The following reflective essay was written by Rivers Wilder Green, the first recipient of the ‘Agua de Sapo’ travelers scholarship by Unruly Travel. This grant is given to a LGBTQ+ or female traveler to fund a partial or full scholarship on an Unruly Travel group trip. This year’s recipient traveled to Finca Ganadito in the Osa Peninsula of Costa Rica to experience activities around sustainable living, community connection, and rewilding practices.
Fathoms Below: Mermaids, Mangroves and Reflections on Rewilding
Their familiarity was the first clue. My eyes darted between the freckled woman and the girl with lagoon eyes. I felt high. Sunset on the beach (scarlet macaws overhead, always in pairs). Bursts of neon (fireflies) against a plum sky in the too-many-greens jungled cow pasture that separated sea from primeval tree line. The other guests had already spotted a caiman.
The surf had properly spanked me. Pulled my hair. Tossed me around. Bruised my knees. Some ancient fish part of me knew the exact time to release control of my muscles to avoid serious damage. That’s the trick. When it’s half-dangerous you kick and pull. When it’s mortal you let go. I was left with scraped skin and a trickle of blood. I was grinning ear to ear.
The meal didn’t have to be delicious (it was). The umami of ochre ocean was flavor enough. We were cautioned to not turn on any unnecessary lights because of the acorn-sized black beetles that flew about in the night air. They thwacked me in the face and eyes while we made conversation. I was slap happy. The trip could’ve ended before my first sleep and I had redeemed the full value of what it took to get to Costa Rica. A little sunburn? Check. Fresh juice from a machete-d coconut? Check. The memoir I bought at the airport? Finished. A hug from the person who sees me clearly? Enough.
I had read Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park novels before I was old enough to understand them. They start here. On the west coast of Costa Rica. On the shores of a secluded national park lay the remains of a dinosaur carcass. Nearby an infant is attacked in its crib by a horde of ancient knee-tall bipedal lizards. This was going through my mind as we scanned the mangroves for saltwater crocodiles on the boat trip to Drake Bay. We were on the river for maybe thirty minutes before the boat headed straight for the open ocean. A flash of terror on the face of the friend next to me.
“We’re going into the ocean?”
I beamed.
The boat driver cut off the engine when we left the tourmaline river and entered the competing vortices of brackish surf that separated the mangroves from endless sea.
My mother used to take my little brother and I to a park with a giant tire swing. My brother and I would share the swing, facing each other, and my mom would hover over us, holding the chain where it connected to the overhead beam, swinging it as wide as she could, singing the song ‘Fathoms Below’ that opens Disney’s animated movie The Little Mermaid. Mom loved to emulate the old male sailor voices.
I’ll tell you a tale of the bottomless blue
And its hey to the starboard, heave-ho
Look out lad, a mermaid be waiting for you
In mysterious fathoms below
Where Triton is king and his merpeople sing
In mysterious fathoms below.
This is what I’m thinking when our boat’s engine is cut off and the waves decide how close we will get to the outcropping of rocks before we’re out of the whirlpools and into calmer surf.
Waves bucked us off our benches as we passed the rainforested coastline. The colors were every shade but primary. Local dogs (also blissed-out) bowled each other over in the sand as we made our wet-landing onto the beach. We braced ourselves in the back of the pick-up truck as it keeled over muddy graveled roads and learn someone recently spotted a wild puma.
Then the wrinkle.
The girl with the lagoon eyes (and effortlessly cool shaggy haircut) confirmed that the freckled woman was her mom.
Her mom?
I didn’t know you could take moms on this trip.
A mortal wave in my gut:
Could we have done this together?
I am crushed.
My mom was diagnosed with a brain tumor after giving birth to my brother when I was 22 months old. Doctors estimated she’d be gone within the year but because we were proximal to pioneering medical campuses in Washington, D.C. we got to enjoy her for much longer. There were periods where she was radiated and lost all her hair, but it would grow back. Then chemotherapy. Fear of her premature death curled and burned inside me like a hot coil for all my formative youth.
