out was routed through Hoth, rather than Boston. It was definitely cold enough to freeze a tauntaun. Also, zoom in on this photo, and you can clearly see Imperial Walkers approaching the terminal!

Finally, some images from the trip to Suriname last year: the houses along the waterfront in Paramaribo, the market (exchange rate: c. 3 SRD to $1 US; those are cheap bananas!), and some images of the forest.

Earthquake report

2009-01-09T20:15:00.001-05:00

I am back in Costa Rica again, just in time for an earthquake. Yesterday afternoon a 6.2 quake hit in the mountains east of here. I was on the bus at the time, and with the usual combination of bad roads and bad suspension, I didn’t feel anything out of the ordinary. Alex was in town for a visit, and we were chatting and laughing on the bus from San Pedro to Heredia. The only odd thing I noticed was a crowd of people gathered outside the supermarket in Tibas as we went past. I wondered whether it was a fire or a burglary. We had to stop by the market in San Pablo when we got off the bus, and we found a crowd of people there as well.

“¿Qué pasó?” I asked the security guard who was preventing people from entering the building.

“Un temblor. ¿No lo sintió?” An earthquake. You didn’t feel it?

At first I assumed that the damage had been minimal, but we turned on the news at home to see horrific helicopter footage of the road we had traveled on just the day before. The Vara Blanca route, one of the main passages between Sarapiquí and the Central Valley, is a twisting narrow track carved into the mountainside through the cloud forest, barely wide enough for two cars to pass (which doesn’t stop semi trailers from barreling over it at full speed). Was, I should say. The Vara Blanca road is now obliterated by a series of mudslides. Entire mountainsides have just peeled away; houses and factories have slid off into the valley. Many towns are isolated without water or power, and reports of missing people are still coming in. They have no idea how many people have died.

As we drove into town the day before, Alex and I had both been commenting on the bad state of the roadway and the precarious buildings perched over the abyss. We both thought that a lot of places looked like accidents waiting to happen. We had no idea how soon the accident would come.

Alex wanted to go back to her farm yesterday, but all the roads were closed. We sat and watched the news, horrified by the images of destruction, and she tried to reach Felix (her fiancée) in Sarapiquí. He finally got through, to say that he was OK and nothing in the house was damaged. She asked if there had been much damage in the region. He said, “sí, mi amor, es un desastre en Sarapiquí—” and then the phone line went dead.

We watched the news; footage from security cameras of buildings shaking and people running, people crying on each other’s shoulders, cracks appearing and widening in the pavement. Nothing about Sarapiquí. The phone network was down and we couldn’t reach anyone.

An hour later Felix finally got through again. The disaster had been an ecological one: mountains collapsing upstream had turned the Sarapiquí river to mud so thick that the fish jumped up the banks looking for water. Felix was worried about all the fish and shrimp and caimans in the river: how would they survive? After she hung up the phone, Alex said, “do you think there’s any other country where someone would worry so much about an ecological disaster?”

I am thankful that no one I know was hurt or lost. But there are many people out there without housing, without power, without water, even. I am donating what I can to the local Red Cross.

Vara Blanca will probably be closed for months. The Zurqui, the faster route through the mountains, was closed while engineers inspected the tunnel and the bridges, but it opened again this morning. Alex got home safely this afternoon, and I’ve been in the apartment by myself ever since, a bit spooked by the aftershocks that rattle the windows now and then.

My aunt Pegi lives in California, near the San Andreas fault. My mother once asked her whether she worried about earthquakes, but Pegi just looked at her as if she was crazy. “An earthquake is over in five seconds. You have six months of winter!” True, although winter is something you can at least predict and prepare for. Given the choice—earthquakes, winter—I’m still not sure which I’d pick. The next two years ought to give me more of an idea.

A doctor in the house

2008-12-07T14:54:00.003-05:00

After five and a half years of work, I am finally a doctor of philosophy. It feels good. On Thursday I gave my defense talk— a 45-minute lecture on the highlights of what I've done in all this time— and I somehow managed to make it all cohere into a solid, logical outline. Ever since I started graduate school I've wondered why everyone else's projects, as laid out in defense talks, made so much more sense and worked so much better than mine. I discovered the secret: a defense talk isn't anywhere near a recap of all that you've done as a graduate student. It's a greatest hits compilation, focusing on the projects that actually turned out to have cool results (in my experience, less than 30% of what I actually did). I had also wondered how people could remain so calm and collected while presenting the culminating talk of a 5-6 year research career. Well, I still don't quite know the answer to that one, but it worked for me, too. The whole time I was up there, I kept expecting the adrenaline wall to hit me and make me lose my stride, but it never came. I just focused on what I wanted to communicate, and the words flowed, and I found myself really enjoying the opportunity to share my work with so many people. Hopefully the rest of my scientific career will continue to flow this way. I know it will not always be easy, or even enjoyable, but now I know that moments like this are possible.

Giving thanks

2008-11-29T21:05:00.001-05:00

Winter is here at last, with icy north winds that sweep the last of the oak leaves down the gutters. The sun sets around four. I walked downtown last week for groceries, and the wind had numbed my face through the scarf before I was halfway there. I’d forgotten what cold feels like, the way cold takes up residence in your ribcage. Walking through the small patch of woods behind Eastern near twilight yesterday, I felt absurdly naked without a pack on. I caught myself scanning the forest for clearings near the trail, and realized I was looking for a tentsite. This weather and the low light in the oak trees brings it all back: sleeping in the cold and waking in the cold; making sure your boots freeze in a shape that you will be able to work your frozen feet into in the morning.

Sometimes I miss the Trail with a desperate intensity. A hiker friend who I’ve recently gotten back in touch with said, “I think about the A.T. like an ex-girlfriend.” And it is kind of like that—so easy to look bad and remember just the good parts, and think, why did it ever end? and then you remember the bad parts, and think, why did I ever do that to myself? Walking under the cold oaks at dusk I thought about the simplicity of Trail life, which is the aspect I miss the most. The day’s task was as easy as putting one foot in front of another, finding water, cooking food, surviving. You only have to look for the next white blaze to know where to go. Especially in winter, when these simple tasks consumed all the energy I had and more, the Trail life had a Zen-like focus in the moment. Life in the outside, the “real world,” is so much more scattered and various. There are no blazes to guide anything. The goals are bigger, though, than simply reaching a mountaintop somewhere in the forest.

On Thursday, if all goes well, I will finish my doctorate. It’s a bittersweet feeling to know that I will soon be leaving Connecticut. This has been a good place for me, mostly; I’ve learned so much about love, friendship, ecology, survival. I will miss a lot of people here. Not the place, necessarily—Connecticut is far enough north that it snows, but far enough south that people don’t know how to drive in the snow, among other shortcomings. But the people here... more than anything, I’m going to miss Robin and her family. She’s been the most wonderful advisor anyone could hope for. She and Rob have welcomed me into their home like another daughter. I’ve watched her kids grow up into amazing young adults. I’ve learned so much from her guidance, and it’s been such a joy getting to know her. I spent Thanksgiving with Robin’s family and friends, a gala feast that concluded with Pictionary and Scrabble into the wee hours of the morning. I hope that someday I will have a home and a family of my own so full of love, curiosity, and good humor.

As the cold and darkness settle in, this is a good time to take stock and give thanks. I am thankful that I will not be living in a tent this winter. I am thankful for the wonderful people I have known. I am thankful to have been here and thankful to be leaving.

Leading economic indicators

2008-11-04T13:33:00.000-05:00

If you are a US citizen and you are reading this before 8 pm on November 4^th and you have not voted yet, go and do it now. Then you can come back and read the rest. Thank you.

I have not posted anything for ages, partly because there has been little to report, but mostly because there has been no time in which to report it. I am finishing my doctorate in a month. If I had known beforehand how much of my life would be given over to the soul-sucking, time-gulping monster that is my dissertation, I am not sure I would have signed up for this. But it’s too late to back out now. If I want to graduate on schedule and keep my job, I have no choice.

Why write this now, then? Because there are things I need to say. I have half an hour allotted for lunch. I wolfed down my pizza in five minutes so I could write instead.

As I was walking downtown to vote this morning, a heavy mist off the river obscured the trees and gave the air a damp, chilly weight. In the six blocks between my house and the polling station, I passed three foreclosure signs and two going out of business sales. Willimantic is still reeling from the last economic collapse, when the thread mills closed down in the 70s, and there is a pervasive grittiness to the town—graffiti on the walls, plywood-boarded windows, garbage in the side streets. In recent weeks I’ve seen a new desperation, though. A couple of weeks ago when I was taking out the garbage, I saw a man going through recycling bins on the curb. I asked if he was looking for returnables—I had a bunch of diet coke cans in the storage room that my old housemate had left, that I’d never gotten around to redeeming.

“Yeah,” he said, “I don’t go through the trash like some people. Only recycling. You gotta understand how hard it is. Three kids in school, my wife is disabled from an accident, the settlement hasn’t come through yet and we’re up to our ass in legal fees...”

There was a hardness in his voice and a reluctance to meet my eyes. New England; everybody wants to show that they can take care of themselves. I handed him the bag of cans, maybe a dollar’s worth. I wished there was more I could do.

A few days later I went to the Salvation Army, looking for an old wool shirt to take on a camping trip in the White Mountains with the Field Ecology class. (There’s nothing better than a wool shirt for keeping warm in the rain—which was predicted for the weekend—and they smell a lot better than synthetics when they’re sweaty and wet. The Salvation Army seems to be the best place to find a cheap one.) It was family night, 50% off everything and the store open until seven. The line was literally out the door. I found my wool shirt and stood waiting to pay for 45 minutes, chatting with the Puerto Rican grandmother in line behind me. As we got close to the register, the line stopped moving entirely. A dark-haired woman and her teenage son had piled their stack of purchases on the counter and she was trying to pay by check. (I recognized the look in the boy’s eyes, being a veteran of teenage shopping trips at the Salvation Army myself). The blue-haired matron at the cash register was calling the bank to make sure the check would clear.

“It’s been refused,” she said, loudly enough for a lot of us to overhear. The dark-haired woman and her son paid by credit card and left the store, their bearing military-stiff. New England.

I have been watching the stock markets drop and economy go into a slow free fall, but moments like this make it real and personal. People are suffering, and meanwhile the Republican National Committee spends hundreds of thousands of dollars on Sarah Palin’s wardrobe. The prosperity is not trickling down.

There are hopeful signs, though. After I voted I stopped at the Coop to buy milk and cereal—about the only thing I’m eating these days, since it takes no preparation time. The Coop is a haven for unabashed liberal hippy types like me, and I chatted with the staff at the checkout line about our cautious, almost secret hope for tomorrow.

“I don’t want to get too hopeful,” one man said. “I don’t want to let myself think, like in 2004, that Americans couldn’t possibly be so dumb... we keep proving ourselves dumber than I think possible.”

“But it could happen,” an older woman said. “It’s like America could really wake up. Like we could change, become what we used to be again. An example to the world.” She laughed. “It’s hard not to get, you know, sappy. Like the sun’s coming out again.”

I looked outside, and indeed, the sun was coming through the fog, rising up over the roof of the abandoned thread warehouse like the Obama-Biden campaign logo. I allowed myself a vertiginous moment of hope.

And more hope as I walked home. A gnarled old apple tree leaning over someone’s fence had dropped its cargo of lopsided fruit in the gutter. I remembered a conversation some years ago with a neighbor in Maine who was a Holocaust survivor. We had been walking in late October. Fruits lay thick under the half-wild apple trees by the roadside.

“It’s a shame that no one picks them,” I said.

She shook her head. “No, it is a good thing. It means that this winter, no one is going hungry.”

The white sun rising behind clouds and apples rotting in the gutter. Hope, such as it is.

Otra salida

2008-08-24T08:55:00.000-04:00

Once again I find myself in the departure lounge of the Juan Santamaria International Airport in Alajuela, watching the clouds begin to build up on the ranges of mountains that hem the Valle Central. Late August; classes start tomorrow. It’s a field lab, nothing too exacting, but lord knows how I will stay awake. I am bone tired from ten weeks of being responsible for twelve young people’s welfare, not to mention the sleepless night last night as low planes shook the second story of my hotel every half hour or so. Still, I keep going. It’s one day at a time, often one hour at a time, doing what I need to do to keep my head above water. It seems sometimes as if no time has passed since the first weekend I was here, back in May. Alex was leaving town for a few days and I would be alone in the house with all those memories, with no one in the neighborhood to call.

“Are you going to be OK?” she asked me.

“Do I have a choice?” I said.

And that’s the way it is; I keep going because there is no alternative.

I thought I would wait until I had something momentous and good to talk about before posting here again. And I do, in a way: I got the job. The teaching job with OTS, the one I’d dreamed about, traveling around Costa Rica teaching natural history, conservation policy, and methods of field ecology to undergraduates. In many ways this is the ideal job for me: I love teaching, I love traveling; I love this country, though I fear I will never really understand it. And yet, and yet... part of the reason I applied for the job was to be here with Franklin. I had hoped to share the good news with him. Instead, I’m celebrating— if it could be called celebrating—alone.

Friday afternoon in the OTS office I signed the contract. I’d hoped to feel some sense of victory, something, but instead I was just numb and exhausted—I’d spent six hours doing the final inventory for the REU program, and I’d stupidly forgotten to bring anything for lunch. I scrounged a donut from a tray of goodies that someone had brought in, but mostly I survived on coffee and the kind of single-minded determination that, I hope, will see me through this and get me my doctorate.

Yesterday I wandered around San Jose, bought lunch for a homeless man, got rained on, wondered what exactly I am doing here. Hopefully when I return in January I will have a better idea.

Impressions of Suriname

2008-06-15T10:40:00.001-04:00

Diversity. This is the word that comes to mind when I think of Suriname—cultural, linguistic, and biological diversity in a dazzling and bewildering array. Diversity also marked the talks at the ATBC meeting, with nearly 500 scientists from something like 60 countries in attendance. I’ve been feeling kind of blah about science for a while, kind of jaded. I’ve been questioning whether I really want to continue in this field, with its 8% funding rates and cutthroat competition for jobs. After the conference, though, I feel renewed and ready to jump back into the fray.

I flew into Paramaribo at 2 am last Tuesday, after a series of flights and layovers that was just as horrible as I’d feared, including five hours of fitful sleep on a rock-hard, foot-wide bench in the glacially air-conditioned Miami airport. Things got better after that, though. (I have to confess that I didn’t even know how to pronounce the name of the city until the plane was in its final descent and the captain repeated the name of the destination. All this time I’d been saying Para-maREEbo. It’s really Para-MAri-bo, with a lilt that makes it sound like a dance step or some fruity tropical drink. Most of the locals just call it Parbo, which is also the name of the—not great, but effective—local beer.)

The first day in Parbo, I wandered around the marketplace trying to make sense of things, through the fog of jet lag and dehydration. The historic downtown is all two-story wooden buildings, white with painted trim, with raised porches to keep them above the periodic floods. The pungent brown Paramaribo River, rimmed with mudflats at low tide, defines the horizon; the far shore lies indistinct in a humid haze. Along the waterfront, between the cafes selling cheap rotis and fried chicken, there are memorials to the successive waves of immigration in the country: African Maroons (slaves who fought for their freedom and established villages in the forest interior), Hindustanis, Chinese, Indonesians. There’s no memorial for the Dutch colonists, but their influence is everywhere. (I was particularly grateful for the Dutch influence on the cuisine—the best cheese I’ve had in a long time!) The diversity is mirrored in the faces of people on the streets, from people so dark-skinned they almost look indigo blue, to people with golden brown skin and almond-shaped eyes, to people as blond and pale as me. Almost everyone assumed I was Dutch at first, and then effortlessly switched to English when they saw my bafflement. Almost everyone speaks Sranam Tongo (the local creole language), Dutch, and English, and it seems that pretty much everyone knows some French and Spanish as well, at least enough to explain the menu and take orders in a restaurant. According to some of the students I met at the conference, most people in Suriname still maintain the languages and some cultural traditions of their ancestral homelands as well—Chinese, Indonesian, and a number of Indian languages. I’ve never been in a place with such an amazing mosaic of cultures. Being merely bilingual (plus enough French and German to get me into trouble, but not enough to get out of it), I felt rather handicapped.

