FINDING MYSELF IN A WILDERNESS The True Story of a Modern Jungle Jane
	APRIL 2005

by Laurie Huffman, with Don Huntington

Some people buy ski boats with their disposable income. Others buy summer homes. I bought a jungle. In fact, I’m considering buying a second jungle.

I came by my love for tropical environments as a four-year-old child living in Coco Beach, Florida. My father was a rocket scientist helping design the Titan missile at the nearby Kennedy Space Center. I was glad to leave the stars to my father because my heart, even at that age, was caught up in the circle of life that kept turning up in the hot, humid, postage-stamp-size jungle that was the backyard of our Florida home.

My six-year-old brother and I were usually down on our knees in the mud playing with our back-yard menagerie, which included monstrous land turtles and baby alligators. At that early age I relished the opportunity of surrounding myself with growing things. I liked the way bugs and animals looked. I enjoyed watching them wriggle around. I loved the heat of the tropics and the green that surrounded me.

Pint Size Teacher
We later moved to Sacramento, with its adobe architectures and golden fields that seemed the very opposite of our steamy, swampy Florida paradise. So I put aside my role as budding swamp explorer and tropical biologist for a few years and jumped headfirst into the role of schoolteacher. I was already in third grade and the path into the future seemed clear to me.

In order to prepare for my teaching activities, I would solicit surplus pages from lesson grading books from elementary school mentors at the end of the academic year and use them in the “neighborhood school” that I conducted during the summer in my back yard. I created lesson plans, set out chairs, had classroom lectures, took attendance, and handed out grades. My dear brothers and most of the kids from our Sacramento neighborhood made up the student body in my little school. They were really great students, though I think nobody ever actually learned anything.

Now it is three decades later and I’m a language professor with Los Medanos College and at UMUC (University of Maryland University College). Everything now is different, of course, from the little backyard school when I was in third grade, except that I am still blessed with having an incredible set of students. However, the students in my classrooms now actually learn things from me. I’m teaching them to speak both Spanish and English and to become familiar with cultures that are different from their own.

My students usually leave each of my classes with a smile on their faces. As I shut off the light and walk out behind them, there’s a big smile plastered all over my face, as well. Learning is most efficient when conducted in an atmosphere of kindness and love. It is most effective when it is fun.

Living the American Dream
I’m a third-generation descendant of a family whose story illustrates the American Dream as vividly as any I’ve ever heard, I guess. People say that if you come to America and are willing to work hard you can achieve almost anything. That doesn’t happen in every situation, of course, but in the case of our family, it was absolutely true.

My grandfather was an immigrant field laborer from Mexico. He came riding to America in a boxcar in the ’20s and ultimately built a thriving Bay Area business. He accomplished all this without even being able to sign his name. My father outdid my grandfather by becoming a genuine rocket scientist, eventually founding his own successful engineering company.

My mom had the most challenging career of all in managing our home so that everything happened smoothly. Everyone in my home while I was growing up had work to do. I can’t remember a moment during my childhood where anybody was idle or bored. I spent some years following my mom’s career as a housewife, plus pursuing a second fulltime job as a teacher and graduate student.

My California life-style eventually began to weigh heavily on my spirit. I felt like a hamster on a wheel, I was running vigorously, but didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. I had schedules to keep, commuter traffic to put up with, and an endless sequence of stressful days that I had to somehow endure. Besides all that, I was faced with the challenge of living in one of the most expensive cities in the world.

Don’t get me wrong, most of the time I love the hills and hubbub of East County living. Some of the best people I ever met and some of the greatest places I know about are found in the shadow of Mt. Diablo. But twelve months a year of this energetic lifestyle sometimes get to be too much.

I finally decided that I needed a get-away. Wouldn’t it be wonderful, I thought, to be able to flee to a place where I could take shelter for a time from schedules, traffic, stress, and budgets? I began to dream of a place where I could wake up to the sounds of jungle animals and birds. For a little while, at least I wanted to see green wherever I looked.

