Like the Waves

            by Tessaly Jen

 

The brochure made Ecology Project International sound like everything I could have dreamed of in a summer abroad program: eighteen glorious days in Costa Rica, accompanied by only ten other students, an enthusiastic teacher, and two group leaders. We would spend a week at Pacaure Reserve, a secluded coastal heaven, before venturing inward.  There would be live monkeys—real howling, swinging, animated monkeys—just outside our living quarters. As far as our sleeping arrangements, I wasn’t sure if they would be tents or buildings or what, but I didn’t care: the location sold itself regardless of the accommodations. The most exciting part of the trip would be the turtles. Though the brochure didn’t guarantee that I’d see a turtle, I didn’t have any doubts. Pacuare was the fourth most important nesting ground for Leatherback sea turtles in the world, and altogether, EPI students had seen 190 Leatherbacks come to nest the year before. I was ready for the adventure of a lifetime and couldn’t wait to find out whom I’d be sharing it with.

 

When I arrived at the airport, I discovered that there were some characters on the trip. The one who drew most of my attention had a short beard, traces of a mustache, short hair, and a rattail. There would be many times during the trip when I’d have to quell my desire to cut it off. The boy was wearing an earth-toned plaid shirt, olive cargo pants, and Teva sandals…and he was sitting on his father’s lap.

When we went through security, the airport personnel held back George, the lap-sitting boy. After a few minutes, he rejoined the group, grumbling about losing his Swiss army knife. He continued to mutter in angry frustration for the hour that we spent at the gate. Apparently he hadn’t heard any news since 9/11.

 

After a long flight, we arrived at the San Jose Airport in Costa Rica. We stood in weaving lines to get through customs, but the thrill of being in a different country sustained me. A massive mural of the rainforest, complete with a dummy riding a zip-line through the trees, covered one of the walls. The stamp that the customs official placed in my crisp new passport sent a surge of energy through me. My first big adventure on my own had begun.

 

After spending the night in San Jose, a tour bus picked us up and drove to a loading dock where a boat would carry us on canals to Pacuare. As we drove down towards the coast, it became increasingly apparent that the bus’s air conditioning was broken. We looked hopelessly at the red warning on the huge windows: “In case of emergency, break windows to escape.” Our only source of ventilation came from the tiny open door at the front of the bus. By the end of the three-hour ride, our clothes stuck to our sweaty skin and the ice I had filled my pink Nalgene with had melted and turned into lukewarm water. I sighed in relief when I finally stepped into the fresh air outside.

 

We arrived at Pacuare Reserve at sunset and the warm light was reflecting on the water. Two palm trees arced over a hammock next to the sand. The small buildings had faded red-shingled roofs and paneled walls the color of the ripe bananas fields we had passed during our drive down. The beach hugged one side of the main building and the thick green rainforest crept up to the other.

 

            Many of the researchers working at Pacuare were foreign. Among these was Jessica, a petite British woman with curly red hair, circular-rimmed glasses, and a charming accent.

            “What’s up dog?” Patrick (a group mate) asked her nonchalantly one day at breakfast.

            “What the hell is up dog,” she responded incredulously, not understanding the slang phrase.

            “Not hella much dog,” he answered, beginning to laugh.

She watched him with a bemused expression until I took pity and explained the meaning to her. From then on, she greeted us with a friendly and properly annunciated, “What is up dog?”

 

I was ecstatic to be working with Becky, my bubbly group leader, and Jessica for my first night patrol. We set out at ten thirty, walking down the beach and looking for turtle tracks.

The water, gleaming with the reflection of the moon, created a gentle glow on the shore, but my sight was limited to dark outlines. So a little ways down the beach, two bright lights from the forest easily caught my attention. Jessica recognized them as two of the male researchers’ flashlights. They were on a night hike searching for amphibians and reptiles. Jessica and Becky, looking to spice up the long walk down the beach, decided to mess with them a bit. After telling me the game plan, the three of us crouched down behind a short sand dune and began to hurl coconut shells and other stray objects towards the trees. The flashlights immediately shifted to the treetops and began to search back and forth for an aggressive animal. We continued to chuck things at the trees and they continued to search for about five minutes.