After a day of recuperation and wandering the city, I met up with a group of other scientists and flew to Ralleighvallen, a remote site at the edge of the country’s largest national park. At the airport, we all crowded onto a cargo scale with our baggage, and the tour director called out people’s names. I just about fell over when he said, “Louise Emmons.” She’s one of the best-known tropical mammalogists, and she’s worked all over the tropics since the seventies, doing groundbreaking work on small mammal diversity and abundances. I’d read her papers and heard about her work for years, but I never thought I’d get to meet her. As it was, we ended up as roommates for a few days on a balcony overlooking a wild river and a tangle of vines. Louise is a magnificent person, down-to-earth, good-humored, and full of amazing stories from so many years in the field. She’s small in stature, but she radiates competence, and her presence can fill a room. It was a real inspiration to spend so much time with her.

Also on the trip was Varun Swamy, a plant systematics classmate of mine from four years ago—we slowed the hikes considerably with our botanizing—and Tana Wood, who managed Proyecto Bosques the year before I did, and a number of young researchers from the U.S., France, Germany, and Belgium; and a young couple from Puerto Rico with a remarkably well-behaved and adorable 7-month-old baby boy. Over beers in the evening, we traded stories from the field, and a group that had been strangers on the flight over ended up like old friends. It was almost like being back on the Appalachian Trail again, with the sense of shared challenges and triumphs.

On the second day we hiked up the Voltzberg, a smooth-sided granite inselberg whose distinctive form graces the Surinamese $10 bill. (A very random aside: I love Surinamese money. Each denomination has a gorgeous scene from nature on the back, and the silhouette of a tropical tree—with the scientific name printed underneath it.) The view from the top of the inselberg was truly one of the most stunning things I’ve ever seen: wild tropical forest with no sign of human habitation from horizon to horizon, broken only by the brown loops of the Commewijne River. The forest primeval.

Back at the conference, many of the talks focused on how to conserve and protect tropical diversity in a changing world. The forests of the Guiana Shield Region—stretching across French Guiana, Suriname, Guyana, Brazil, Venezuela, and Colombia—represent one of the last truly wild tracts of land anywhere on earth, and there is tremendous pressure from logging, mining, and forest conversion for agriculture. Particularly biofuels, ironically enough. In the search for “sustainable” fuels, the Amazon forest is getting destroyed to plant oil palm and soybeans. (Old-growth peat forests in Indonesia are also getting cut down for oil palm plantations, but the soils themselves store so much carbon that cutting the forests produces a huge net release of carbon to the atmosphere that would take hundreds of years to mitigate...) The threats are serious, but there’s a lot of hope, too. Keeping tropical forests intact is one of the best ways to prevent greenhouse gas releases to the atmosphere. The current estimate is that about 30% of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is released by the burning of tropical forests. Conserving those forests would be a huge carbon offset, and obviously a great way to conserve biodiversity as well. We need economic incentives to make it happen. You can read more about it at www.mongabay.com, my favorite clearinghouse for breaking news about tropical environment. (Incidentally, the guy who runs the site was at the conference. I met him at a cocktail party. He’s young, smart, articulate, and dedicated—exactly what we need in the field of tropical conservation. I told him to keep up the good work.)

The conference wasn’t all about applied conservation strategies, though. There’s a lot more esoteric research out there. Including mine, I’m afraid. The part of my research that seems to be generating the most interest among the scientists I meet is the most theoretical, least applied thing I’ve done. I’m looking at the phylogenetic structure of communities during succession, i.e., whether the species that colonize a site during forest regeneration are more or less closely related to each other than would be expected by chance. I met a number of leading researchers in the field, and had some really productive discussions.

The conference featured five concurrent sessions of talks running all day, plus poster sessions and plenary lectures. For the most part, I went to every talk I could. My favorite was one about the home ranges of jaguars and pumas in an undisturbed forest in Ecuador. Their ranges are almost entirely confined to the floodplains—exactly where human habitation and disturbance is usually strongest. The authors are planning to trap and track jaguars in more disturbed habitats next, to see whether they are displaced from their optimal habitats when people are present. There was also an amazing camera-trapping study from a remote region of Suriname, where the investigators actually captured jaguars mating on camera. There were some great plant talks, too, including one about floodplain species in the Amazon. Some of these plants can be totally submerged in water, in complete darkness, for three months... and still recover photosynthetic activity. The plants look like they’ve had a bad week—the leaves are a bit yellowish, and dying back at the edges—but they spring right back when light is available again. Truly amazing. It’s kind of like the plant equivalent of the baby in the well.

For most of the conference I went to talks every session. There were so many things I wanted to see, and so many friends of mine giving talks. On Friday afternoon, though, I played hooky. I ran into Deedra (the remarkable La Selva station director) and Liz Losos (the head of OTS), who invited me on a spur-of-the-moment tour to see the river dolphins. We jumped into a van and made our way to the waterfront, where a smiling but laconic boat captain took us out to a secret spot on the wide brown river. We motored for perhaps half an hour, watching rain showers move across the landscape behind us, and then we idled by the edge of a small tide rip and scanned the surface for fins. Dolphins like merengue and Brazilian pop music, it appears. The boat captain put on a scratchy old tape, and all of a sudden groups of dolphins appeared in the water all around us, tumbling over each other and leaping across the very bow of the boat. Groups of perhaps eight or ten surfaced together, showing their gray backs and pink undersides, the exact beguiling color of Bermuda beach sand in those photoshopped resort advertisements. They’re little dolphins, perhaps a meter and a half long, and the way their snouts are shaped they appear to be perpetually smiling. I don’t know whether any of my photos turned out—my camera has such a delay between when I press the button and when it takes the picture that I’m afraid I’ll have nothing but splashes. The memories are glorious, though. I’d never seen that many dolphins at once, and I’d seldom seen such acrobatics from them, either.

The last night of the conference was a banquet and a dance party that lasted until 1 am. It took me about half an hour to get back to my hotel, after bidding farewell to new and old friends, and my shuttle to the airport this morning left at 2:45. I just had time to shower, change, and do some last-minute packing. I slept perhaps a half hour on the shuttle and an hour or so on my first flight. Now as I write this, I’m in the airport in Trinidad, insufficiently caffeinated, and feeling much worse than I ever did after a college all-nighter. Perhaps I’m getting too old for this sort of thing. It’s worth it, though, all worth it. Je ne regrettez-pas rien. We’ll see if I’m singing a different tune tomorrow, when the REU students all arrive!

A post-script: well, I am back in Costa Rica after a nerve-wracking evening in Miami. My plane from Trinidad was delayed on the way out, and then we sat on the tarmac in Miami for over an hour while they pulled someone’s bag off the plane that was sitting at our gate. I watched the hour of my boarding time for the next flight approach and then slip past. Finally they let us out. I ran though customs and immigration, figuring there was a slim chance that my connecting flight had been delayed as well—this being MIA, and American Airlines, it was more than likely... and sure enough, my connection was delayed. I ran across three terminals and got there just as they started boarding. (The only rough spot was that the new boarding time was 9:11—why couldn’t they just say 9:10 or 9:12, for god’s sake?—and when the TSA agent pointed out that the time on my boarding pass had already gone by, and I told her the new time, there was a moment of dead silence in the line around me. Some things you just can’t say at an airport security checkpoint. I wondered for a moment if I would end up in Guantanamo. But she just narrowed her eyes and waved me through.)

Ida y vuelta

2008-06-02T17:47:00.000-04:00

So I find myself in Costa Rica again. Leaving Costa Rica again, actually, on my way to Suriname for the ABTC conference for two weeks, and then I’m back here until the end of August. I’m typing this at the airport in Alajuela, with ominous clouds gathering all around. I’ve been here for two weeks, setting up for the REU program, redecorating the house, and trying to get over the idea of being single again. I’ve had a lot of free time—when I made the reservations, back in February, I’d planned to spend a week at the beach with Franklin. Mostly I can manage not to think about it; it’s just on certain nights when the rain lets up and the air gets cold and I turn over in bed, reaching for somebody who’s not there and who never will be again. Or I catch myself listening for footsteps on the stairs outside, or listening for the sound of his motorcycle engine, or remembering—but I don’t want to dwell on this; it’s over.

I am thinking of a novel I read in high school, Huasipungo, about land reforms in Ecuador. The plot is convoluted and tragic, and I don’t remember anything now except the last scene, where a yellow bird flies over the field where the peasants died in their revolt and sings “ya’cabó... ya’cabó...” Ya se acabó, it’s over now. When I think of being single it is mostly a profound weariness that overtakes me. I don’t have the energy for dates and bars and that whole scene; I don’t have the courage right now to risk anything, and I feel old, abandoned. I feel like that yellow bird, a survivor, a voice from the past. I need to start belonging to the present and future again, but I’m not there yet.

I had wanted to wait until I had something good to report before posting to this blog again. I was hoping something large and wonderful would happen, something to offset this horrible betrayal. Of course the world doesn’t work that way. I’m trying to be grateful for little things: the rainy season has started, after a week so dry that the earth was cracking in places; my paper that was recently rejected from Ecology Letters was at least rejected with an invitation to resubmit, though when I’ll find time to rewrite it god only knows. I am in good health. The plague of winged termite queens that infested the house last week seems to have diminished.

Really, there is one major thing that I am thankful for: the kindness of my friends. The people I know at La Selva have been so kind and understanding. Alex took me into town for groceries a few days back, when I was upset about the paper rejection, and the upset-ness of everything else was threatening to spill over. We got back to her house about 9 am, and the rain was pissing down so hard that we had to shout over the din from the tin roof. We sat at her kitchen table drinking tea.

“Alex,” I shouted, “I don’t want to go to the station with this rain. I want to sit here all day, baking fatty, sugary things and eating them.” And that was more or less what we did. The rain kept up all day and into the evening, while we baked banana cake and ginger snaps and made a giant batch of roasted vegetables for dinner. Meanwhile, Alex comforted me and told me crazy stories from her days of working in the mountains of Braulio Carillo. Felix came home from work, dripping wet—he’d been up in the mountains all day, and he reported that the rain was even worse up there—and polished off about a quarter of a banana cake. I don’t know where it goes on his lean frame. Around suppertime, Steven and Marilyn came out from the station (the rain had let up) bringing a bottle of wine, some good bread, and corn chips. Alex invited everybody for supper, making a delicious dish of roasted vegetables, pasta, and cheese sauce. We sat around the table talking and laughing and reminiscing, all these old friends. There was nowhere else on earth I would rather have been at that moment, and at such a time, to think of what (or who) I was missing made as little sense as dreaming of snow in the humid tropics.

And now I’m flying off to Suriname, to present a talk based on the paper that was just rejected. Hopefully the audience will be more accepting (so to speak) than the reviewers. I wish I was more excited about this trip. Part of what is dampening my enthusiasm is my flight schedule: I leave San José at 7:15 tonight, and I get to Paramaribo at midnight tomorrow, after an eight-hour layover in Miami and six hours in Trinidad. Not quite enough, in Miami, to justify shelling out the $200 for an airport hotel room, so I’m hoping for a comfortable corner of the floor.

Adios amor

2008-04-10T23:19:00.002-04:00

Around the time of my parents’ divorce I spent a lot of time reading Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. I must have been ten or eleven; those years blend together into one murky unhappiness, the first intimations of how vast and trackless the world becomes as we grow older. I loved the illustrations in the book, and the calm, rational tone of the text as it explained things like black holes, binary stars, the odds of finding other life out there. (One variable in the page-long equation for these odds, I remember it still, was the likelihood of said intelligent life destroying itself through nuclear war before it ever contacted us. We try to imagine other life, and we imbue it with our own worst characters.) The part that keeps coming back to me now is the one about the end of the world. A series of illustrations show what will happen when the sun burns out, returning the solar system to the dark. I always felt a shiver of—what? recognition? relief? The thought that no matter what happens, it all goes back to dark in the end. The first picture shows a deserted beach and some vague vegetation, the ocean Caribbean blue, the sky flawless. The caption, though it’s been years and years: “There will be a last perfect day.”

Well, we had our last perfect day. A last perfect week. We. It’s not we anymore, and it never will be. Here I go again with the confusion of pronouns, the long division. Franklin and I have separated. There, it sounds better that way.

I went down to Costa Rica for spring break. A perfect week of sun, sand, palm trees, laughter, and joys that I will leave to your imagination. We (again the pronoun; there’s no avoiding it) talked about the future. I was planning to try to finish my doctorate early, move down there in the fall. We were planning to get an apartment together in the town where I worked, and I was applying for a teaching job. Between buses in Limón, we went to a department store and compared prices on stoves and refrigerators.

And then. The day after I flew back to the US I got an email from him. He said he had had a wonderful time, he always had a wonderful time with me, but there was something I should know. Around the time I met you, he said, I was with somebody else. And so I wrote back to him to say, yes, I’m hurt, but it was so casual at first between us. I wish you had told me earlier, but what’s past is done and the important thing is to move together into the future with honesty and compassion.

And then. And this is the part that I still can’t get my mind around, though it’s been weeks now, almost a month. And then I got an email from her. Silvia. His wife. Yes, they’d been together for ten years and married since 2002. They went through a rough spot a few years earlier, but they were back together and trying to patch things up when she stumbled on my email to him, sometime in the week that we were in the Caribbean. And what she wrote to me was the most heartbreaking thing I have ever read, the story of their love and their life together and my part in destroying it. Coming from someone whose existence I had never dreamed of, because he was such a good liar. Coming from someone who, even in the depths of her despair and anguish had some measure of compassion for me, even when she thought I had been complicit all along.

I felt sullied, stained, horrified; an unwitting partner in a heinous crime. There are certain things I will not do, and one of them is to get involved with a married man. After my parents’ divorce, I swore that I would never involve myself in that, no matter what the circumstances. I am not a person who destroys. At least, god, I try not to be. I destroy to the smallest extent possible. And here I was.

I called him. I asked him how he could do this to her, to me. To himself. I’m an idiot, he said. I’m sorry. I don’t know who I am anymore.

Who he is: beautiful, funny, brilliant. A breathtaking lover. A liar. So profoundly lost. I told him, I can’t see you anymore, I can’t talk to you again, you are not the man I loved.

I put down the phone and started shaking, and even now the tremor comes back to me. For days I didn’t eat, didn’t sleep. It is as though the man I loved is dead, even though Franklin is still walking around somewhere. In a way it’s almost worse. I look back over the past two years, two of the happiest years of my life, and I think, what was real? Was anything real? Will I ever know, in the future, how to tell?

On the scale of social intelligence, I think my innate capacity is very, very low. What I know of human relationships I’ve learned by applying other intelligences in its service. I was a painfully shy and awkward child. There was a point in high school where I decided, OK, relating to other people is important. I will watch and see how they do it, and form some rational theory of human behavior. And over the years I became very good at it, to the point that I can feel like a truly social person. People enjoy my company, I can make friends. I can even fall in love like a regular person. And then this. Maybe I know nothing, really, about what is at the core of us humans. I only know my own heart, barren landscape. Compromised. And I can tell myself over and over, I didn’t know, I was taken in, I was fooled, but the fact remains. I did this.

For a time I couldn’t tell anyone. It was too raw. I still haven’t told the whole story to most people around me, only those I can trust not to twist it into some horrid parody: Susan was sleeping around with a married man! Have you heard?

Why, then, am I putting it out here for all the world? I guess because the vast majority of people who visit this site are my friends and family, and the others don’t know me from Eve. And also because it is a kind of catharsis. Because it’s honest. Because it’s a reminder that this is the reality I wake to every day. A changed landscape.

