West of the Fields

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.