Stefan Bechtel, author

This article was published in American Way, and accompanied by wonderful photos by Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Jay Dickman, whose work also appears in National Geographic.

Rumblerumblerumbleba-BOOEY!

Every time the volanco blows like that, I stop climbing and peer uneasily toward the summit. All around me, up the rust-colored moonscape of the mountain’s flank, I can see poltergeists of smoke rising from lava rubble. Here and there, little vents, or fumaroles, release pent-up gas in merry little puffs, like leaky radiators. And now, high above me, Arenal’s central crater lets loose a vast, gray, convoluted cloud of ash and smoke. Soundlessly expanding into the pale blue Costa Rican sky, it comes to resemble an enormous, floating brain.

It’s an awesome and dismaying sight. And so is the sound, moments later, of the rockfall caused by the blast. The mountain seems to have regurgitated a mouthful of rocks along with all that gas, like a dyspeptic diner spitting up his lunch. I can clearly see the boulders bounding down across the barren mountainside, kicking up puffs of smoke each time they contact the surface. (From my present position, I’m separated from the rockfall by a narrow valley… at least, I think I am.)

Moments later, Arenal’s summit disappears into a shroud of mist and rain, its usual dress at this time of year. Then she blows again.

Ba- BOOM!

Against my skin, I can feel the cool dappling of mist and the faint pitter-patter of ash descending from high above. The air is bathed in the smell of sulphur. I feel strangely, vividly alive up here, so close to the Earth Mysteries I can almost hear them breathe.

Volcan Arenal is one of the most active volcanoes in the world. From my present perch, I have no trouble believing this. It seems to be rumbling to life two or three times an hour (though locals say it will sometimes erupt as often as fifteen or twenty times an hour, or lie quiet for several days, with no discernible pattern to this activity). Such geologic insomnia is all the more amazing when you consider that the mountain has been doing this more or less continuously for the past twenty-eight years, since that morning when it erupted after what’s now believed to have been more than 400 years of dormancy.

Prior to the big blow, incredibly enough, it was widely thought that Arenal was just a small, mild-mannered volcano in north-central Costa Rica that posed no danger at all. Then, that Monday morning, July 29, 1968, at 7:30 a.m., it exploded with almost unimaginable ferocity, spewing boulders the size of Cadillacs into the sky, and blasting the surrounding countryside with superheated poisonous gas – Gaia’s blowtorch. (The deadliness of this type of eruption, volcanists say, is caused not by molten lava, but by hot gas and ejected blocks.) An area of about fifteen square kilometers was hit hard; two small towns were wiped off the map.

The Occult Explanation

In the years since 1968, Arenal has erupted occasionally, but never so dramatically as that Monday morning in July. Mostly, Arenal just goes on rumbling irritably, letting off little thermonuclear blasts of smoke and ash, providing a strange sort of entertainment for the thousands of people who feel drawn to its power. At night, tour buses from San Jose and people in pickup trucks drive the dirt road to its base, hoping to witness an eruption that spews glowing magma down the mountainside like inverted fireworks. If you wait awhile, you almost always get to see one – a real treat, considering that, according to one authority, only ten in every three million people have ever witnessed a volcanic eruption.

For thousands of years, people having willingly lived at the foot of volcanoes, despite the obvious perils of the address. Seismic engineer Guillermo Alvarado wrote in Costa Rica: Land of Volcanoes, that at least 200,000 people have been killed by volcanic eruptions in the past 500 years. But there have always been good, sensible reasons for living so dangerously, says Alvarado: Volcanic soil is richly fertile, the drainage is good, the volcanic plain is often flat, and there’s frequently an abundant supply of water nearby.

But staring up at Arenal’s luminous, symmetric cone, whose upper reaches have now vanished into the primal brain cloud, it’s easy enough to believe a more occult explanation: people are drawn to volcanoes because they simmer with some weird, mystic seduction, like the mysterious tower in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The fire atop the mountain, the fire that burns without consuming itself! People want to be near volcanoes because they’re obviously magic. In one of the local hotels, there’s even a photograph of what’s said to be a flying saucer, hovering over Arenal – as if the allure of volcanoes has attracted adherents even beyond our own world.