I thought about just leaving this blog as it is, an unfinished monument to finished things. Better to let it change and grow as I do, though. It’s weathered one breakup in the past, though not nearly so egregious a betrayal, and chances are (if I can bring myself to go through this all ever again) it will weather more. A friend who has studied Buddhism tells me that violent, strong emotional shocks like this can become a force for inner change. That is what I am trying to do, to find myself again, to define myself outside of the dreams I carried for so long.

Two poems, to close. This devilishly intricate form is called a paradelle. It was invented by Billy Collins (in the late nineties, I think), as a sort of joke about the difficulty of poetry. I have appropriated it twice now, once for passion and once for loss, and there is something momently satisfying in the process of tying up so much human experience in the all-too-strict confines of these lines.

June 14, 2006

The river swallows the rain; daylight dwindles.
The river swallows the rain; daylight dwindles.
Twilight comes up from holes in the ground,
twilight comes up from holes in the ground.
Daylight, twilight, holes. The rain comes in,
ground dwindles; swallows from the river

lift up long wings in shimmering flight.
Lift up long wings in shimmering flight
and barely audible song,
and barely audible song.
Long flight, barely shimmering,
and up in song, lift audible wings.

Under the darkening leaves you hold me,
under the darkening leaves you hold me
like a drowning man holding a raft.
Like a drowning man holding a raft.
Darkening under you, a raft: hold,
holding a man leaves me drowning

in song, in rain. River twilight shimmering
up from under the drowning leaves.
A long raft dwindles, barely holes up;
the swallows’ wings lift, the darkening comes.
A man like audible daylight, you hold me,
holding the ground and flight.

March 18, 2008

What have I lost? I ask the sun.
What have I lost. I ask the sun.
No answer. The wind scatters dry leaves,
no answer. The wind scatters dry leaves.
What answer? I have no sun.
The dry, the lost. I ask; wind scatters leaves.

You, my night sky and morning,
you. My night sky and morning
rain, moving over me, blinding
rain, moving over me, blinding
me. Morning and night, rain.
You, moving my sky, blinding. Over.

In another country I loved you
in another country I loved you
beyond the fragile power of words,
beyond the fragile power of words:
I, you, another. Loved. Fragile.
Beyond power, in the country of words,

lost. The wind scatters you. What you loved
leaves me. I have no power
over sky, rain, sun. I ask and I answer,
my words moving beyond fragile:
of the dry night and blinding morning
in another country.

Beauty and foolishness

2007-12-19T08:24:00.000-05:00

For the past three years, my friend Bernal has been trying to get me to go fishing. Every year when the fishing season opens in December, he says, “eh, vamos al río para jalar un bobo” (let’s go to the river and fish up a bobo). Last weekend we finally found a time when both of us were free, the river was low and clear, and a friend with a truck agreed to take us through the pastures and mud roads to a secret fishing spot. Bernal and Víctor (the man with the truck) came by my house early Saturday morning, and Franklin and I jumped into the back among the fishing rods.

The bend of the river was still in shade when we arrived, the water running green and smooth by the black sand beach. We spread out along the sand bar, avoiding the downed trees that cast their lure-snagging arms into the current. It’s been years since I fished with a rod, and my first casts were somewhat embarrassing, but the in the beauty of the early morning river I hardly cared.

Franklin caught the first bobo, a gorgeous little trout-like thing just the size for our largest frying pan. Bobos are streamlined, blunt-nosed silver-scaled fish that like to hang around the edges of rapids. They’re rare enough in Costa Rica that they enjoy a semi-protected status: you can catch a limited number for personal use, but it’s prohibited to sell them. Bernal said there’s a considerable black market, anyway, with the fish fetching up to c9000 per kilo—about $18; two or three days’ wages for a lot of people here.

We stood in the current until lunchtime, with little minnows nibbling our bare feet. Toucans flew over, and once a quartet of green macaws, making their trademark ungodly racket, swooped low over the river. I had a few nibbles, but nothing solid. Just as we were about to leave, Bernal had a strike. He reeled in a gorgeous bobo, almost half a meter in length and about 2.5 kilos, as far as we could judge.

“Que bobo más lindo,” said Víctor. What a beautiful fish, and also, Spanish being the delightful palimpsest that it is, what a beautiful fool. We hung the two beautiful bobos on a string and began the trek back through the soggy pasture.

Later as I prepared the smaller fish, pan-fried with lemon, garlic, onions, and peppers, I began to think more about beauty and foolishness. There’s a wonderful Billy Collins poem on the subject, called “Nightclub,” which I would love to quote at length, but I will refrain out of respect for the vanishing species called copyright. (Google it. Lots of people have already performed this particular act of copyright infringement.) The poem’s more or less about how love makes us all foolish, and all beautiful.

I thought about my friend Alex, who, after finishing her doctorate, moved here to Costa Rica to live with her tico boyfriend, Felix: an act that some might call foolish, but also an act of undeniable beauty. They have bought a farm together, up in the foothills along the San Ramón road, and they’re planning to start building the house next year. A few months ago I went up there to help put in a living fence and replant some tree seedlings that they’re planning to use in reforestation. This week, I took a quick trip up to the farm with Alex again. The fenceposts are sprouting new leaves, and the seedlings are growing well. In a month or so they’ll be ready to plant out into the nascent forest. The species I helped them plant is cola de pavo (“turkey tail”), Hymenolobium mesoamericanum, a tree so rare that it was first described as a new species in the year 2000. There’s a Hymenolobium tree at La Selva so large that the trail curves around it; the immense buttressed trunk looks like a rocket ship poised for flight. At Alex’s farm, the seedlings are only putting out their third or fourth leaves. Looking at them this week, I felt an almost maternal combination of sadness and pride: I’d placed those seeds in the earth, and with luck, they could all outlive me.

Alex showed me the space where the new house will stand, currently a patch of brilliant red earth carved out of a hilltop. Off to the south, ranks of green mountains vanished into the low clouds, with rain showers now and then darkening their flanks. We talked a little about her decision to come here.

“Sometimes it still scares the hell out of me,” she admitted.

I’m trying to imagine what it would be like for me to live in Costa Rica. The thought of leaving Franklin is like the idea of cutting off my right hand. At the same time, it’s scary to imagine a future so different from the one I always pictured: a little New England town, a job teaching generations of smart and enthusiastic students about Lotka-Volterra equations and phase plane diagrams; a garden, a cat or two, my piano, and my solitude. Here, I could have many of the same things—garden, cat, maybe even a piano—and I would be with the man I love. But the job? I don’t know. I just don’t know.

Alex said that the six months when she was in the midst of the decision was the most stressful period of her life, but after she decided to stay here, she felt peaceful. She knew it was the right decision. For me, I don’t know whether I’d ever feel peaceful with my decision. I’m too prone to second-guessing and daydreaming of might-have-beens. And I know I’m in no position to make this kind of choice right now: I’ve got to finish my doctorate before I plan anything. She’s right about the stress, though. I feel the decision looming over me like a wave about to break.

In a few days I’ll be back in the temperate zone, which, according to the little news I have seen, is currently intemperate as all hell. When a US snowstorm is featured in Costa Rican newspapers, you know it must have been pretty serious. I don’t know how I’ll take the cold—when the temperature here drops into the upper sixties, I have to put two blankets on the bed at night. And I don’t know how I’ll take the culture shock, either. Each time I come back to the US, it’s harder to adjust. There’s such a dangerous mix of arrogance and provincialism at play right now: so many people seem convinced that the US is the bright center of the universe and therefore justified in all its greed and belligerence. Seen from the outside, from a little country where peace has brought prosperity, this view seems all the more irrational. The US has changed a lot in the past few years. The past six years, three months, and seven days, to be precise. There was a moment when America could have chosen another path, a path that would have allowed us to keep our moral standing in the world. Instead, we’ve chosen a path into war and more war, with no end in sight. Sometimes I think that I’ll leave the US even if Franklin and I don’t end up together. It’s not the country I grew up in any more, and it’s no longer a country in which I would want to bring up children.

Franklin and I took a vacation this weekend up to Arenal, the most active volcano in the country. We got to see the lava rolling down the side of it, albeit from a great distance, and we relaxed in the hot springs on the less active side of the volcano. The forest is growing back on the old lava flows around the base, although the newer flows still have that lunar, blasted look. Sometimes I think that love is a force like lava in the world, wild and destructive, burning and rearranging everything it touches. It ripped apart my family when I was young, when my mother fell in love with another man. And now love is forcing me to a decision between two futures, two worlds. I wish sometimes that I could control it, that I could force myself to be rational and accept the world I was born to, to give up this love, this country, this crazy, beautiful, foolish dream. But I could sooner stop the lava flowing down Arenal than stop my love for Franklin.

Disgusting news flash

2007-11-22T16:44:00.000-05:00

OK, this entry is going to be really disgusting. If you are easily grossed out, stop reading now. Or at least don't say I didn't warn you.

Here's the news flash: I just had my first botfly. For those unfamiliar with the organism, it's a fly that lays it eggs on a mosquito. When the mosquito bites a bird or mammal, the larvae hatch and drop off, activated by body heat, and burrow into the skin. There they begin to develop.

The best way to avoid botflies is to keep clean. Apparently it takes a few hours from when the larvae hatch to when they begin to burrow in, and if you scrub yourself well every day you can avoid them. I don't really have much evidence to back this up, except circumstantial case studies: I know a guy who got eighteen botflies in ten weeks, and he was notorious for not showering, and for wearing the same skanky field clothes nonstop. The second runner-up (six botflies in a month and a half) was pretty stinky too. I'm generally assiduous about staying clean in the field, but in Nicaragua I went for a few days without showering. The shower was an ice-cold drip coming straight out of the cloud forest. I thought staying dry would help keep me healthy. Well, it kind of backfired, I guess. Judging from the instar, I'm pretty sure it was a Nicaraguan botfly.

The first indication of a botfly is a mosquito bite that doesn't go away, and begins to itch and prickle more after a few weeks. I had just such a bite behind my ear. I vainly hoped it was just a weird fungus or something, but when I looked closely at it, using the bathroom mirror and the signal mirror on my compass, I could see the spiracle (a small tube that the larva extends through the skin to be able to breathe).

The worst part, I think, was realizing that I had it. There's something viscerally horrifying about the thought of a larva, a parasite, living inside your skin. And there's no way to get rid of it right away-- in order to get rid of a botfly, you have to kill it first. (While the larva is alive, it resists being removed by digging little hooks into the flesh around it.) Well, I knew the theory of botfly extraction, having been present at enough of them. I cleaned the area with alcohol, dried it off, and put a piece of electrical tape over it to block off the spiracle and kill it. Then I went to bed. It was hard to sleep; the botfly was restless at first, pricking around, and all I could think of was Aliens.

In the morning, I pulled off the tape and used my emergency snakebite kit to create suction and pull out the larva. It wasn't quite dead, and it resisted. But eventually it came out. It wasn't very big; maybe half a centimeter plus the spiracle. The pale cylindrical body had concentric rows of black spines. I didn't look closely at it. I threw it in the trash and then took the trash out to the bin by the road.

The attitude that researchers have towards botflies varies widely. I've known people who preserved their botflies in alcohol and gave them cute names. I even know one guy who let his hatch out, because, as he said, "it's the closest I'll ever come to being pregnant." Some people consider them just another rite of passage, like a bala sting. (When I got my first bala sting, out on the Peje a couple years ago, my assistant Andrew said, "well, I guess you got your jungle cherry popped.") Overall, the experience wasn't nearly as bad as I had thought, somehow. Perhaps the anticipation of a thing is worse than the thing itself. Still, as far as jungle rites of passage go, I would take a bala sting over a botfly any day.

Herpetology 201: Snakes Eating Things

2007-11-19T16:49:00.001-05:00

Well, quite some time ago I promised a few photos of snakes eating things. I have a pair very nice snake predation events on film now. I had been hoping for a third, to complete my trifecta, but predation events of any sort are rare to witness, and I decided it's time to post these anyway. The first episode took place back in July. It's a tree boa, probably Corallus hortalanus, wolfing down some small unfortunate brown bird. (Even the ornithologists present couldn't be sure what species it was; by the time the boa was discovered, the bird was pretty mangled).

The other photos are even more interesting: a terciopelo (Bothrops asper), one of the most common pit vipers here, eating a lizard (Ameiva festiva). Franklin and I were coming back from the field in late September when we spotted a lizard behaving strangely. Generally Ameivas run so fast you can barely see them, skittering about the edges of sunflecks on the forest floor and catching any insects they can find. But this one was lying on its side, barely twitching. We stopped to watch it, and in a moment my eyes distinguished the snake right beside it, waiting for the venom to take effect. Franklin kept an eye on it while I ran back to the office for my camera.

We sat and watched until nearly dark, oblivious to the clouds of mosquitoes that began to orbit our sweaty heads. The snake waited until the lizard no longer twitched when she (Franklin knew it was a female; I forget how) nudged it with her head. Then she swallowed it, head-first.
Both the snake and the lizard were relatively small. From the sidewalk, it was hard to see them at all against the backdrop of dead leaves.

Sick and tired

2007-11-09T16:03:00.000-05:00

So I finally let Franklin drag me to the clinic, after three weeks of this cold. Actually I dragged myself to the clinic while he cleaned the house and washed clothes, sweet man, but he was the one who made me promise to go. Turns out the cold has degenerated into bronchitis. I now have antibiotics and a cough syrup that makes me feel loopy and underwater, but at least I can breathe. I've spent most of the past couple days lying in the hammock reading Cien años de soledad. Magic realism and cough syrup is a trippy combination, to say the least. It has been raining, too, nonstop; so much that the river overflowed into the pastures and the entrance to La Selva was underwater. Today the river is down, and so is my fever, and so I chanced the long walk into the station to check my email. Pura vida, as they say. Beats the alternative.

Under the Volcanoes

2007-11-02T19:18:00.000-04:00

Well, I’m back from Nicaragua. It’s a fine country, but I must say, a hell of a place to recover from a cold. Between the exhaust from poorly-combusted diesel fuel, the dust from animal droppings in the streets, the omnipresent cigarettes, and the smoke from wood cook-fires (even in the cities), I was hacking up my lungs basically the whole time. The cough has continued since I got back, though not quite as severely. I spent the past three days in the forest doing plant surveys and being (as I once wrote in a Trail register, grossing out a number of people who thought my sister and I were “ladies”) a veritable Cape Canaveral of snot rockets. I’ve had this cold for two and a half weeks now. Today I am sitting at home, doing nothing but drinking lemonade and typing this, in an effort—probably futile—to drive away this damn virus for good.

So, the news from Nicaragua. The border town of Peñas Blancas is, as ever, the most wretched hive of scum and villainy readily available in this part of Central America. Having been through there three or four times now, I have learned to avoid the major hazards for unwary travelers. Foremost among these hazards is the flock of ambulatory money changers that congregates around the various lines you have to stand in as you wait for various stamps in your passport and customs forms. These men wave large rolls of bills and flash their laminated ID cards and calculators, all very official-looking, but woe to the traveler who falls prey to them. A guy I know was handed a 1000-cordoba bill (about $50), also very official-looking, which turned out (when he presented it to the hotel manager later that week) to be a denomination that does not actually exist. Another friend attempted to change about $60 into cordobas. The guy claimed he didn’t have enough change with him, and instructed her to wait. He vanished, along with her dollars, into the warren of hallways. Fifteen minutes later, when he still hadn’t reappeared and our bus was starting to re-board, we talked to the uniformed police officer outside the door. We told him what had happened and gave him the badge number and name of the supposed money changer.

“That is so unfortunate,” he said. “There’s a lot of crime at the frontera.” Such was the official response. I suppose another $60, or even $5, would have gone a long way toward producing information, but neither of us had any to spare, and the bus was honking behind us. We cut our losses. On the way back through the border, my friend swears she saw the same money changer emerge nonchalantly from the building and then sprint like hell for the trees across the parking lot. He was far enough away that we couldn’t catch him, though.

