Peril in Paradise

Big news in the village this week – a snake bit a local gardener, which landed him in the hospital for three days. The poor fellow was working out in his field wearing sandals (no no) and stepped on a Cascabel Mudo (Mute Rattlesnake). That’s why you see Costa Rican field workers wearing rubber boots all day long. I wear them too! Snakes chomp into rubber, not flesh. Mute Rattlesnakes are quite rare at Finca El Tigre. We have Terciopelo – Fer de Lance -and they are much worse. At least the Cascabel Mudo will give you warning if you weed your garden a bit too close to where he’s napping – he will kind of hiss at you – give you a chance to back off. The Terciopelo gets more easily irritated and might strike you without any warning at all! And believe me - you don’t want to get bitten in the upper body by one of those rascals! You will almost certainly survive a snake bite to the foot but a bite in the neck would not bode well no matter how fast the helicopter gets you to the hospital.

It goes without saying that you need to put your full attention to weeding a tropical garden to avoid mishaps. Not just with snakes – there are a whole slew of biting insects out there that will ruin your day, not to mention certain exotic creepy crawlers that will burn your skin after just the slightest touch.

You also have to watch where you’re going out in the forest. Always remember the well known adage: ‘Look where you’re walking – stop to look up.’ If you don’t take care, there are prickles and spines and all sorts of ways to get burned, stabbed, cut up and worse.
So why do we do it? Why court danger out in the forest when we could just cut some decent trails and have a nice relaxing hike? Well, we do cut the trails – afterwards. What happens is we start out wanting to see something – like a tree we want to identify. But to get over to it, we have to scale a mountain, holding onto tree roots for dear life to keep from tumbling down, then scrambling over rocks and more steep terrain until finally we reach the tree. We take a look. Is it? It is! It’s a Tempisque! In fact, we found two - yes two -rare Tempisque trees growing just 1 meter apart from each other – even rarer! Generally, hardwoods grow scattered apart from each other in nature. What a find! Needless to say, we now have a nice trail so you can see the two Tempisques too without much physical difficulty.

I believe you have to be a bit of an adrenaline type to live in a tropical forest. I get my adrenaline kick by riding horses. We don’t do dressage training out at Tigre – we fly! We take our horses and trot down the mountain at a good clip, pacing them for their own good. We reach a nice grassy pasture with rolling hills that extends some 5 kilometers across the valley, and here we fly. The horses relax and we go from a nice extended canter to a full exhilarating gallop. The horses love it and so do we! We come across foot trails in the grass and ride the trails like a motorcycle – curving here and there and suddenly the trail disappears back into grassy pasture with views opening up for miles all around. Now we just joyfully fly across the pasture – me sitting or up in jumping position, depending on the terrain. We know where we’re going and we fly as a team.

However, the thrill can switch to terror in an instant– my horse could stumble over a rock and throw a shoe or, as what happened the other day, we could round a curve at full out gallop and come across a car in the middle of the lane. Here, in a split instant, time expands and attention melds with adrenaline to deal with ‘shit happens’. I’ve had my share of near-mishaps but not many accidents. Partly it’s judgment – no more racing on the road! I really have to apologize to my neighbor Gabriela who was just minding her own business, driving around a bend and confronting the likes of us. No harm done but my horse, Volcan, had to spin a tight corner to keep from plummeting us both down the mountainside. He is such a good boy!
But it’s not all adrenaline. There are just instants here and there. A hike in the forest is mostly just magical. When hiking alone, I stay to the trails if Armando and his trusty machete are not accompanying me to hack through the obstacles off-trail. But sometimes the trail hasn’t been cut for a while and the brush has grown a bit higher and I just kind of push the envelope. But if the going gets too rough, I always turn back to the trail.

But the most terrifying peril of all out at Tigre is completely out of our control – thunder and lightening storms –all we can do is sit and tremble in fear with our dogs.