Back of Beyond Read online

  Far below, silvery threads of rivers wriggle around the ridges, fed by feathery waterfalls. I peered into a primeval land, unchanged for thousands of years. Once most of Costa Rica looked like this, before the aggressive deforestation, spurred by easy wealth from coffee plantations. You touch a little of the earth here in pristine form and feel a surge of empathy for the ancient Indian cultures once spiritually centered in these silent ranges, before being wiped out by the Spaniards.

  And then, just as the jungle has entered your soul, you vanish into a long tunnel and emerge into the bright light of the central valley and the San José sprawl far below. The transition is far too rapid. I wasn’t ready for neat fields, farmhouses, frilly suburbs, and concrete towers. I wanted to go back to the purity at the other side of the mountains.

  Monteverde! That’s a long hard drive, they said, you’ve got thirty miles on really hard backroads—all uphill, they said, and all for what?

  “For the golden toads,” I said. And that quieted them.

  Ever since Carol and David Hughes’s photographic forays for National Geographic into this remote part of northwestern Costa Rica, Monteverde and its profusion of wildlife have become world reknown. Naturalists and botanists flock to lose themselves in the six-thousand-foot ranges of virgin cloud forest in the Cordillera de Tilaran. They come to study the mating habits of the rare quetzal and the Bell birds, to photograph the more than two thousand plant species native to Monteverde (an orchid-lover’s paradise), and even to spend weeks high in the jungle canopy examining the world of epiphytes—miniature jungles in themselves of plants living on other plants. But it’s really the elusive golden toad that has captured everyone’s imagination—tiny creatures that can be found only in one small pool here where they come to mate. I decided I’d like to see them for myself.

  The doomsayers were right about the journey. It was long, and the last thirty miles indeed pummeled my backside to pulp in the somewhat spartan automobile. I arrived at dusk to find the dining room of my alpine-looking hotel filled with eager-faced young hikers from Scandinavia singing Swedish folk songs which took me back to my hearty, healthy camping days in the mid-sixties. Suddenly I felt rather old and decided to have an early night.

  At dawn, mists filled the lower valleys thousands of feet below, but the cloud forest on these high ranges was cloud free, today, basking in fresh light. I’d been told this was the best time to set off so, clutching cameras and a lunch pack, I left the soft morning sun behind and entered the dark forest.

  Within minutes I realized that finding the golden toads would not be as easy as I’d assumed. Recent storms had made a mire of the narrow trail, which wound around fallen trees and thigh-high tangles of roots. Flies were out even so early in the morning and seemed to relish the streams of sweat pouring down my face and arms. The air was stagnant, smelling of decayed leaves and mossy rot. Occasional views out of the jungle showed steamy ridges of virgin forest; the mists were creeping higher now up the valley sides; there were strange rustlings all around me and every once in a while came the eerie echoing scream of howler monkeys—one of the most unpleasant “natural” sounds I have ever heard.

  After another hour I was a mud-caked wreck, flailing up almost vertical hillsides, tumbling down again into swampy patches buzzing with cicadas. And then the mists moved in, making everything indistinct and blurry in the half-light. No one else was around. I lost the trail briefly and felt utterly helpless. From the air the jungle seems so ordered, a Teddy-bear textured coating of deep green over rolling hills. But below, that deceivingly benign canopy is total chaos, with only the thin thread of a trail to maintain an intruder’s sanity.

  Somehow, much later on, I found the pools where the golden toads were said to congregate and mate and was not at all surprised to find them empty—just inky black puddles in the gloom. I was too tired to walk so I sat among the mossy roots of a fallen tree and let the flies have their way with me.

  I may have dozed because when I next looked the pools were rippling. I looked closer and there they were, a dozen or so golden toads no more than four inches long, frolicking about in the blackness, totally oblivious to me, seeking out the females who seemed to be successfully eluding them. In that setting of riotous vegetation and otherworldly confusion, they seemed utterly perfect, unblemished, sparkling little creatures doing what comes naturally in these lonely pools high in the Monteverde cloud forest.

