Crazy Good Fortune Out of Blue - 17*
The bar/restaurant turned out not to be any better lit than the hallways, so it had a rather spooky feel to it. I decided to sit at the bar while waiting for everyone else to show up, where a silver-haired gentleman sat nursing some sort of manly-looking drink. His coif was quite amazing, actually. It looked like a news anchor’s hair or a televangelist’s ’do, all poufed up and perfect, not a stray hair out of place. I sat down a couple of chairs away from him, ordered my drink, and after a brief moment of silence, he spoke up.
“Al Gordon,” he said. “Resident radical professor.” The odd thing is, he spoke to his drink, not to me. He didn’t move his head at all, just gazed steadfastly at his whiskey neat or whatever it was, so I felt a little confused at first. I wasn’t sure if he was talking to me or perhaps just practicing the beginning of a speech that he was giving the next day or something. When I didn’t answer, though, he glanced over at me, waiting for a response.
“Oh!” I replied. “Well, you know, there’s another one here!” I thought that he would be pleased to learn that he had a comrade, someone with whom he could perhaps talk shop, but this seemed to depress him. He sighed heavily and went back to staring moodily at the bottom of his glass.
Soon, everyone else showed up—Richard, David, Alice, Jerry, and Renee. None of us felt like going out again, so we decided to eat dinner here and share a table. We had a nice, if unremarkable meal and then all decided to turn in early, a bit fatigued from the long train journey. Unfortunately, when Richard and I got to our room, we realized that neither one of us had grabbed up the room key on our way to the bar. Someone still manned the desk in the lobby, however, so Richard moseyed down to get a spare key. He returned with the desk clerk who explained that there was no spare key. There was no master key, either. The sole key that would open the door to our room was in our room, lying on the bed.
The quick-thinking clerk, however, devised an ingenious way for us to get in. He walked over to the outside of the bathroom and started pulling out the slats of glass that composed the louvered window. When they were all out, he and Richard gave me a boost and I squeezed through the opening, climbed over the toilet and went around to open the door for Richard while the clerk replaced the glass in the window.
As we started to undress for bed, the casual security and threat of petty theft weighed on my mind, and I said to Richard, “You know, there was a sign at the front desk that said we should keep our passports in the hotel safe. What do you think? Maybe we should?”
He shook his head. “They’ll be perfectly safe in the room while we’re here. And we’ll just take them with us when we go out.”
This sounded reasonable, so we turned out the lights and snuggled down into the bed, listening to the surf pounding below our window. We soon dropped off to sleep, only to bolt awake when we heard shouting in the hallway. We heard a scuffle, and some grunts, and at one point, someone slammed heavily up against our door, giving us quite a start. We heard smacking sounds, like fists hitting flesh, lots more shouting in Spanish, and then we heard a crash of splintering glass followed by a prolonged, blood-curdling scream. Hysterical sobbing ensued, followed by more yelling, and then everything became utterly quiet.
Normally, Richard might get up and go check out a disturbance, but tonight, he thought it wiser if we both just stayed in bed. The next morning, we ran into David and Alice and they told us what had transpired. Apparently, a love triangle that involved the manager, one of his employees, and a guest became quite heated. The two men got into a fight and at one point, the manager put his fist through a window, severing an artery and a couple of tendons. Since there was no one in Limone to do the necessary emergency surgery, he had flown to San José last night. Unfortunately, he left with the only key to the hotel safe—which is where David and Alice had deposited their passports for safe-keeping. They were supposed to leave for Nicaragua the following morning and of course, would need their passports for their journey.
“They said he should be back by tonight,” David told us rather morosely. We all knew that this was optimistic to the point of insanity. Horace liked to say that the word “mañana” didn’t carry the same sense of urgency in Costa Rica as it did in the rest of Central America.
We wished them luck and then conferred with Jerry and Renee over breakfast as to how we wanted to spend our day. None of us were charmed with Limone, but we had heard that Cahuita, a spot south of here on the coast, had beautiful beaches. So we decided to go there. We went to the bus depot and bought tickets, then boarded as soon as the coach, a converted school bus, was available.
As we waited for our departure, we watched a mother indulge her young son’s every wish for every single kind of fried junk food and sugar-impregnated treat in the food stalls that lined the street where the depot resided. We thought she was asking for trouble, as the boy’s appetite seemed insatiable, but we didn’t really think about any larger implications until she finally got fed up with his requests and marched him onto the bus. Two seats in front of us, he stopped and projectile-vomited a vile, Pepto-Bismal pink, chunky wad of puke onto the floor of the bus, right next to our seats, as it happened. We waited for the mother to clean up the mess, but she didn’t do anything, just pushed her son along into the interior of the bus. We waited for someone to notify the driver, but no one did. More and more passengers boarded the bus, tracking through the vomit. I was trying to decide if one of us should do something, when one of the passengers threw a newspaper on top of the rank puddle, and I thought, well, okay, that should help.
