Resplendent Quetzal
Erica Jenks Henry
Instead of donating the remainder of our GoFundMe collection to a missionary school in rural Thailand where my parents volunteer, as we claimed we would do after memorial service expenses, we took the kids on vacation to Central America. The decision was pure impulse. We booked everything at the last minute, and when Jordan, my husband, bought the tickets, he accidentally purchased them for San Jose, California, instead of Costa Rica. Luckily, he realized the mistake while going to bed later that evening. Unable to sleep for most of the night, he woke the next morning in a horrific mood, silently throwing ties and shirts around as he dressed. Then, after storming off for work without so much as a goodbye or explanation, he called American Airlines and changed the tickets for a moderate fee, which was much better than arriving at the airport in Chicago only to be informed we were heading to California without any hotel or house reservations for Spring Break. But he told me all this later in the day, after he had fixed everything.
My impression of Costa Rica, even before I first went fifteen years ago, was and continues to be one of color. As other Americans raised in the 80s may understand, I think of each letter of the country’s name in a different hue, with tropical birds loitering, perhaps sitting on top of the “o” and the “i,” like the image on a box of Fruit Loops. I imagine people grinning wildly as they zipline through hibiscus-draped jungle, strapped up in all sorts of gear. While that sounds fun, perhaps I flatter myself to think it’s a little too Disney World for my taste. I never have wanted the packaged experience, or reliable safety, for that matter. I want the real deal: a weathered bungalow on the beach with wild animals all around in the sea and on the land, not the security and predictability of an amusement park.
With our baby, Stephen, buried not yet four months prior, it was high time for the family—our four daughters and the two of us—to embark on an adventure as a sort of therapy or distraction from the horror of his death and the aching, terminal sadness that followed. We didn’t actually bury him, though. That was a figure of speech. My husband made the spontaneous decision while at the funeral home without me the day after he died to have his body cremated so that he could stay with us. I was in no shape to make decisions, though because I had always thought I would like to be cremated myself, it seemed like a good knee-jerk choice, particularly as my husband had been put on the spot by the funeral director. Still, perhaps because it was a baby’s body, the idea was nightmarish. Those next two days, as we waited to receive word from the director that we could pick up the remains, I regularly thought of the body traveling to the decrepit Cook County hospital for autopsy and then incineration. Driving along the highway over the following weeks, however, passing the lonely, frozen graves that edged up to the interstate, I comforted myself that our child was still in our home.
Upon our fireplace mantle the ashes now sit in a lidded vase of gold and bright colored porcelain, the container a distinct ceramic from Thailand called Benjarong that my mother gave me years ago without this intended purpose. We keep thinking of taking a handful to scatter in our favorite places, but we never quite get up the nerve or desire to let them go. It feels depressing. And I hesitate to release any of the dust in that sealed bag, even to open or touch it at all. Beside the urn is a picture of me holding Stephen, four weeks old, as I stand next to Jordan in the kitchen, in front of spaghetti and meatball fixings. It’s one of two photos we have of the three of us. We never got a photo of our whole family before he left us at ten weeks old, or I’m sure it would be that image in the frame instead of the goofy one with unglamorous dinner preparations in the background.
I recently read, I think in Joan Didion’s book, that you can’t avoid grief. It’s the inevitable though variable human response when someone close to you dies. On the other hand, mourning is work. It is a type of labor you choose to do or not. Both are difficult. The grief, as everyone warned us, comes in great waves, some endless and excruciating, inspired by the imagined sound of his cry from upstairs or another pacifier found beneath a radiator, and some quick little stabs, the regular sight of a woman’s covered stroller. Mourning seems to be an even murkier thing, impossible to grasp, unclear and borderless, unexplained and unexplainable, something only we are able to decipher for ourselves, not put upon us as it seems to have been so conveniently done for past generations with traditions to guide them.
I can’t figure out if going to Costa Rica was mourning or not, but it felt necessary to keep us from sitting at home—the girls with many days off from school for spring break—thinking about his absence and the way spring break would have been different with a little baby in tow. And it felt necessary to continue to fulfill my husband’s declaration, boldly made only minutes after we found him, that the death of our son would not break us apart—as I had been immediately certain it would—but instead bring us closer together.
