Sloth Christmas
michael jerrard photo / unsplash
LA FORTUNA, Alajuela Province, Costa Rica
A Sloth State of Mind
Costa Rica has a motto: Pura Vida. Literally: “pure life.” It’s an invitation to stop worrying and just gear down and chill. Don’t stress over what you can’t control. Dispacito, as the animal-crossing signs dotted beside the country’s highways remind. The choice is yours: You can complain about the bad road and the obstacles along it, or you can slow down.
The locals embody this principle – which may be why Costa Ricans routinely come out at or near the top of those global happiness polls. And no local embodies it more than the sloth.
The three-toed sloth is one of the strangest and most beguiling creatures on this earth. The more you learn about it, the more you’re tempted to conclude it just might hold the secret to sustainable life for all of us. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Our mission-brief, during this Christmas visit to see daughter Maddy (who is studying in Costa Rica this year), is simple: Become a sloth for one day. Emulating its routine. Resonating on its frequency. Slipping inside its matted fur. See the sloth, be the sloth.
If you’re detecting a pattern on this site, Big Sloth Day is actually quite different from Do Nothing Day. That one was political — a pushback against the capitalist productivity ethic. This one’s almost the opposite, not a refusal but a buy-in — a deep dive into an alien way of being. Think of it as a radical stab at cross-species empathy.
Of course, to do this faithfully would require sleeping in a tree, which is impractical. The best substitute, I decide, is a hammock. When sloths aren’t slumbering in the crotch of a branch they snooze suspended. They basically make a hammock of themselves. A locking mechanism deploys in their wrist tendons, and they hang from a branch and tap out.
So, hammocks are awesome … for naps. Sleeping a whole night in one turns out to be pretty uncomfortable. And actually not very sloth-like, because changing position takes enormous energy. My grunts keep waking the girls, who are quite sensibly sleeping (or trying to) inside the casita. I do feel safe from predators, though – including any online scammers and spammers luring me into their schemes: the phone is out of reach on the veranda deck below.
*
On a Big Sloth Day, the first order of business is lowering your metabolism. A fruitful tack would probably be getting heavily stoned. But last evening, as I punched the clock to start the experiment, we decided to go a more spa-like route. The town of La Fortuna sits in the shade of a giant volcano, and the entire region is plumbed with thermal springs. Just outside town, people park their car by the side of the road and scramble down the bank into the river El Choyin.
It is a strange sensation to step into a warm river. We weren’t the only ones eager to experience it. In pools where the tumbling whitewater stills, bathers were lolling, blissed out, their eyes steamed open like clams. We found a little spot of our own. Stubs of half-burned candles sat on the rocky banks, placed there by nocturnal lovebirds. It was incredibly relaxing. You could feel the blood draining from your brain. We were getting into the right headspace.
Now we felt ready for phase two. It was time to be among sloths.
In Sloth Territory
A few splashy-looking operations in town were offering sloth tours with “guaranteed sightings.” “If you’re ‘guaranteeing’ nature, is it really nature?” Jen said. “Are the animals really doing what has kept them alive for so long – avoiding us?” A better option, it seemed, was a territory north of town that sloths access via a wildlife corridor, and roam (okay, roam very slowly) untracked and undisturbed. We booked a guide; without a trained eye to help you it is crazy-hard to spot a sloth in the jungle. Because they face threats from below and above (big cats and eagles, respectively), sloths typically perch high in the canopy, sandwiched by layers of foliage. Their shaggy fleece blends in perfectly. And they are usually completely still.
That stillness is the sloth’s best defense. “To move is to live,” Olga used to write in people’s copies of her book. To a sloth, to move is to die, potentially.
And yet move they do. Indeed, once a week, a sloth logs a Big Day of its own. After six days of languorously munching on leaves, the sloth ventures down to the ground to take a dump. It was long thought that the point of this dangerous excursion was to mask its scent: rather than just letting go from the heavens and perfuming every branch between it and the ground, the sloth carefully buries its poop, like a cat. But there is a new theory of why sloths come down, which we’ll get to in a moment.
