Fun and Wild III

The next morning I finally, after all these years, went on a Canopy Zip Line. This ride was apparently invented during the logging days, when loggers would be way up to hell and gone high on a mountain cutting down old-growth giants. At the end of the day they just didn’t feel like struggling down the steep slopes, so they devised these wires, strung from tree to tree, and rode down on a pulley attached to a harness. Nowadays, this is huge business for the tourist industry. I’m guessing property owners can make orders of magnitude more money by zooming tourists over the trees than they do cutting the trees down. So I joined the industry and ante’d up my $45 (all for science you understand).

Once again (like the water slides), a big hunk of the adrenaline is knowing that you aren’t in well protected Disneyland again. You immediately see this is not disneyland any more by the happy and VERY dirty faces of the previous group.



The main assistant (There were three assistants and a photographer) gives us instructions, that were more him making jokes than useful instructions. Up we walk up on a man-made platform at the top of a ridge. Very high. Lots of Texans in the group. Everyone, including me, gasping a little. The guide making more jokes, this time very much more appreciated.

So who goes first? Of course, a guy that had done it before. So very cool to watch him float off the platform down the forest to the next platform. When my turn came, it was really exhilarating. Wind on your face, green everywhere. Just like your best flying dream. I used to do this as a kid from the highest avocado tree in our neighbor’s back yard, but this ride was orders of magnitude higher and faster. We zipped our way down a very high mountain. Here’s a movie of the middle. You can see one guy zipping way up high from right to left, followed by his fiancé coming right into the platform we are sitting on.



This was all fun and games, but everyone knows it isn’t safe. I mean the guides are really experienced. You are never untethered, so you can’t really fall to your death. But one of the women in the group somehow let go of her right hand, which is bad for two reasons. One is that letting go means your head goes down till you grab onto something else. Two is that your right hand is your braking hand. So suddenly we see something not right as Pam zooms toward us waiting at the platform. She has her head down by her knees, and she’s just going REALLY fast. I immediately looked at the guide, and watched him prepare for a “catch”. He braced himself for the collision, and caught her body with his right arm and shoulder and cradled her head with his left hand. Her out of control momentum drove them both back a meter or so. He crashed into the tree trunk (on which the platform was built) a little, but she was unharmed. Scared shitless, but unharmed.

I have never heard of these zip rides in California, I’m guessing because they just aren’t safe enough for our litigious society. But here they are everywhere. Again, the Costa Ricans have imposed layers of security on an otherwise really dangerous ride. But my point is the same. In Costa Rica they work hard to create an illusion of safety, whereas in California they work hard to create the illusion of danger.

Here I am thoroughly enjoying everything, illusions and all.

FunAndWildII

The night after my water-slide adventure I stayed at a hotel (Arenal Paraiso) with acres of thermal pools. I wandered around looking for a good pool by myself, to soothe my aching knees (from scrambling over lava during the day). Found a good hot one at the very top. No one else there. Lowered myself in. Felt really good. Started to relax. Started to almost fall asleep.

Suddenly whoa! A snake. In the water. What the hell is it doing here? Then it started swimming toward me! Up I erupted, like a boulder flying out of a crater. Jesus. It was little, but isn’t it the little ones that eat you?

So that’s what I would call a “natural” hot springs, one that has an ecosystem. What if there were white sharks, and part of the fun was your participation in the food web? I went to a lower pool, but somehow I just couldn’t relax much. Here’s a movie peek at two of the well-hidden hotprings. Can you find a snake in the movies? Don’t tell me if you can.



So, would YOU ever expect to find anything alive in a 100-degree pool? No. Never. But that’s California. Here, anything is possible. I can really see how Michael Crichton started his novel Jurassic Park in Costa Rica. If a snake goes hunting for its meal in 100 degrees, anything, including T. rex, is possible.

Fun and Wild

A few nights ago, I paid money ($39) for dinner and a soak in a hotsprings at the Baldi Hotel (I actually stayed in the Hotel Amistad for $25 dollars!) The Baldi is as ostentatious as you can imagine, but it has lots of hotsprings. And the thing that caught my eye at the tourist information booth when I saw the pictures, is that they have water slides that empty into the hot springs! Really? Water slides at a thermal hotsprings? I drove out there, paid my $39 dollars, ate my dinner a little too quickly, and changed into my bathing suit and started wading around and around and around. People, sidling up to bars, kissing in the shadows, laughing and talking in groups.