Suddenly Becky let out a grunting, “Hierrrrrgh.”

Jessica joined her and they chorused, “Hoohoohoohoooo,” breaking the silent air.

“Hierrrrrgh! Gwhoohoohoohoo! Mmmerrrrmm,” the three of us were soon groaning between silent giggles. After a few more minutes, the flashlights disappeared and the men left, realizing it was a ploy.

Our chances of seeing a turtle were shot because of all the commotion we’d made, but our laughter held us for much of our way down the beach.

 

Though there was plumbing at Pacuare, there was no electricity. It started getting dark around six and by eight, you could only identify people by their voices. To avoid stepping on poisonous snakes or running into walls, everyone walked around with headlamps once the sun had disappeared.

In order to take a shower at night, you had to hang your headlamp on the shower nozzle at the perfect angle so that it didn’t get wet, but still provided enough light to see the soap. In itself, taking a shower in the dark is frightening. Perhaps because of grade school escapades to play Bloody Mary in the bathroom, running water in the dark had always freaked me out. Still, after hiking down the beach for the patrol, I couldn’t bare the feeling of dried sweat mixed with sandy dirt any longer. So, I opted to take a shower. The icy water hit me in a blast and I hurried to wash quickly. When I reached for the shampoo, I saw something dark move by the entrance (the shower stalls had bamboo doors that ended about a foot from the tile floor). I backed into the corner of the stall as my heart thumped in my chest. I was defenseless, no clothing or weapon to save me. I couldn’t run away naked and nobody would hear my scream. There were snakes in Costa Rica whose venom could kill you within three hours. I thought about the long canal ride we’d taken to reach Pacuare and the kilometers of banana fields before civilization. I would be dead long before any antidote could reach me. The dark creature appeared on the sandy white floor. I took my headlamp and shined it into the eyes of a large olive toad.

 

After my late night with the toad, I was glad to be in the second group the next morning. While watching herons at the nearby lagoon intrigued me, I didn’t want to wake up at five to do it.

Despite the humid heat in my cabin and the scratchy sand in my bed, my exhaustion overtook me and I fell asleep quickly. Yet far too soon offensively thunderous crashes, hoots, and howls awoke me. I felt heat constrict my body even more than it had the night before. As I groggily opened my eyes, a warm glow enveloped me. The sunlight, which filtered through the orange sarong we had put across the window, bounced off the wooden wall and onto my face. I supposed I had a warped sense of time and had actually slept for a full night, but when I read my watch, I was horrified to see 5:27 stare back at me. It turns out that while it’s nice to be next door to the kitchen for a late snack, it’s not so nice the next morning. The paper-thin walls created the sense that the chefs banging various pots and pans were not a room over, but were rather banging them against my head.

And the monkeys! Would those stupid monkeys ever shut up?! While the incessant “hoohoohoo” had been a warm welcome the day before, it now took on an uncanny resemblance to the dreaded beeping of my alarm clock back home. When I considered living next to monkeys, I’d thought about them as entertainment. I hadn’t bargained for this.

 

“Oh my God! I just broke a nail!” It took me a few moments to realize that my group mate had just uttered those quintessential Clueless words. I looked up from the notes I had taken on a turtle-nesting lecture. “And I just painted them,” she continued in a whiny voice. It had been a shock when she’d brought out her collection of nail polish. I mean for goodness sake, we were in the middle of nowhere! Who was going to notice? The monkeys? Most of the researchers washed their clothes in well-water that smelled like a mixture of animal feces and compost, and were comfortable sticking their ungloved hands into maggot infested holes. I’m pretty sure that no one was concerned with appearances.

“I’ve got nail clippers,” I offered.

 

Pacuare had a rule that, in order to conserve the energy required to pump water out of the well, one could only take one shower each day. This doesn’t seem unreasonable, but when surrounded by dirt and equatorial heat, one shower doesn’t really cut it. With this said, we all started to smell like the P.E. locker rooms used by freshmen who haven’t quite learned the meaning of deodorant. Even so, when George came near, the foul smell increased tenfold.

