Art from El Dorado
Beginning in 2020, Monteverde artist Daniel Wesson spent five years wandering the abandoned breeding grounds of the Brillante ridgeline and “becoming the toad” to create these original color and b+w illustrations for “The Golden Toad: An Ecological Mystery and the Search for a Lost Species.” Click the thumbnails below to expand the images, and explore excerpts from the book below the illustrations.
“The Wanderer,” Daniel Wesson (click to expand)
For two hours, the biologists explored the stunted forest, documenting several hundred orange toads in an area no more than two hundred yards long and one hundred yards wide. In some pools, they encountered a dozen males wrestling for the attention of a single female, grasping over one another in a desperate bid to beat mortality. They collected many in great glass jars. When the sun began to set—turning the orange toads into luminaries, burning in the dark—they retreated to a small shack in which Jerry James had often bivouacked with Wolf Guindon on their explorations through the stunted forest, further east along the ridge above 1500 meters. That night, they slept on the damp wood boards and listened to the wind howl up from the Atlantic slope like a banshee, a cold rain washing over the enchanted mountain. In the dark corners of the shack, the toads in the collection jars ran down like old clocks in the night, and as the silver moon rose high above the shrouded forest, were finally still.
“The Boon,” Daniel Wesson (click to expand)
The species would come to be commonly known around the world as “the golden toad,” though in Monteverde it was often referred to simply as “el sapo dorado.” The first pair that Savage brought back to the United States, male and female, are still preserved at the Los Angeles County Museum. The other specimens went out like emissaries to the major world collections in Paris, Great Britain, Berlin. There they remain, the last remnants of a vanished species, with no voices left to tell their story—no answers to the mystery that they left behind when they disappeared for the last time beneath the earth, never to return.
“Into Brillante,” Daniel Wesson
As we moved through these quiet cemeteries, I wondered if their spirits were still or restless. Would they know me in death, if they met me, when they had never known me in life? Would they let themselves be seen by me, when I had no right or claim to their existence? Or had their ghosts grown bitter in the long years since their annihilation, lonely in the dark halls of their high room on the mountain? Would I feel their cold fingers on my skin if they began to climb my legs, their numbers overwhelming and their desires hopeless, desperate eyes wet with thirst? I imagined what it would feel like if they overtook me, long fingers covering my eyes in their tarnished light as they pulled me down to join them in the earth.
“The Creeping Fear,” Daniel Wesson
Beneath the university’s powerful electron microscope, the teams examined slides of infected frog tissues from disparate sites and specimens. With their collective knowledge, they confirmed that this same causal agent – the chytrid – was indeed present in the lost frogs of Australia and the Americas, and that it was the proximate cause of the disappearing frogs that they had each observed in their own countries. The killer had come out of the shadows, in the end – it stood before them terrible to behold.
“Arcadia,” Daniel Wesson (click to expand)
In time, brothers and sisters emerged, chirping their creation myths. The remnants of the clutch of eggs decayed into the earth, and the golden toads made their home on the high mountain. In those long years of solitude, the savage wind bent the trees into twisted postures, their bodies wrinkled and deformed. Their roots clutched to find the soft pockets of the earth, and their hollows collected rain-pools, gleaming like the most valuable of gems. Strange songs echoed down the valley beneath a dark sky lit by purple electricity. This was the promised land of the golden toads: raw and ragged on the fringes of creation. The hills were steep and the ground uncertain, landslides sweeping down the canyons and echoing into valleys. In the distance, a great lake glowed red at the foot of a volcano. There was no want for surplus, no fear of god; only the amber pools of light burning like torches in the darkness — the first golden toads living and dying on their elder mountain.
“On the Mountain of Revelation,” Daniel Wesson (click to expand)
We must have been a strange sight to those frogs, who had lived their whole lives on that secluded mountain, wind and rain and silence their only kings. How many years had it been since they had looked on one of our kind? Had the stories of us trickled down like water, generation to generation? As we treaded through their deeper sanctuaries, I wondered if they understood that we were plunderers, world-eaters, capable at any moment of carrying them off to a hopeless fate — wrapped in plastic in thieves’ hands, never to be seen again. Did they know enough to tuck their young away in dark hollows as our ghostly figures drifted past, dim reflections in black eyes?