As I’ve grown older and more open to Eastern religion, I’ve come to love the idea of meditation, but I have been too busy to do it with my four daughters, much less make it a practice. There are so many other things I could be doing with those five minutes or more—prepping dinner, reading, weeding my garden, tidying up my messy house, or of course, giving my children the undivided or even divided attention for which they are eternally clamoring. But after Stephen died, everything changed. Why not meditate? Was there anything more important? Was anything worthy of time at all?
So here I am. I sit, trying to focus on my breathing and clear my head—watching the thoughts as they drift by—for ten minutes a day. After finding a relatively quiet spot to sit in cross-legged pose and before setting the timer on my phone, I warn my two youngest daughters, not yet school-aged, that I am going to meditate. Sometimes they nestle on my lap, sometimes they yell at me and cry—perhaps disturbed by my apparent disregard for them due to my intentional unconsciousness—and sometimes they are mindlessly distracted by the television I am dualistically willing to turn on in exchange for my own peace.
The one thought that always comes to my mind is this: “You are very, very sad right now. So very sad.” I let that heavy thought come, and then I let it go. I know it’s true and that it is behind every single thing I do now, but by watching it float by like a cloud, I can acknowledge the other thoughts and feelings and sensations I am having behind that feeling in order to hopefully be fully present. Honestly, I don’t know what the goal of meditation is, or even my own goal in doing it, but being present seems like a good thing, even if the last thing I want is to be present in my black hell of a hole of a life right now. I would rather be far away. Sometimes I think about leaving the rest of the family, through death or otherwise, but I know my daughters have been through enough to screw them up already. I think I also like meditating because with my functioning so much lower than before, it feels like at least one thing I can say I am doing. Effectively, I am doing nothing, but I can check the activity off the very short list of daily accomplishments.
I also now live in terror of other children dying, and meditation helps with that too. I listen to their breathing and pray simple, greedy prayers over them while they sleep, and my heart races when I see cars speed by our street. Once, only a handful of weeks after he died, the two-year-old ran back to our parked car ahead of me as we left a coffee shop, and I pictured what would have happened had I not grabbed her in time. It may be obvious, but having a child die does not lessen your family’s likelihood of future misfortune. Your name goes back in the pot.
So now we find ourselves at the most famous volcano in Costa Rica, Arenal. We rented a car and drove up from the capital, San Jose. My husband used credit card points to book a magnificent hotel with a hot tub in the room. Supposedly, we will be able to relax and watch “el volcan” at night after a long day of hiking and exploring. When we visited Central America thirteen years ago as a pair of dating backpackers, fellow travelers told us about sitting in a jacuzzi watching the red ring on top of the volcano each night. Our budget was too tight for such a room back then, but ever since, I’ve dreamt of having the experience for myself.
A week or two before my son died, I dropped off my third daughter at preschool and headed home on foot as I always did on mild days. My toddler daughter, the fourth, was in a stroller, and my two-month-old son was in a carrier on my chest. I was strolling along on the unseasonably warm, early December morning, almost home. I think I had a coffee from my favorite coffee shop in hand. Maybe the caffeine’s what did it. For whatever reason, I suddenly had a moment of sheer peace. The idea of enlightenment crossed my mind. The day was so normal and the moment absolutely boring in every way, entirely similar to so many other moments I have had in the past and so different from the exotic life I had always dreamed of for myself. But I felt a serene contentment that I never remember experiencing before. The thought occurred to me that I could be okay with anything. It was as though everything did and did not exist all at once. Everything that is awful or terrifying or devastating in the world was okay in a way that I don’t know how to explain. And I felt a happiness that was not circumstantial (albeit my sweet baby on my chest, my funny daughter in the stroller, the open day ahead, and the coffee in my hand), I don’t think. I felt neither old nor young nor disappointed nor overly hopeful about life.
The afternoon he died, I had just returned from picking my daughter up from preschool in much the same way. Stephen had fallen asleep on my chest, and the two girls were in the stroller. I carried him up and put him down to finish his nap in my bed for the last time. I would never hold him alive again. The walk on his final day, that last time I held his breathing body, was so similar to the day I experienced the feeling of surreal ease with the world. The only difference on the day his heart stopped was that I was in a big rush and not feeling grateful. But the circumstances, other than that, not two weeks later, were spectacularly similar, practically identical. Was that enlightened moment, something I have not experienced before or since, a premonition? My body and mind preparing me with a supreme, time-surpassing knowledge? I have other stories, but I’ll save them. And then I wonder, aren’t most of our human days, the monotony of them, all spectacularly similar?