Baldi

I, skulking past them, looking for what? Warmer water? A pretty girl? No, the frigging water slides. Eventually I asked, and found they were even farther up the hill. Up I went, and there they were, three giant water slide exits into a giant thermal pool.

I casually slip into the water, a bunch of overweight 50-year old frenchies wading around socializing. I sidle over to the three slide exits, two of them covered tunnels, the third open. Where are the laughing 20-year olds? I saw a bunch down lower. Cmon, isn’t anyone going down this thing? Nope. I asked the apparent guide of the frenchies, is the water slide closed? No, he said, relieved (He was bored to tears, I found out later). You want to try it? Sure.

So up we walk. Up and up. Now it’s been a few years (actually a couple of decades) since I last went down water slides, and they were much smaller than this one. The man, who was a Tico (slang for Costa Rican), LOVED water slides. Oscar was his name. I asked him about this one. Well there is one easy one, one medium wild one, and one really really wild one. Sounds like the set up of a joke, doesn’t it?

Cool. What do you mean really really wild?

Well my first time down it I thought I was going to die.

Oh. Why?

Because it (and the easy one) is completely covered, and especially at night, is pitch pitch black inside. You can’t see the turns coming.

Ok. I’ll go on the easy one.

So, picture yourself me. Here I am, kind of wandering around impulsively doing things till my Russian colleague (Leonid, more later) comes with his molecular biology stuff. Always wanted to see this volcano and here I am about to ride a water slide full of its heated water. In the dark. In a country far, far away, where I know almost no one, and am traveling completely by myself.

But what the hell, right? It’s just a water slide. People don’t die on it, or it wouldn’t be here. So Oscar goes first, and then I go. Seated. Slick new swim trunks on (less friction). My first sensation is that it is just such a rush to accelerate. I can see the first turn and lean into it. Nice. And then the lights go off. Pitch black. I kind of guess which way to bank, and I guess wrong. Almost slam my head on the side of the slide.

Not a video game.

Suddenly steeper, faster. I instinctively lie back, holding my head off the slide bottom. Survival mode. The next few turns scared the piss out of me, no idea where I was, just banging from side to side. Skipped out the exit into the pool of frogs, and just about puked.

Oscar was laughing. How’d you like it? Uh, it was a little much.

You have to get used to it, he said.

So, I went back up, and got used to it. Tried the medium one. Open, so I could see. Very fun. Then I tried that one again, only this time facing down on my belly like superman. Very cool. Like a big body surfing wave. Tried the covered medium one belly down. It was fun too. But I walked away from that scariest one. Why?

Because Costa Rica isn’t like California.

In California, they try to generate fun and wild from a platform of boring safety. They build an illusion of fun and wild. The jungle ride, magic mountain, the matterhorn. All are carefully engineered, with emphasis on careful. Cause if they screw up; if somebody gets hurt; they get sued, big time.

But in Costa Rica, where it seems nobody gets sued, they take very scary things, like boulders shooting down a mountain, and build an illusion of safety. Somebody built a scary water slide. It isn’t safe. It is fundamentally wild. But they present it as if it is a California water slide.

Two more examples tomorrow.

Wild&Fun

So what does wild mean? I’ve been thinking about this question a lot. I’ve also been thinking about fun. What does fun mean?

Yesterday I was over at a National Park trail at the foot of the Volcano Arenal. This thing is a real volcano.
Volcano Photo
It goes up symmetrically, very steep, and its top has been covered by fog all but maybe 15 min of the last 3 days.

But after walking a well-tended National Park trail , you come to the end, where the sign reads don’t go any farther. You hear this funny noise along the way, sounds like wind on the video, but it’s not.

