This is my third time in Costa Rica. The first was a trip with my family and the second a group tour when I was in high school. There was a rebellious side to me as a teenager - I lauded Catcher in the Rye, and opposed almost anything mainstream. I associated a lot of these ideas with music, hailing classic rock as the sole genre worth listening to and insisting that that pop had no value except as a drug of conformity.
It was on an organic farm in Costa Rica that I put Zeppelin II into my CD player for the first time, watching rain pound against the roof of my camping tent. The effect that album had on my rebel teenage spirit was immense: when I returned from the trip, I arrived at school with “Ramble On” blasting through open windows.
In college, I got into more current music, rap, modern rock, and eventually jazz. While my devotion to The Beatles, Rolling Stones, and The Who remained strong, Led Zeppelin loomed farther into the background. As the years passed, I listened to them less and less.
Two weeks after moving to Costa Rica, I scanned my iTunes list for something to listen to. I had forgotten about the night on the organic farm with Zeppelin in my ears. Yet that night, I chose Zeppelin II. But that wasn’t all. The strangest thing wasn’t that I happened to put on the same album I got into the last time I was here, but that I got the same feeling I had while listening to it. I was into it like I had been that rainy day…a decade ago. It was only later that I made the connection. As the lyrics go, “I’m goin’ round the world, on my way, I’ve been this way ten years to the day…”
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