christmas4thecrows
Registered: March 2008
City/Town/Province: Missoula
Posts: 1
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No one can truly prepare themselves for all of the beauty in this world. Nor can they prepare themselves to see it marred by our own creation. Somewhere in a foreign land lies beauty beyond imagination where dreams run wild on imaginary things brought to life.
We came bearing little, but the clothes on our backs, sun screen, bug spray and a water bottle. This was no life of luxury. A taste for adventure and a longing to change the world and maybe find ourselves along the way was all that we could hope for. We cannot fathom these fantasy worlds that truly exist and maybe that is why it is so hard to believe that these places are disappearing like dreams from the night before.
Leatherback, Baula (Ecology Project International), the massive beauty stalking the shores at night, we chanced to meet on a moonlit beach in Costa Rica. I stumbled upon her in my shroud of black, we didn’t want to scare her, but beckoned her with all our hearts yearning and feet aching to see that one glimpse of perfection. You fall to the sand in a silent surrender to her magnificence and try to believe this creature exists. Crawling slowly towards her I am blessed with a view of her face, her flippers laboring through heavy grunts. She is wet with blood; a small puncture adorns her soft appendage. Who has wronged your innocence? In wonder, we witness the secret of her motherhood hidden in large mounds of fresh turned sand and wave a silent farewell as she lumbers, clumsily to the churning foam and is swallowed by the sea.
And then there is outrage. For her soul and every creature like hers who suffers from this world’s cruelties. We relocate the eggs so hungry villagers won’t find them, poking their sticks into the nests and scooping the defenseless babies away to some poor child’s stomach or on the ears of some lucky local. And how can we blame them?
The turtles will disappear into the sunset and never return unless we teach, unless we learn. They tell there tales through the markings of propellers etched into their soft shells and in there washed up bodies, lungs filled with debris and plastic. We walk along the shoreline and count thousands of pollutants littering this paradise. We take pounds of it with us, but it isn’t enough. It is never enough, but it is something. The river mouth is heaped with debris of lives and pasts and waste. How do we teach a nation about this wasteland of naivety?
I whisper a silent goodbye to the jungle that surrounds us, victims of a growing demand and hello to emerging development in the places where beauty once lives. Now they are haunted by the things we’ll never see and never comprehend. And where do we being? We want to scream to the world about this abomination, this cruelty and turn our backs to a culture of history and tradition. How do we tell the hungry man with starving children that he cannot take? That he cannot feed his hungry ones tonight? Where do we begin to persuade a nation that pollution is filling their veins and killing the land that they depend on? The banana plantations where women and men work fifteen hours days to make a dollar, a most precious dollar, is a culprit to these dying breeds and how do we turn out the many determined locals who count on that dollar to see them through?
The Costa Ricans never ask for much. Pura Vida! And a day is always a happy one on their side of the hemisphere. How do we tell these people that they are wrong? We begin at the beginning. Children eager to understand the world can understand change. Teach about the wrongs and they can learn the right. We can show them, every one of us can show them, show each other. Then we can take that knowledge and learn to fix our mistakes and mend a harmed oasis by joining hands in work to clean a soiled world.
It is never just one being that needs saving, but many voices crying out to the wind. We share an international treasure of turtles, floating like angels in the sea. Yet everyday, we bargain with their lives and others like theirs and for what? They are helpless. They are vulnerable. They are more than just a small loss. I only hope that one day we find humanity tangled in the fishnets of our ignorance.
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