It is the sound of boulders rolling down the volcano, I should say flying down the volcano. Eventually, you notice, way far away on the side of the volcano, a fog rising up. Then, after some practice you see that this is dust not fog, and that it is being kicked up by big mother boulders shooting down the mountain from the top. The noise is the noise of these boulders, distorted by the very long distance away. Check out the video. You won’t see the boulders, but you can see the dust rising where they hit. Really cool. Really wild. If you happened to wander over in that vicinity you would die a terrifying death as you tried to dodge screaming boulders on the sharp lava rock.



So the question of wild is very interesting. Christian, a Tico (Costa Rican) economics major was interviewing people watching the boulders fall. He had interviewed them two years before and was trying to see if the “value” of the experience had changed in the interim. I asked him if it had. He wasn’t sure, or really very interested. But what he WAS interested in was the monkeys.

Two years before there were tons of monkeys. Now they seem to be gone. Christian is convinced that the exponentially increasing traffic on the trail has scared them away. Totally cool hypothesis. This kid should be a biologist, not an economist.

Now those of you who’ve followed my blog might recognize this effect as a strictly behavioral one. These loud tourists have very little impact on the ecology of the area. Just a thin low-relief trail. No changes to the vegetation, or run-off or anything. Just a lot of loud tourists streaming back and forth every day.

But the behavioral effect that Christian observed, probably correct yet completely unproved (because Christian never measured quantitatively the density of the monkeys), is that the monkeys moved away during the last two years.

This is kind of the reverse of the lobster effect inside the reserves at Catalina. There, the imposed protection makes the lobsters more aggressive (via hunger), and thereby changes the ecosystem (our hypothesis, as yet unproven). Here, the lifting of protection may be causing the monkeys to shy away to somewhere else (don’t know what the ecosystem effect is here, but I imagine it is pretty big).

Ecosystem managers tend to think from the bottom up. Maintain the trees and plants intact and everything will be ok. I’m thinking more and more, these days, that this approach leaves a ton of critically important questions about behavioral changes unanswered.

Here’s Christian standing by a big ole tree in the park.




What about the fun you ask?
Stay tuned.

Wrong-footing Around

1Mar10

Wrong-footing around.

Came into San Jose, Costa Rica, near midnight night before last.  To bed at the Hampton Inn.  Slept like a log.  Awakened by telephone. The delivery of my little 4X4, rented for the entire 4 weeks. 

Everything is out of balance.  My Spanish sucks.  My sense of what the hell I am doing is very unfocused.  Bad combination.

Just a scant week before coming here, out of the blue, I got an email from the Costa Rican fellow who was so instrumental in organizing a travel course I co-taught here 4 or 5 years ago.  It was an intensive 3-week course with 13 students; TONS of logistics, a half-dozen different places we bused or floated to.  It was really cool, but also very hard work, and I vowed never to do it again unless someone else did ALL the organizing.  I even told Jose as much.

So literally days before I was to come to Costa Rica, and literally years since we last corresponded, Jose sends me an email, completely out of the blue, telling me he is ready to call my bluff and organize a travel course from top to bottom.  I write back and say I’ll be there in a couple of days, can we meet.

Yesterday, Jose swept into the lobby of the Hampton Inn, and escorted me back into the real Costa Rica.  The epitome of Costa Rica is that nobody uses street names.  They use landmarks.  Addresses are simply a hierarchical series of landmarks.  Very confusing.  Very wrong-footed.  Especially for an entity such as Google Earth!  When I looked up Hampton Inn on Google earth, I found no less than half a dozen in the airport area alone!  Which one was I in?!

Of course, I neglected to consider that Google Earth could get anything wrong.  That the descriptive algorithm of landmarks means ambiguity, a quality that makes computer algorithms burn up.  There is only one Hampton Inn near the airport.

Jose got there early.  He came with his sister and her husband.  We reminisced and gossiped in the lobby, and Jose recommended a good side-trip to one of the volcano rain-forests, and even called a local lodge there.  He was about to send me on my way, when I said, whoa.  I want to see your new school!  Cmon, Jose.  Let’s go see it. 

Wrong-footed in the right direction. 

WakingUp

Up at 5:45 AM.  Brutal cell phone, doesn’t know how loud it is.  Also doesn’t know that when I fumble it off, it doesn’t mean “snooze”.  The second alarm reminds me how out of control I am.

One last check of email before heading to the internet desert that is LAX.

Check the coastal forecast just out of habit. 