As well as the money changers, all the way through the border crossing one is beset by hordes of people attempting to sell you immigration and customs forms, which you can pick up at no charge at the requisite desks. Another small hazard, worth mentioning, is that most of the food outside the official cafeteria is pretty suspect. On a border crossing a few years ago, one friend got food poisoning from the empanadas, and another discovered midway through that her freshly-squeezed orange juice contained a quantity of worms.

Fortunately, the rest of the country is not like the frontera. I hesitate to write too much about it, actually, because Nicaragua is one of those tourist destinations much of whose virtue rests in being largely “undiscovered.” The few tourists who make it there tend to be interesting people, and in many places the locals are still genuinely interested in talking to tourists about the world outside. As someone who grew up in a town where tourism was a major industry, and where locals had developed a jaded love/hate relationship with “people from away,” I found the Nicaraguan attitude refreshing and endearing. Nicaragua is certainly not a recommended destination for leisure travelers—certain amenities, like potable tap water and hot showers, are notably absent—but there are some lovely places and some great people there.

Franklin and I spent the first part of our vacation on the Isla de Ometepe, where we had spent a week together in 2006. The island looked much the same, except that low clouds obscured the volcanoes and most of the political propaganda from the 2006 election had been painted over or washed away in the rain. (Political aside: Ortega’s approval ratings are fairly abysmal, even in a country where, as I read in the paper on the day before we left, 44% of people do not feel safe criticizing the government. The promised reforms are nowhere in sight; the major parties haven’t reached accord on any of the pressing issues. Sometimes I wonder what people were expecting when they re-elected him—the last time he was in office, if I recall rightly, he basically sold the country out from under the common people so he could live the high life while babies starved in the streets of Managua. Of course, considering my own country of origin, I really shouldn’t point fingers at states who re-elect demonstrably failed leaders. OK, enough politics.)

We stayed at Finca Magdalena, a local coffee cooperative in the town of Balgüe that has started offering food and lodging for tourists. It’s a couple hours by bus and a long uphill walk, but a lovely place to stay. For the first couple days, I lay in a hammock and watched a family of urracas (birds like giant blue jays) cavort in the papaya trees, and coughed. It was good to rest, but the farm is up on the side of the volcano and was in the clouds much of the time. The misty chill and the ice-cold showers didn’t help my recuperation.

On the third day, Rodrigo (one of the local guides) mentioned a rodeo on the other side of the volcano. He and some friends were planning to go, and he invited us and the other guests at the finca, an American woman named Patricia and a group of Belgian backpackers. We planned to meet up on the main road (the only road, really) sometime in the afternoon. Franklin and I walked down early to have lunch in a restaurant along the road, having exhausted the menu options at the finca. We found a restaurant/bar in a family’s back yard, with a shabby-looking thatched roof erected over two or three plastic tables. Chickens, dogs, pigs, and half-naked toddlers scrambled out of the way to make room for us. At another table, the older children were grinding corn for atol in an ancient, handmade-looking mill. One of the girls, probably twelve or thirteen, detached herself from the group and came to take our order.

We shared a liter of beer while we waited for the food (rice and beans, fried cheese, fried plantains, cabbage salad, and blistering hot sauce with peppers from a bush by the road—delicious, but quite slow in coming). A couple from France, Eric and Clementine, showed up just as the food arrived. We invited them to join us, since it had begun to drizzle and the only other table was under a drip. Eric was carrying a guitar, much to my delight. A few minutes later there came a young woman from Argentina, and a Canadian. We ordered a few more liters of beer. Finally, at about three, Rodrigo and Patricia showed up, along with some of the Belgians and Marichel, a young woman from Catalunya who is doing volunteer work in the village. Patricia and the Belgians had brought some bottles of home brewed liquor from the expatriate owner of El Zopilote (“The Vulture”), a tourist lodge near the town.

“It’s probably too late for the rodeo,” Rodrigo said. “And that chicken looks really good…”

Once again, the food was very slow to arrive. We ordered another liter of beer while we waited, then two, then three… Patricia and the Belgians shared their white lightning, too. One of the bottles was lemon flavored, a sickly-sweet cough drop sort of taste. On its own it wasn’t great, but mixed with lemonade (by this time I had ceased to care about potential parasites in the water) it was passable. The other bottle was infused with essence of hot peppers, and was every bit as lethal as it sounded. With Spanish as a common language, we talked about life, travel, politics, religion; all the topics one might expect from a group of young people of eight nationalities in a bar in the middle of nowhere. We also compared tattoos: Franklin’s snake armband, Rodrigo’s dragon, Eric’s Aleut-inspired band across his rib cage. I think I was the only one without one. The empty bottles stacked up in the side yard and occasionally one of the children came out bearing another plate of food for someone. The drizzle intensified and the woodsmoke from the house hung low about the clearing. Gradually it grew dark.

The guitar made an appearance. Eric and Clementine, it turned out, had just started playing perhaps a month before, when they started their trip. Clementine works as a piano teacher in France, and she hadn’t wanted to travel for so long—they plan four or five months—without an instrument. I can completely sympathize. They didn’t know many songs, though. (Clementine strummed a vaguely familiar set of chord changes: “Radio’ead. Eh, no alarms y pas de surpises?”) With my voice weakened by the cold I couldn’t contribute much either. But Marichel had a fine voice, and entertained us all with a rendition of “The House of the Rising Sun” – in Catalán.

Finally the matriarch of the house, a formidable woman a head shorter than Franklin and easily twice as wide, came out to announce that there was no more beer. We paid our final tab and swayed our way up the road… to another bar. By now it was getting dark, and none of us had flashlights for the km-plus ascent to the finca. Of course, by now we were pretty much past caring.

At the second bar, we were introduced to “Caballito Blanco” (little white horse), the Nicaraguan aguardiente. We shared numerous rounds with the local guys there. One of them was a kid, probably sixteen or seventeen, who managed to convey by gestures that he was deaf and mute. He was also missing a hand, either from an accident or a birth defect. His name, engraved on a handmade metal pendant he wore like a dogtag, was Yaimer, though when we wrote our names on a napkin he shrugged to indicate that he couldn’t read. He was a fine drinking companion, though. He also managed to convey by gestures a hilarious story in which he got lost on the volcano and ended up in a neighbor’s pasture being chased by a bull. I love small towns, and the way that people’s differences become part of the fabric of things, rather than shoved into a corner and forgotten. It can’t be easy to live in rural Nicaragua with such a suite of disabilities, but he seemed pretty happy.

We left the second bar and headed for the finca, but we were waylaid by Rodrigo’s father and some friends, drinking another round of Caballito Blanco on the back porch of a house in town. The owner of the house was a Hare Krishna who had spent years in San Francisco, and had retired to Nicaragua where he made a modest living selling whole wheat bread, fruit, and vegetables out of his front room. He and his assistant, an intense young man who expounded his theories of religion to anyone in hearing range, offered us another drink to wait out the latest round of rain showers. We talked about reincarnation and rock music.

Finally the rain let up and we decided to head for the finca. We had preternatural luck with the weather. The almost-full moon behind the clouds cast a diffuse bluish glow over everything, just enough to distinguish puddles from road and road from underbrush. We walked back slowly and stumblingly, but we managed to find our way.

The day that we left the finca was the first day of the coffee harvest. I was eager to see what it was like, and to do something to satisfy my harvesting instincts. Having grown up in a place where cutting wood and preserving food was a necessary part of fall, it’s really weird for me to live in a place where there are none of those rituals to mark the seasons—indeed, hardly any seasons to mark. Especially in fall, it’s somehow deeply satisfying to gather food, whether it’s wild berries or potatoes from the garden. (A friend of mine has a theory that modern women’s love of shopping is merely a misplaced version of this gathering instinct.) So I volunteered to go up in the morning with the coffee pickers. Franklin, bless his heart, came along as well. For him it was no novelty—in college, he used to pick coffee for a few weeks every year to make his textbook money. It’s also not as easy for him as it is for most people, since he’s color blind. For me, the red berries on the branch stood out from the green like stop signs. For him, it was a matter of gray on gray. Coffee berries ripen singly or in clusters, but this early in the season there are usually only a few ripe ones on a branch. We walked along the row of coffee bushes, on the steep side of the volcano, with willow baskets strapped to our waists with strips of bark. I helped point out the ripe berries for Franklin; not the quickest picking strategy, but it worked. Monkeys hooted in the shade trees above us, and the sun came out for the first time all week. It was lovely and peaceful up there.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t stay all day in the coffee patch. We’d planned to catch the ferry out the next day, and in order to get an early boat we planned to spend the night in the port town of Moyogalpa, 30 km away on the other side of the island. We packed our bags and started walking. We bought a loaf of bread from the Hare Krishna and asked him what time the bus came by. He frowned and told us there was a transit strike, at least for the unpaved side of the island. No, he wasn’t sure how long it would last. I guess it was a good time for the bus drivers to strike, given the huge puddles on the road, but it did throw a monkey wrench into our plan to get to Moyogalpa.

“We’ll get a hitch,” Franklin said. We thanked the Hare Krishna and started walking.

It was a very quiet afternoon. Also very hot. The sun had finally emerged in all its gringa-wilting intensity. We walked probably five or six km without a single vehicle passing, and my energy began to flag. Just as we came out to the edge of a corn field, heat shimmering over the surface, we heard a wheezy motor chugging along behind us. We stuck out our thumbs; the driver grinned and slowed enough that we could hop in back. The truck was a boxy Soviet thing from about 1950, I guessed, with a metal frame welded onto the back. The cargo, besides me and Franklin, was a load of construction material, a branch of green plátanos, and a profoundly drunk man passed out on his back. We bumped along the rutted road at a speed only slightly greater than walking, but it was a blessed relief.

After a few minutes we reached paved road, and then a considerable hill. The truck stalled halfway up and rolled back into the ditch, coming to rest with only three wheels on the pavement. Franklin and I jumped out to help. The driver sent his co-pilot off into the banana plantations, shouting, and he returned in a few minutes with a crew of helpers. As a woman, I was summarily exempted from pushing the truck by the code of machismo, so I contented myself with taking pictures instead. The drunk guy was also exempt: he remained passed out in the back through the whole episode.

The driver explained that the starter motor didn’t work, so they’d have to get the vehicle back onto the level road to push-start it like they always did. After the truck was heaved up onto the pavement, with a Herculean effort, Franklin and I said our farewells and kept walking. We figured it would be a week before they got it started again. We had just reached the top of the hill, though, when we heard a familiar wheezy motor sound. Sure enough, it was our friends in the blue truck. We hopped in back and got another couple kilometers down the road, almost to the main intersection with the road to Moyogalpa, before the truck broke down again, this time with an ominously final-sounding clunk. We wished them luck and re-shouldered our bags.

Perhaps a kilometer down the main road, we heard another engine sound. It was a bus, the most beautiful bus I have ever seen, a 1980s era Bluebird school bus festooned with Jesus stickers and headed straight to Moyogalpa for fifteen cordobas. It was the same price we’d paid earlier in the week to get out there, so I guess the strike hadn’t been about wages.

Well, there is much more to tell about Nicaragua—the mustard-yellow cathedral of Granada (much prettier than it sounds), the multicolored chaos of the central market in Masaya, the mega-despiche of the frontera as we returned, with our bus arriving at the same time as three others... but I am out of time to write, and it’s time to get back to fieldwork. I’m still hacking up my lungs. If this doesn’t stop by the weekend, I might have to drag myself to the clinic.

Headed to Nicaragua

2007-10-17T12:16:00.000-04:00

Yes, it's that time of year again: my visa is set to expire, giving me a good excuse to take a vacation. We (Franklin and I) will be visiting Ometepe again, hoping the volcano gods will be good to us once more. We also plan to swing by the market at Masaya: Nicaraguan handicrafts for everyone on the Christmas list.

I am more than ready for a vacation. Last week I spent seven consecutive days in the field, in plots that are all more than an hour's bike/hike from the station. The work is pretty intense, too: I'm re-censusing seedling growth in my plots, which means bending down constantly to check tag numbers and make sure the measuring tape is in the right position. On a hot day, the dehydration headache sets in early when I'm spending half my time inverted. I am exhausted, worn down, and getting a cold to boot.

Usually I know that I need a break when I stop enjoying things. Sunday afternoon there was a troop of capuchin monkeys overhead, eating Welfia fruits and shaking the branches at me, and all I could think about was locating the next damn seedling quadrat, and dimly wondering whether Welfia fruits are edible to humans, too. All this work reminds me of being on the Trail in winter, sometimes: there's no possible way to carry enough food to keep myself satisfied. On the A.T. it was more a matter of the distance between town stops and the limit of what a body can carry. Here it's a matter of what can fit in my backpack along with the equipment: water bottles, radio, field gear, med kit, compass. Two sandwiches, an apple, and a bag of platanitos is about all I can cram in, and by day seven it's not even close to enough lunch.

I remember a day, four years ago now, when I was way out at the back of the property with my labmate Pablo. It poured rain all day, ceaselessly. On the way back, as we stopped to dump out our boots for the umpteenth time, I must had made some expression of displeasure. He just looked at me.

"We're having a rainforest experience," he said. "People pay good money for this."

When this work starts feeling like a chore, I always try to remember that. Then I start seeing the little things again: metallic green tarantula hawks (giant wasps) scanning the path for spiders; the pale lavender flowers and spindly white stalks of the parasitic plant Voyria tenella; the huge damselflies they call helicopteros whirring their blue and white wings in the open air. A rainforest experience. I am very fortunate.

I had hoped to upload some photos before we leave, but the Blogger photo upload system is down again. It's too bad; I have some really great photos of snakes eating things, always a big hit with any crowd. So stay tuned for snake photos and news from Nicaragua!

Herpetology 101

2007-09-22T18:13:00.000-04:00

Franklin is working as my assistant right now, studying plants, but he’s really a herpetologist by trade. On days when we finish our fieldwork early, we walk back slowly from the plots and explore the forest, trading the knowledge from our respective specialties. My frog-catching abilities, which have lain dormant since I was about 12, are suddenly useful once again. Last week I caught a little Bufo hematiticus, a toad that lives in the leaf litter and blends so well with the grays and browns that I never would have spotted it if it hadn’t moved. Franklin showed me how to tell males from females: the males have an extra stub coming off their thumbs, a spur they use in combat and for amplexus (clinging onto the female during mating). Also, if you grasp a male toad behind the ribs, it will usually give some kind of signal—chirping or vibrating its throat—to keep other male toads from trying to mate with it. Or in Franklin’s words, “es para decir al otro, ‘suave, suave, mae, no soy playo’” (it’s to tell the other guy, ‘hey, easy, buddy; I don’t swing that way.’) Apparently this is a common problem in toads, except in the species where the males and females have evident exterior differences. Male toads in mating season will amplex with just about anything that moves. (If you’ve ever seen the movie Cane Toads—and everbody should see that movie— you know that sometimes they’ll even amplex with things that don’t move. Like beer bottles, for instance.)

I feel comfortable now catching frogs and lizards—at least the non-toxic frogs, and the little lizards that don’t bite very hard—but I let Franklin deal with the snakes. Snakes are his real joy, everything from tiny leaf litter snakes that fit in the palm of his hand to giant pit vipers.

Sometimes our encounters with herps are a little closer than we might prefer. Last week as we were surveying a plot about 3 km into the forest, Franklin had a close call. I was finishing up a sapling census while he went back to get our backpacks for lunch and water. I heard him heading off into the forest, and a few moments later I heard “hue puta!” (son of a bitch) and then “...que linda culebra” (what a gorgeous snake). Fearing the worst— because Franklin would call any snake beautiful, no matter what it did to him— I yelled up to him, “que pasó?” Nothing, fortunately. He’d slipped on the muddy hillside and landed with his hand about a meter away from a coiled-up terciopelo (fer-de-lance, Bothrops asper), the second-largest pit viper in this region and one with a reputation for ferocity. The reputation may be undeserved, though, because in this case the snake just uncoiled and took off. (Note that the snake in the photo is not a terciopelo. It's a Leptophis, most likely; non-venomous, at any rate. Anybody who did that with a venomous snake would be asking for a trip to the hospital!)