George believed that by creating a layer of grime over his skin, he could repel mosquitoes, spiders, and other biting insects. He had probably succeeded in creating this coating by the end of the second day at Pacuare, but unsatisfied, he went shower-less for several days past that. And not only did he go without bathing, he also went without changing. On the fifth day, George was still wearing the plaid shirt, cargo pants, and Teva sandals that I had noticed at the airport.

When he came to sit next to me during dinner one night, his acrid and sour body odor swallowed all of the fragrant smells emanating from my plate of pineapple, rice, beans, and fried potato strips. I gagged on the mouthful I was chewing before deciding I couldn’t possibly eat with him.

“Um, the candle flame is a little weak here, I think I’m going to move to a place with better light,” I said lamely. He nodded his head and made a grunt between bites that I took as my cue to exit.

The only open seat left was across from a pimply lanky boy with a mouth full of braces. As I sat down he began to shovel rice into his mouth. For every forkful that entered, half a forkful fell back to his plate.

“What do you think of Pacuare?” he asked me, a few grains of rice and bits of black bean spewing past his plate and landing at the base of a candle. My mind, focused on his eating habits, didn’t register the question. Instead, I looked down at my own plate and contemplated whether I was still hungry.

 

One afternoon, I went to dig up turtle nests with a researcher and two group mates. We trudged three kilometers through the sand to a nest marked by a stick covered in a bright plastic ribbon. The researcher carefully stomped on the ground until her foot met a less compacted area, indicating the nest. I volunteered to dig, excited to find all the empty eggs from which turtles had hatched. About six inches down, it started to smell like something rotting. The stench intensified with each inch. Finally I spotted something off-white in the dark sand. I carefully lifted the damp shell and passed it to one of the other EPI students. “One!” I stated triumphantly. As I continued to dig, I noticed the ground squirming. Was one of the turtles struggling to escape? But rather than find a dark thimble-sized head emerge, I uncovered a swarm of maggots wriggling in and out of a fresh group of shells and over a dead hatchling. “It’s okay, just keep digging,” the researcher encouraged. I dove back into the hole, which was now so deep I had to stick most of my torso into it to reach the bottom. I felt my stomach churning and my throat constricting as the putrid smell of the rotting turtles overwhelmed me. It was even worse than getting stuck behind a garbage truck on the way to school. “Two,” I muttered weakly as I tossed out a maggot-infested shell.

Eighteen shells, twelve dead turtles, countless writhing larvae, and several minutes later, I emerged from the hole. If I had been a cartoon, my face would have been green.

I saw a Leatherback; I saw twelve. The brochure hadn’t said anything about the turtles being alive.

 

It was my last night and I had yet to see a live turtle. I couldn’t believe that out of the one hundred and ninety leatherbacks that had nested at Pacuare the year before, none of them returned during my weeklong visit.

It was eleven thirty and my patrol group had already reached the endpoint on the beach, turned around, and would soon walk into the station when, looking into the distance, our leading researcher squinted her eyes in concentration. “Hold on a minute,” she instructed us. She cautiously approached several bike-tire-sized streaks running the length of the beach. I could feel my heart beginning to race. She returned reporting in a whisper that she’d found several hatchlings escaping to the water. My excitement swelled up inside and I had to force myself to stay quiet. I walked toward the nest at the top of the beach, terrified of trampling over one of the helpless hatchlings. I bent over the moving sand. This time, rather than fleshy maggots, a tiny black head emerged. The rest of the body followed before the turtle stopped, resting in exhaustion. He began to scoot towards the water with awkwardly beating flippers. His muscles had not yet developed coordination and he involuntarily began to curve to the left.  I nudged his tiny shell back on track and followed him toward the gentle waves. The researcher wouldn’t let me move him closer to the water because he had to build the strength that he’d need in the sea, but it was almost painful to observe his tired struggle. I felt like a parent watching their child heave into last place in a race.

His first taste of water was teasing. The wave carried him in only for a stronger one to push him back further. It was much like my trip. The brochures had built a great anticipation that was dampened once I had arrived.

A larger ripple enveloped the tiny hatchling and he floated away as gently as a flower petal. With that wave, I could feel the tide of my own trip turning.