  The experience was worth all the discomfort of that day.

  Much (much) later I finally staggered back into civilization to be greeted by an elderly gentleman in a straw hat carrying two aluminum milk cans. We met by chance near the dairy and small cheese-making plant for which Monteverde is nationally famous. He introduced himself as Osborne Cresson and invited me to his home for “homemade lemonade and a fresh-up!”

  There I met his wife Betsy and son, Oz, who told me the fascinating story of Monteverde’s founding by a group of world-weary Quakers from Alabama who purchased six thousand acres in these high hills in the 1950s for a farming community and biological reserve. Their struggles to reach their elusive eyrie in oxcarts on almost nonexistent trails, build their own homes, and establish an economically viable colony would make a wonderful film. The three of them, and their talking parrot, exuded such a sense of peace and calm that I knew I had found yet one more shangri-la in this land of hidden shangri-las.

  Inspired by the enthusiasm of the early Quaker settlers, this cloud forest region has attracted worldwide scientific and conservationist attention and is one more example of Costa Rica’s “peace-in-action” philosophy. A portion of the Quakers’ original manifesto states: “In contrast to increasing militarism we hope to discover a way of life which will seek the good of each member of the community and to live in a way that will naturally lead to peace in the world rather than war.”

  Outside the wide windows of the Cressons’ simple wooden house, flowers and orchids bobbed in the mountain breezes; off to the side were orange trees, macadamia bushes, banana and breadfruit trees, blackberries galore, and even a small cluster of coffee bushes.

  Betsy spoke for the family. “This is paradise—truly. Every year I’m here I get a year younger.” Osborne and Oz smiled and nodded. Even the parrot seemed to agree.

  After Monteverde I became a frustrated monkey seeker. I was tired of hearing their chattering high in the cloud forest canopy and seeing nothing. Then I got an opportunity to visit Mike Kaye’s Tortuga Lodge in the Tortuguero National Park on the Caribbean coast. So I postponed departure for a few days and found myself, very early one morning, flying eastward at ten thousand feet through a torrential thunderstorm in a creaky twin-engine Piper and wondering if monkeys were really all that important after all.

  We eventually broke cloud cover at about treetop height and landed on a grass strip, with dark jungle on one side and long empty strands of beach on the other. The rain continued to pour as we crossed a narrow channel to the bamboo and thatch lodge set in fifty acres of tamed jungle.

  Breakfast was waiting for us at a long table in a room adorned with photos of guests standing beside catches of enormous sharks (a 232-pound bull shark caught by an A. Grassi seemed to be the most prominent), tarpon, and snook. The talk was all sport fishing. First-timers ogled at the enormous jaws of shark trophies on the wall; the more experienced fishermen discussed the finer points of battling 150-pound tarpon whose strike and aerial acrobatics exhilarate the initiated and usually terrify novices.

  In spite of the teeming rain there was an atmosphere of excited expectation in the room, and Mike Kaye, plumply regal in spite of his baggy shorts and green Tortuga T-shirt, watched over his guests benignly. Some of them were avid turtle watchers, come to observe the nocturnal egg laying of over five thousand green turtles and enormous seven-hundred-pound leatherbacks along the nearby beaches. “It’s a very touching experience to see these creatures laboring for hours in the sand, digging their holes, laying their eggs, covering them up, and dragging themselves
back into the ocean. You never forget it.” Mike is still a romantic.

  As the fishermen prepared to leave I joined my guide, George, in a small shallow-draught boat. We were off to look for monkeys and chugged slowly up the river, past a small village of palm-thatch cottages, watching the jungle slowly close in around us. The rain eventually stopped, the sun emerged, and it became steam-heat hot. The river narrowed to a creek and the jungle canopy formed a one-hundred-foot-high nave overhead. The banks were a riot of vines, broad-leaved heliconia, philodendron, and anthurium. A white heron eased itself langorously into the wet air; two macaws watched us slip by, and a flurry of green parrots thrashed through the trees and vines, their screeches echoing in the gloom. A “Jesus” lizard (basilisk) ran upright like a jogger across the water from one bank to the other on wide webbed feet; a Morphos butterfly with an eight-inch wingspan enjoyed a free ride on our boat for a while before fluttering off in flashes of bright blue.

