Downwind is not the same as downstream, though life, like time, flows only in one direction.

Had I the perspective of midlife or, better still, old age, I might not have been in that boat; my brazen countenance might have softened with the years, so too my sense of agency. But I was twenty-four, and a year ago I had finished grading the morning’s exercise and looked out of that classroom window onto the playground in Arizona, watching the children at recess without seeing them, still believing that teaching was my calling, yet unable to quell the yearning for something more.

It was the yearning that brought me to Costa Rica as I chugged up the Sarapiquí river to enter into the lives of those unsuspecting campesinos, forever..

Actions are born of events and, in turn, beget them. Was I ever in control of my own destiny?