Costa Rica: The Language In The Jungle
By Anne Campisi

The Corcovado jungle jewels the southeastern coast of Costa Rica. It’s the home of tapirs and jaguar, orchids, eyelash vipers and parakeets. Raucous howler monkeys hoot and bawl for your evening meals and wake you up howling again at dawn. It’s a brilliant wash of sensory overload in some ways. To me, the languages of the jungle are foreign. Spanish is hardly as significant as the constant Babel of birds and insects, the omnipresent cipher of scat and tracks, tides and heat, or the urgent codes of color and stripe that speak to what’s poisonous and what is merely beautiful.

Though I’d hiked through it alone without incident, the entire route from La Leone to Los Patos seems mined with hazards if you list them back to back: sharks hunt in the mangroved inlets that I’d blithely waded across at noon. The temperatures soar to the 90s, and there are riptides. Poison dart frogs carry neurotoxins. Jeering flocks of scarlet macaws in the high canopy of almond trees hurled scull-basher nuts down at me as I raced beneath them, hunched under my pack for cover. I nearly stepped on a small caiman holding still in the long grass and narrowly ducked walking nose first into a black and yellow spider the size of my hand, who’d strung its web across the trail. The clear path through it all, 9 miles along the beach from La Leone to the interior Serena ranger station, is a long, lovely, humid stroll. Or, that’s what I thought without the burden of hindsight.

Inside the jungle, the air is dense and deep with the vital scents of decaying vegetable matter, passion flower nectaries, ocean and dander. But I’m guessing a little; smell is a sense I hardly use with precision; and so while I recognized—maybe for the first time—that I was inhaling a tremendous wealth of information, interwoven scents that told the identities, proximities and relevant histories of untold millions, flora and fauna (much of it sniffing right back at me, easily figuring my identity, proximity and history), I hadn’t the skill to interpret it. The perfume was not unpleasant, only extravagant. Illegible, invisible, the jungle’s redolence envelops, steaming its trace into hair and skin and lungs.

The Corcovado biome is over 100,000 acres and covers eight habitats, from the marine and mangrove to the cloud forest and montane. It is so rich with life that the normal pace of walking can be too fast. Finally, I had to stop, to hold my breath and allow some of what had fled my arrival to venture back, or to see what was always there but invisible or disguised. And in a moment, there in the tree is a sloth! And here flies the giant Morphos butterfly with its iridescent blue wing. There a lek of hummingbirds; certain sticks prove snakes.

A small wonder of Corcovado is the vibrant orange and purple land crab, fist-sized and smaller, that forages en masse amongst the undergrowth. They have a gentle, custodial relationship with seedlings and leaf litter. When the ground cover is dense, you cannot see them, but you hear them with each step as they edge away, their shells against the low leaves making the sound of rainfall. If you stop, they slow and stop. But two new steps in any direction and the green ground for fifteen yards flees your feet with a sssshhhh.

But just as it seems like I'm having this magnificent solo wilderness experience, noticing all sorts of hidden wonders, delighting overmuch as a creature of the world and so forth; I notice—a biology student holding very still beneath a nearby tree, holding a clipboard at her knees. And all at once I see that my moment of glorying in the world has just ruined the fruits of her having held perfectly still and quiet, by herself, for the last three hours. And that for the past fifteen minutes, she's been observing me.

Serena, the central ranger station where most backpackers come through Corcovado camp, is also an established biological research facility. So in addition to hikers and rangers, you also have a bunch of grubby, happy scientists at large, most of them spending months and months studying, say, Corcovado dirt. Or the crabs, Iguanas or a certain kind of moss. They can speak several dialects of the jungle, at least.

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