Good reports on the tumor became occasions for sushi and a movie. Bad news meant we each got our own pint of Ben & Jerry’s to be eaten in one-go.
Sometimes she’d have a seizure and my brother and I would be sent to friend’s homes for a few days.
Ever playful, my mom would wrestle my brother and I. When we’d gain an advantage she’d roll her eyes back and say “Something’s happening.” We’d stop, and then she’d lunge back at us continuing the fight, laughing at our lack of guile.
On one hot summer night awaiting results on new tests, my brother, aunt, cousins and I laid in blankets on the living room floor (slumber party). My mom burst into the room smiling. Good news.
“Aunt Anita” my cousin Anthony cries.
“You said if you got a good test you’d run around the street naked!”
My mom (a high school prom queen who was proposed to three times before I was born) gets serious.
“You’re right!”
She throws her clothes off and jets off into the night.
I struggled to stay clothed many times on our trip. Baring my heart and my naked body is a family past time. Yet, my body is a radical object.
Last fall, when I renewed my passport by mail, I opted for the gender marker “X”. If you had told me Trump would again win the Presidency I wouldn’t have believed you. I’m not as brave as I appear. I have never been offered a choice. No one stopped me at LAX.
Learning to love my mom as much as I could while she was alive might be the only reason I can laugh during an epoch of mass extinction.
My whole world felt doomed before I could even walk. The cucumber came pickled.
I’ve never lived on a planet that wasn’t being cut down, deforested, denuded, dammed, poisoned; its species decimated at freakish paces for reasons like “taste” or “we’ve always done it this way”.
We despair for alternatives.
We recreate the palate pleasure without harm to animals. We rewild the cow pasture enough so that capuchin monkeys choose the new canopy to rear their young. We choose the intentional community-agritouristy-she/they-vegan-budget-travel trip over a booze cruise.
You create a national government that decides eco-tourism is more important than having an army (bravo Costa Rica). You hire biologists from across oceans to catch sea turtle eggs as they fall from sea turtle cloacas to rebury them afield.
I hadn’t known that sea turtles’ sex is entirely dependent on the temperature of their nest. For Olive Ridley sea turtles, who nest in Drake Bay, Costa Rica, gender diversity means life or death.
If it’s too warm the hatchlings will be female. In a cooler climate males prevail.
I personally see no problem with there only being female sea turtles, but apparently it’s important that humans intervene as seas and temperatures rise to ensure enough males survive for already critically endangered populations.
You ensure male sea turtles by reburying their eggs in the palm shade, a few dozen feet from their initial nest. The cooler ground hatches males, a tiny intervention that might give their species another century on Earth.
Because there’s a mythology about enhanced virility for humans who eat sea turtle eggs.
Because newly hatched sea turtles waddle towards moonlight. If there were a titty-tiki-bar resort where that palm shade would be, with all the accompanying noise, light and sound, the hatchlings would confuse it for the moon and dehydrate themselves scrambling in the wrong direction (the moon is over the ocean, their future home). As someone in recovery, the irony overwhelms.
In Los Angeles I work with unhoused folks struggling with mental illness coordinating weekend activities and community projects. I get to host karaoke on Sunday nights. We look after tomatoes, flowers and squash vines on Mondays. We alternate between watercoloring and jewelry-making on Saturday afternoons. After my trip, on the first weekend I was back at work a resident told me she saw the entire cast of True Blood at the 7/11 on our block. We’re in Hollywood, maybe it happened. Then she said she saw Harry Potter riding a bicycle in the night sky.
We are all desperate for wilderness. If we can’t see it in the real world we will see it with our mind’s eye.
It girds me to know that biomes as wild as Costa Rica’s Osa Peninsula still exist.
The night before our planned excursion to Corcovado National Park I asked our host Rob if there was a wildlife sanctuary at the park. He returned a puzzled look and shook his head.
