El comienzo

El comienzo

It was a five hour drive to Chicago from my hometown in northeastern Iowa. Fall had finally turned cold in the Midwest, and the day hung heavy and low. Only two weeks earlier, I had sat behind the driver’s wheel, stared down an unfathomably straight stretch of Utahan highway. 144 days out West, 14 back home, and now this, another departure. Geography kept getting up on me, kept moving.

At four o’clock the next morning, I stood in line at airport security. I played with the hem on my brother’s old sweater, eyed the burn marks on my firefighting boots, made use of the little familiar things.

Taking off was always the best part. Layover in Florida, the rippling blues of the Caribbean. Then descent, as though I was being absorbed into green, into broad leaves, into voracious and wriggling life.

Costa Rica, I thought, following the signs in the San José airport. It had been like looking at nine weeks of blank space: I couldn’t begin to imagine it, so I hadn’t tried.

And now, here, the blank space began to take form, to fill itself in, to become.

…

My initial ticket read October 30, 2012; my return was marked January 3, 2013. For more than two months, Costa Rica was to be home: a week in Heredia, five in Chilamate, three at Selva Bananito Lodge and Preserve. Bienvenidos.

In Chilamate, a pueblito in the lowlands of central Costa Rica in the Sarapiquí region, I volunteered at CECOS, el Centro de Aprendizaje para la Conservación en Sarapiquí, or the Sarapiquí Conservation Learning Center (SCLC). A non-profit organization, CECOS opened as a learning center in the mid-1990s and has been working to bring opportunities to local Tic@s ever since—from English as a Foreign Language classes to community charlas (discussions) to becas (scholarships) for high school and university students. As a short-term volunteer, I was involved in a little bit of everything: from planting trees as part of our reforestation project to writing and editing documents in English to lending a helping hand (or foot) to local Sarapiquí instructors at cooking and dance classes.

La oficina de los voluntarios overlooked the green Sarapiquí River; blue-jeans frogs made themselves at home on the scattering of senderos; at my host family’s house at night, I could hear the gray- and white-skinned lagartijas chirping through their reptilian throats. Rain fell hard and fast in Chilamate, a thunderous overtaking that submerged sidewalks and molded boots, and then for a few days, the sun would settle up high in the sky and the aves would open their wings, feathers fanned in bright streaks of color. Then my host brother Pancho would recite 
names and migratory patterns to me from his carefully kept birding book, whistles trilling in his throat.

Three hours away from Chilamate—south of Limón on the Caribbean coast, 10 miles from Bananito Sur on a wending, river-crossing road—stood Selva Bananito Lodge and Preserve, the site of my second internship. An ecolodge surrounded by the selva, I spent my first weeks there as part of the human minority: three Tic@s and one macha (blondie) to fifteen horses, four dogs and one cat—not to make mention of the culebras, perezosos, aves, murcielagos, escorpiones, grillos and other non-domesticated, but certainly present, animals. I cleaned rooms with the women; I hauled downed manú wood in from the jungle with the men; I cleared brush back from reforested trees with the quick whack-whack of a machete; I drove a metal carving tool into wood with a martillo to make new placards: No alimente a los caimanes / Don’t Feed the Caimans. I played bol with the Nicos who worked on the neighboring finca, and with the arrival of tourists, spoke English upstairs in the dining room, Spanish downstairs in the kitchen, serving and eating, walking up and down and up and down, neither turista nor trabajadora, but some strange species in-between.

They wanted to teach me words—Gato and José, Anita and Meche and Gris—they wanted me to know araza, the pucker-mouthed yellow fruit, and tacos, the spikey-soled fútbol cleats, and caballeriza, the sweet-smelling stable, all sweat and horsehair. Tolda for bug net, almohada for pillow, paño for rag or towel. Walking back from bol, the mud outline of the balón a perfect imprint on my white shirt, Gato pointed to the lights flicking on and off in the rising darkness: luciérnagas. Like lagartijas, which Pancho had painstakingly taught to me in Chilamate, Gato listened to me roll the syllables around with my tongue, correcting my sounds. Almost every day after, he would turn to me and ask: “y los insectos que brillan, ¿como se llaman?” 

“Luciérnagas,”  I would respond, letting the word grow from down in my lungs. 

“Eso Clare,” he would say, grinning, “eso.”

Fotos: 1. Caribbean views 2. Jungle livin' 3. Welcome to CECOS! 4. View from el rancho at the Selva Bananito Lodge