Reflections
The buildings sit at the base of the Orosi, an extinct volcano which dwarfs
everything around it. You can sit for hours, as clouds pass by its peak,
contemplating the wildness of the volcano’s virgin forest and the jaguars,
tapirs, anteaters, monkeys, boa constrictors and butterflies that live there.
Each morning from the porch of any building, you can watch the sun rise over the volcano and slowly fill the valley with light, often producing expansive rainbows that frame the Pacific Ocean or Lake Nicaragua in the distance. In the evening, in an amazing array of colors, the sun sets quickly over the Pacific. At night the absence of human inhabitants in the several-hundred-square-mile area makes for a spectacular display of the Milky Way and the southern constellations.
During the rainy season the station is extraordinarily calm, with only thunderstorms or the sounds of birds, monkeys and other wildlife breaking the silence. In the dry season, however, the wind howls almost constantly until you think it will blow the roofs off the buildings. A short hike into the volcano’s forest, where only the sound of the overhead winds can penetrate its canopy, quickly restores your sense of tranquility.
It is especially refreshing to venture into the forest in the dry season and encounter, within a 20-minute walk, at least six radiant streams, each flowing with water pure enough to drink by hand. Nowhere else in my 30-year career have I experienced the excitement of knowing that this is how it used to be everywhere.
Bern Sweeney