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Fire and Rain, Part 3

© Mel. White

The Pan-American highway knifed through emerald green valleys, lush with broad-leafed plants and butterflies. Each turn seemed to bring another cloudlet of butterflies, winging their way up from the green walls that surrounded us. We were motoring toward the Braulio Carillo Preserve a restored tropical rain forest preserve that featured an aerial tram ride. Our tour guide, who spoke both Spanish and English fluently, was very knowledgeable about the area and the plant life and animal life.

"What was this place like, 30 years ago?" I ask. You can see him gather himself slightly, like an athlete preparing for a jump, as he translates from my English into his own Spanish.

"It was like everywhere else; they had come in and logged down almost all the old trees -- except for the ones that were too hard to get to," he said.

"How did they start building the rainforest again? Did they start planting trees and bushes?"

"No. They just let the land rest and grow."

I nodded. It was the way that the wildscapers I'd met suggested -- to let nature do its own healing and regrow from the local plants. The areas I'd seen across the United States. In some sense it was hard to measure the success of the strategy without sending in a team of biologists to assess the land and count what lives there and so forth. A butterfly blew past the window and I turned to follow its path.

The rain forest and the tram ride lived up to its billing. After a video presentation about the tram and the forest, we climbed into the gondolas and set off for a tour of the canopy, flying over the leaf-strewn floor like birds.

It was green -- like being inside an emerald fractal. After awhile, you began noticing the non-green things; spots on leaves and the color of foliage. Distant birds called to each other and metallic-winged butterflies flitted lazily below our feet.

This is the ideal way to view a wild area -- with minimal intrusion and minimal damage. The tram ride is one of the more popular tours in Costa Rica (just as we left, SIX large buses of tourists from cruise ships showed up to take the tour. Not 10-person vans like we had, but big Greyhound-sized buses full of tourists).

Our tour guide explained that it would take another 70 years for the forest to completely recover to its natural state. At this point, many of the "first growth" plants had been replaced by secondary plants; plants that had more food and shelter value for the wild life it supported.