OUR TIME IN THE JUNGLE MOVED REALLY SLOWLY, AND I KNOW WHY: It’s because everything we did there took absolute, 100 percent, full and total attention.
At home, whenever we wanted to go outside, it was never much of a production. We didn’t have to think or plan in any way. Back in Gorham, we could just grab the doorknob, open the door, and step into the world like unconscious drones.
But in the jungle, every time we wanted to enter or exit a door, we needed to be on guard. The monkeys loved to get into the kitchen or the bedrooms. If they were around, even if it seemed as if they weren’t paying attention, they were looking for a crack to slip through. So we’d pause at every doorway, scan the perimeter, ready the latch. Then, quick as we could, we’d slip out, close the door, and secure the latch behind us. If the monkeys got into any of the monkey-free zones, they would wreak holy havoc on whatever they could find—dinner plates, food supplies, laptops—so we needed to exit and enter with speed and military precision.
The same was true for nearly every other aspect of daily living. Want to take a walk down the path? Keep your eyes sharp for pinchy lines of leaf-cutter ants and the serpentine buttress roots from the surrounding trees. Ready to rake out the macaw cage? Stay clear of their beaks. Macaws can exert more snapping power than a pit bull. Forget your book up at the cabin? Be on the lookout for poisonous vipers—as Jackson learned firsthand one night.
We heard her before we saw her. “I just stepped on a giant snake!” she screamed, high-stepping back to the Human Kitchen. Without hesitating, Earl grabbed a machete, ran outside, chopped the snake’s head off, then brought it back and placed it coiling and looping (and headless) on a kitchen cutting board. The snake in question was the terciopelo, or fer-de-lance, “the most feared and dangerous of the Central American snakes”—at least according to Les Beletsky, author of the Travellers’ Wildlife series on Costa Rica that Carol let me borrow. How dangerous is the fer-de-lance? One story I heard from a grounds crew member concerned a local farmer who was bitten while working in his field. With no medical attention available, he went home and had his wife take care of his wound as best she could. The next day, the farmer died. The day after that, the wife died! As the story goes, she got enough venom in her system through a cut on one of her hands to reunite her with her husband and give the snake another victim.
Was this actually possible? To find out, I asked Earl, Carol’s husband and our resident animal expert. If anyone would know, he would.
Earl was in his late fifties, wore a mustache, and had sandy-blond hair tossed to the side like the aging surfer that he was. He had worked in construction for many years, then as a commodities broker, before landing in the Osa like a coconut washed up on the beach. He could build most anything and cook most anything, and he had an encyclopedic collection of animal, bird, plant, insect, and general facts tucked beneath his sun-bleached hair. During the info-packed tours he led, I never saw him stumped by a visitor’s question.
“What kind of tree is this?” a woman might ask, pointing to one specific tree in a jungle of trees.
“Oh, that’s a saragundi,” Earl would say. “You can tell by the leaves. They close up at night and are a popular medicine for arthritis.” And off he’d go. When it fruits, who eats the fruit, peculiar adaptations, and so on. He wasn’t pompous, just knowledgeable. He was easy to talk to, easygoing, and as cool as Carol was fiery.
As for the two-for-one snakebite? “It’s a rural legend,” Earl explained. “The fer-de-lance poison turns into a separate protein when it interacts with human blood and begins to digest your muscles from the inside out. When this happens, the wife would never come in contact with it.” He went on to explain the science behind the snakebite venom, but I really wasn’t listening at that point. I just kept picturing my daughter nearly stepping on one of these deadly muscle liquefiers on the path leading up to our cabin. We certainly weren’t in Gorham anymore.
Back home, virtually nothing threatened to pinch, bite, or sting us in any serious way. Nothing died in front of us from week to week. But on the Osa, we were forced to face all kinds of large and small threats, actual life-and-death dramas, throughout each day.
Another example: Logan’s bed continued to be a hub for scorpion activity in the rain forest. After our first “Save the Scorpions” rescue mission, he found a new one a few nights later lurking behind the same board just to the right of his pillow. Clearly, a message needed to be sent. Working again by headlamps, and away from the gentle glow of Traca’s compassion this time, Logan flushed it from below with his journal and I skewered it from above with my pocketknife, pinning it to the wall just through the spot where—if it had a heart—its heart would be. As I suspected, there was nothing to kill in this creature, because it simply would not die. No matter how much I twisted the knife or dripped sweat onto Logan’s bed, the scorpion continued to strike the knife handle with its barbed tail, eventually working itself free, cutting itself nearly in half, and falling into the darkness under the bed. When that happened, Logan, Jackson, and I screamed at the same time, an earsplitting sound I’m sure the howler monkeys envied, all of us jumping frantically onto a bed or a trunk, protecting our suddenly vulnerable bare feet from the pissed-off, rampaging, nearly-split-in-two arthropod somewhere in the blackness below us. When the girlish shrieking stopped (and trust me, this took a while), I gathered my courage, pulled the bed aside, and splatted what was left of the scorpion with my sandal. In my memory, this event plays out in super slow motion, though it probably took all of three minutes to unfold.
The parakeets were also having their own wild ride on the life-and-death roller coaster. When Logan neglected to fill out his daily feeding log one too many times, Earl reassigned him to the maintenance crew with me, and Traca took over as surrogate mom for the birds. But a few days later, she woke up to find her little nestlings peck-peck-pecking on heaven’s door. We’d started with seven, but lost a few of the weaker ones early on. Now another was dead, and the rest had a bad case of the dreaded crop sour. Carol tried to extract the rotting, hardened gunk from their gizzards with a tube and a syringe, but it didn’t look good. In her professional opinion, and she had raised generations of these fragile green guys, none of them would make it. But Traca was determined. She sat and massaged their crops, no doubt pouring all the love and Reiki energy she could into their little blanket-covered colander of dimming life. While we all did our sanctuary thing, she did not leave them, not for one banana-picking minute, until Carol inspected them late in the day.
“Well, what do you know?” she said with a fellow nurturer’s respect. “I think they just might have turned the corner.”
When this prognosis was announced, Traca turned and looked at me with more relief and pride on her face than I’d seen since the day Jackson was born.
As for Sweetie: three days after she bit me, I walked out of our cabin to see what would happen. My plan was to head straight for the water and dive in if I needed to, but I never made it.
“John! She’s coming!” Traca called.
I turned to find a monkey tearing across the lawn, heading right for me. Earl later said that Sweetie had been high in a tree when she saw me out in the open. Like a frantic fireman, she zipped down a vine and hit the ground running, up on her hind legs, arms raised and swaying back and forth for balance. I could have run. I’m much faster than she is, especially when adrenaline is coursing through me, as it was right then—but I didn’t want to escape. I wanted to rejoin the troop, and Sweetie was the gatekeeper. I watched her close the gap between us, her sights set only on me. As contact was imminent, all I could do was take a deep breath, extend my hand, and pray she didn’t bite it off.
Thankfully, it was nothing so dramatic. Sweetie climbed up, perched on my shoulders, and hitched a ride to a nearby chair, where we sat down. Reunited and it felt so terrifying, but good.
After that, as with all things in the jungle, I was ever vigilant. Though Sweetie was nothing but sweet to me, I was still on guard. Where was Winkie? What would my escape route be? It wasn’t constant fear, just a heightened sense of awareness, an animal sense of my surroundings.
We all felt it. We were four animals released back into the wild, waking up day by day to the beauty and the danger, the life and death, all around us all the time.