Life gets underway early in Costa Rica. Official twilight – that time of crepuscular luminescence when the stars fade prior to sunrise – starts at around five AM with sunrise occurring a brief twenty minutes later. The sun hurtles across the sky in about twelve and a half hours. Costa Rica is only ten degrees north of the equator plus or minus so there’s not much change in the length of a day during the year. In the afternoon Sol drops suddenly beneath the horizon and the country is plunged into darkness. 

But not into silence.

To take advantage of the relatively short days the residents get going early – many are active before dawn – and any attempts to sleep past twilight in the morning are misguided and futile. At night a different group takes command and the tropical darkness is filled with an endless cacophony of the locals trying to get just a bit more out of the day. I wish they would all just shut up. This nearly endless clamor makes deep sleep impossible and made me long for the peace and quiet that is found here only in San Jose, the largest city.

I am in the jungle and I am surrounded by life.

The place I’m staying at is a little hacienda in an unmapped village outside the town of Tilaran in the northwest part of the country. I found the place online at www.airbnb.com, which I highly recommend as a source for off-the-beaten-track travel accommodations. The micro-inn is called Casa de Helena <link inactive> and if you click on that link you can see the place. The casa is located in an area of mixed pasture and jungle and is filled with the constant chatter of all of the things you come to such places to see and who just refuse to shut up. Down the hill a couple of miles is the western shore of Lake Arenal and, some twenty miles away, the Arenal Volcano, about which more later.

The ambient din is played upon a background of wind. A constant, unrelenting gale that whooshes through the trees, clatters the leaves about the place and drags branches across the corrugated metal roofs of the buildings. This is a low spot in the continental divide where the trade winds, which have travelled nearly unimpeded across the Atlantic and Caribbean rush into the Pacific. The wind is so reliable that Costa Rica has assembled a line of wind generators to harvest energy and sell the electricity to its neighbors to the north.

On top of this background are layered the Melodies of Life. The most constant are the bugs. Big bugs, little bugs, beetles, cicadas, crickets, wasps, everything – with the thankful exception of mosquitoes – that is encased in a chitinous shell and can make noise, does. Their theme in the symphony is quiet only during the early morning but from about ten AM through sunup the next the staccato ticking, buzzing, whirring, and clicking never ends.

The insects’ sonic hiatus in the morning is filled by the birds. Since I have been here I have seen everything from tiny hummingbirds to vultures. There are brown birds, yellow birds, red birds, parrots, toucans, and these little finch-like things. Every last one of them, save only the vultures, makes noise. Some are merely a pleasant chirp. The trill of a hummingbird flitting about is a pleasant counterpoint to the thrum of its blurred wings beating the air. The raucous call of the toucan and the chattering conversations of parrot and parakeet provide the rainforest ambiance one would expect in a jungle setting. There is even a bird, amongst all the cheeps, tweedles, and warbles, which sounds like water dripping into a sink.

Last, and oh-so-most-certainly not least, are the monkeys. Howler monkeys to be precise. These are the largest of the new world monkeys and at a hefty twenty-five pounds are creatures you would want to avoid in a dark alley at night. They are also the unfortunate world champion title holder in the Guinness Book of Records for the “World’s Loudest Land Animal”. One lives right outside my room. Their calls – which are not unlike the sound Godzilla made while eating Tokyo – are clearly – not my word – heard for up to three miles. Howler monkeys wake up at 4:45AM, trust me. The first thing they do is to call out, at maximum volume, to every other Howler Monkey within their twenty-eight square mile auditory range. Such calls are promptly responded to by the other howlers in the area. The day has begun.

And so ends the first night.

By the second night this, what was a dissonant tumult the day before, has magically morphed into a gentle lullaby. Even the monkeys call has turned into the tropical equivalent to a town crier’s “Five A.M. and all’s well.” I’d hear the first howls of the morning and think: Oh, good. I can go back to sleep for another hour. By the third night you doubt you will ever be able to sleep with silence again.

So, awake and refreshed, I climb out of bed, into my clothes and out onto the patio where I can sit with a cup of freshly brewed Costa Rican coffee and look at the volcano. Better make that “volcanoes”. Oh no. Here he goes again. You betcha.

