What makes something spectacular?  A “You don’t know what you’re missing” kind of event?  Does it need to be flashy: fireworks on New Year’s Eve?  Should it be well advertised and highly anticipated: the Super Bowl?  Could it be in the middle of the night when we’d all rather be in bed?

In Gandoca, Costa Rica our traveling community spent two sleepless nights with the rangers and researchers of a sea turtle conservation crew.  Countless kilometers of Caribbean shoreline have been preserved by the government so that wildlife projects such as this can protect the livelihood of inhabitants much too soft spoken to protect themselves.  And so, with those inhabitants in mind and at heart, we found ourselves aroused from snooze with the news that a Leatherback Sea Turtle had surfed her way on shore from the depths and had begun her seasonal egg laying ritual. 

                                  CELL students walking Gandoca beach during daytime

In two parallel lines we walked behind our guides with all of our flashlights flicked off and only the cloud-filtered grey light of the moon to make out the silhouettes of the beach wood and each other.  Down the way one could see the brief illumination of a red light, as if cautioning on comers to slow down for what was ahead.  Coming still closer, doing our best to twinkle-toe away from the playful impact of the torrent’s rolling white foam at our sandy but still dry shoes, the only silhouette worth noticing now was surreal. 

A few paces away, sprawled on the shore, head facing the coconut trees that were bowing towards the ocean further up the bank, was something spectacular.  There were no new year’s fireworks, but in the slurry of those coconut trees hovered thousands of fireflies like free-floating ornaments celebrating the arrival of new pearl-colored spherical hatchlings.  Or they could have been insect-sized photographers flashing in the peripheral of the tropic stadium that was erected as we all surrounded this leather-hided creature swaying its hind fins back and forth, left and right, over and over again like two pendulum line backers digging away at a salty chamber beneath the sand; yet another of nature’s many incubators.  She went on like this for, I was told, an hour, but what amount of time can measure a prehistoric event such as this?  And it really was pre-historic.  A happening that precedes history.  It was like watching an aquatic dinosaur coming back to the same stretch of beach that she emerged from as a palm sized Tortuga millions of years ago… 

And I wish you could have been there.  You don’t know what you’re missing.  It’s so hard to miss something when you don’t know what you’re missing.  This thought was given to me, which is to say, it was not my own, while we witnessed the leatherback swirl back around and in no rush whatsoever (it is a turtle, remember) pull her way back towards the unbounded pool that binds us all.  Head flat on the volcanic sands, front fins forward.  Slap, slide and pull.  Waves crashing.  Slap, slide and pull.  Crash.  Slap.  Slide.  Pull.

Foam.    

Tomas Newman