costa rica ii: blurry photos of animals

[part one]
[also, thanks to everyone who came out to the show last night]

it begins. look: this is a sloth. okay? you are looking at a sloth right now. it was far away, and i had to use “digital zoom,” which is a filter olympus designed to make it look like you took a picture while running, and drunk.

i photographed this squirrel monkey many, many times. this was the best picture that resulted. god help us all.

the second-best way to catch crabs? wait patiently outside their holes, then close off said holes when they have ventured too far away from them. the best way to catch crabs? from yo mama. snap!

napping in the sun, we were awoken by shouts of dismay as an iguana scurried into a nearby encampment of sunbathers and then froze there for twenty minutes while people milled about, first terrified, then bored. we can really only construe its actions as a desperate cry for attention. what are you running from, iguana? your life is superb. you live in a national park, and you look like a dinosaur. when i was nine, those were my only two ambitions in life.

it looked sort of like a big guinea pig. i don’t even know what you would call it. that’s its ear above the triangle of branches.

and here are some raccoons. after all the exotic birds and monkeys and lizards, it was a shock and a pleasure to see the quotidian north american raccoon bumbling around costa rica. i felt a deep kinship with them. it was like: you’re a long way from home, friend. how did you even get here? i smuggled you in my luggage, that’s how. i don’t even remember why! but i did.

a butterfly landed on katherine’s hand, which at first was a lovely thing to have happened. but then she started shouting, “I AM THE PRETTIEST PIXIE,” and claiming that she lived in a palace made of rainbows and starlight. when the dust cleared, there was a crumpled iridescent object protruding from her mouth. i’m not really sure how we move on from that.

as we dined in a lovely outdoor thai/indonesian restaurant in the town of dominical, this friendly cat walked right up to us, leaped into my lap, made itself comfortable, and cheerfully commenced lacerating my groin and junk with its claws. for this behavior, the cat was rewarded with roughly a quarter of katherine’s dinner, which was curry, which the cat ate with great enjoyment. cats! if only all of them were spayed.

you can get really, really close to a hummingbird without scaring it. the same, alas, is not true for giant spider-killing wasps. (FORESHADOWING FORESHADOWING FORESHADOWING)

some photos of monteverde, a crowded mountain town near a number of cloud forest reserves and the home of ziplining, which we politely declined to do, several hundred times. we did, however, see frogs. we also saw insects, although not at world of insects, above. instead, we went on a hike up a mountain, which is where we came across this thing:

holy jesus god. here, a wasp is lugging around the immobilized body of a freaking tarantula. i mean, christ. wasp versus tarantula. this is not the kind of nature encounter one sees promoted by the costa rica tourism board. it was like we had stumbled into mini-mordor.

katherine felt sorry for the tarantula, and once we had stopped dry-heaving from the sheer awfulness of it all, she went over to try to save it. her shadow fell over the two creatures. the wasp stopped. its stinger coiled and became visibly heavy with poison. faintly, we heard it hissing. “bring it on,” it hissed.

that was when we started running.

the top of the mountain had a few TV towers and was shrouded in cloud, and i ran around like an idiot and took a bunch of pictures. some of them look vaguely like stills from star wars. this is one of them. it was awesome up there.

the way back down was superb as well. i have a bunch of pictures like this, and some are nice but none do justice to what we saw. the hills, the forest, the distant bay—they had this lovely lulling effect that was exactly what we had been looking for, an escape from the urban winter, a lush rolling panorama almost aching with its own vital beauty. we stood atop a rock, and gazed, and were quiet.

that was when the wasps attacked.