While Native American inhabitants in this region date back to 3000 B.C., what is now known as the town of Monteverde was founded and named by those original Quakers. They came after a group of young men, Marvin among them, refused to register for the peacetime draft and were imprisoned and paroled. Though Marvin served in the Medical Corps during World War II, the judge suggested that these young Quakers might find another country to live out their ideals. Costa Rica, which had abolished its army in 1948, became their destination.

We rent a house on the mountain a few miles from the town of Santa Elena and just below the Monteverde Cloud Forest Biological Reserve. A cloud forest is, in essence, a rain forest at altitude. We live at just about 5,000 feet. From our kitchen window sometimes we can see through the trees to the faint horizon of the Pacific. From my makeshift desk I look across a jungle valley to another slope of forest. As it is the wet season, every day the clouds eventually surround us, and then the rain.

A week ago last Wednesday a different kind of rain began to fall. We understood that Tropical Depression 16, later to be called Nate, was along the Caribbean coast. A warmer than usual rain was falling, but my wife and I went for a hike with some friends that morning, high above a house and road that would eventually wash away.

Our friend who has been on these trails many times kept remarking that he was seeing water in places he’d never seen before. Late in the hike, a troop of capuchin monkeys appeared in the canopy overhead. The lead monkey yanked at a branch and threw it down to warn us away.

That night the rain pulsed across our tin roof in waves. While it continued the next day, our girls and a friend splashed in puddles in the soaked yard, all of us unaware of how dangerous the situation was becoming. By Thursday evening we had lost power and on Friday morning, water. My wife said she thought she had heard the rumble of a landslide during the night. We got word that the community was gathering below and hiked down. On the road, power lines had fallen, their poles askew because the dirt that had held them was gone.