Each evening we’d sip a beer on a rock by the lagoon near our hotel and recount our day’s adventures and conjure up our future. As a child, I always wanted to be a ranger in a national park when I grew up, and now Steve’s enthusiasm for the wild matched mine. So we canceled our plans to return to England to do Ph.D.’s in economics. We’d become naturalists and live in the jungle, in a tent. Of course we did go back to England and get doctorates in economics. But on those Yala evenings, as the lowering sun gave that lagoon a coating of crushed crimson glass, our dreams made complete sense.