A week before our trip to Costa Rica, a college friend I had not seen for almost three years came to visit from Portland, Oregon. Her parents, who she was visiting in Iowa, brought her and her two children to Chicago to spend the day and night with me, because she had missed the memorial. What do you say to an old friend after your baby has died? It had been about three months since the awful event, so time had passed, but when they arrived, we and her parents sat awkwardly on the couches. My five-year-old, always aware of people’s curiosity to see and hear about Stephen, brought out poster boards covered with his pictures that a friend had made for the service. My two-year-old played with the passports I had retrieved from the basement filing cabinet in preparation for our approaching trip. After the visitors looked at the photos, I mentioned we were about to go to Costa Rica for Spring Break. My friend’s parents, in their sixties, grew suddenly animated. They had recently become bird watchers, and Costa Rica, they explained, was the mecca of bird watching. My friend’s father was the first to mention it. The resplendent quetzal. He told me how the creature lived in different parts of the country during different seasons. Something about the tone with which he described it and said the words “resplendent quetzal” sealed the name in my mind.
The next day my friend and her children left, and I took my oldest daughter, the ten-year-old who found Stephen dead in my bed when she checked on him during his long nap, to her therapy session, the least I could do to try to help her cope with all the trauma. After the session, the therapist ushered me in to discuss scheduling and my child’s progress. “So you’re going to Costa Rica?” she asked.
“Yes,” I nodded, trying to restrain the torrent of tears that always felt ready to burst forth upon entering her office. “Yes, I know I’m a terrible mother,” I wanted to say. But I managed to hold in the words. She had suggested after previous sessions, without saying so directly, that I was being “too sad” for my daughter’s well-being.
“That’s just wonderful,” she said. “A getaway will be so good for your family.”
Relief. I explained that we had considered joining friends at a beach house in Florida, but that we had instead decided to go on an adventure and do something exciting and distracting. The truth was that my husband didn’t think a 60-degree Florida winter was what he really needed. He wanted a startlingly hot, humid spring break.
The therapist smiled and nodded, supporting the choice, to my amazement. Then, out of the blue, she asked, “Have you heard of the resplendent quetzal?”
I nearly laughed. I had indeed heard of the bird, not just any old “quetzal,” but this peculiarly and memorably named “resplendent quetzal” only the day before.
Later that evening I looked up the resplendent quetzal in the enormous bird book of the United States my brother sent me for my birthday a couple years earlier. It included a listing for a quetzal, but not the resplendent. Even the mentioned variety, however, was a very rare bird to see, a bird only occasionally spotted in particular areas of the American southwest. So of course I Googled the resplendent quetzal on my phone. I learned that it’s extremely colorful, but mostly an iridescent greenish blue. The male has a soft, tufty crown, a red chest, and very long, elaborate tail feathers. Both male and females have sweet faces with big, gentle eyes.
The resplendent quetzal is on coins, flags, stamps, and coats of arms throughout Central America and, along with the jaguar and feathered snake, occupied a large role in the mythology of ancient Mayan civilization and other Indigenous groups. Its image is found throughout the region’s archaeological ruins and relics. I read on to learn that due to human development and lack of environmental protection, the bird’s populations have all but disappeared in most of its native countries except for Costa Rica, and even there, it’s considered an uncommon privilege to spot one. Not yet an endangered species, they are severely threatened. And I came across stories of Guatemalan tourists weeping with joy upon learning the resplendent quetzal still exists during their travels to Costa Rica. Though the Guatemalan currency is named after the bird, they are almost extinct in that region.
We had already booked our lodging, but I was now determined to find a quetzal, even if it meant more travel and less beach time. Surely seeing such a mythological creature would ease my broken heart and serve as a sign of not just the existence of the supernatural but also the afterlife. It would assure me that life, despite all we had seen, still had meaning.