“Ghost Frog,” Daniel Wesson (click to expand)
Reports from many of the other sites have gone silent, but the frogs in that stream were thriving. They sat on the mossy rocks at the river’s edge, in the spray of water from the little cataratas. There were many juveniles, a new generation, life returning to a wounded land. Among the dozens we encountered along that two-mile stretch of stream, three bore the cross of the chytrid fungus. Doomed, not doomed? It’s hard to say, but the biologist told me that that streamside population would not exist today if they had not developed a resistance to the pathogen. With any luck, they will still be there three months from now when the rains come to the mountains, a baptism.
“Strange Pool,” Daniel Wesson (click to expand)
It has happened in our age; we have seen it happen. It began to occur so often that we gave it a name — extinction, which sounds better than annihilation — and we began to measure it with dates, statistics, and locations; so that we might put our finger on a map and say here, it happened here, to them, not us. We have brought it down on the heads of others, because we are a species that is able to create life, and death, and afterlife. We know about it; we might even believe that we understand it. But we have never lived it, and as far as our evolutionary empathy might extend, we can never know what it will feel like until it happens to us. So we look to the ones who have gone before us, ahead into the dark, and we search for signs of hope — when the moon gives no light and the last rains fail.
“Afterlife,” Daniel Wesson (click to expand)
In the cloud forests of the afterlife, wrapped in mist, the golden toads move in tunnels that run through time. Dirt walls, warm and winding, ceilings like a low cathedral – they are scattered with the footsteps of the ones who have gone before, faithful wanderers. Those tunnels weave in tangles, deeper, farther, until their long fingertips grow cold, touching the ancient waters. Concealed in the shadows beneath green leaves, in the wavering pools, the wind breathes life into a lost species. Their ghosts come down to touch the mountain-top, carrying word from the beyond into the corporeal forests, prophecies to those that still sleep beneath the stars. They are the golden shapes of the sunlight settling through the canopy in the charmed air of a tropical evening; they are fire sermons drifting in the cold, high dark. Life, death, afterlife. Egg, tadpole, toad. Orange sky, green leaves and shadows – in the half-light, the shyness of the branches makes the forms of golden toads.
“The Cave,” Daniel Wesson (click to expand)
When they had first emerged into the long, dark, and quiet midnights, the dim sparks of our young fires did not yet flicker in the valleys far below. They had watched their generations live and die as they handed down their precious secrets; through dry spells and heavy rains, they clung to their sacred rock, the temple of their existence. In those long years of solitude, the roots of twisted trees clutched to find the soft pockets of the earth, and their hollows collected rain pools beneath a dark sky lit by purple electricity. That was the promised land of the golden toads: raw and ragged on the fringes of creation, the amber pools of light burning like torches in the dark—that was the golden age of the golden toads.
“The Eternal Forest,” Daniel Wesson (click to expand)
In Monteverde, they still find tapir tracks in the soft mud of the highlands from time to time. Jaguars roam the Peñas Blancas valley like old kings below the forests that they once abandoned. The green-eyed frogs are coming back, and the brilliant forest frogs are climbing up the mountain on the Pacific slope. The Resplendent Quetzals are peering out at a changing world from their dark dens high above the earth, wondering if their wings will carry them above the peril. We could spend our whole lives looking for the golden toads, or we could take a walk in the cloud forest on a rainy afternoon to watch the sun set over the hills of the eternal forest, loving it for everything it is, and not blaming it for what it isn’t.
“Burial of the Dead,” Daniel Wesson
The thunder spoke from high above the steep walls of Salamander Falls, and as the first drops of rain began to fall, our father waved to Kyle from the riverbank. Kyle scuttled down the steep rocks and balanced over the wet log growing mushrooms; stone by stone, he crossed the water to our father. He had raised his hand and was pointing to a crevice in the rocks, where the rain had drawn out from the shadows a small salamander – the first of many that would emerge to greet the rains. He was looking out at the world with eyes of hope. It was a beautiful day. They stood there together at the bottom of the waterfall, listening to what the thunder said, and a summer storm came down to touch the earth.