Last week I traveled to Costa Rica for the first time. Curious to experience the full effect of the jungle, I took a walk by myself on a lodge trail in a thick and wild part of the Osa Peninsula. My feet crunched along to chirps, caws, roars, and howls. At one point I crossed paths with a black and yellow five-foot-long snake. With my limited knowledge of herpetology, I thought I was walking straight into the jaws of a Fer-de-lance. But this snake wasn’t a Fer-de-lance. (It was a relatively harmless tiger rat snake.) And it didn’t kill me. Neither did the jaguars that still roam freely throughout this jungle corridor. It was oddly comforting, however, to be in a place so wild that the possibility still exists.