Later in the week I had a close call of my own. We were finishing up a seedling survey in one of our plots. I was about to reach for a tag, when an enormous serpent uncoiled from the forest floor barely a meter away. It was as thick as my upper arm, with the unmistakable wedge-shaped head and diamond markings of a terciopelo. After a heart-stopping instant when it came straight towards me, the snake turned downhill and vanished. Maybe I’ve been spending too much time with my dear herpetologist, but it really was a lovely snake. Its scales had an almost iridescent sheen, and it moved with such grace and precision. It was hard to believe that something so large and beautiful had made itself invisible just by holding still.

As we continued down the seedling plot, Franklin commented that it was the healthiest-looking terciopelo he’d seen in a long time: “ella era bien gordita” (she was nice and chubby). I asked how he knew it was a female from that brief glimpse, and he said that only the females get that big. And it was big—my seedling plots are two meters across, and the snake nearly stretched from one side to the other when it took off. I asked him to make a note on the data sheet so we’d remember to watch out for it when we came back to survey the saplings. The margins of my data sheets are usually full of little warnings like that: nido de avispas (wasp nest) en XB135, flacas (ants with a nasty sting, genus Odontomachus) en B150. I had to laugh when I came across Franklin’s note as I entered the data: X135: B. asper ♀ c180 cm. Muy buena condición.

Mexico photos

2007-09-01T17:36:00.000-04:00

Finally, I have a few moments when a) the internet connection is up and running, and b) my to-do list is sufficiently short that I can steal a few moments to post photos. So here are some much-delayed pictures from the ATBC conference. Many thanks to Erin for the images! A certain macha grande forgot her camera.

Viva el Volkswagen! Buses and bugs-- the original bugs-- still flock the streets down here. This one was advertising an upcoming rodeo.

The downtown traffic in Morelia seemed incongruous, sometimes, against the backdrop of mountains and the ancient buildings. Walking out of the musty, dark, stone interior of the cathedral, I half-expected to see stagecoaches lining the streets instead.

I love this statue. No idea what it commemorates, though.

Vendors in the park downtown were selling towers of cotton candy, plastic swords, and slinkies. Go figure.

Erin and I enjoyed the cool breeze off the fountain in the town park. I still can't get used to seeing field station friends in non-field-station apparel.

Dennis and I explored the 15th-century aqueduct that used to supply all of the city's water. Apparently the original one was constructed of wood.

The best Mexico story unfortunately doesn't have an image to go with it. As I was heading to the airport, 25 km from the city, I had a long and interesting conversation with the cab driver. We talked about free trade, globalization, climate change, and the history of US-Mexican relations. We both agreed that the border wall is an expensive and useless farce, and will probably end up being built by illegal immigrant labor.

"Where are you from?" he finally asked.

"The U.S.," I had to admit.

"Oh, I thought you were a German. You speak such good Spanish... I've been to the States: California, Florida, Carolina del Norte; San Luis, Missouri. Yeah, I've been all over the U.S. Seven or eight trips, probably... once I even had papers!"

No, I haven't vanished off the face of the earth...

2007-08-20T19:37:00.000-04:00

...I have just vanished into a vortex of work that didn’t allow me much time to breathe, let alone write updates for my blog. I feel a bit guilty about this: when I talked to my mother last week, for the first time in about a month, she said, “oh, so you’re still there! From your last blog entry, I wondered whether you’d disappeared into the jungle with Franklin and you’d emerge in ten years’ time with six little children in tow.” Not likely. They would be damn cute kids, though.

We did manage to finish up that last bit of work at the finca before Don José cleared the pasture again. I thought about going back there to take a look, but my student Tommy said, “don’t go; it would hurt your heart.” He’s right, I know. All those little trees gone, trees that I’d marked and watched and measured. (I’d heard that expression from Tommy once before, when I interviewed him for the REU program. He was talking about an environmental club he’d founded on his campus. One of their first actions was to protest the cutting of the big sycamore trees that formed an avenue down the center of the campus. “I just couldn’t watch those trees go down,” he said. “It hurt my heart.” I think it was that admission, and the way he said it, that put him at the top of my list of candidates. I knew he would understand the way I think about the forest; how my heart, too, is tied to trees.)

At the end of July I left the REUs in the capable hands of Johel (Costa Rican bird researcher, salsa dancer extraordinaire), and I headed to Mexico for the annual conference of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation. Nearly 800 tropical biologists from across the globe convened in the historic downtown district of Morelia. The talks and workshops were held in early colonial stone buildings, cool even in the heat of the day, with giant chiaroscuro paintings of local dignitaries gazing solemnly over the proceedings. One of the great things about tropical biology is the huge variety of subdisciplines it contains. I saw talks on topics ranging from amphibian declines to tree physiology to the phylogenetic structure of communities. My own talk, dealing with patterns of biomass accumulation and change in species composition during forest succession in northeastern Costa Rica, was fairly well-received. One professor even told me that he thought it was one of the ten best talks at the conference—although he did elaborate that it was my relatively slow and clear delivery, apparently unusual for an American, that made it stand out: Swedish was his native language.

Outside of the official conference events, I spent most of my time hanging out with La Selva friends, especially Erin (aka “La Muñeca), who I hadn’t seen for more than two years, and Dennis (aka Señor Culebra), who finished his fieldwork last December and is now back in Miami writing up. Also present: Julia (practically the only German at La Selva who doesn’t work on bats; great singing voice; if I’d known she would be there I would have brought my guitar!) and four of the five Reinas. Oh dear, I will have to explain the Reina thing at some point... It was wonderful to catch up with so many good friends. The hard thing about field station life is that it’s always transitory, and it seems that just as you get to know someone, one of you has to leave. Researchers come from all over the world to La Selva, and scatter to all over the world afterwards. It was an unexpected gift to have so many field station friends in one place. We wandered about the city trying to determine which café had the best hot chocolate, which was the finest of the local brews, and where you could get the best quesadillas—half a block from our hotel, it turned out: ten pesos, about a dollar, for fresh corn dough, cheese, and toppings. We ate there so often that the bag I brought to the conference still smells like frying quesadillas. At one point we found ourselves in a café across from the cathedral, watching the sun set over the pinkish stone spires, when a band of mariachis came through and serenaded us. I felt like I had stepped into a postcard come to life.

After ATBC, the end of the REU program swallowed me up like a tidal wave. When I’d left, the students were in the midst of fieldwork. When I returned, all of a sudden, there were just three weeks to go. I was inundated with drafts of papers, presentations to look over, requests for last-minute reimbursements, and the backlog of emails from the time I’d been away. I feel like I never really caught up. Undoubtedly there are things still lurking at the bottom of my to-do list from that week.

The REUs put together an impressive slate of presentations and papers, though many of them ended up staying up for several nights in a row in order to get them done. I don’t know where they get the energy—but then, if I think about myself at that age, I would have done exactly the same thing.

Before I knew it, we were loading baggage and equipment boxes onto the giant air-conditioned bus that would take us back to San José. It was raining, fittingly, when we left, and there was a party going on at the comedor to celebrate the Costa Rican Mothers’ Day. I spent my last few minutes on-station as REU Coordinator dancing merengue with Johel in front of the comedor, under a leaky tent festooned with multi-colored crepe paper streamers. Hopefully the REUs have some good memories of their last glimpse of La Selva: the suspension bridge and the trees glittering with rain, and the multicolored crowd on the dance floor.

We spent the last evening of the REU program at Hotel Amistad in San José, and ate our final banquet in the nearby Café Mundo. It was a bittersweet feeling. I remembered picking up the students at the airport ten short weeks ago, when I hardly knew their names. They’d learned and accomplished so much since then, and they’d become a solid group. Arrayed around the long table, we talked and laughed and made uber-geeky science jokes that drew puzzled stares from the tourists across the room. It was hard to believe that we’d all be going our separate ways in the morning.

When the last shuttle pulled away from the curb, taking the last group of students to the airport, I suddenly felt like I’d been hit by a ton of bricks. I wonder if professors feel this way when a course gets over. I don’t think so; I think the feeling stems from the huge amount of personal responsibility attached. All the stress and worry that I hadn’t permitted myself to feel for the last ten weeks, the emotional burden of being in charge of twelve people’s welfare, came crashing down around me. I knew I’d be tired when the program ended, but I hadn’t counted on being quite this tired. I feel like I’m still recovering now, more than a week later. I guess next year I’ll be more prepared for this. Yes, that’s right, next year... on the day of the presentations, my supervisor came down from the main office to visit La Selva and see how everything was going. And to offer me the job in 2008. I talked to my advisor, who agreed that it would be a good experience, and I signed on as the coordinator again. This, of course, was before the ton of bricks hit me. Well, it’s been an overwhelmingly positive experience, and I’ve certainly learned a lot about teaching and mentoring. Lesson one: prepare for the load of bricks.

The rest of the story

2007-07-06T16:06:00.000-04:00

I have spent a lot of time recently thinking about error, the different sorts of error and how to avoid it. This is probably related to the statistics-intensive ethics discussion we had last week, addressing how to minimize sources of experimental error. This sounds, on the surface, like a pretty dry topic, but it’s vital to scientists: how can we be sure that we’re really measuring what we want to measure, and that our results can really be interpreted the way we would like to interpret them? Basically, how can we keep from screwing up?

This blog is full of errors, too, mostly minor and inconsequential. Typos and disappearing photos; undoubtedly some butchered Spanish grammar. But there is one major error, an error of omission, that has stood uncorrected for more than a year now and needs to be rectified. How to say this... dear readers, I am in love. Not just with Costa Rica (though I do love this place), but with one Costa Rican in particular. His name is Franklin. We got together last June, at Expo Sarapiquí. At the time, on the rebound from my breakup with Matt, I really wasn’t interested in anything serious. We had great chemistry, though, and we stayed together until I left in December. He was my companion in Nicaragua (ah, yes, things other than bitterness can hide behind a sin comentarios). We kept a low profile on the field station—he was working as the lab manager and I, of course, as a researcher, and we wanted to stay out of the gossip mill as much as possible. Most of the ticos knew, I think, but the rest of the researchers were generally oblivious. It helped that Franklin’s cabina was next door to mine, and he didn’t have a roommate.

When I left in December, we didn’t make any promises. But we stayed in contact through email and Skype (where would I be without Skype?), and we really got to know each other better in those months than we had in all our time together. Then a month before I was scheduled to return, he was laid off from his job on the field station. They wanted somebody who speaks English and has a chemistry degree (and this being OTS, the job search is still underway now several months later, and poor Danilo is being run off his feet as temporary lab manager). His contract was scheduled to end the day I arrived.

Well, dear readers, you can imagine how I felt. I will spare you the shopworn metaphors of grief. Once I got over the shock of it, I tried to think of some way that we could at least see each other again. I offered him a part-time job as my field assistant and he accepted. And now we live together in a little house by the entrance road to La Selva, about a kilometer from the station. He’s gone almost every weekend, working at his other jobs—he’s a curator for about four different serpentaria (snake zoos) across the country. I’ve learned the sound of his motorcycle engine by heart.

It’s not a life I would have imagined for myself: cooking rice and beans and plátanos on the two-burner propane stove, hanging our field clothes from the rafters to dry, sweeping the termite droppings off the shelves before we put the dishes away, shouting to each other over the din of rain on the tin roof. The damp night air carries in the scent of the garden—half a hectare of flowers and fruit trees on the hill behind the house—and rain; the roosters and the howler monkeys wake us before dawn. No, not a life I would have imagined, but a life I love.

The last two weeks have been a little crazy. I’m running my liana removal experiment in six sites, two of them in young forest on private farms outside the field station. At the beginning of June, one of the landowners told me that he needs the land back for pasture. My census was scheduled for late August, after the end of the REU program, but Don José was not persuaded. He gave me until the 15^th of July to finish everything.

Franklin started working for me on the 18^th of June, and ever since then I’ve been leading a triple life: in the mornings, we would bike the 3k out to the plot in Flaminia and frantically take light measurements, growth data, and leaf samples from unknown plants. In the afternoon, I’d bike back to the station and do my REU work. In the evening, I’d come back home and cook (Franklin’s not much of a cook, so he washes dishes and cleans up the kitchen after supper). I love my work—all of it—but at the end of the day I feel kind of stretched-thin. Fortunately, we finished up the plot yesterday, well ahead of schedule. Now I just need to train Franklin for the other aspects of the project and show him where the other plots are, and I can go back to leading a merely double life. I’m looking forward to it.

(Franklin, before and after his change of jobs. He's always been a bit of a rebel: note the bat on the lab coat pocket.)

(Viva la pareja impareja.)

Magic disappearing photos

2007-06-29T21:21:00.000-04:00

I don't know what happened to the photos I posted a few days ago. They were fine for a while, and now they have vanished. I think I will have to invoke demonic interference (Hurlbert 1984) as an explanation. They were pretty damn good pictures, though, so I will try posting them again. Here goes nothing.

Denizens of the lab clearing

2007-06-26T23:14:00.002-04:00

Many of the interesting animals here are way out in the forest, but you don't have to travel too far to see wildlife. Here is a sampling of animals I've spotted in the lab clearing-- the space of cut grass and semi-organized plantings around the lab and dorm buildings-- just this week.

Exhibit A: Saturniid caterpillar. These guys are attractive but oh-so-nasty. I ran into one unawares last summer. It stung me through my pants pocket, through three layers of cloth, leaving a welt that burned unbearably for about 20 minutes, itched thereafter, and was still visible a week later. And I am not kidding when I say these things are the size of my index finger:

Still, it's not so bad: in Brazil, caterpillars from the Saturniid genus Lonomia have been known to cause fatal kidney failure from unknown toxins. (If anyone knows the genus of this beauty, please enlighten me. Invertebrates are not a forte of mine.)

Speaking of things that can kill you, here is another one recently spotted in the lab clearing. This is a beautiful example of the eyelash viper, Bothriechis schlegelii. These snakes have highly variable color morphs, from a mottled brown-green to bright green to this gorgeous yellow form, found only in Costa Rica. The local name is oropel, more or less "golden skin." Snakes from a single litter can be very different colors. Oh, and before antivenin was widely available, these little guys caused a number of fatalities every year. Though the fatality rate is much lower now, they are still responsible for some disfiguring injuries: because they hang out in low vegetation, most bites occur in the face and neck area.

Eyelash vipers are smaller than you might expect, and harder to spot. See if you can find the one that Diego's taking a picture of. Fortunately they are also very tranquilo, as snakes go. A researcher I know was taking pictures of a bird, running around trying to get it in the frame, when he felt something drop out of a bush into his shirt pocket. He didn't think much of it until five minutes later when he looked down and saw the little snake crawling out.

And finally, monkeys. They were on the bridge again, close to sunset, and I managed to get some semi-arty shots of a mother and baby. Everybody loves monkeys. Myself included.

Extracurricular activities

2007-06-22T19:29:00.001-04:00

One of the perks of working with the REU program is the opportunity to work with the mentors. This is Steve Yanoviak, an expert on canopy ant communities, ten meters up in a Brosimum tree. And guess who took the picture, also ten meters up the tree? That's right, dear readers, it was me.

If I could start my PhD over again, I think I would do something that involved a lot of climbing.

Your tax dollars at work

2007-06-22T19:24:00.000-04:00

Every summer, the National Science Foundation of the USA funds the Research Experience for Undergraduates program (REU), in which undergraduate students work with established scientists to learn about research and how it operates. I was an REU fellow myself, quite a few years back, working on kidney physiology in estuarine fishes in a lab on the coast of Maine. Now I find myself involved in the program again, in a very different capacity and a very different setting: I’m the REU Coordinator at La Selva Biological Station. Most REU programs take place at labs in the US, but this one is in a Costa Rican field station.

