MAP MISSTEP; VOLCANO BURBLINGS

An example from experience of a map misstep: In Costa Rica I traveled to Monteverde and its cloud forest reserve for the quetzal bird (a brilliant-green streamer-tailed trogon, whose tail feathers were highly prized by the Aztecs; still a mythical bird to me as I never caught sight of one). I mentioned to a local Tico that I could hear thunder and observe clouds every day, but that it did not rain. He deigned to inform the idiot foreigner that he was standing on the flanks of a volcano, and the rumblings beneath my feet were the inner burblings of the magmatic physiographic feature. Vulcan seemed to suffer from perpetual dyspepsia.

Where I went wrong (but I blame it on the "misleading" map, of course) is that the x marking the volcano on the map was actually the crater that according to my mental map seemed on the other side of the country (CR is probably only 60 miles wide); and by road I had traveled hours across country from east to west and then back east up the grade (and the western flank of the volcano).

The Tico tried to ease my fears by informing me that the volcano had not erupted since 1968! My instincts told me to not wait for moody Vulcan to again get the heaves. I left early next morning.

DARK CATHEDRAL RAT

He was diminutive Jesus, the sot, who lived in the clearing in the rain forest near Sixaola, Costa Rica, south of Limon, and who kept, after successful hunting trips, a skinned, fly-covered whole tepesquintle (a very large, wild “mountain rat") hanging above his hearth slowly desiccating into rat jerky, and where directly below he kept a pot of black beans perpetually cooking which he generously offered his infrequent visitors. I, the vegetarian, ate happily (of the beans), gazing across the clearing into the dark understory of the cathedral-like rain forest trying to avoid thoughts of the half-roasted, half-raw rat carcass guarding my meal.

Jesus related to me the story about his losing his dog. They were out, the two of them, hunting rain-forest game, such as the tespesquintle, when Jesus heard an awful yelp from his hunting companion ahead. He found his pet wrapped against the trunk of a large tree by a huge boa. His machete soon released the dead dog and the serpent never enjoyed its last supper.

A year later, after I returned to the U.S., I learned that diminutive, dogless, desiccated Jesus, the sot, fell off one of the always-wet, precarious single-log bridges I teeteringly crossed in that part of the Costa Rican rain forest. He was found facedown in the swirling stream, his body finally hydrating, under the dark, unforgiving, dripping cathedral canopy of death.

TRANSYLVANIAN SOUNDS

When I lived in the midst of lowland primary rain forest on the Atlantico side of Costa Rica, there was the most eerie, uncanny, unbelievable night sound one could ever imagine. It sounded so strong and nonbiological I could not imagine then, lying in my hammock, that it could issue from anything within the animal kingdom. The best I can describe it is that it sounded close to the sound when someone plays a saw on their knee, bending and warping a quavering, wailing, metallic, strangely melodic siren sound that sounds electronically synthesized.

If there were one thing I could retain from my 4 1/2-month stay in the one-room bark house filled with scorpions in the middle of the 450-hectare tract of primary rain forest, it would be a recording of the strange nighttime sounds, especially the mournful bird (?) that plays the synthesizer.

The rain forest is nearly silent during the day; but at night it's a transylvanian (double entendre) Bela Bartok symphony, with competing woodwinds and brass, of tonal beauty and timbral eeriness. That lost sound traveled through the dark woods, deep into my imagination, and resonates in me today as a mysterious Green Mansions: A Romance of the Tropical Forest (by W. H. Hudson, 1916) of dark, shaded incomprehensibility.