At that point, I had not yet recognized the human inability to accept the permanence of the death of a child. Our brains are unable to comprehend that the loss will go on our entire lives. After Stephen died, I found myself always hunting for something. When the kids asked me to help locate a missing baby doll or play purse, the searches felt weighty and urgent. When emptying paper bags full of groceries, I peered into the bottom of each one, searching for that last missing item that I hadn’t seen or pulled out yet. My son. I was always waiting, expecting to find him in some long-unopened drawer. And now this bird. I would scour the land, trees, and sky for the resplendent quetzal, and unlike my yearning to find my son, the epic search could be rewarded. Supposedly, it was possible.
That is how we find ourselves at the $350 a night hotel resort at the foot of a steaming black volcano, our lovely daughters at various points on the scale from whining to joy, in tow. My husband checks us into the hotel, and the staff brings us each a pink iced beverage and the girls frosty orange drinks. We sit in the open air of the receiving lounge, ornately decorated with lavish floral displays that seem almost gaudy, except for the fact that they are made of real, local vegetation and match the very real and natural garden landscaping outside. A gentle breeze blows through the room, and the sunlight beyond the interior shadow almost seems to sparkle. Where have we arrived? Huge, baroque pieces of glistening mahogany furniture surround us.
I study a map on the empty concierge desk. It’s a picture map, useful for people who speak any language, with images of all the activities to do on the roads around the volcano. There are monkeys by a waterfall, turtles, butterfly gardens, crocodiles, and hot springs, the legendary zip lining, and one image of a bird that looks like a resplendent quetzal. I gasp and consider asking a person behind the counter to come and explain its presence on the map but decide against it.
“How much did this place cost again?” I ask Jordan as we carry luggage to our room, biting the skin next to my thumbnail.
He grins behind black plastic sunglasses, happy and proud. “It’s credit card points! What else are you going to do with them?”
I choose to live blissfully unaware of what other practical things we perhaps could have done with those points. There was a time when I would have, but that time has come and gone.
“Look, Mom, a hummingbird!” says my oldest, Sophia, pointing towards a tall bush covered with long pink flowers. I see the flutter, the cloud of blue green that moves as I think a hummingbird should move. Very small, magical-looking black and orange birds are everywhere, and tiny yellow birds hop around outside the door of our hotel room above some flowers growing out of a pot. I wonder if cardinals in the winter or robins in the spring are as mesmerizing as this to foreigners visiting us in Chicago. But tired reality does not live up to ecstatic anticipation, and the first evening only our kids enjoy the hot tub in our expensive room because we’re too exhausted after navigating the hairpin turns on the Costa Rican highway and soaking in the outdoor hot springs, getting sunburned for the first time in months.
We have arranged to go on a tour with a guide. The concierge tells us to look out for an “Indian” who will take us, which raises my red flag for racism. How could they just describe this man as an “Indian”? When we ask more specifically how we will recognize him, the concierge tells me we will know him by his long hair. He indicates hair that is a little longer than shoulder length. I imagine a North American Native American on a horse with long, flowing hair and a trail of feathers. I am also racist. Am I?
We wake the next morning and go to the splendid, tile-floored open-air lobby. The staff points out a toucan in the courtyard as we walk in. There, in real life, in the wild, is the bird with the small black body and huge, colorful, rainbow-like beak. It’s surreal.
We wait, kids flopped in large wooden armchairs, for a good twenty-five minutes before a young man walks in with long hair and an oversized baseball cap worn backwards. He is wearing flip flops, board shorts, and a tank top with a recognizable surf logo. He stands in stark contrast to the fancy hotel staff in their maroon polyester uniforms and frozen smiles. We stand up when the receptionist gestures in our direction. The man with long black hair walks over and cheerily greets us. “Hi! I’m Kesh.” We herd the kids to our red rental jeep, I assure Kesh he can have the passenger seat, and soon, we are heading off the town’s main two-lane highway and onto a dirt road into the jungle.