Given the workplace, my job description is a little more varied than one might expect for a typical REU coordinator. I’ve done a lot of routine office work, coordinating purchase orders and doing inventories of lab supplies. I’ve also given lectures on avoiding snakebites, parasites, and skin fungus. Last week I spent the better part of an evening pulling spines from a Cryosophila palm out of an unfortunate student’s hand with a pair of forceps sterilized with lab-grade ethanol.

There are twelve students, each paired with a different mentor who’s doing research at the station. They’ll be here until mid-August, studying a huge range of topics: the effect of phosphorus on stream invertebrates’ growth rates; fruit dispersal by birds in old growth and young forests; the ecology of an invasive frog species; how to distinguish the land use history of a forest from satellite imagery; etc. This year’s students are an amazing bunch: adaptable, fun, dedicated, and bright. They come from all over the US and Puerto Rico, from schools ranging from Ivies to city universities. Some of them have traveled all over the tropics; many have never left the US before.

Last night we had our first ethics discussion. The ethics series is a part of every REU, but there’s considerable leeway in the topics discussed. When I was an REU, working at a lab that focused on toxicology and physiology, we spent a lot of time talking about the ethics of animal care and use. Here, I decided it would be a good idea to focus on issues related to tropical biology. We talked about conservation in the tropics: what is the appropriate balance of land use in the tropics? who makes the decisions about tropical conservation, and who enforces them? what role do scientists play in tropical conservation? It was a lively and illuminating discussion. People shared their expertise on everything from conservation biology and watershed management to colonialism and Native American fishing rights. We went from CITES to buffalo burgers. (I’m still not sure how we got to buffalo burgers, actually.) On the whole, I was amazed at the level of maturity and thoughtfulness. This is going to be a great summer.

For years, I’ve subscribed to Joseph Campbell’s philosophy: follow your bliss. I try to do what I love and love what I do, and hope that somehow this will lead me on a path to useful, sustainable work that will leave the planet a little better off. The job I’m doing right now feels like a step in the right direction. Thanks to all the US taxpayers for making this possible!

Dawn from the balcony in Panama

2007-06-14T14:59:00.000-04:00

A man, a plan, a canal...

2007-06-01T23:05:00.000-04:00

Yes, that’s right. Panama. I was there, though I have nothing to show for it—not even a stamp in my passport—except some blurry seascape photos from the balcony of a 5-star hotel.

Tuesday night, as the plane descended toward San José, I was musing on what an easy trip it had been. Everything had run on time; I’d had plenty of time to get to the international terminal in Atlanta. They didn’t even make me pay overweight charges on my giant duffle, though I’m pretty sure it was a few pounds heavier than it should have been. I wondered, as I stared idly out the window at the city lights and a distant thunderstorm, what could go wrong this trip. I was kind of half-hoping the airline would lose my luggage, so I wouldn’t have to worry about negotiating the Caribeños bus terminal with it in the morning. I think that all the time I’ve spent in Latin America has been good for my blood pressure: the expectation here is that nothing will run smoothly, and when things do it’s a pleasant surprise.

As the plane sank lower, the clouds closed in. The fog was so thick I could hardly see the wingtip light. The engines droned; I felt the thump of the landing gear coming out. Then suddenly the plane lurched upward and climbed again with stomach-wrenching speed. The captain came on the intercom a few moments later, sounding more shaken than I’d ever heard a captain sound. “Uh, folks, we had a little visibility issue here with ground fog around the airport. We got down to about 300 feet and we still couldn’t see a thing. We don’t have the capability to land on instruments here, so we’re just going to, uh, go into a holding pattern for a bit and see what happens.” Airline captains are generally such stalwart examples of Midwestern bland good cheer. It was rather nerve-wracking to hear his composure slip.

A few minutes later: “Folks, this is your captain again. We have just received word from the tower that the airport is closed. Nobody’s getting in or out right now, and we don’t know how long that’s going to last. We are headed down to Panama City and hoping we can land there.” And so we did, getting into the airport a little after midnight. With nothing but carry-on luggage, the motley herd of passengers—including two high school groups, who seemed to enjoy the proceedings greatly—was waved through customs and immigration with only a cursory glance at our passports. We loaded into buses at the curb, the night air still hot and steamy, redolent of wilting flowers and diesel exhaust. The first class passengers were deposited at a hotel half an hour from the airport, and the rest of us headed out into the countryside. It was a long, long road with absolutely no lights on either side. I speculated with my seatmate, a fashionable young tica, about whether we’d end up in army cots in the middle of the jungle somewhere.

Eventually—well past one—the bus reached our destination, the Hotel Intercontinental Playa Bonita. The place was quite grand, with live orchids all over the lobby, a private beach, and two giant swimming pools. Unfortunately we had all of six hours in which to enjoy it, and I spent most of that time sleeping.

In the morning I did get to play a halfway decent piano in the lobby, so the little detour was worthwhile. I also got free lodging for the night, coffee and a stale roll for breakfast (apparently marooned air travelers don’t merit the full five-star treatment), and a view of the Panama Canal from the bus. All in all, a nice—if quick—vacation to Panama. I must say, though, that I’m very glad to be in Costa Rica.

Some thoughts on Art

2007-05-30T12:35:00.000-04:00

My dear readers, I owe you a big apology for not writing for so long. For those of you who’ve stuck with me, thanks. I will endeavor to do better in the future. It’s not that I’ve lacked for things to talk about, but rather for the time to talk about them. Also—though I may be the only one to whom this matters—this is my 100^th post. I feel like it should be something profound and momentous. Hence, some thoughts on art (and a brief, scattered update on where the last four months have taken me).

This spring, I’ve become aware that art, in its various forms, enriches and informs my life in more ways than I generally give it credit for. As a scientist, I am constantly seeking the most parsimonious explanation for the way things are. Artists are doing the opposite, in a sense: revealing the implausible, defying explanations, doing away with borders and confines. Artists don’t necessarily even concern themselves with the way things are. But the best art, in my humble and decidedly uneducated opinion, is like a funhouse mirror. Good art throws back a changed reflection of the world, with certain elements exaggerated or distorted or absent, so that you have to think again about the way things really are. And I don’t mean that in a visual sense at all; more in a metaphysical sense. In the scientific, rational mindset, there’s a danger of becoming committed to one narrow view. I have seen many good scientists who get entrenched in one way of seeing things, and can’t admit other possible explanations. Artists help keep the ways of thinking open.

Last week I flew to Scotland to visit my sister Lucy. She’s finishing an MFA in Edinburgh. She started out in printmaking, but she’s moved into sculptures and installation works. The work that I liked best was an installation she called “Winter Memorial,” on the coast just south of Dunbar. In a narrow inlet between sandstone outcroppings, she had hung strings of printed banners like prayer flags. The banners were printed with images of giant snowflakes, in white on white, so you could see the images appear and vanish as the light changed. The idea was to leave them in place and document their slow decomposition in the wind and saltwater.

“It’s about the first things that global climate change will affect,” she said. “Snow and tide lines.” But it’s also about prayer, and hope, and transience. Tibetan Buddhists leave prayer flags in sacred places in the mountains, and when the flags disintegrate in the wind the prayers are gradually released to heaven. For Lucy and me, prayer flags have an additional resonance: our mother always hangs them in her garden and the apple trees in the back yard. Prayer flags, for us, call back the island of our youth, the land to which we dream of returning. A land which could vanish under rising seas by the end of the century. Thinking of all these things, I found myself nearly in tears at the sight of Lucy’s work. I think that pieces like this—things that evoke a visceral, emotional reaction—will be as important as the science when it comes to convincing the public that climate change is happening, and that we need to do something now.

Lucy and I wandered about Edinburgh, with its medieval stonework and narrow streets, taking in about as much cultural life as is humanly possible in a week. We went to concerts, shows, art galleries, bars, shops; hosted several parties and attended many others. Our stepsister Stella is also in the city, studying informatics at the university. Stella and her boyfriend Conrad prepared a marvelous Sunday brunch, featuring a veggie haggis. (For those of you who don’t know which parts of a sheep separate the true haggis from the vegetarian version, count yourself lucky. Google at your own risk.) We read the Robert Burns “Ode to a Haggis” with great ceremony before stabbing the thing. It was actually quite tasty, especially when accompanied with a feast of potato waffles, veggie sausage, fried bananas, mushrooms (almost too charmingly called “mushies”), beans, and tomatoes. I’m probably forgetting something. Oh yes, mimosas. Stella and Conrad definitely know how to put a brunch together.

Conrad also knows how to keep track of what concert tickets are going on sale, which is how we all got tickets to see Mogwai in an unbelievably intimate venue called The Liquid Room. An appropriate name, given the amount of beer on the floor before the night was over—but the show was truly amazing, and we were about four rows back from the stage (four standing rows of solid-packed Scots like vertical sardines, that is; there weren’t any seats). Such energy and depth. For a long time, when I was a kid, I didn’t listen to any music more recent than about 1930. Discouraged by what was on the radio in the 80s, I pretty much gave up on popular music. I’m glad I decided to give it another chance. I don’t know if Mogwai really qualifies as popular music, anyway. They’re one of those groups that skates around the edge of popularity. Seeing them on stage, I got the sense that they’d being doing this whether or not anyone listened. I’m glad they do.

Another amazing group that I got to see this spring was the Arcade Fire. The weekend before I left for Scotland, I drove down to Pennsylvania for a barefoot hike and a book signing. A friend of mine runs a barefoot hiking club in that area. We’ve been trying to arrange a meeting for a couple of years now. I finally found a time that worked, and it turned out to be the same night that the Arcade Fire was playing in Philly. I had just been lamenting the fact that I would miss their New York and Boston shows, since I would be in Scotland, but as soon as I heard they’d be in Philly that weekend, I jumped at the chance for a ticket (mil gracias, Liza!) The barefoot hike was fun, and the concert was simply stunning. I’d seen them play in New York two years ago, when they were just starting out. In the past couple years they’ve become such consummate musicians and masters of the stage, and their new material is really powerful. The song “Windowsill” encapsulates a lot of the things I’ve been thinking about lately. A friend recently asked me, “where are the protest songs of this generation?” I played that in response.

Continuing the theme of “no temporal continuity” ... way back in March, a few weeks after I last posted, I had another art-filled week. At the Wallace Stevens Poetry program on Tuesday night, I met Adam Zagajewski. Seated next to him at dinner, I had the chance to converse with him at length. He is every bit as wise, humble, and empathetic as his poetry suggests. Moving from the esoteric “high art” end of the spectrum to the arena of popular mass entertainment, on Thursday night I went into New York City to see Maná live at Madison Square Garden. Maná is kind of a guilty pleasure, but a pleasure nonetheless. Every once in a while you owe it to yourself to go and see men with guitars and big hair strutting around a stage. It’s even better if they’re hot and speak Spanish. And I have kind of a thing for drummers...

I had meant to take the Metro North back on Friday morning, but a horrendous sleet storm shut down the trains. I ended up wandering the streets (all awash in four inches of icy slush) with a charming Dutch girl named Anna, 18 years old, doing her “grand tour” in the US. We met at the wretched youth hostel where we’d both crashed the night before—and to which, sadly, we were forced to return. They even charged special “high season” rates that second night, which I strongly suspect were really “trapped in the City” rates. To escape the weather and the baleful eye of the hostel manager, we went to the Met and spent the entire day looking at art. Usually I can’t take more than a couple hours in a museum before I end up feeling like the kid in that Far Side cartoon, raising his hand in the back of class: “can I be excused? my brain is full.” But somehow on that day, with the sleet tapping ominously on the skylights, I found I could stay all day in the museum. Anna and I talked about life, art, love, friendship, the state of the world; all the things that have been on my mind lately. Somehow the art all around us and the surreal ice-covered city outside brought us as close as sisters for the hours that we shared.

I was a bad grad student that week—I skipped out on our Thursday lab meeting and missed a chance to learn about Ripley’s K and its applications in spatial analysis. Aside from a few hours of grappling with 4D programming when I finally got back to Willi on Sunday, I completely neglected my work. But I returned to it refreshed and renewed, ready to take my tiny place in the parade of human progress.

Well, this entry is far too long already. It would not be complete, though, without a mention of Robin’s Seder. My advisor invited me to her family’s Seder, and it was one of the highlights of this spring. I’d been to a few Seders before, but never one quite so traditional and at the same time completely appropriate to modern times. All the blessings were sung, all the traditional foods set out, and all the rituals followed from the washing of hands to the finding of the afikoman. But the readings were taken from Tikkun, a liberal Jewish quarterly magazine. I’d never heard the Passover story told in quite such terms. The text emphasized the universality of suffering and privation, how all of us make our personal journeys through Egypt. It talked about the importance of learning from the past without dwelling on it. It stressed reconciliation between Israel and Palestine, and pointed out that opposing Israel’s expansionist policies is not anti-Semitism, but rather represents a higher allegiance to the spirit of Judaism. (Kind of like the way protesting the Iraq war is about the most patriotic action an American can take right now, even though I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been called unpatriotic while protesting.) I’m not Jewish. If more Jews thought this way, I’d consider converting.

After the Seder, I played chamber music with Robin’s teenage kids, Rachel and Charlie. Rachel’s a violinist and Charlie plays cello and guitar; I played the piano. (There’s probably a commandment against it somewhere, but I do covet my advisor’s piano.) Rachel and Charlie have an astonishing rapport. In chamber music, there’s a magical sense that the beat doesn’t belong to any single person; instead, it’s somehow an emergent property of the group. Usually it takes a while to develop this sense. With the two of them it materialized almost instantly. We played some Haydn trios and the Beethoven C minor, and later I played the first movement of the Shostakovich cello sonata with Charlie. That piece is glorious beyond words. We talked about it a little, nonetheless, how the ethereal, improbable cello melody gives way to martial rumblings of staccato octaves in the left hand.

“With Shostakovich there’s always a sense of foreboding,” Robin said. “Underneath the joy, there’s a reminder of darker things.”

“A bit like life,” Rob (her husband, also on my committee) mused.

And it is like life, only more so. The concentrated, unearthly sweetness of that melody, soaring out across three octaves and ending up in a totally different key from where it began—beauty too rich for use. Then the tolling of bells, the inevitable, irrevocable passage of time, the reminder of mortality. Art as a mirror for the world, a mirror that transforms the world and the way we see it.

Hasta pronto, y que les vaya muy bien.

More snow. And vultures.

2007-02-26T09:54:00.000-05:00

This time it’s my own driveway I get to shovel. It’s not nearly so pleasant here, though. The driveway, like nearly everything else in the apartment, was cheaply made a long time ago and scarcely maintained since. It has a certain amount, as we say in the business, of topographic variation. And then there are the vultures.

I’d never given much thought to vultures before I came to live here. I’d see them every once in a while lifting from something ghastly at the side of the road, or circling high up on thermals above the town. Now I spend a lot of time thinking about them, because upwards of 65 of them roost all winter in the trees behind this house.

They first showed up early last spring, a few days after an elderly neighbor passed away. It sounds like something out of magic realism: three days after Rosamunda’s death, the vultures came to roost in the trees behind Pilar’s house. They stared down at her with dark intelligent eyes and muttered among themselves like shipwrecked sailors. And I don’t mean to make light of the woman’s death. What I mean is to point out the unsettling coincidence. If it were magic realism, the vultures would be some sort of portent of worse things to come. They certainly felt like a bad omen in the long emptiness of last spring, after Matt’s departure. As it’s turned out, they’re just a nuisance. Thus far.

When they first came, my car was parked in the driveway under the overhanging spruce boughs. Overnight, it was whitewashed and reeking. I spent three hours with a hose and a scrub brush, getting it clean. That night the vultures left again. I parked in the street for a month to stay out from under the trees. A late snowstorm and a town parking ban forced me back into the driveway one night, and that very night the flock came back. This time, as well as a reeking coat of whitewash, they left several small rib-bones (squirrel, I rather hoped) entangled in the windshield wipers.

