A serpent in Eden.

• Author: Kinney, David
• Position: Brief Article

I never saw the boa constrictor that lived in the thatched roof of my cabin, but I did find a snake in my carry-on bag while rummaging through it to find something dean to wear to dinner after we had flown back to Sari Jose.

The serpent was more traumatized than I was: It had sought refuge in my bag after slipping from the pocket of a guide's shorts, where he had stashed and forgotten it. His stuff had been wrapped in the same plastic trash bag as my luggage for the voyage from the lodge across Drake's Bay and up the Sierpe River to the landing strip. If the waves thrashing the small boat hadn't terrified the hapless reptile, our whoops and ribald commentary upon spotting two sea turtles treading water as they mated certainly had.

It turned out to be a common cat-eyed snake, but in the dim light of the hotel room, its markings mimicked a fer-de-lance, Costa Rica's most dangerous snake, like the one we discovered coiled beside the path on our first trek into the rain forest four days earlier. That was no big deal: You're a lot more likely to run across a fer-de-lance on the Osa Peninsula than to run over a possum in Ossipee, back in Alamance County.

After all, snakes were one of the things that had drawn David Bailey and me to the eco-tourism lodge overlooking the Pacific near Corcovado National Park. Our companion was a herpetologist who had taken Bailey up the Amazon a few years ago. He had promised night jaunts in the jungle (a word he would never deign use) to grab creepy crawlies by flashlight. But we never made one of those forays: On our second night there, after we had imbibed muy muchos cuba libres in the lounge and were on our way to my cabin for a few Irish whiskey nightcaps, the herp had split open a big toe on a concrete stepping stone. In drinking as in snaking, it's the ones you don't see that get you.

That gave me another thing to brood about amid the marvels that this beautiful, untamed Eden offered and the adventures...