Last full day

Today we had some finesse painting, some real heavy heaving and some lingering looks at what is now essentially a finished basketball court and painted bathrooms and posts around the beginnings of a new community center. This is a very low-key group but without saying a word, we knew that a lot got done in a week. Martin, who shows up in the group picture, has been a principal worker in the background, helping install the septic system, the plumbing for the faucets and toilets and at the end, getting the very heavy basketball stand set in its post hole. He used his carpenter's level, using the bubble to sight the entire structure just so before he began shoveling in the wet cement.

Lunch was a local gathering a couple of miles back on one of those mystical dirt roads that rises and falls as if it will just wander by itself into some distant, unending succession of forgotten Caribbean-side farmsteads forever and ever. Little children, bigger children and a few babies who received kisses from everyone of every age attended the lunch. We sat at a large two-plank table with a tin roof for shade overhead and red-flowered ginger plants casting "sombra" from the side. A breeze came up out of nowhere in a merciful minor miracle.

The afternoon was a giddy succession of zip-line zips through the canopy of the rain forest. Using heavy leather gloves not out of place on a falconer's hand, we braked when necessary, but mostly launched ourselves over and over through yielding openings in the woods, feeling for the brief moments that we flew over the foaming Sarapiqui river below that this is what a bird must understand in its endless cruising overhead.