Ringside Seats for the Eruption

The Arenal Observatory Lodge sits on a forested hilltop about a mile and a half from Arenal’s base – so close I’m repeatedly wakened in the night by the volcano’s earth thunder. The lodge was built in 1987 to house scientists conducting long-tyerm studies of the volcano, but is now open to visitors most of the year. (Volcanologists from the Smithsonian Institution and elsewhere commandeer the lodge for a couple of weeks each year, and there’s an active seismograph in the dining hall.) With its small, spare rooms, A-frame dining hall, and clear, high-altitude air, the lodge has the feel of a modest Colorado ski chalet. Yet, unlike Colorado – or anywhere else I can think of – you can stroll out on the terrace and stare almost straight up at the volcano, waiting for something interesting to happen.

According to Fred Aspinall, son of a British macadamia nut farmer, who, with his sons, owns the place, the lodge is located on the safest side of the mountain. Most of the eruptions have blasted out the weaker, distant sides of the mountain (to the west, northwest and southwest), creating a lava-coated wasteland below a great horseshoe-shaped crater. But on the south side, the mountain’s walls have held up and its lower slopes are still green.

One morning a small group of us hikes across the mountain’s southern flank, through lush secondary jungle spattered with orchids and overhung with tree ferns, where keel-billed toucans flash through the treetops. A troop of howler monkeys hails our passing with a chorus of gutteral honks. The monkeys peer down at us with their small, black, anxious-looking faces.

Moments later, the trail abruptly disappears beneath a black wall of lava, thirty or forty feet high. A few years ago, this river of rubble spewed down the mountainside and simply buried everything in its path, a fiery drama repeated countless times in the earth’s history. Before us lies a piece of real estate so new it is still smoldering. If you dug six inches down into the gravelly rubble, it would burn your fingertips – so hot you could bury a pig in it and have a luau. This is, arguably, one of the youngest places on earth.

Yet, oddly, everywhere else I look are evocations of the unimaginably ancient past. The towering, Paleozoic tree ferns. Steamy jungle. The distant, smoking volcano. I half expect the ground to begin shaking with the footsteps of an onrushing T. Rex.

Although tens of thousands of visitors pay homage to this phenomenon annually without incident, that undercurrent of danger pervades, and, indeed, it is part of the allure.

“How do you know there’s not going to be another big eruption – you know, like, today?’ I ask our guide, Giovanni.

Giovanni just laughs gently and, by way of answer, tells a story. In January 1993, a friend of his – a volcanologist working for the Smithsonian – was down in Columbia for a volcano conference, which took place near the crater of the Galeras volcano. One day, he and a group of other scientists climbed up into the crater to collect gas samples for study. But for some reason, Giovanni’s friend had to turn back to get something at the hotel. And not long after he left, the volcano exploded, killing nine people, including six scientists.

Giovanni shrugs, casting his eyes upwards towards Arenal.

There’s just no telling.

Blessing and Burning

This whole green, rumpled country is a land of seismic tumult, a land of earthquakes and volcanoes, a land still being born. The crooked spine of Central America, in fact, is formed primarily of volcanoes – the 870-mile-long Central American Volcanic Range contains the greatest density of volcanoes, active and dormant, in the world. (It’s part of the volcanic chain called the Ring of Fire, which rims the Pacific Ocean along the edges of the earth’s tectonic plates.)

In Costa Rica, these volcanoes have been rising off the ocean floor for the past sixty-five million years, and quite a few are still rising. Volcanism has left an indelible brand on Costa Rica, blessing and burning it both. The mineral-rich volcanic soil is part of the reason the country is so preternaturally green. Add abundant rain, plus a benign, sunny climate – it lies eight to twelve degrees north of the equator, having an average year-round temeprature in San Jose of seventy-two degrees, similar to a greenhouse – and you get a country so densely packed with exotic life forms it’s almost beyond belief. Though it’s only about the size of West Virginia, the country is home to a tenth of the world’s butterflies, more than 1,200 species of orchids, 350,000 kinds of insects, and more bird species than in all of North America combined.