I assumed, given the list of species at the park brimmed beyond what I would expect to see in a few hours of walking, that some would have been at least semi-captive. Like, maybe there were a few injured animals that acted as ambassadors? I was wrong. We saw our first coati walking down the beach, striped tail hitched toward the sun, before our boat had even landed. A tapir side-eyed us trying to take its picture as it chilled underneath the mangroves. All four species of monkey (spider, howler, capuchin, squirrel) traipsed liana overhead. There was an anteater in the trees and also a toucan. A deer-like rodent, an agouti, scampered parallel to us between ferns. The creek boasted three basilisk, famous for their ability to ‘run’ on water. A fat black iguana stared at us like the star of a rap video.
It became a joke to me how many wild animals’ we’d see throughout our time in Drake Bay. Days after the formal trip at Finca Ganadito had ended, on a waterfall hike in Uvita, a friend pointed out yet another sloth, dangling from a branch over us in a parking lot. Exhausted, I balked, “Why is that dog in a tree?”
I was unnaturally anxious about traveling this year. Beyond what barriers my gender nonconformity presented, I hadn’t travelled internationally, or alone in a decade. The bluster of my college-aged years, where I managed to see 5 continents in a short time, seems a distant memory. In 2023 I got sober; this time there was no vice to steady me.
It was with that uneasy gut I found myself the only available seat at the San Jose Terminal, after customs, at a cafe with wifi, to wait to meet Calen and officially begin my trip.
And after a latte and a coke, I had to pee.
I was charmed when the handsome guy across from me offered to watch my luggage. Upon return, I noticed the whole group he was with were good-looking and we struck up a conversation which turned into following each other on Instagram.
And, I learned, he and his whole group of friends were also trans.
I know from studying marine biology in Australia and Fiji that hermaphroditism (both simultaneous and sequential) is super common among fish. Excluding insects, hermaphroditism exists among 33% of the animal kingdom and in 95% of vascular plants. I wonder if gender nonconformity is more common in certain ecosystems. It turns out animals are more likely to be hermaphroditic in lower latitudes. (Darling it’s better down where it’s wetter).
When I get closer to the equator, I expect rainforests and corals and gender-bending. Hot sauces, varieties of color and eclectic fruits. We need biomes where we feel less-othered. The world’s only getting browner and queerer.
I met Calen protesting Trump’s first inauguration in 2016. We were cohered by a total liberation group called ‘Collectively Free’. Total liberation includes animals too. We represented a growing group of humans that know speciesism is as foolish and dangerous as sexism or racism. I carried a sign the group had published that read : White Supremacy is Killing All Species.
Calen is extremely charming (and beautiful and handsome). I was intimidated. Their sparkled blue eyes belied a ferocious character that was willing to jeopardize their safety for people, human and more-than-human alike. We were soon arm-in-arm barricading Trump supporters from seeing their new President inaugurated. Years later we were both arrested outside a pig slaughterhouse in Smithfield, North Carolina.
Calen’s heart expands infinitely in all directions. It is not enough for them to post about total liberation, they organize, write, make art, produce campaigns, edit videos and are sometimes taken on grand trips overseas because people who give a fuck about saving the planet see Calen as a unique (and badass) ambassador. They are tirelessly imagining a rewilded eco-socialist future.
I am lucky to have a friend who loves me in all my wildness and ambiguity. If there are parts of me in danger of colonization, Calen is there to sow wild seed.
It is with this knowledge and confidence that I am willing to go wherever they go and know (ad infinitum) that the experience will be considerate of humans, their ecologies, the global impact, and animal-peoples too. And considerate of Earth, for Earth might be as sentient as you or me.
Calen’s is a daring, wild and beautiful lens that beacons to other daring, wild and beautiful people. If you’re in need of rewilding, you’d be lucky to join them.
There’s mermaids out there in the bottomless blue
What I’d give if just one said hello
Watch out for ‘em lad, or you’ll go to your ruin
In mysterious fathoms below
The salt on your skin
And the wind in your hair
And the waves as they ebb and they flow
We’re miles from shore
And guess what? I don’t care
In mysterious fathoms below
In mysterious fathoms below
