Malapalto
Image from Shutterstock: Marco Marques
Since arriving to Costa Rica in early March, I am settling in to my third place of residence; a place I hope to call home for the remainder of this global quarantine. My first landing was at the Samasati Retreat nearly three weeks ago as the hired yoga teacher, but as they made the difficult decision to shutter their doors early due to the drop in tourism, I had to quickly find an alternate living space. With a bit of luck and absolute generosity from my new yoga friends who own property just a short walk from Samasati, I extended my stay in the canopy and remained in “retreat-mode” while figuring out what next steps I would take. Should I return home to Colorado where the city was at an economic standstill or wait out the epidemic here, in a foreign country with familiar faces with the intention to get a little closer to this culture that called to me. Twist my arm, I chose Pura Vida.
After a week with Steve and Gina, a home opened up forged by their broad network here, they even found me a lovely roommate to move into a two-bedroom house set across from the beach in a secured neighborhood. This new place has been a creation in my mind for years. A newly-built, clean-lined modern design with blank interiors, high ceilings, and simple furnishings. The master bedroom is flooded with sunshine and the backdrop beyond the home is all jungle with sky-scraping trees and tropical birds always present. This is where I am self-quarantining, limiting my social interaction and spending long days behind the property-line as it is currently a criminal act to go to the beach. With a small cupboard filled with the essentials of food and beverage and enough space to practice yoga, work, cook and lounge, I have been invited to continue to build a productive life abroad—one that includes writing every damn day.
Today, after a hot yoga flow and a cup of coffee prepared traditionally in the chorredor, I make my way downstairs to observe the ruckus that is happening outside. I glance out to a pile in Frangul’s yard that is growing bigger by the hour, I study this gathering of dead tree limbs, thick trunks, and leafy branches pitched like bonfire. They are cutting down the ficus and banyan trees surrounding the property, using only a light-use chainsaw, machetes and man’s footed balance and sheer trust. These now chopped trees, were once proud gatekeepers of the sun, shading the property like verdant wallpaper, providing a home for sloths, pizotes, birds and insects. They are now slumped into a sad stockpile of timber: dismembered arms, once as wide as the house, now cut at the shoulder, bare of body. I look closely at the now supine stems and notice long black lines snaking their way up each branch, like a paintbrush was taken to the bark; languid lines drawn from root to crown to paint a picture of something. But what.
They are now slumped into a sad stockpile of timber: dismembered arms, once as wide as the house, now cut at the shoulder, bare of body.
The repetitive thud outside mimics what I think the sky will sound like when it falls; a rhythm of splitting wind and shaking earth as the ground catches falling trees. Then Frangul sweeps them neatly into a disjointed pile in front of his home. A home made of corrugated tin and black plastic bags-turned tapestries and clotheslines strung with underwear, flimsy trousers and one electric yellow wielding apron.
Frangul and his men are dangling from ropes tied around their waists, machetes in hand, rubber boots and tight white tees. They move like informal trapeze artists along the narrow network of stems. Watching them from my balcony, the appropriate 6-feet back, I give them a thumbs up after each 30-foot limb comes swinging from the sky, guided down by thin rope led by the strong-armed Ticos. Then they whack the bark until the branches become splintered twigs. Not a second later does another section of tree come flailing down as the bronzed man in the sky holds his saw overhead, grinning from his outpost in the spindly crevice of the fig tree. This dance would continue until dusk.
I see Kimberley, the property owner, watching the work unfold. She comes over and I ask her about the damage to these beautiful life-givers, or what looks to me to be a rather sad endeavor of reducing the foliage around the land. Wearing a straw bucket hat over her ice grey ombré wig, she flashes her white teeth and explains to me, with a distinct Caribbean accent that, “these trees are sick.” She points up to the remaining rubber fig trees, addressing the airborne disease that spits onto the other plant life around it, the red palms and hibiscus. If they don’t take these ones out, they will destroy the surrounding life without apology.
Kimberley grew up in Puerto Viejo, this is her home, this is her jungle. A 30-something Tica, tall and lean with curvaceous edges. She could have stepped straight from the fashion spread of Vogue, as she makes yard work look like high-fashion. She wears long tribal-print dresses and tight cotton jumpers while carrying jugs of water, training her rescue puppy and managing these newly-built properties she designed herself. She knows these plants well and their relationship to the whole ecosystem. I listen to her with a half-smile as I take it all in, hanging on her every syllable as I listen to the English words pronounced with a Jamaican-drawl; her words as edible as they are audible.
While watching the men slay the wooded stems, Kim tells me, “we take these trees all the way down. We have to.” She looks back at me, sliding her slender black fingers across her bare neck, drawing a line from ear to ear, “muerte,” she coos, but it falls hard on my ears, just as another severed limb comes swinging to earth.
“Malapalto” is the next word that moves like honey from her lips. She widens her already luminescent eyes, “these are the tree killas,” spoken with exaggeration as she exhales a sharp ‘ssss’.
The whirring from the chain-saw splinters against our conversation and I inhale the dry, earthy smell of sawdust that floats towards us. Kimberley tells me what’s happening with these trees. A particular fungus is killing the entire tree by forming on dead tissue that is typically caused by water stress—like an inadequate amount of moisture and warming temperatures. Today happens to be a perfect example of that. It hasn’t rained in days and the air is still and stagnant, no brisa, no clouds, only sky scorched by sun. I am pouring sweat from my palms and feet, and Kimberley stands there with her asymmetrical bob heavy around her heart-shaped face and without so much as a sheen on her brow. The spores produced from the fungus are then spread by insects and splashes of rain (when it does come) and quite often means a trees demise, along with anything in its pathway. The precautions taken are necessary if they want to see their newly planted saplings thrive and the other legacy trees stay well.
The second destructive force that has caused these working men to climb like monkey’s up the steep branches and start slicing veins and stems with precision, is the invasive Stranger Fig. A competitive tree that operates from their aggressive ability to strangle other trees, cutting off their ability to effectively photosynthesize by growing above the canopy of the support tree, depriving it of sun and its capacity to continue breathing new life. The veiny roots bind the tree, wrapping its host in a net of capillaries, from canopy to root in their own network of limbs. Their steady overthrow takes nutrients from the original tree and outbids them in the game of life, a slow rot is their demise. The dead tree becomes hollow and barren, while the new fig claims its home after destroying generations of growth that came before it. Nature’s balancing act is that these tree killers will actually become a beneficial source of food for the wildlife here. A silver lining, if you choose to see it.
On this particular day, I am seeing how disease and nature can work symbiotically—and how sometimes death can be the chance for new life.
The management of land in the rainforest is constant; mitigation of invasive species, knowing when to step in with human solutions and when to let the jungle heal herself. Today, they are sweeping house, clearing the existing nature in order for new and old species to move in and try their chance at success. The dark lines of disease on the ficus trees have taken lives, instilling trauma where once was abundant growth. On this particular day, I am seeing how disease and nature can work symbiotically—and how sometimes death can be the chance for new life.
When the sun melts away, I make my way inside, self-isolating in my home built from shiny tile and concrete. The pile of lumber now teeters above the height of Frangul’s home, a small mountain of sequestered wood. Beneath the drying tinder, I can see the forest repairing her wounds. Butterflies flicker around the edges of the broken stumps, a lizard pokes its head from the leafy greens, ants flood the skin of the blackened branches and the sloths, too, choosing direction based on what holds sturdy. If I listen really, really closely, I can hear the healing happening in this place built on fertile earth, where young saplings seek new pathways for growth beneath the long veins of uncertainty that trace the fallen forest.
Image courtesy of Layton Membrey / @layton_membrey