The situation hasn’t really improved since then. I park on the street whenever I can. The flock has grown. When I come home late at night, I can hear them in the trees, rattling their feathers and shifting among the branches. When I work at home on a sunny day, I can see the shadows of their wheeling flight crossing the blinds as they leave in the morning and again at evening as they return. They cover the back lawn with their filth and feathers and bits of unspeakable far-gone meat. As the snow melts, a charnel stink rises out of the back lawn. After I shovel the driveway here, at least the part under the trees, I feel like I should sterilize my shovel.

I was talking to my mother a few days ago, about some troubles I’ve had with a friend. She (my mother) told me something very important: not everything in life has a lesson attached. Sometimes, for no reason, life hands you—and here I paraphrase; my mother doesn’t talk this way—a shit sandwich. Maybe the vultures are another example. There’s no reason for the vultures to pick these particular trees, this particular house. Shoveling rancid vulture snow isn’t my personal penance for some past sin; it’s just what I need to do in order to keep the driveway clean, and so I shovel it.

A taxonomy of snow shovels

2007-02-23T21:47:00.000-05:00

A few years ago, I lived in a house with a long, steep driveway. At the top there was space for five or six cars, and a retaining wall on one side. It cost $90 a pop to get the whole thing plowed. Being graduate students, my housemates and I decided we’d shovel instead. After all, how many big snowstorms does Connecticut get in a winter? When I lived there, it seemed like at least one every week. It took a solid hour to get the standard 4-6 inches off that driveway, and when one storm dropped a foot overnight, I spent three hours out there. I’d grown up shoveling snow, but never quite on such a scale. It was there that I developed my taxonomy of snow shovels.

There are really only two kinds: a plow shovel and a scoop shovel. (Occasionally one finds a hybrid, but the hybrids are always inferior.) A plow shovel is the deep-bellied variety, usually made of plastic and often with a crook in the handle. It’s best for light dustings of 2-3 inches. You push it across the surface of the driveway like a snowplow, pushing a mound of snow to the far side. A scoop shovel is the lighter, nearly flat variety, usually made of metal, with a straight handle. It requires a more active technique, where you lift up a load of snow and toss it to the far side of the driveway. Or over the retaining wall, if you are so unfortunate as to have a retaining wall. If there’s more than four inches on the ground, a scoop shovel is preferable—if you try to use the plow shovel, especially if the snow is wet, you end up with an impenetrable moraine about halfway across the driveway and you have to attack it with scoop shovels anyway.

I came to be very proficient with both types of shovels, but I always preferred the scoop shovel. On that long driveway, I developed a rhythm, and even, if I might say so, a style. I’d shovel from one side to the other, flip the shovel into the other hand without even thinking, and go back across. The tiny lines of snow left behind—even the best shoveler can’t get it all—would form a neat herringbone pattern, checkered with my footprints.

When I’m shoveling snow, it’s almost like meditation. I can forget about everything except the work at hand. So I was overjoyed to wake up this morning to a bright white landscape of maple branches stacked with snow. I’m house-sitting and dog-sitting for a friend who’s out of town. Her driveway’s just long enough that shoveling provides a pleasant break from reality, but not so long or steep that it feels like a chore.

There are a lot of things I would like to not think about right now. Even barring the usual horrors of the modern world that I generally block out to stay sane, it’s been a rough week. This week I had to go through applications for a summer program I’ll be running in Costa Rica. There were eighty applications for twelve spots, and it was heartbreaking to turn some of those kids away. Also, my research is not going well right now. I’m learning how to program, and I’ve gotten to a point where I think I know what I’m doing, only to find that the machine thinks it should be doing something quite unrelated. I spent a fruitless couple of hours this morning poring over eight lines of code. And an analysis I’ve been working on for the past six weeks, on data I’ve collected over three years, revealed that there’s essentially no structure in my data set. An ideal data set would show up in this sort of plot as several discrete little clusters of points. Mine looks more like something from Jackson Pollock. The trouble with almost all ecological data is the difficulty of separating signal from noise. In my case, I’m beginning to wonder if there’s any signal there at all.

The minute I got out there on the driveway, in the bright glare of morning, all my data analysis worries vanished. It was just me and the snow and the scoop shovel; white snow ahead and black driveway behind. There’s something wonderful about work that’s so repetitive it becomes automatic, work where the progress is visible, work that stays done when you turn your back on it. That’s what I loved about carpentry. When I was laying floorboards or framing a doorway, I knew that my work would probably outlive me. I don’t think I can say that for any of the work I do these days. Who knows? Unless I can find some meaning in my Jackson Pollock data set, I might end up going back to carpentry after all.

Christmas Ferns

2007-02-14T22:18:00.000-05:00

Several people have asked if I’m going to post any of my poems. I have a strange reluctance to share them with the great anonymous society of the web—but then, almost everybody who reads this site is a friend of mine. Without further ado:

Christmas Ferns

In a beech wood at twilight, late fall.
Hoarding their secrets in the red leaves.
Feathers, vertebrae, ladders of scales,
strands of flippers that slit the light,
going from green to gunmetal as day fades.
I saw one in winter, snow-outlined,
a ribcage. They carry names
that have nothing to do with their quiet life.
I could say Christmas ferns, Polystichum acrostichoides;
I could describe fronds and pinnae, rhizome scales, sporangia.
There are words for every part of them
except their shining presence among the leaves;
there are words that weave and do not weave
the web of the way things are.

I want to jot down a few words about the genesis of the poem. I have mixed feelings about this, as well. Any work of art, whether visual, musical, verbal, etc., should stand on its own without burdensome explications. Sometimes the de-mystification of an artifact is almost a despoiling—it robs the reader (viewer, listener, etc.) of the chance to bring his or her own experiences and interpretation of the work. But I’ve found that I often have a deeper enjoyment of art when I understand something of the context where it arose. Hence the metadata, if you will:

Most of my poems are crabbed together in the margins of notebooks over the course of months and sometimes years. This is one of the few that came to me almost whole. It was a Saturday afternoon in late October 2004, and I had been grading student’s lab reports on photosynthesis since early morning. I needed a break, so I walked out in the forest behind the house where I lived at the time. I was thinking about the utter impossibility of really communicating anything with words. What slippery little beasts they are. I noticed the Christmas ferns growing in the leaves, more un-knowable even than other human lives. I thought about the time I’d seen one by the Trail in wet snow, so startlingly skeletal against the still-brown backdrop of leaves. Metaphors can give us a kind of comprehension, but what is the veiled shape behind their hinting? When I was in college, I had a chemistry professor who likened our understanding of molecules to a blind man examining an elephant. For things too large or too small, you can perceive only bits and pieces, and put the rest together by guesswork. It often seems to me that everything, eventually, falls in the category of the un-knowable if you follow it far enough.

I should record one more detail, a slightly mundane one, which I hope will not take the magic out of the poem. The last few lines were loosely inspired by the conclusion of a student’s lab report: “the experimental and control setups both did and did not have effects on both groups of plants.” In case any of my students are reading this, don’t ever write like that! The rest of the lab report, written in a similarly circumspect and informationless style, was a chore to wade through. But I am oddly, obscurely grateful for that one sentence.

Chop wood, carry water

2007-02-05T14:59:00.000-05:00

I’m not much for Zen—I have too much fondness for the world’s rough-and-tumble perpetuity to ever wish myself above it all—but there are some great koans. Before enlightenment: chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment: chop wood, carry water. And it’s true; no matter how great or terrible the event, the necessary details of life continue in the background. Nothing particularly great or terrible has happened to me lately, which I suppose I should count as a blessing. I have been thinking, though, about how much the details of life have changed since the Zen masters set that one down. Who chops wood any more? Who carries water? Most of the world, probably, but not here in the Land of Plenty. The modern American version of the koan would probably substitute drive to work, pay your taxes.

I’ve just finished reading Baron Wormser’s beautiful memoir, The Road Washes Out in Spring. It’s about the years he spent raising a family in a tiny cabin in the Maine woods, with no electricity and no running water. I was struck by how similar it was to my own childhood. We had electricity (in three rooms of the sprawling downstairs) and running water (after my sister was born—my mother drew the line at carrying water to wash out diapers). But we did grow much of our own food, and we heated with wood. As Wormser eloquently describes, heating with wood is a kind of meditation in itself. It anchors you to the place where you come from. When you burn a log, you’ve already handled it seven or eight times: felling the tree and lopping off the branches, hauling it out, cutting it to length, splitting, stacking. In the backwaters where I grew up, wood heat was still common enough that a household would be judged on the merits of its woodpile.

Even if you bought cordwood, there was still work. The first winter after my parents divorced, my mother lived with the three of us daughters in a poorly-insulated little house that went through five cords in a winter. She bought 4-ft lengths—slightly cheaper than the pre-cut wood—and every day after school, my older sister and I would saw the logs into thirds so they could fit into the stove. We’d stay at the sawhorses until dark, telling stories and joking and chucking sawdust at each other when the jokes got too bad. I suppose I could look back at this episode as evidence of some Dickensian, uphill-both-ways, barefoot-in-the-snow, terrible childhood. But instead I treasure those memories.

Today I live in a house with an oil furnace in the basement, like most people in this part of the world. I’ve never liked oil heat. You don’t have to think about where it comes from. Every month or so a giant truck fills up your tank; you nudge a little lever on the thermostat, and presto, your house warms up. I guess the convenience is what appeals to most people, but to me, it seems like a loss—one more part of our connection to the earth gone missing. You don’t have to think about the giant swamps of the Carboniferous Era, all the eons that that carbon lay buried beneath the earth, all the work of extracting and refining and shipping. It’s really weird, when you think about it, that the vast majority of us here in the Northeast depend on fossil carbon mined on the other side of the world to heat our houses.

And one thing about wood—you can count on it. You do your work, splitting and stacking and hauling, and you light the fire, and you get warm. Not so with oil. This morning when I woke up, the morning of my 28^th birthday, it was six degrees outside and 45 degrees in the apartment. I could see my breath. Some time during the night, the furnace broke. My first thought, when I rolled out of bed, was “time to light the fire.” But when I came fully awake, awake enough to poke around in the basement checking the breakers and the emergency override switches, I realized that there was nothing I could do, short of calling the landlord.

Sometimes I hate how dependent I am on technology I don’t understand; on long, untenable supply chains; on oil. Sometimes I’d like to just move to a little cabin in the woods, and have nothing around me that I can’t repair with my own two hands. Of course, if I ever did, I’d end up bemoaning the loss of my academic life, my career, my chance to reach the wider world and make a difference in more lives than just my own.

A minor change: in the time since I began writing this update, something great has happened to me. I won the Wallace Stevens Poetry Contest. I am still wavering between elation and denial—I have to re-read the email several times a day to convince myself that I really won. It’s a huge honor. In mid-March I’ll be reading one of my poems on the same stage as Adam Zagajewski. It just takes my breath away.

Back in the temperate zone

2006-12-22T13:17:00.000-05:00

I’m a little more than 35 degrees of latitude away from the place where I last posted, and it seems I can feel every single one. On the flight from San Salvador to Dulles a week ago, I fell asleep to a backdrop of green mountains and palm-lined beaches. I woke up maybe three hours later over lifeless trees, frosted fields, and rivers glinting in the manner of nearly-frozen water. Though it was close to noon, the sun hovered close to the horizon, looking faint and somewhat hesitant through a blanket of low clouds. I wondered briefly whether I had fallen, like Rip van Winkle, into more sleep than I’d bargained for. But the day continued as before, with local time only an hour different.

It’s been warm here in Maine, for December; the lakes are still totally open and the ground is hardly even frozen. It’s cold for me, though, and I find myself still struggling to adjust to the temperature. Yesterday I helped my mom and stepdad clear out brush and cut some trees that were shading the solar panels. In the evening we invited friends for our annual solstice party, to dance around the fire and eat and drink to welcome back the sunlight. I felt like an overstuffed doll in six layers of clothing, my mittened hands blunt and strangely unarticulated. Adjusting to the language is strange, too; when I’m tired I find myself slipping into Spanish without warning.

It is lovely to see my friends and family, and lovely to have a piano at my disposal again. Still, I feel sometimes torn in two, as though some figment of myself might still be out there in the endless rain and red mud, measuring trees, listening the to toucans and oropendolas cackling in the leaves high overhead. And there is something else. Lacking words of my own sufficient to the task, I turn to a writer I respect above all others: “...the strongest motive throughout had been a personal one, not mentioned here, but present to me, I think, every hour.... Active pains and joys might fling up, like towers, among my days: but, refluent as air, this hidden urge re-formed, to be the persisting element of my life.” Gracias, amor. Si dios quiere, nos vemos.

Damn, where did November go?

2006-11-28T20:19:00.000-05:00

It seems like just yesterday I was paying my October station fees and packing up for Nicaragua. And today the bill was due again, and shortly I’ll be packing up for winter in the States, a decidedly dicier—and icier—proposition than a vacation on Ometepe. I am a little worried about the temperature change. This week a cold front has dropped the nights down into the upper sixties (shudder), and the first night I hardly got any sleep. I would wake up too cold and put on some more bedding, sleep an hour or so, and wake up cold again. In the morning I ended up very bleary-eyed under two blankets and three sarongs. The towels were next in line.

The highlight of the week has been a visit from Brenda, a longtime family friend who’s been in Costa Rica studying Spanish for the past three weeks. She heard rave reviews of the La Selva Thanksgiving celebration from my parents last year, so she decided to come down and check it out for herself. The feast didn’t disappoint—like last year, it featured tiki torches, fireworks, wine, and an endless parade of tempting dishes. And afterwards, following tradition, a group of us went to the Y Griega (a bar down the road) for dancing and karaoke afterwards. Brenda dances a mean merengue, though she declined to join in for the group sing-along of “Like a Virgin.” We stayed till closing (2 am).

Brenda’s a good sport—as well as dancing to dawn, she came to the field with me, helped enter data, helped cook dinner for Steven’s birthday, and joined in the lewd and ludicrous conversations of the researchers. I hope she enjoyed the visit as much as I enjoyed having her here! Probably the most adventurous part of her stay at La Selva was a floating trip on the Rio Puerto Viejo.

On Saturday afternoon, I was sitting on the back porch of the old lab when Detlev (head of the German bat researchers) came running out of the jungle, quite wet. This in itself was not unusual—wet people coming out of the jungle is a daily fixture of station life. The unusual thing was his attire: nothing but a pair of swim trunks.

“Susan, we’re going floating!” he said. “You’ve got to come!”

“Floating where?” I asked him. Ever since the crocodile sightings of the past summer, floating has been generally restricted to the lower reaches of the river.

“Rafael’s house,” he answered cheerfully. It’s a derelict house with beach access, about 600 meters down the SOR—right in the middle of croc territory. But Detlev told me the Germans had all floated downriver once already, and the crocodile hadn’t put in an appearance. I reluctantly agreed to go. After all, it was Saturday afternoon, and the only thing I had planned was more data entry. I put on my Tevas, bathing suit, and sarong, and headed into the forest. Floating from Rafael’s house involves two activities that I generally avoid at all costs: swimming in croc-infested waters, and going into the forest in sandals. Admittedly, “the forest” here is a concrete trail more than a meter wide—but still, not the smartest thing in the world.

On the way out to Rafael’s house, we ran into Brenda, who had been napping at the River Station.

“Susan, what are you doing in the forest in that get-up?” she said. “I thought you said never to go out without boots, and to always wear long pants and long sleeves.”

I explained what we were up to—crocodile and all.

“Oh,” she said. “Wait for me.” A few minutes later, as the three of us headed into the jungle in our bathing suits and sandals. “I must be crazy,” Brenda said. “But I’ll probably be glad I came. When I look back, most of the things I regret are the things I didn’t do.”

As it turned out, we had a quiet, uneventful float down the Puerto Viejo. The crocodile, if he was around, kept a low profile, and the biggest animal we saw was a toucan. Still, I was highly impressed with Brenda’s sang-froid, and with her attitude. In my life, too, the things I regret are usually the opportunities I miss. Brenda’s safely back in the States now, but I hope I’ll be able to keep her spirit of adventure in mind during the last few weeks of my field season.