I am frequently amazed at how, unbidden by me, certain themes reappear in my life. Several weeks ago I wrote about humanity’s propensity for living in, if not actually stupid places then at least, places with an insanely high potential for disaster. I mentioned earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, and hurricanes as examples; along with volcanoes. As I look across Lake Arenal I see the not-so-slumbering cone that is the Arenal Volcano. Arenal is one of the more recent of the so-called stratovolcanoes that are strung along the eastern edge of the Pacific Ring of Fire. And if that’s not a good title for a country song I don’t know what is. The eastern margin stretches from Alaska’s Aleutian Islands in the north to the frosty-tip of South America at Tierra del Fuego – which is tango for “Land of Fire”. This chain includes my hometown volcano of Mount Rainier.

Arenal, a mere twenty miles from where I sit, is one of the more active volcanoes in the world. It is a textbook perfect conical shape with a little puff of smoke coming out of the top. The view is framed by the shores of Lake Arenal yielding a picture postcard vista of sufficient beauty to give real estate developers wet dreams.

To put things in perspective I had visited this area about twenty years ago. At that time the road from the Tabacon Hot Springs, near the volcano, to the town of Nuevo Arenal was paved with stones ranging in size from egg to watermelon. I was in a small four-wheel drive vehicle so it was just bumpy and slow. Just outside of Nuevo Arenal there was a two-wheel drive car going the other way. Two of its passengers were, in fact, walking in front of the car and moving larger stones out of the way. They still had about 14 miles to go. You could visit the Tabacon Hot Springs for a couple of bucks and the only people living out here were the local ranchers raising their cattle on the rich grass growing on the volcanic soil.

That is all changed. Some ranchers are still here but the Tabacon Hot Springs now cost sixty dollars and the postcard perfect view of the lake and volcano is edged with subdivisions filled with Gringos trying to get the most bang for their retirement buck. They might just get their wish.

Because, the quiescently bubbling Arenal Volcano, at about three-thousand years old, is just a baby. It started up when its neighbor a bit further down the chain stopped. These stratovolcanoes are so called because they are stratified into layers of what the U.S. Geological Survey describe as “alternating layers of lava flows, volcanic ash, cinders, blocks, and bombs”. The fields around the lake are littered with such “blocks, and bombs”. Think of a rock the size of a minvan for scale. Now imagine it falling from the sky flaming red at about a thousand degrees. Now, and this part cracks me up, most of the bombs around Arenal didn’t come from Arenal volcano – it’s not big enough – yet – they came from the much larger, much older, and still active volcanoes Tenorio and Rincon de la Vieja just to the northwest. Rincon de la Vieja is a cluster of volcanic cones in a pair of larger volcanic calderas; the smaller of which is about three miles across and the larger between eight and twelve. A caldera is what is left over when the top of a volcano blows up showering the area with “blocks, and bombs”. To give you an idea about how powerful some of these Costa Rican volcanoes are, consider that Crater Lake, in Oregon, was formed by an eruption of 25 cubic miles of rock resulting in a caldera half the size of Rincon de la Vieja. The temporally recent eruption at Mount Saint Helens was a paltry 0.7 cubic mile of rock leaving a crater, not even a caldera, just one mile across. That is basically a sneeze in Costa Rica.

So what will happen is that Arenal will continue to erupt until the weight of the cone is sufficient to trap the pressure underground at which point the volcano becomes dormant. Then, after a while, it blows up and the process begins again. The last major eruption was in 1968 – before the lake was dammed and way before the gringos showed up. It was quiet before then but has been erupting and growing continuously since.

Which is all very appealing to my inner geologist. I gave strong consideration to Costa Rica as a place to plant my roots when I was looking for my new home. It still has a strong pull. A near perfect climate, friendly people – there is no “Costa Rican Freeze” to match its Seattle equivalent – and a total of six “major active volcanoes” within a short distance. What’s not to like?

But sitting here looking out across the lake, the gringo filled subdivisions of expatriate Norte Americanos, and the smoldering cone of death that is the Arenal volcano, I do know that if I’m lucky enough to end up here someday I’m not going to risk it all. I’m going to rent.