I have always been interested in maps. Dots are on a piece of paper with lines between them that connect each other and make the world what we know it as. I am the nerd who opens Apple Maps to look at highway routes and what cities go through. In grade school, I spent rainy afternoons spinning the desktop globe, quizzing myself on capital cities until the letters blurred. Even now, memorizing main streets and knowing roughly where everything sits feels like pocketing a tiny survival kit. It all comes back to my instinct to know where I am headed, sometimes to a fault. I drive home from Bloomington without GPS, even when traffic is bad, to prove I can recite the turns from memory. That craving for certainty spills into other corners of my life: I stick to the same breakfast order, hesitate on unfamiliar trails, and stare down a new menu like an exam. I like what I like, and change can feel less like an adventure and more like stepping onto an unmarked path.
The pineapple farm took me by surprise. What I expected to be a boring tractor ride around a plantation turned into a very informative, interactive, and tasty way to learn about organic pineapples. This farm produces about 25 percent of the certified organic pineapples on Earth. I looked out at what I would call a decent-sized farm. Big, not really. A couple hundred acres of the farm is nothing that we have back home when it comes to corn or soy. But that fact shocked me. In all that land, they can produce so much for so many people. Pineapples can take anywhere from 18 to 24 months to grow. A lot of time, but on a different scale when you can grow year-round. Workers bend to the plants, check skin color, and twist only if a pineapple hits its perfect sweetness level. Our entire food system is built off of time. That discipline reminded me of the leaf-cutter ants from last week, where they take the leaves for the fungi to eat. A different scale but a similar principle. When the network stakes its lunch on you, speed matters less than ripeness and efficiency. Next time you toss a pineapple into your cart, think about where it has been, who it has been touched by, and how long it takes to end up on your kitchen counter.
Our final data hike looked simple on paper. One last one-kilometer transect to wrap up La Selva. We set off, talking about our project, thinking we were going the right way. About twenty minutes later, trail markers showed we were in the wrong spot. We eventually got to the right spot and finished our last trail. It was surprisingly hot at only 82 degrees, but I guess with humidity, it can never be cool in any sense. What I chalked up to be a cool-down for a long ten days in La Selva turned into the sweatiest day of the entire stay. There were some positives. I got to see more forests on what would likely be my final day ever in La Selva and any experience with as much freedom in a tropical rainforest as that. I mean look at this beautiful tree!
The best routes are not always the shortest. They are not always the easiest. Being lost is sometimes just being unaware of a bigger map. When rain washes out leaf-cutter ants’ paths, they have to go around the puddles and navigate through new areas they may have never seen before.
Tree I thought was pretty cool
La Fortuna Waterfall looks like it was ripped from a desktop wallpaper. We got to the waterfall in the late morning, and I was amazed by the view. A constant gush of water down into a large and natural pool that fields into a river. We walked down what seemed like thousands of steps down the mountain.
The long trip was well worth the wait. I am used to cold water in Lake Michigan, and the pool was just the right temperature. As I looked up from the water, I thought of one thing. Hundreds of gallons smash rock every second, explode into vapor, reunite in the pool, and then snake away toward the ocean. It made me zoom out a bit and think about myself. The water never stays in one form for long, thundering as a sheet, bursting into mist, settling as a calm pool, then slipping downstream toward places it can’t see yet. I realized my own route this summer is doing the same thing. One minute I sprint to get an assignment done or search for job opportunities. Then everything settles, and hopefully, the endpoint is destiny and determined by the path that is set for me to get to the ocean.
The distance from the Arenal Observatory lodge to the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve is 12 nautical miles. It seems like a short trip, but instead of driving straight through the mountains to Monteverde, you have to loop around Lake Arenal and head south for about 150 miles in all, a journey of more than three hours. This long drive left me a lot of time to think as the night before I slept for than I had in over a month. Monday was Memorial Day, a day in which I do a lot of reflection myself. A part of me felt guilty for not being in the U.S. for this sacred day.
I kept thinking about how battle plans rarely follow the neat arrows you see in history books. Front lines shift when a bridge blows, a storm rolls in, or a commander hears new intel at the last second. Troops detour through mountain passes, supply trucks reroute around cratered roads, and entire campaigns pivot overnight because one river floods or one radio message gets intercepted. Lesson taken: curves can be compromises that outlast us. A road, a law, or a stoppage may feel weird or wrong but might be there for something later.
This past week has shown me a lot of bends. Atypical routes may not be the most efficient or predictable, but they nonetheless shaped the experiences to remember. I will still love memorizing street grids, yet I am learning to leave blank spaces for curves I can’t predict, obstacles, or changes in topography that are not visible on a flat piece of paper. So for every new map I trace, I’ll keep a spot blank: room for the bends that turn a simple route into a story worth remembering.
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