  Screams came from deep in the rain forest. “Howler monkeys,” said George. I nodded. I’d heard them before. Now I’d like to see them—just one would do. George pointed to a clump of elephant ear leaves above a patch of water lilies by the bank. At first nothing, then very slowly an enormous gray iguana with a four-foot long tail emerged from a tangle of vines and gave me his spiny profile to photograph at leisure.

  Between brief bouts of jungle noises, utter silence. The boat drifted by itself and we sweated and listened and watched. The jungle on the west side of the creek stretched unbroken for one hundred miles to the high cordilleras; we could peer in about ten feet. After that it was just a tangled mystery.

  We floated on, dazed by the heat. In the stillness I was struck by the total aliveness of the forest; an incredible green machine of endless self-perpetuation, dripping with seeds, berries, pods, nuts, blossoms, pollen-coated stamens, all bursting with perfect blueprints for the next growth and the next ad infinitum—eternally re-creating itself, unseen, unhurried, and unchecked.

  In that tiny boat I felt like an openmouthed intruder, hardly understanding anything of what I saw, irrelevant to the place, almost envious of the jungle as an unquestioning participant in the enormous rhythms of life, responsive to a far deeper purpose. The little tribulations of our conscious lives and the apparent inability of us human beings to find a common harmony with all the myriad life systems around us seem to leave us spinning on the surface like flotsam, so tangled in our petty patterns that we fail to comprehend the larger whole of which we are a part. And while we’re trying to understand what we dimly sense unconsciously, we slowly destroy ourselves and the earth too….

  And then I saw the monkey.

  It was a whiteface, sitting in a banyan tree on the opposite side of the creek watching us with dark unblinking eyes. We stopped the boat and just sat looking back; I had an odd feeling he knew exactly what I’d been thinking. What struck me most was the humanness of the face: he seemed like a very old, wise man, wrinkled and balding, a little sad at what he saw below him. I tried to take a few photographs but my heart wasn’t in it. He just sat there, never shifting his gaze. George was smiling and nodding. “I seen him before,” he said quietly. “I know him.” The jungle was utterly still; nothing moved.

  And then he was gone. A few waving leaves, a quick shadow in the gloom, and then nothing.

  George was still smiling. Even he knew what was on my mind. “Bet he could teach you a few things,” he said.

  I nodded.

  I bet he could too.

  It was all George’s idea to camp out on Tortuguero beach and wait for the turtles to come in. I would have preferred a comfortable bed at the lodge but George said we should do it “Archie Carr’s way.” Dr. Carr was founder of the Green Turtle Research Station here in 1957. He and his followers over the years managed to save this largest known nesting ground from the massacres of native poachers, who made small fortunes from the flesh, leather, and shells of this endangered species. But it’s a hard job—never-ending vigilance during the egg-laying season. And we were about to become part of the ritual.

  “Arribada! They’re here!”

  One eye opens. It’s dark but not too dark. A moon makes the beach gleam like burnished armor. Phosphorescence sparkles along the surf. It’s cool, too, with a breeze—a welcome change from endless days of one hundred-degree sticky heat.

  George shakes my shoulder.

  “Said they’d be here round two. On the button, man.”

  It is two-ten in the morning on a twenty-mile stretch of beach along the Caribbean shore of Costa Rica’s Tortuguero. Behind us, across the river, is the jungle, black and silent now, stretching back a hundred unbroken miles and more to the Nicaraguan border. Fifty yards in and you could lose yourself forever in that tangled chaos of vines and vegetation. Scary place.

  “Counted four—an’ there’s more comin’.”

  I peer out into the surf as it froths and skitters across the sand. Gradually black domed shapes, edged in moonlight, are wallowing up the beach.