Gifts for the whole family

2006-11-16T21:39:00.000-05:00

Returning from town yesterday evening, I saw the first Christmas lights hung in the windows of houses in Flaminea. Which reminds me, it’s time to do some shameless self-promotion. You may have noticed a new link on this site: Buy My Books! If you like what you’ve read here, please consider clicking that link. My sister Lucy and I recently published the chronicles of our Appalachian Trail adventures, and for the botany geeks among you, I also have copies of my field guide to plant families at La Selva. Happy reading!

2006-11-16T21:26:00.000-05:00

Se�ora de Altagracia: my best Nicaragua photo, I think.
(c) 2006 S.G. Letcher

Herbario Fino

2006-11-11T11:58:00.000-05:00

After the gritty—and often startlingly beautiful—chaos of Nicaragua, I spent a week in the herbarium at InBio (the Instituto Nacional de la Biodiversidad). The contrast could hardly be more pronounced: I returned not only to the first-world security and orderliness of Costa Rica, but to a climate-controlled, meticulously curated collection of plant specimens. There’s something at once ennobling and humbling about an herbarium; all that effort and knowledge collected in one place. All the extraordinary diversity of the forests here, whittled down to a series of gray metal cabinets holding folders of dried plants mounted on acid-free paper.

Before I left for Nicaragua, I’d brought eight boxes of plants to put into the freezer at InBio for quarantine. (Three or four days in a freezer will kill the fungi and insect pests on fresh specimens that might otherwise damage the rest of the collection.) I had another five boxes, from last year’s work, waiting for me in an Indiana Jones-esque stack of identical cardboard boxes at the back of the herbarium. Fortunately I’d labeled my boxes clearly and drawn a map of their location last year.

Two thousand sixty-one plant specimens in seven days: welcome to Herbariathon 2006. Nearly all of my specimens were identified before I pressed them, either by me or by local plant wizard Orlando Vargas, but I wanted to make sure that all the identifications were up-to-date and consistent. There were also a few wild cards that had stumped Orlando. Marisol and I spent a week stacking and unstacking specimens, comparing them to the herbarium collections, updating the identifications where necessary. We spent probably 8-10 hours a day in the herbarium, wrapped in fleeces against the 60-degree chill. At the end of the day, we retired to the albergue, a building across the street where InBio provides lodging for visiting researchers.

The other residents of the albergue were a group of college students from Spain who were volunteering for the institute as an internship. Their work revolved around a newly created national park on the border with Nicaragua: defining the boundaries with GIS, collating data from biodiversity inventories, and helping to design the trail system. I got to do a lot of cool things in college, but nothing quite that cool.

Also residing in the albergue were a group of parataxonomists. I think I’ve finally discovered what I want to be when I grow up. They spend about half the month in the field, collecting specimens—insects and plants, mainly—and the rest of the time at the institute, cataloguing their finds, identifying them to the family level, and sending them off to specialists who know the species. Billy and Marcos showed me some of the insects they had collected, and some photos from past expeditions: knife-edged ridges, shrouded in mist, rising up out of thick jungle; native villages three days’ hike from the nearest road; waist-high rivers to be forded; jungle camps with a few tents set up in a clearing and a tarp strung up for cooking out of the rain. Unfortunately—for me—these jobs are all held by ticos. The idea behind InBio is capacity-building and job-training for Costa Ricans, by Costa Ricans, in order to understand, conserve, and responsibly use the native biodiversity of the country. It’s worked brilliantly—after only sixteen years of existence, the institute has one of the best plant and insect collections anywhere for this part of the world. They’ve trained a huge number of people. It would be wrong for me, an outsider, a gringo, to come in and take away a potential job for a tico. It doesn’t stop me from dreaming, though... There are so many countries in Latin America where the biodiversity is poorly known. This is a model that could be taken elsewhere, with the right funding, and set to work. I have no talent for administration, but I’ve got a certain amount of botanical knowledge now, and I’ve got a few friends with policy aspirations... maybe I’ll end up being a parataxonomist, or training parataxonomists, in Guyana or somewhere. (Eh, Tsitsi?)

With the help of Fransisco Morales and Nelson Zamora, two of the best botanists in the country, Marisol and I identified the last few specimens on Tuesday afternoon. I stayed behind to finish boxing up my specimens—the bulk of my work for the past three years, neatly contained in eleven cardboard boxes—and take care of a few odds and ends. Wednesday morning I caught the bus back to Puerto Viejo, with a bittersweet post-partum sort of feeling. I have really enjoyed this vegetation inventory project, even when it meant hacking shoulder-wide tunnels through tangled young forests or driving through alarming mud-pits. It’s weird to think that I won’t be hauling that blasted pole cutter around on my bike any more, or stopping by Orlando’s office with a bag full of plant bits. It’s finished.

The thought of being finished with a big chunk of my project is reassuring at one level—yes, I’m really capable of doing what I set out to do; the specimens are all catalogued and all the data updated and awaiting analysis. At another level, it’s terrifying. What next? Graduate school has brought me some of the best years of my life: good friends, exciting work, a steady salary, health insurance. None of that is guaranteed in the upcoming years. I would love to teach, but the job market is highly competitive right now. A few weeks ago a visiting professor told us that a tenure-track plant ecology position had opened up at his institution, and they had 95 applicants. My goal is to find work that’s meaningful, engaging, and has the potential to do some good for the troubled ecosystems of this planet. The more I think about it, there are a lot of possibilities. And one way or another, it’s bound to be interesting.

2006-11-09T11:47:00.000-05:00

The adventure begins: waiting for the ferry in San Jorge, with the two volcanoes just visible behind me.
(c) 2006 S.G. Letcher

2006-11-09T11:45:00.000-05:00

Little house under the volcano.
(c) 2006 S.G. Letcher

2006-11-09T11:43:00.000-05:00

A common sight on the roads.
(c) 2006 S.G. Letcher

2006-11-09T11:42:00.000-05:00

(No words necessary.)
(c) 2006 S.G. Letcher

2006-11-09T11:41:00.000-05:00

Banana plantation with stone walls.
(c) 2006 S.G. Letcher

2006-11-09T11:40:00.000-05:00

House, Altagracia: tico turquoise has made inroads into Nicaragua, it appears.
(c) 2006 S.G. Letcher

2006-11-09T11:38:00.000-05:00

Beautiful guanacaste tree (Enterolobium cyclocarpon) at the water's edge.
(c) 2006 S.G. Letcher

2006-11-09T11:37:00.000-05:00

Church in Moyogalpa.
(c) 2006 S.G. Letcher

2006-11-09T11:36:00.000-05:00

Propaganda.
(c) 2006 S.G. Letcher

2006-11-09T11:35:00.000-05:00

More propaganda.
(c) 2006 S.G. Letcher

2006-11-09T11:34:00.000-05:00

Posada Cabrera, Altagracia. Not bad for $3 a night, thought the mosquito net came in handy.
(c) 2006 S.G. Letcher

2006-11-09T11:32:00.000-05:00

Rice fields near Merida-- compare to the photos from China!
(c) 2006 S.G. Letcher

2006-11-09T11:31:00.000-05:00

Denizen of Volcan Maderas.
(c) 2006 S.G. Letcher

2006-11-09T11:29:00.000-05:00

Just like Northeast Harbor back home.
(c) 2006 S.G. Letcher

2006-11-09T11:26:00.000-05:00

Hasta luego, Ometepe.
(c) 2006 S.G. Letcher

Postcard from Nicaragua

2006-11-03T21:16:00.000-05:00

A postcard from Santo Domingo de Heredia, Costa Rica, more accurately, back in the land of internet access. I want to set things down while they are still fresh in my memory. Near the border at Peñas Blancas, the landscape of Nicaragua was indistinguishable from that of Costa Rica: pastures full of gray Zebu cattle, savannas with thorny trees, remnants of forest; volcanoes in the middle distance vanishing into the low cloud ceiling. Almost everything else about the two countries, though, was a stark contrast. The example that comes immediately to mind is the food options at the border. On the Costa Rican side, there’s a cafeteria with shiny linoleum and a buffet behind plate glass. Crossing into Nicaragua, the eateries are three-sided buildings beside the road, thrown together from scrap wood and metal, each one with a small smoky fire out back. They offer fried plantains, rice and beans, the occasional chicken. Lo que hay. Nearly all the food in the Nicaraguan countryside is still prepared over an open fire; a heavy scent of wood smoke still clings to the clothing I brought with me.

Isla de Ometepe is a large island, formed by two volcanoes (one active still, one dormant), in Lago Nicaragua. Lago doesn’t do it justice; it’s more like an inland sea. Check a map, if your Central American geography is as nebulous as mine was until I started working here. There really is a stunning amount of area covered by water in southern Nicaragua.

Ometepe hadn’t changed visibly since my last visit, a little over a year ago. There are still far more cows than vehicles on the main roads. The few vehicles that survive on the island are pretty down-at-the-heels. The buses are all 1980s vintage or earlier, festooned with stickers and religious slogans but otherwise unrenovated. Like the horses and oxen, they’re given just enough care to keep them from keeling over. Breakdowns are common, almost expected. One day I took a trip towards Mérida, on the southern side of the island. The bus broke down twice in less than 4 km: once with a flat tire, easily fixed, and once with a mysterious ailment that was remedied by the conductor pounding on something in the undercarriage with a large rock. I walked on the way back, and it was faster.

Mechanical difficulties are not limited to the terrestrial realm: on my last visit to Ometepe, the ferry’s motor refused to start when I was leaving the island. It was the first boat, 5:30 AM. Men clambered down to the engine room in the dark and banged on various things, but to no avail. Dawn came up over the volcano, purple fading into blue, and the stars winked out. Then a bus, one of the much-beleaguered horde, backed down the dock. I wasn’t sure quite what was going on until the boatmen opened the bus’s engine compartment and took out the battery. A few minutes later the ferry’s motor started, with a burst of black smoke from the tailpipe.

Last year, I spent most of my time in a hammock with a fat and thoroughly unedifying novel. This year I explored a little more of the island, visiting some of the beaches and hiking up the side of Volcán Maderas for a breathtaking view of the lake and the other volcano (Concepción). In the valleys, nearly all the arable land is taken up with rice fields and banana plantations. Up on the slopes of the volcanoes, they grow corn and beans. The climate is mild, and the volcanic soil is rich enough for two crops a year. It would seem like paradise, except for the flies. I guess it’s a logical consequence of living somewhere where the vast majority of transportation is by horse or oxcart, but there are a damn lot of flies. Islanders have a habit, which I quickly picked up, of putting a napkin over the mouth of your beer bottle as soon as it comes to the table.

It’s hard to adequately describe a Nicaraguan vacation. Certain images, then: the shadowed understory of banana plantations, with the starchy and unwholesome scent of organophosphate pesticides. Stone walls, so incongruously like New England’s but built of porous basalt, enclosing the plantations and neighboring fields of sugar cane. Dawn spreading like an oil slick over Lago Nicaragua, with thunderheads already building. Black volcanic beach pebbles; a thin line of yellow primrose petals at the water’s edge. Plumeria is blooming all over the island: branches like blunt instruments and such fragile flowers. I kept one pressed between the pages of a book. It’s still faintly fragrant.

The most notable thing about this year’s trip was the political propaganda posted everywhere. Nicaragua is coming up on a much-contested presidential election. Daniel Ortega, the Sandinista leader from 1985-1990, is running again. The country is divided, to say the least. I almost wrote “violently divided,” but the violence so far has been, thankfully, kept to a minimum. In the Sunday paper, I found an interview with Ortega. He felt confident of victory. On the same page there were interviews with the leaders of two opposition parties. Both promised that, when elected, one of their first acts in office would be to incarcerate Ortega.

The propaganda mainly takes the form of garishly colored posters, slathered across all the walls in town. Each party has its own bright colors: hot pink and green for the Frente Nacional de Liberación Sandinista, red for the Alianza de Liberación Nacional, carnation pink for the Movimiento para la Renovación de Sandinismo. (Their candidate, Mundo Jarquín, had by far the best slogan: vota por el feo que quiere una Nicaragua linda. Vote for the ugly guy who wants a beautiful Nicaragua. I have to admit, based on his picture, that “el feo” is not an unwarranted description.) As well as posters, the campaigns organized impromptu parades with brass bands, drums, and homemade fireworks. A truck with giant speakers mounted on top would follow close behind, blaring party slogans. This was all well and good, except that for three nights in a row, parades passed through Altagracia at something like three in the morning. I had to wonder if the parades were actually organized by the parties they advertised, or by rivals hoping to smear their image: vote for ALN, the party that wakes you up repeatedly in the middle of the night!

The most interesting campaign strategy I came across was the hiring of discomoviles. A discomovil is a fixture of Central American society: a roving truck that brings strobe lights and giant speakers to set up in any convenient open space. Voila, instant party. Well, one night in Altagracia both the FSLN and the ALN had the bright idea of hiring discomoviles. At the same time. The banks of speakers, three meters high and nearly as wide as the road, were set up facing each other, barely four blocks apart. And when I say blocks, these were Nicaraguan town blocks of maybe three or four houses. Maybe 200 meters total. The beats bounced off each other, recombining into bizarre variants of Latin music never heard before or since. John Cage would have loved it. Between blocks of merengue, salsa, cumbia, and reggaetón, the DJs subjected the crowd to a few pithy sentences of propaganda from their respective parties. If the DJ talked for too long, the crowd would begin to gravitate toward the other speakers. I mostly hung around the Sandinista end of things. Not for any political reason—personally, I really hope that somebody can keep Ortega out of office—but the music was marginally better.

Of the elections in my own country, I will give the same response I generally give these days when asked about my love life: sin comentarios. No comment. There are more than enough blogs that deal with sex and politics.

Hasta la Isla

2006-10-24T23:04:00.000-04:00

It’s been a couple of long, exhausting months in the field, and I’m ready for a break. Fortunately, the government of Costa Rica has given me a good excuse to take a vacation: my visa expires on Thursday. As a U.S. citizen, I get an automatic 90 day tourist visa every time I come into the country. I just have to spend 72 hours outside the country and voila, another 90 days when I come back. Renewing my visa is as easy as spending three days at the beach—provided that the beach in question is not in Costa Rica. And so, dear readers, I am bound for the Isla de Ometepe in Lago Nicaragua for a few days of sun, sand, and absolutely no schedule. A heartfelt thanks to Oscar Arías and the Departamento de Inmigración.

The cutest thing in the rain forest

2006-10-22T16:01:00.001-04:00

What's the cutest thing at La Selva? I know many who would nominate Steven for the title, and some who would nominate Dennis, but personally I think the cutest thing here is the bats. This week I've had the good fortune to see a bunch of particularly cute ones.

On Wednesday evening, the German bat researchers caught a leaf-nosed bat about the size of my hand, with a little baby clinging to it. It was a ball of brown fluff all except for its bright pink nose and its itty bitty wings. The babies in a lot of bat species here can weigh up to a third of the mother's body weight. ("That's like giving birth to a turkey!" Erin said. For me, it would have to be an extraordinarily large turkey, like the one my family got for Thanksgiving one year from a farmer in the next town. It was so large we had to slice it in half with a crosscut saw before we could fit it in the oven. I have a whole new respect for bats.)

On Friday I got to see an even cuter bunch of bats: Ectophylla alba, the white tent-making bats. They produce their own shelters by gnawing along the midvein of a Heliconia leaf. Every few days, when the leaf wears out, they move to a new roost. I check for bats every time I see a folded-down leaf, but I've only found them twice. Erin's excellent field assistant Mauricio located these guys while he was doing a survey of understory herbs. He guided a bunch of us out there around noon. It was the best lunch break I've had in a long time.

2006-10-22T16:01:00.000-04:00

Mauricio shows Dennis the leaf tent.
(c) 2006 S.G. Letcher

2006-10-22T16:00:00.000-04:00

These guys are about the size of golf balls but way cuter.
(c) 2006 S.G. Letcher