I write too much. One day into the trip Daryl warned that I would fill up my book. Still, I know generational loss; you put as much detail as possible into the original because it flakes off in every permutation derived from it. I’ve chronicled two subsequent major trips with a similar degree of anal-retentiveness and I don’t intend to stop. Nor do I intend to fully transcribe any more of them.
    But what about Costa Rica? I wish we’d seen more of the country; the beach, the city, the Caribbean coast. I’d gladly go again, but I’d like to be with someone who knows Spanish or I’d need to bring mine up to scratch. I don’t think I’d do the resort thing, despite my copious whining, I’d want something a little more real, bugs and all.
    Right now (April 2007) Diane is back in Costa Rica, doing the same thing over again. She said that fewer students were interested this time, which saddens us all. If anything, I want more people to go to places like this, anywhere wild and remote enough that you can meet nature on her terms, not ours. No easy outs physically or mentally, let humanity take a back seat, let it be cast back to its proper place where you confront the reality of all earthly existence: that we are at the mercy of the planet. Every clothed primate in every antiseptic cube surrounded by miles of concrete needs that forest to drink, to eat, to breathe. We forget this; we externalize and worship the supremacy of our imaginary numbers. I remember, and this is my memory, and now it is yours.

   We were told a more stringent set of rules than what actually seems to be in place. After equipping to be independent of electricity and making do with one compact fluorescent bulb weakly lighting a large room, we discovered that there was a television in the station. The rear half of the building is set aside for the staff. We only entered in when a particularly interesting moth was found on the wall. It was night and besides the moth in the room we found the Ranger’s family clustered around a small old TV.

    We were also told that the rules of the National Park we were in prohibited having alcohol. The subject never came up during our visit and when we left, Diane stayed in Costa Rica to get some real research done with her graduate students (including two from our course). Only after being back in Canada did we hear of the drinking games that went on at the station.

    All our garbage was burned if safe, buried if organic or inert, or had to be packed out. We had two smokers in the group who didn’t feel like adding their leftover filters to the load needing to be carried out. They ended up keeping them in empty film canisters.

   After I graduated, Diane hired me to work in her lab, creating her mite image database, which can be seen here. I hung around the lab for about a year and a half, and that job, through experience or contacts, has pretty much led to every paying gig I’ve had since then. Good stuff.

   As for the Tree Ferns, we crunched the numbers and though we found no significant effect on other tree ferns, there was a strongly significant difference between “forbs” upslope vs. downslope. “Forbs” was the category for every little thing that poked up out of the ground which wasn’t grass, but that we couldn’t identify more specifically. Basically, between 1 and 2m, less forbs grow dowslope than upslope. This led us to believe that chemical inhibition of germination from the tree fern could indeed be taking place. We didn’t have a mechanism, or any backup studies, or control data from neutral (i.e. non-tree fern containing) plots in the forest, but there you go.

   Here’s an instructional video from videojug.com: How to Make Gallo Pinto (I don’t think we ever had the green peppers or coriander).

    I washed my clothes with some relief when I got back. I decided to pre-soak, because if there was ever a time when it was called for, this was it. I dumped everything that was horrifically muddy into a bucket of water. When I poured the water out a while later, it looked like I was brewing tea. A couple more soakings and the clothes went into the washer and dryer. Over time, every cotton t-shirt I washed in Costa Rica disintegrated into a network of holes, the grey pants faded several shades lighter, and four years later, the shoes are still brown.