volcano=4, we/our/us=18

The distinction between earth and sky seems more negotiation than fact from atop Volcan Irazú this May morning. Clouds below us spread like plush white carpets all the way to the Caribbean on one side and the Pacific on the other. On a clearer day we could see two oceans at once, a staggering perspective unique to this place in Central America, the highest volcanic peak in Costa Rica. No matter. We left our superlatives in the car. Didn't bring a guidebook. Even with fog sniffing around like wind's unmannerly pet ghost we see a dense mosaic of rain forest, farmland, rivers and mountains.

Black sand directly underfoot. Eyes plummet down barren slopes, 1,000 feet to the bottom of Irazu's principal crater. We marvel: what made this monumental hole in the ground so lifeless also created the brilliant greens of the surrounding hills. Briefly tempted to test the alien ground, topography nebulous and inviting as the sky. Desire tempered by gravity slides and dire signage. We back away to rejoin other animals and plants boldly staking claim on the volcano. Scraggly tufts of grass thicken enough to host picnicking Ticos not far from the crater edge. Low shrubs make a daring comeback, then fierce little Myrtle trees post up. Man makes like a monkey in one, swinging from a limb and howling ew-ew-ew-oh-oh-oh while kid laughs and wife takes pictures on her phone.

Towers on the densely forested ridgelines above Irazu's principal crater are vital telecommunications sites for all of Costa Rica. Steel scarecrows painted up red and white. The volcano has erupted seven times since 1900, causing more than USD $150 million in damage. The latest major eruption began in 1963, the same day JFK came to San Jose.  In a brief speech to university students he said the word "free" a lot:  11 times. Said  "people" 10 times, "right" 8, "great" and "nation" 7 each. "We," "us" and "our" counted together = 30. No mention of "volcano" or the 20 inches of ash blanketing the city, choking rivers and flooding nearby valleys. The  eruption outlasted JFK by two years. When an American President returned to Costa Rica in 1968 the most used non grammatical word in his airport address was "share."

Of course this has nothing to do with anything. Not like "Nature of Magma Plumbing System," a recent and comprehensive assessment on Irazu's petrography, geochemistry and geobarometry, which concludes that two distinct magma chambers are "co-existing, evolving and  mixing" under the crater. The "eruptive style of Irazu" it concludes, is mainly controlled by magmatic gases and water, working through their differences with increasingly frequent catastrophic results for human property and life.

All this is beyond our expertise, which is general. But still a pride in our hubris begins to swell, pride that people compare this national park on top of an active volcano to the moon because people have been to the moon, pride in the pictures we take with our cell phones, in the over-worked metaphors and contrived conclusions we use to describe them, pride most of all in our ability to remain optimistic, to picnic on the edge of certain doom and to mimic monkeys so hilariously.

North of Irazu's principal crater, the rain forest literally draws a line in the sand, beyond which we must once again go under rather than over that which impedes us.