Free Small Wonder by Barbara Kingsolver Page A

didn’t realize we’d have to do it without the benefit of bridges. At the bank of the first one we plunged right in with our jeep, fingers crossed, cheerfully encouraged by a farmer in rubber boots who was leading his mule through the water ahead of us.
    â€œThis will be worth it,” Steven insisted when we reached the slightly more treacherous-looking second river. There was no bridge in sight, and no evidence that one had ever existed, although a sign advised Puente en mal estado —“Bridge in a bad state.” Yes indeed. The code of Costa Rican signs is a language of magnificently polite understatement; earlier in the trip we had been informed by a notice posted on a trail leading up a live volcano, “Esteemed hiker, a person can sometimes be killed here by flying rocks.”
    Over the river safe and sound, with the Golfo Dulce a steady blue horizon on our left, we rattled on southward through small fincas under the gaze of zebu cattle with their worldly wattles and huge downcast ears. Between farms the road was shaded byunmanicured woodlots, oil-palm groves, and the startling monoculture of orchard-row forests planted for pulp. The dark little feathered forms of seedeaters and grassquits lined the top wires of the fences like intermittent commas in a run-on sentence. To give our jostled bones and jeep a break, we stopped often; any bird was a good enough excuse. A dark funnel cloud swirling above a field turned out to be a vast swarm of turkey- and black vultures. With our binoculars we scanned the vortex down to its primogenitor: a dead cow, offering itself up for direct recycling back into the food chain. Most of the peninsula’s airborne scavengers, it seemed, had just arrived for dinner. Angling for position near the carcass, two king vultures flapped their regal black and white wings and rainbow-colored heads at each other. “Wow, amazing, gorgeous!” we muttered reverently, gawking through our binoculars, setting new highs in vulture admiration.
    At dusk, with seven rivers behind us, we pulled into the mile-long driveway of Bosque del Cabo under a darkening canopy of rain forest. Although the road tunneled between steep, muddy shoulders, we could smell the ocean beyond. Our headlight beam caught a crab in the road, dead center. We slid to a stop and scrambled out for a closer look at this palm-sized thing. A kid with a box of Crayolas couldn’t have done better: bright purple shell, red-orange legs, marigold-colored spots at the base of the eye stalks. We dubbed this beauty “resplendent scarlet-thighed crab” and nudged it out of the road, only to encounter more just like it almost immediately. Suddenly we were seriously outnumbered. Barbara surrendered all dignity and walked ahead of the jeep in a crouch, waving her arms, but as crabherd she was fighting a losing battle against a mile-deep swarm. These land crabs migrate mysteriously in huge throngs between ocean and forest, and on this moonlit night they caught us in a pulsing sea of red that refused to part. They danced across the slick double track of their flattened fellows, left by other drivers ahead of us. In ourmany trips together we’ve rarely traveled a longer, slower, crunchier mile than that one.
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    We slept that night in a thatched palapa, lulled by the deep heartbeat of the Pacific surf against the cliff below us. At first light we woke to the booming exchanges of howler monkeys roaring out their ritual “Here I am!” to position their groups for a morning of undisturbed foraging. We sat on our little porch watching a coatimundi already poking his long snout into the pineapple patch. A group of chestnut-mandibled toucans sallied into a palm, bouncing among the fronds; no macaws, though we were in their range now. We walked out to meet this astonishing place, prepared for anything except the troop of spider monkeys that hurled sticks from the boughs and leapt down at us, hanging from