Not to mention the fifty-nine significant volcanoes, of which five – Arenal, Poas, Irazu, Turrialba, and Rincon de la Vieja – have been active in recent times.

The Corner of the Old Lady

Rincon de le Vieja lies in the northwestern part of the country, in Guanacaste province. Unlike the rest of Costa Rica, Guanacaste tends to be dry as dust for much of the year. It’s a sort of eccentric Texas, where Brahman bulls graze in sun-baked fields, green parrots lull in the mango trees, and the whole russet countryside gently rises to the summit of the volcano, which even in hot weather disappears into the clouds like Jack’s beanstalk, ascending into another world.

To reach the 34,000-acre national park that surrounds the mountain, I have to go rattling an hour up a desolate gravel road, to the Hacienda Guachepelin – an enormous cattle operation where visitors can get a clean, pleasant ranch-hand’s room and ride a horse into the park.

The next morning, on horseback, my guide, Gustavo, tells me the story of how the volcano got its name, which means “the corner of the old lady.”

Once, long ago, he says, an Indian princess fell in love with a young man of whom her father, the chief, disapproved. So the chief threw a great feast, ostensibly to celebrate his daughter’s impending marriage, but actually to trick the young man. When the boy showed up, he was captured by the chief’s men and put to death. The princess, distraught with grief, went off into the mountains and never returned. There she became a witch who was renowned for her healing powers; those who sought out her wisdom were said to be going “to the corner of the old lady.” People still go up to the mountain to be healed, in a modern sort of way, because there’s a place up there called the Kitchen Stoves, famous for its volcanic vapors, hot springs, and bubbling mud pots, whose slippery ooze is said to make a soothing facial-beauty mask. Nowadays, legends eventually turn into cosmetics.

The Rhubarb That Ate Chicago

Another oft-visited volcano, this one only an hour and a half north of San Jose in the Central American Volcanic Range, is Volcan Poas. North of the hulking green mountains on the road to Sarapiqui, you can see it – a bare, gray, volcanic extrusion hanging over all that green like a threat.

There are actually three craters at Poas. The Botos volcanic cone, long extinct, is now a mystical-looking, cold-water lagoon surrounded by vegetation that grows to preposterous sizes. My favorite is the “poor man’s umbrella,” which looks like the Rhubarb That Ate Chicago. In one of Costa Rica’s frequent rain-showers, I can can cower underneath one of its enormous leaves and stay completely dry.

But the big attraction is the main crater – it’s almost a mile wide. Inside it is a greenish, bubbling cauldron that contains the most acidic water on earth (with a pH of slightly less than zero). Unlike Arenal, Paos is not prone to regular violent eruptions; she just hisses and bubbles and emits great clouds of sulfurous gases, which are so acidic that the surrounding crater rim is utterly devoid of life.

Volcano power can be like that: Slow and corrosive or dramatically sudden. Now, scrambling a little higher up Arenal’s rocky scree, I glance into the clouds, toward the hidden summit. It’s then that she starts making a new sound – a deep, repetitive chugging from deep inside the caldera, rising and falling, more like a freight train than a volcano:

Choo-choo-choo-CHOO-CHOO-CHOO-CHOO-choo-choo!

This new sound is entirely unnerving. I can feel its rumbling resonance vibrating through my feet.

“The greatest travel always contains with in it the seeds of a spiritual quest,” Paul Theroux has written. But at this point, in my present precarious situation, I’m beginning to wonder about the actual utility of such an observation. Sure, I suppose I am behaving like some sort of twisted pilgrim up here, clamboring higher and higher, ever closer to the self-consuming fire. What is it that I am seeking? To be illuminated in some sort of fundamental way? To discover the source of all light, the light behind the light?

Ka-BOOEY!

Actually, to tell the truth, at this moment I don’t really care. Suddenly, ahem, the main thing I’m sure of is that I don’t like the sound of that. All such ethereal considerations will have to wait. Right now, a hot shower, a cold beer and a prudent distance from Volcan Arenal are about all the self-realization I need.