Whoops, Tsunami watch.  Big quake in Chile, 8.8.

Google around for a while.  Looks like Southern California has some protection.  In 1960, a similar quake sent a tsunami that devastated Hawaii.  Hawaii is on “alert”, so probably something will hit there.

For a marine scientist, or even someone who plays in the ocean, a tsunami is the strangest, beastly thing.  It is as if your cherished ocean is transformed.  Video footage of the big one that swept the Indian Ocean a few years back was jaw dropping.  People perched in multi-story buildings watching the water level rise, a river of strangeness where there once was a predictable ocean.  People who can’t climb higher are plucked off the building, and swept away by the irresistible current. 

I think often how I would react if a big earthquake hit our home in Venice. What would I do?  Would I scream at my Bird, “Get your wetsuit on quick, grab a boogey board we have to race to high ground.”  Of course, high ground (greater than 40 feet above sea level) is a mile away.  The wave period of a tsunami is 15 min.  The odds are against us, if it is the 40-foot waves that rang the Indian Ocean’s bell.

Bird is asleep, fighting a new winter cold.  The taxi is waiting for me.  “Bird, there’s been a big earthquake in Chile.  They’ve issued a tsunami watch for LA.  Warning for Hawaii.  Don’t think anything will come of it, but if you hear a commotion of police sirens or whatever, that situation’s changed.”  Strange way to leave a loved one for 4 weeks.  Still, I got a sleepy loving kiss out of the deal.

Heading to Costa Rica for a month.  Everyone I talk to thinks I’m going there to surf.  I guess I will have to surf to make them feel properly jealous. 

But first I have to spend a week dissecting out Dolabrifera brains and carefully, cleanly, preparing them for a “molecular genetic analysis”.

Dolabrifera is the slug that doesn’t sensitize.  You can give it as much electric shock as you want to, and its reflexes won’t get stronger.  Do that to our California sea hare, Aplysia, and for hours it reacts to the slightest wisp of a touch as if the sky is falling. It pulls in, not just the piece that is touched, but everything into a round ball of cringing slug.  Aplysia learns. 

Dolabrifera doesn’t. 

It is hard to believe that I’m sitting in LAX, swimming in the anxiety of travel; leaving behind my familiar house, my loving Bird, and the security of routine, in order to study a sea hare that doesn’t learn.

But I am.  There you have it.  Sabbaticals are the most improbable things.  My colleague at Chapman, Walter Piper, has a verb for this, “Wrong-footing”.  He likes to do it to his students, surprise them with a weird question, keep them off balance. 

This sabbatical has been wrong-footing me.  It keeps me off balance.  It forces me to think a little differently.  It wakes me up.  

Here's Miami's mobile charging station (sent my blog from here).  Fly to CR shortly.

31Jan10
Ok, back from a behavior conference in Steamboat Springs (that’s me on the right, snowboarding!).

Lots of new ideas swimming around in my head after this conference. The Winter Animal Behavior Conference is a diverse collection of behavior researchers.  They study the behavior of everything from computer animicules to bugs to slugs to lobsters to fish to birds to rodents to primates.  

Note that most animal behaviorists lay off humans.  The study of humans is a bit too dicey for most of us.  The ratio of heat to light is too high.  Any hypothesis, no matter how reasonable, generates huge controversy in the study of human behavior.  The noisy heat of the controversy tends to occlude any light that is shed by the data.

So we study animal behavior.  For some, the goal is to better understand human behavior.  For the rest of us the goal is to understand general principles, and especially the evolution of behavior.  

For me, the key reason for going to this conference, besides snowboarding my tail off, is to hear new ideas, to see what new experimental approaches are emerging, and sometimes to initiate collaborations.

This year was a gold mine.  Amazing talks by a host of “newbies”.  I’ll be referring to them in the next few postings.  I told them about the ravenous lobsters of Big Fisherman Cove, and they liked the story.  These guys are more interested in the learning than in the ecology (just the opposite of my buddies at the conference in November), but there is plenty of juice for everyone in this story.

Anyway, my next junket is coming up at the end of February.  Off to Costa Rica to study the natural history of a slug species that doesn’t learn!

Stay tuned.