After about a minute bumping down the road with branches and bushes scraping the vehicles’ doors, Kesh tells Jordan to stop the car. Then he rolls down all the windows and tells Jordan to turn off the car. He turns to tell all of us, including the girls, to close our eyes. I wonder if this is how people get robbed and left for dead, even as I obey and shut my eyes. I am aware that I am not being hypnotized, but I feel compelled to obey his gentle voice. The girls have become very quiet in the back of the vehicle. “Listen,” Kesh says, at last. “Do you hear the shee shee shee? That is the strawberry poison dart frog.” He is silent again. A long pause. “Do you hear the howler monkey?” Kesh imitates the sound of a loud, angry dog, and when he is quiet again, we all hear the same noise, only fainter, coming from deeper in the trees. “These are the sounds of the jungle.” And then the rainforest comes alive with so many noises that I had not previously heard. Birds of every sound, the breeze through the branches, a million rustles and grunts. It’s like we are on some 3D rainforest experience ride at, yes, Disney World. How did I not hear this before?
After a time, Jordan starts the car again and we continue on through the rainforest. Kesh tells us about his Indigenous group, the Bribri, as we drive. Of the nine tribes in Costa Rica, the Bribri is the largest with 30,000 native speakers. It’s a matrilineal tribe, where women own the land and perform the sacred cacao ceremonies. His clan, the Kekoldi, raise endangered green iguanas to be released into the jungle for other Bribri to hunt. He tells us about the vulture king, who can fly up to the top of the universe. We are all wrapped up and carried away with his stories.
“Kesh,” I ask, when there is a slight pause in the conversation. “Have you seen a resplendent quetzal before?”
“Pardon me?” Kesh turns around to better hear my yelling from the back.
“Have you ever seen a resplendent quetzal?”
He smiles. “Oh yes, Americans love to ask about the resplendent quetzal. I have seen them deep in the jungle.” He gestures off into the trees. “I could take you on a camping trip with backpacks where we would sleep in hammocks if you had more time.” Maybe next visit to Costa Rica, I think, though any concept of a future is still vague and filmy.
I want him to talk about the mythical aspects of the bird, to make some deep meaningful connection, but he is quiet. At last he speaks. “Long ago they say the forest was full of the resplendent quetzal, but humans have taken their land.”
We arrive at a clearing with a hut, and Jordan parks the truck. We climb out, and Kesh tells us to put on our sneakers as he purchases a couple bags of fried plantains and a cold coconut for each person to drink. We are going to hike down to a waterfall in the gorge below. The ground is slippery and wet below us, and the stones under the trail are black and moist. Kesh motions the girls over to a plant, and points something out to them. I come to see, and there is a tiny red blob. It’s the strawberry dart frog, and soon it begins to make the loud chirp that allowed Kesh to notice its presence.
“Do you know the difference between poisonous and venomous?” he asks. The kids shake their heads no. “If something venomous bites you, it will harm you, but if you bite or touch something poisonous, it will harm you. The strawberry dart frog is poisonous. If you touch it, you will be harmed.” I look sternly at Iris, my eight-year-old who is standing extremely close to the tree and holding her hands in readiness to grab the tiny frog. Kesh seems unconcerned.
We arrive at the base of the waterfall, surrounded by a canopy of monstrous trees. The fecundity of blooming flowers and green poking out of every bare piece of earth and on any bit of dirt between the boulders. The ground below us is a patchwork of stones and water from the waterfall, and the dark pools are full of fat, bumping tadpoles. Dark, deep water has always scared me, as much as I try to deny my fear, and this is no different.
“Can we swim?” asks Iris, who is devilishly daring, and I nod. Of course. I can’t hold them back. Then I overcome my own nerves, pull off my clothes, and hobble in over the large pebbles behind them.
The oldest two are already swimming. I recently read about the meditative power of standing in the deluge behind a waterfall, and I am determined to get there. I realize that the only way to reach the shelf behind the falls is to go through the place where the water is hitting the surface of the deep pool, and I am nervous about feeling that kind of pressure on my head. But I am determined, and I let my body be taken under and through the water, feeling the heavy pounding of the infinite, above and around me. I feel the pressure lessen and know that I have come to the other side, the space between the rock wall and the falling water. There is a thin rock ledge, but the wall is concave and there is no space for my head if I stand. So I sit, submerged to my chest, legs dangling into the watery abyss. I self-consciously wonder what my family and the handful of other international tourists who are sitting on boulders are thinking of my strange, perhaps attention-seeking behavior. I close my eyes. The sound is already deafening, the most all-enveloping noise I have ever encountered, but with my eyes shut, it reaches another level. The sound is part of my body. After I am able to stop thinking about everyone else, I consider that my sadness reminds me of how it felt to be submerged under the water. I know I am still alive, but I can’t control the torrent above me.
