Central America aroused my curiosity after twenty years of an education that had seemed largely to dull it. I had been a mediocre student, partly bec… - David Rains Wallace

After the fox, a creature that resembled a cross between a groundhog and a midget deer emerged to patrol in its turn. The creature was so strange that I had no idea what it was, and so found it nearly as unsatisfactory as the too-familiar fox. Exoticism must be identifiable to be appreciated.

My ignorant journey had started a change in my thinking. I’d come south unconsciously regarding life as something to be adapted to desire. I disliked the usual way civilization reshapes nature by turning landscapes into suburbs or theme parks, yet my tropical daydream was also an attempt, psychological rather than technological, to make the landscape a desirable artifice. Central America’s roller coaster of diversity had showed me how unimaginative that attempt was.

Like all evolutionary stories, it is really two—of how the land bridge evolved, and of how people discovered it. Evolution occurs in geological time but is perceived in historical time.