  They’ve arrived! Just like clockwork—some primordial pre-time clockwork—the green turtles of Tortuguero are coming home again to lay their eggs in the warm sand here as they have been doing every year for millions on millions of years. The eternal life-death-life cycle. And tonight we’re their only witnesses.

  George is a native of this part of Costa Rica, one of Central America’s wildest regions. He’s seen it all before but seems as excited as I am.

  “Just look at them!”

  More are moving in now.

  “This is going to be a night.”

  George nods his grinning black face.

  But we had no idea just what a night it would turn out to be….

  Earlier in the day my monkey had moved me to introspection. Now it is the turtle’s turn. I’m fully awake. As they crawl laboriously up the long, moonlit beach I feel part of some eternal ritual, something that predates man’s appearance on earth by eons. A sensing of those ancient rhythms again.

  “No flash, no lights,” warns George. “They git scared n’ go back.”

  We don’t need them, the moon is full and everything is clear as daylight.

  Slowly—unbelievably slowly—the great dome-backed creatures pull themselves up the sloping sand. One is enormous, almost five feet in length (“’bout eighty pounds a foot,” says George). She is only a few yards from our camp and has reached the nadir of the beach, near the sand-grass. Using her back flippers one at a time she begins to dig out her nest. We move closer slowly so as not to disturb her. Other turtles further down the slope see us and hesitate but the big one seems indifferent now, her eyes glazed and tearful.

  “She cryin’. She’ll cry all the time till she finished. Keeps sand outa her eyes. An’ she don’t care ’bout us—she’s nestin’.”

  As she digs deeper, well over a foot in now, her body becomes more steeply angled. Then she stops and just lies still, her eyes streaming. Suddenly her neck tightens, the leathery skin stretches like sinews and she opens her mouth wide. I expect a sound, she seems to be in pain, but nothing comes out except a gentle hiss. And then it happens. One by one, the tiny white eggs begin to drop into the sandy hollow. They’re like oversize golfballs glistening and leathery; you can see them dint a little as each one falls. Four or five and she pauses, lowering her head. Another straining heave and three more appear.

  Within twenty minutes I count at least sixty eggs.

  “Still got a ways to go,” says George. “She’ll drop ’bout a hundred. They comes back every two weeks ’bout three times—m’be five times, till they got no more left.”

  George reaches out and pats her enormous shell but there’s no reaction from those crying eyes.

  “Real gone.”

  Before the coming of Archie Carr and the creation of the Tortugero National Park, the beach here, known locally as Turtle Bogue, was a gory killing field during the nesting season. Green turtles by the hundred were turned on their backs by veladores and were eit
her slaughtered on the spot for their meat and gelatinous calipee (the essential ingredient of true turtle soup) or floated out to offshore boats with driftwood tied to their flippers. In addition, dozens of hueveros (egg stealers) and offshore harponeros (harpoonists) added to the carnage. By the 1950s the species was almost extinct.

  “Was real bad,” George had told me. “Shells, bones—all the way up. Twenty miles. They didn’t even let ’em lay. If they did, they’d take all the eggs n’ sell ’em.”

  Even Columbus himself noted the excellence of the turtles captured by his men when he explored this rich coast in 1502. Later, the eighteenth-century British Navy used these beaches regularly for supplies of turtles, which were kept alive for months in the holds of their ships.

  We walk slowly across what seems like miles of beach. We’re a long way now from Archie Carr’s place and our kayuka (George’s canoe hacked out from a single tree trunk). The phosphorus in the surf is like a silver brush fire; the breeze is cool. The egg holes are filling. One smaller female (a mere two hundred pounds or so) has ended her laying and looks around as if emerging from some trance. She waves her back flippers and begins raking the sand over the eggs. She seems agitated and speeds up, using all four flippers at once; she lifts and drops her body on the sand to compact it.

  “Sixty days there’ll be a hundred baby turtles runnin’ for the sea.”

  George watches the mother.

  “She’s gotta get back. Tide’s going out. S’long crawl.”