"Fa-TAL!" Exclaimed the conservation manager with much animation as we cruised slowly down the highway in the falling night. He was commenting on the pot of coffee I had brewed in the office that morning and my keen intuition hinted that my methods may not have agreed with him. In broken Spanish I elicited the bone of contention: he uses fully one fourth the amount of beans per cup compared to my morning eye-opener. Either way, contrary to his gentle indications otherwise, it's good stuff. Oil palm plantations and dry-land rice fields slide by in the humid night. A little farther on we pass an organic chocolate farm. It's the start of summer and what can be called the comparatively dry season, though it's rained nearly every other day since my arrival three weeks ago. I'm finally getting used to seeing trees again, and Spanish is gradually overtaking my inclination to respond to everything in Chinese. I feel cold when the temperature drops below 70.
2010 was a stormy and tumultuous year, like nothing we could have imagined, and nothing that I care to recall here. In something somewhat like a movie scene, the raging winds and crashing waves of a midnight storm have dissolved, and I find myself that castaway pulling his senses together on some sunny tropical shore edged with coconut palms and little blue waves licking at its sands. It really does seem a disconcerting dream, but here I am in Costa Rica in my 5th week of work with a new company doing conservation and development in the region. Soon, we'll be settling down into an apartment in Virginia- our 11th place in our 5th city in five and a half years- and maybe things will sink in more fully then, maybe there will be a "normal" again. But for now I'm happy to have passed into a new year and the new promises it holds, whether my senses have fully arrived or not.
Over the last bone-jarring, tattered steel bridge, we roll into town on a dusty lane paralleling the only paved street in Puerto Jimenez. Pulling up outside a low building surrounded by a high metal fence, I wish the conservation manager a happy new year and step out, my mind adrift in some far off place as it attempts to navigate the path from the rubble of Tibet to the jungle of Costa Rica. It could be a long time before it finds its way fully to here and now.
As the gate shuts with a clang, I hear howler monkeys in the distance.