“There.”
Our guide, Ivannia, had been walking silently, staring into the canopy, but now she stops and points. Eventually we see what she sees. There, hanging from a branch in a cecropia tree, is a male three-toed sloth about the size of a carry-on suitcase.
Ivannia gets a bead on him through a spotting scope. He is awake.
Sloths move the way syrup does; they do not so much move as … seep. As we watch, this fellow makes a few Tai Chi-like moves and then, with his Wolverine claws, commences to scratch his belly, in the manner of someone playing the ukulele.
Then from his inverted position he does a full sit-up. For the first time we see his face, frozen into that familiar bemused half-smile. (Strangely, all sloths look a little like the filmmaker Ken Burns.)
He must really have been itchy. Because scratching gobbles calories, and everything about a sloth involves keeping the energy budget low.
For us this was the sloth’s first lesson – a reminder that, at every moment, we too are making oxygen choices. It’s surprising how much energy we waste: how much we wave our arms for no good reason when we talk, how many redundant trips we make from couch to kitchen. Just as an experiment in self-control, it seems worth consciously putting the brakes on useless impulsive behaviour. So maybe you don’t pee when you have to pee just a little; you don’t scratch when you’re just a bit itchy. You wait until the urge is overwhelming. You batch all your impulses and take care of them when you must, denying the dopamine system’s “go” circuitry until you have rewired it a little bit, and at least partially defused the impulse to want. That is the life of a spiritual warrior. Or a sloth.
Once a week, on average, a sloth falls from the tree. Wait, what? How could this happen to an animal perfectly adapted for not falling? Simple: they’re pushed. A male sloth will pay a visit to a nearby rival to challenge it for the affections of a female in the area. The goal is to knock the other guy out of the tree.
Sloth fight! The very idea conjures images of an ultra-slow-mo mime routine. But in fact these contests are surprisingly kinetic. A better metaphor might be the mild-mannered Zen master who’s pushed too far by the local bully and resorts to a disabling burst of martial arts fireworks … and then skips town, its cover as a stealth assassin blown. (Back in the casita, later, we will toy with the idea of having a sloth fight, with pillows, but decide against it: too metabolically expensive.)
Nature has designed sloths to survive these falls. But sometimes they don’t. “I saw a pregnant mother fall eighty feet,” says Ivannia. “She landed on her back. She didn’t make it. But the baby lived.”
A few minutes later, Ivannia spies another sloth – an impressive bit of spotting as this one’s smaller and curled up tight, like a fuzzy cantaloupe.
We watch it for a long while and eventually it stirs, then casually does a one-armed pullup to reposition itself on a higher branch. Sloths have three times the strength of humans, kilo for kilo. For us, even hanging for thirty seconds can be torturous– especially if we’re carrying a little extra weight.
The British nature writer Charles Foster had a nice phrase for what we are attempting here on Big Sloth Day: “a poke at extreme outsiderness.” Foster is a badger enthusiast. Aching to better appreciate the life of this creature so different from himself, he trudged to a hillside in Wales, dug a den about the dimensions of a badger sett, stripped naked and descended underground for six weeks, going so far as to eat worms, the badger’s favourite diet. (His wife put up with this until Foster recruited their eight-year-old son Tom to join him.) Badgers are certainly outsiders (to us). But they are not, I submit, as “other” as sloths.
Staring into a wild sloth’s face, during the fugitive glimpses you get of it, you try to feel a kinship, a shared lineage. With monkeys this is pretty easy: in their balletic leaps and silky moves they look like us, the best of us, a combination of an athlete and a little kid. You can see the wheels turning in the mind of a monkey, the calculations: When will this tapered branch I’m on stop bearing my weight and it’ll be time to jump? But with sloths, the poke at empathy comes up short.
