Alejo

One thing about being a "regular" on this trip is that, during these second weeks, the students are generally hunkered down for their project work, enabling me the opportunity to venture on some side trips, to gain new perspectives, make new friends or just simply explore.  These past few days have occasioned just such diversions, and I write today (after returning home) of my old friend, Alejo, whom I first met three years ago on our first tour.

I called away Caty, our Spanish speaking student, and Emily, the wetlands student, along with Dustin, to venture back up to the former President Orhlich's ranch, north of Piedades Norte, the site of my first visit and the birthplace of the Costa Rican revolution, to show Emily the headwaters of one river that feeds Piedades Norte, and ultimately San Ramon and Palmares, and to show that indeed, there  are clean rivers here.  This is a visual riddle as much as a physical one, as to how Piedades Norte, sitting atop of a hogback ridge, seemingly well above all adjacent communities and farms, can get its municipal water by gravity, with no power assist.  It is the same problem that perplexed me three years earlier, and once on site, I posed the same question to Emily.   As she pondered this, we were able to reconnect with Alejo, the coffee farmer environmentalist and his associate that runs the local watershed, to learn more about the President and the unique natural (and unnatural, even supernatural) qualities of this place.  Meanwhile, the river runs full, clear and drinkable in these parts, spring fed higher up into the cloud forest. 

Alejo is a character: short, a radiant smile, a twinkle in his eye, and a talker with both hands and mouth.  He has thick, ruddy hands from his coffee picking, and a weathered, crusty disposition, at least as I read his body language, for he speaks no English.  And yet, somehow, through that, as we are close in ages, we seem to get along famously, for we visited again last year as well and walked up toward the spring fed source of this river in the cloud forest.  On this cloudy, misty late afternoon, standing by the weather beaten and neglected memorial to Orhlich, he spun a yarn about a couple in these parts many years ago when this place was still a lumber mill, the wife of whom had disappeared, only to be discovered having fallen into the turbine that ran the saws, eviscerated, gone.  That twinkle in his eye as he tells this makes you wonder the truth of this tale, but as we went to the back of the buildings on this site, I spotted pieces of an old, larger diameter pipe running over the creek, descending toward the building.  The turbine shaft, rusty, falling apart, and certainly large enough to host a lonely wife, and perhaps even now, her ghost, for this place, when empty and deserted, has a definite, haunting quality to it, softened only by the constant gurgling of the nearby creek.

Emily did eventually solve the riddle - the same gravitational flow that charged this turbine so many years ago, feeds Piedades Norte miles away, for this point, this ranch, is still higher yet than Piedades, and therefore the pipe that feeds it is fully gravity fed, even descending into valleys and climbing up the other side to the tap.  Head pressure, the source always higher than the outlet.  Simple physics, but if you didn't know it, its secret would be hidden by all the deceiving undulations of the landscape.  

And for this, speaking so colorfully and knowledgeably about this place, with so much obvious passion for the landscape and the environment, I know Alejo's one true love, beyond this lovely landscape, is "carne" - beef jerky from America.  All the bumpy ride up here he kept giving me a knowing, yet slightly questioning look about "carne".    Did I have any, smacking his fingers to his lips?  I would not say, my deception premeditated, for only after he went through his passionate, colorful narrations, and was interviewed by Caty for her project, did I then pull out several bags of carne, to his obvious delight, accompanied by a rapid fire exclamation in Spanish that I don't think even Caty could understand. 

Delight is so obvious in any language.

Next year, as old friends would do, we agreed to a two hour hike in the cloud forest.  I will plan on it, the walker that I am, carne in my pocket, knowing somehow we will communicate just fine.