At last, I feel I have been gone too long. I jump back into the water and swim to my family. Sophia has made a friend. He is a boy with long blonde hair, and they are wordlessly following each other around the green chamber—this den in the jungle. They walk along the shelf that reaches across the entire rock wall, and they climb up boulders and jump back in. The boy’s mother is a pale, thin, very pregnant blonde woman with a colorful strapless dress, and I hate her body for the life blooming within it, a baby who will probably not die. She, her younger daughter, their guide or friend, and a few other young, hip-looking travelers sit with us on the rocks and bank, watching the waterfall and acrobatics of my ten-year-old daughter and this boy, new friends, far from either of their homes, searching for companionship.
At last, the two set their sights on a huge tower of rocks—probably twenty feet high—that reach up near the waterfall. The mission is clear to all of us watching—they want to climb up and jump back off into the pool below. They make their way up, finding a path to hold onto or a stone to reach and grab, but they reach a point at which neither of them can get any farther. We are all nervous but enjoying this show together—it has provided a unity to our group of straggling tourists—so Jordan jumps in and joins them to see if he can get them to the top of the ledge. He too reaches a dead end and gives up. I try not to imagine their skulls splitting on the rock below.
And then Kesh stands up, takes off his shirt and hat, tosses his long, thick hair into a topknot on his head, and effortlessly bounces up the rock wall, leaving behind the young tourist with whom he has been flirting. In memory, I see him on all fours scrambling up the vertical wall as though he were weightless. He points out the best path to the kids and Jordan, and they are all able to get up to the small protrusion of a stone landing with him. Then, with the perfect agility of a man in his element, where he belongs, doing something his people may have been doing for thousands of years, Kesh throws himself off the rock, his small, tight body arcing through the air with precision. It’s a pleasure to behold. He jumps straight into the place where the falls smack the water, and I can only imagine how deeply his powerful jump and the force of the water are taking him beneath the surface. And then he reappears.
My daughter, my oldest one, the one who found our dead son after his nap and cannot stop touching her chest for fear that her heart will also stop beating, is balancing up there, preparing to follow him. Kesh directs her to jump back towards the falls as he did. I cannot watch, and I close my eyes this time. My pulse races. But soon I hear the splash and open my eyes to see the smile on her face as she comes up. The boy copies her. Then it’s Jordan’s turn, and we all wait. But it’s too high. He cannot jump, and he carefully makes his way back down, holding onto vines as he slips with care back down to a lower boulder.
And then we must leave. It’s time to head back up to our car. The girls are ready. I tell Jordan I want to linger for a few more minutes, and he understands. When they depart, I slowly step back into the cold water, leaving the warmth of the sun that has dried my skin. I return to that sacred spot behind the falls and pull myself up again on the ledge. I close my eyes and try to go to the dark place behind my eyes, the space of nothingness. I listen to the waterfall and then try to let that go too. I feel nothing, I see nothing, I am nothing. Soon I remember that I must return to where my family is waiting for me, so I slip back into the powerful torrent of water and swim the few yards to the shore. I put my feet down and feel the stones beneath me. I gingerly wade out and pull my dress back down over my head. I step into my flip flops and head back up the trail to meet my husband and children, lost in the world I left behind under the waterfall.
“Mom!” A child is calling me urgently, and I panic. My heart races; it’s in my throat. I cannot handle more loss. I rush up the path, trying not to slip on the wet dirt. “Mom? Hurry! Come!” Sophia is whispering urgently, and I do hurry, imagining a body lying down in the valley below, having plummeted off the muddy trail that led us to the waterfall.
I turn a corner and arrive where they are, my heart exploding beneath the thin skin and shell of bones that is my chest. “Guess what!?” Their faces are a blur of excitement, and they are all speaking at once. “We saw a resplendent quetzal!”
Kesh is nodding with a surprised smile and raised eyebrows, and Jordan has a look of disbelief on his face.
“What!? Why didn’t you call me?” I feel a sob rise in my throat.
“We didn’t want to scare the bird away.” They are all still so excited it is as though there is another presence or spirit in the air.