All day we have been trying to do things sloths do, such as sniffing the wind in quick little intakes – a practice known as “odour sampling.” But humans are not very developed olfactorily, so it’s been hard to detect any dialled-up awareness of our environment. It becomes clear no amount of aping another creature’s behaviours is going to lead you all that much closer to truly understanding them. Some years ago, the philosopher Thomas Nagel raised the question of whether humans could ever really grok what it’s like to be, say, a bat. His conclusion: No. The sensory world bats inhabit is so different from ours that it defeats our most strenuous imaginings. So too with sloths. Sloths are a little less alien in that they’re earthborne and don’t have a freaky apparatus as their main interface with the world (echolocation). But they are … sloths. Even a crude appreciation of their upside-down life eludes us.
It occurs to me that the only thing that will reliably pull me slowly into the sloth’s world is time. My eyesight and hearing are getting worse. I’m slowing down. Hoarding my energy. As we age we grow a little more sloth-like. This is natural and reasonable. But it cuts across the grain of what our jump-cut culture values and promotes. Did you know that the walking speed of pedestrians in big cities has increased by 15 percent since 1979? We are Homo Huscleis: Gotta be going, gotta be getting back. We work ourselves sick in order to earn enough money to take a sick day. But as the novelist Milan Kundera once observed, “when things happen too quickly, nobody can be certain about anything, not even about themselves.”
The value of chugging along in the slow lane is the sloth’s second lesson. Just as sleep is an elixir of healing, stillness is a catalyst to growth, and in that sense it’s “a form of action,” as Alexis de Toqueville put it. Only in stillness do the deepest and most dignified qualities within us come to the fore.
Back in sloth territory, our guide gets a twinkle in her eye and pulls out her phone. A month ago, she happened to catch some startling footage: a sloth moving across open ground – a medium sloths are so ill-adapted to it was long thought they couldn’t walk at all. To a sloth, walking must feel like a gravity bomb, of the sort returning astronauts feel on the way to the press tent; and yet this sloth is moving at a decent pace, every step exquisitely deliberate, its claws gingerly raised like someone with long nails typing a memo.
“In 20 years I’d never seen this,” Ivannia says. “Is she pregnant and trying to keep her belly off the ground?”
Clearly, sloths can do what we do. They just choose not to.
*
People have tried to keep sloths as pets. But no sloth, it’s safe to say, ever really wanted such an arrangement. They are solitary animals; they don’t like to be touched.
And honestly, you probably wouldn’t want to touch one. A sloth’s matted fur houses entire ecosystems. If you could get a comb through that fleece, you’d scatter as many as a hundred moths (a species of moth that only lives in the fur of sloths), and your comb would likely be dripping with green algae. Scientists used to think the algae was for camouflage – and it is. But it also appears to serve a different purpose. A tantalizing recent paper suggests a new reason algae grows on sloths – a conjecture that, if true, helps explain the mystery of how sloths sustain themselves up there in the canopy. (Leaves alone don’t provide a whole lot of nutrition, and a sloth can take a month to digest a single leaf.) The researchers speculate that sloths are algae farmers, and the first and only consumer of their crop is themselves. This is where the moths come in. After they die, their decomposing little bodies create a nutritious soil for algae production. The sloths return the favour by edging down to the ground, into the path of peril, so the pregnant moths can lay their eggs in the sloth’s dung pile.
Playbook for Survival: The Way of the Sloth
Costa Rica was the first country on Earth to abolish its army, deciding to pump that money into education and health-care instead. It runs almost entirely on renewable energy. Its people manage stress with a surfer’s mastery of the moment: there will always be another wave if you miss this one. This just might be the country that holds the secret to sustainable existence.
And so too its mascot. Peace-loving, self-sufficient. (Growing food on your own body must jump to the top of any list of useful life hacks.) It’s hard not to suspect that this creature first described in the scientific literature as “the lowest form of life” just might be the highest.
The sloths are showing us the way forward.
If only we could slow down enough to notice.