Finding my Costa Rican Hideaway
Finally, I enrolled in graduate school and went to Costa Rica as part of an intensive program leading up to a Masters degree in Spanish. I fell in love with the country and with its people. I began to dream of someday retiring there and living a more quiet, relaxed, and spiritual life.

About a year later, I was offered the opportunity to buy a 50-acre rain forest on the Caribbean side of Costa Rica. I trembled a bit from both fear and excitement as I signed the deed and handed over my hard-earned money to my Costa Rican attorney. In spite of my misgivings, I felt that I had just bought a piece of paradise! I was now responsible for hundreds of trees, banana plants, and coconut palms. I was the mother over a family whose members include innumerable monkeys, brilliant butterflies, comical toucans, small brightly colored endangered frogs, and bugs.

Especially bugs! Billions of bugs! Bugs of every shape and size — from mites so tiny that they ride from flower-to-flower in the nostrils of hummingbirds to magnificent rhinoceros beetles that might spill your drink if one of them landed on the top of your lemonade glass. I love my jungle! I can take a throne-like seat on top of one of my hills overlooking the brilliant azure of the Caribbean and breathe my lungs full of the clean, pure, rich jungle-generated oxygen. I feel every part of my body being reenergized while the fragments of my spirit slowly resolve themselves into a perfectly centered and integrated whole.

My jungle hide away, which I named La Puerta Del Caribe Rain Forest Ranch, provides a perfect retreat from which I can resolve problems and make decisions that cannot be made amid the demands, noise, and frantic din of my California life. The untamed nature of the jungle gives a sense of wholesomeness that helps me cope with the other jangle of civilization.

Wrestling with Paradise
I’ve played the role of jungle woman for the past nine years, retreating to my hidden paradise several times each year and asking myself these same questions over and over — all the while I’m planting seedlings and caring for the marvelous creatures in my jungle hide away.

With help from local villagers, friends, and family members, I have been building bridges, digging river channels, hacking out hiking trails, and building structures for protection against the tropical rainfall. I’ve also been planting sugar cane and tropical fruit trees to the delight of my three sons and the enjoyment of some of their wild animal pets.

I’ve begun to introduce my rain forest to folks who, like myself, love nature and are willing to experience the untamed sides of our planet. Even more than attracting people to visit my jungle, I’m trying hard to promote the principle that you don’t have to be satisfied with whatever rut you’re stuck in. “Take risks!” I tell people. “Invest your life in something you believe in.” “Break out of the mold life has pressed you into.”

I believe that all of us should pursue things that feed our spirits. The underlying message I tell people is, “Don’t be your job.” Friends and acquaintances used to think of me as a professor. Now they come by and say things like, “How’s your jungle?”

Anyway, buying my jungle was a real risk, but one that was worth taking. I have a caretaker named Rogelio whom I pay to watch over the place when I am not there. He occasionally confronts groups of men who are trying to poach trees and wild toucans from my property.

He tells the men, “You must turn around and leave immediately. This property is owned by a señora from America. If you touch anything that belongs here — even if you take one small leaf off of one of the plants — it will be like pulling an eye out of her head.”

I’m heading back to paradise for the second time this year in July. I sometimes take expeditions of no more than fifteen people with me. These are adventures of exploration that go far beyond mere sightseeing tours. Together we learn Spanish and Central American zoology. We visit people living in jungle villages and in the thriving modern city of San Jose.

There are many things in my California life that set my spirit fluttering like a bird trying to escape back to my private Costa Rican jungle retreat. Maybe it is our winter fogs or our East County traffic jams. Sometimes it’s simply the feeling I get while trying to understand the politics of my job. Or it is the pressure of trying to juggle my sons’ schedules. Or the stresses of budgeting enough to afford our comfortable California lifestyle?

When these tiresome demands of modern life begin beating against my spirit, I close my eyes and think about the breaths of pure oxygen that I soon will be taking in my own jungle paradise. I can imagine the sounds, sights, and smells that will once again bring healing and contentment to my spirit.