“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau preached endlessly about the need to de-stress, unwind, just “chill”. Whether you go “to the woods” or find an equally peaceful getaway on the beach, in the mountains, or in a room in your house that you have equipped with a lock on the door, your favorite music and scented candles, escape is an essential part of finding ourselves.
Travel allows me to gain new perspectives, renew my spirit and get back the creativity I give up in my pressured life. The more remote, the better. I wrote this when I returned from the Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica. I hope it helps you find your own perfect escape.
"Awakening" on the Osa Peninsula
The most persistent characteristics of this place are the heat and humidity. They drain every bit of life from your body until you feel that you must lie down. But lying down only makes the intensity greater. When you lie down it feels as if you are covered, head to toe, in suffocating blankets of moisture.
Your face is sweating so much your eyes sting. You try to wipe it from your face, but the sweat from your hand mingles with the sweat from your face and forms a river that runs down your cheek and pours like a waterfall from your chin.The sun is so bright it burns your eyes, but sunglasses are painful to wear.
How is it this climate drains the life out of humans, yet creates and sustains the most incredible variety of life in plants and animals? Butterflies are everywhere - in every size and color imaginable. Jungle runners scurry from under rocks and leaves - and large, horrible looking lizards peak around corners to see if you are a threat to them. Scarlet macaws fly overhead, screeching their greetings to each other.
Howler monkeys wake us up before dawn with a growl that sounds like a huge jungle cat - and dawn comes very early here. My children start their day chasing the coati mundi from the cocoa trees and end it searching for land crabs with their flashlights. They find eight or more each night. We came here to put our lives right - to put in perspective the need we think we have for window treatments and more horsepower and new CDs.
Just getting here should have been enough to put it in perspective for us. We flew, in a six-seater, twin engine aircraft over the mountains, bouncing and bobbing through each cloud we entered, landing on a dirt landing strip surrounded by jungle. We traveled by windowless van, with no air conditioning, over dirt paths and across a river with a crocodile waiting beneath the bridge for a lunch of some living thing. Finally we boarded a fishing boat which wound around the curves of the Sierpe River - named the Serpent River for its shape, and perhaps partially because of its inhabitants. When the Sierpe emptied into the vast and beautiful waves of the Pacific it seemed as though all the twists and turns of our lives had been washed clean by the glorious expanse of the ocean.
But we weren’t there yet. The tiny boat thrashed and struggled against the insurmountable crests, inching its way toward the peak of the cliff that hid our camp. And yet, seeing the shore beneath the camp was not the end of the journey. Still we had to jump into waste-high waves and struggle against the surf and rocks to reach the shore. Once ashore we climbed into a large wagon, hitched to an antiquated tractor that pulled us up a long, winding path, past the curious eyes of a band of capuchins, to a clearing in the jungle. There was our home away from home - one of five thatched roof huts with screened walls and a ceiling fan that offered the only relief from the incredible, oppressive heat. The only relief, that is, except for the rare afternoon when it would rain torrents of cooling rain just long enough to turn the hot, sticky air into slightly cooler, sticky air.
Settling in to this place, we were transported to an environment that is as it has been forever. Almost completely inaccessible, this peninsula could not be anything except natural. The food we would eat was grown on the peninsula. The water we would drink and bathe with was pure rainwater. We would sleep when it was dark and wake when it was light, obeying natures signals for each of our daily rituals. It would feel like total freedom. We were no longer needed for even the most basic decisions. The only function we seemed to have was survival. We must watch the paths we walked for fire ants and poisonous snakes. We must be careful where we steadied ourselves long the paths - the innocuous looking tree could be hiding deadly barbs designed to impale us. We were one against, and one with nature.
Just as we were feeling quite against her, with her heat and thorns and ants that kill, we would stumble across a jungle waterfall emptying into a clear, cool pond, with a Jesus Christ lizard scurrying across its surface, and we would revel in our oneness with her glory.
Everything in this place survives in a symbiotic relationship with something else. Everything except humans and the tree-cutter ants that the natives describe as the closest creature to the white man. “They move into the forest working constantly to cut down all the trees, and build huge roads and houses for no apparent reason, except to use whatever resources they can get their tiny hands on.” We have been put in our places.
The bats that live inside the towering hollow Agarlic trees stare at our wide eyes and gaping mouths, then fly away - not in fear, but in what looks from their sour faces, like disgust. The capuchins chatter about us endlessly as they swing above our heads, staring at our odd behavior. Even our kind, dedicated naturalist guides treat us with a certain condescendence. I feel embarrassingly pathetic in my lack of knowledge and understanding of the planet I inhabit. Yet I am totally enthralled with my awakening to its perfection. I learn to revel in the sensation of the unrelenting heat. I feel cleansed from the native food, and the lack of preservatives, chocolate bars, diet soda and Chardonnay. I struggle along the treacherous paths, watching for poisonous tree frogs as our guide advises. I welcome bedtime when the sun disappears - pleasantly exhausted from a day of invigorating discovery. And discovery is everywhere in this contrary paradise.
I have learned that there are three kinds of plant life: the vascular plant which draws in food from the earth, stretches upward to absorb energy from the sun, and grows tall and strong from its own efforts. There is the epiphyte, which attaches itself to a host plant and feeds from its food and energy supply without damage to the host. Then there is the parasite, which attaches itself to a host plant and sucks the very life from the host, as it feeds hungrily on the food and energy supply the host plant has worked so hard to collect. The correlations are endless. The lessons are not difficult or laborious. They simply spring up as we open our minds to our environment.
For the first time in twenty years I have no feeling of need to be in touch with my office – to have control. I realize for the first time that I have no control. I am suddenly, finally, gratefully – stress free. Henry David Thoreau said, “Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.” I always believed him. Now I understand. There can be no stress here. There is no stress in simply surviving.
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