At that moment, the bus driver sprang on board, settled into his seat, closed the doors, and started up with a big whoosh. The wind generated from our acceleration then rushed through all the open windows, and the vomit-soaked newspaper pages rose up and began whirling around the interior of the bus. I thought things couldn’t get much worse, but that was before we stopped along the way and picked up several sweaty soccer teams who had just finished rousing games in the tropical heat. They crowded onto the bus and then people started squeezing three to a seat. A man wedged himself onto the seat next to me and then proceeded to doze in fits and starts. Every time he dropped off, his head would plop into my lap like a bowling ball, one covered in some sort of slippery hair product. He would jerk awake, sit upright, and then repeat the cycle. I wished I’d brought a pillow.
We thought The Jungle Train was leisurely, but this bus must have stopped every two hundred yards. By the time we reached Cahuita, we were once again exhausted and hot and thoroughly wilted. And Cahuita … well, let’s just say that Cahuita made Limone look like Malibu. The town center at this point in Cahuita’s history (I’m sure it’s different now) was primarily a collection of rundown shacks surrounding the town dump. Most dumps don’t smell too wonderful, as anyone knows who has encountered one. But a dump in the tropics has a particularly sour, stomach-turning, mind-numbing odor. We staggered out of town and practically ran for the beaches, which in fact, turned out to be exquisite: white sand beaches, clear, azure-colored water (the snorkeling and scuba-diving was supposed to be outstanding here), lovely palm and mangrove forests.
Jerry and Richard and Renee all decided to go check out some rocks that formed a natural jetty, but I hadn’t brought proper footwear for such an activity, so I decided just to hang out on the beach. While I was sitting on the sand admiring the view, a sweet young man came along and gave me some fruit that he had collected from a nearby tree. They were a citrus fruit about the size of a small kumquat, and they looked a little bit like a yellowish, tiny lime. He showed me how to eat them; you split open the thin, tough skin and then popped the fruit into your mouth. The fruit was composed primarily of a large, hard, inedible seed, but it was surrounded by a tart, refreshing bit of flesh that you could suck on. He hung around and chatted with me a little, then went on his way.
When everyone got back, we walked along the shore until it was time to go back to town and catch the bus. As it was the last bus of the day, and we definitely didn’t want to get stuck in Cahuita over night, we made sure to arrive at the bus stop early. (When we got back, Luis told us frightful tales of people getting their heads chopped off with machetes in Cahuita, although I was beginning to think that he had some sort of preoccupation with people getting their heads chopped off.) Every single person in town stared at us while we waited, in a none-too-friendly way, rather like we were tomato bugs on their prize tomatoes. At one point, a dump-scrounging dog came cringing up to us, reeking to high heaven and acting like it might just take a chomp out of one of us. Feeling nervous, we decided to order Cokes from a nearby pulpería just to have something to do. We were heartened by the fact that after we ordered our drinks, the woman running the pulpería gave us a glimmer of a smile. Everyone relaxed a little as we drank our Cokes, and it seemed as if the townsfolk regarded us with a more tolerant air. Richard finished his beverage and set the bottle down on the counter, saying, “Man, was I ever thirsty!”
And Jerry, being incomprehensibly Jerry, said, “You don’t even know what thirsty is, white boy.” His words reverberated throughout the town square.
At that, the woman’s eyes at the counter became glittery and hooded and the rest of the town tensed, on high unfriendly alert. Even the dog that we had managed to shoo away with faint, half-hearted kicks started growling and stalking back toward us, its tail sticking straight up like a stiletto. Thank God the bus pulled up right then, or we might have been the next victims of a machete beheading.
After another long, hot, steamy bus ride back to Limone, we enjoyed a tasty meal at a modest establishment in town, the highlight being the crispy, sweet, fried plantains. Then we took a wild cab ride back to the garage, I mean hotel (which apparently—and unsurprisingly—collapsed into rubble during an earthquake that occurred several years later), and spent an uneventful night. Of course, the manager had not arrived by the time we left the next morning, so David and Alice were stuck in Limone until he showed up. I felt sooooo glad we hadn’t put our passports in the hotel safe for safe-keeping. I would probably be tempted to dynamite the thing by now.
The good news was, we were on our way home. The bad news was, it took longer to get back than it did to arrive since the train couldn’t travel as fast up the steep side of the mountain range, which we had descended on our way to Limone. By the time we got back, we once again felt like dog meat so we pretty much just collapsed into bed.
The next morning, Jerry came sauntering into our apartment shortly after we arose, inquiring about a broom and dust pan. We tracked these items down for him and as we accompanied him back to his room on our way to breakfast, Richard asked him what he needed it for.
“Oh, I have a tarantula in my room, so I thought I would just take it outside,” he told us. Jerry was a Buddhist and a pacifist, and, of course, a vegetarian. He had even participated in a walk for peace across the U. S. in the early 1980s. Of course he didn’t want to hurt a living thing, but even though I had seen Alan, the Monteverde biologist, pick up a tarantula and stroke its abdomen while the tarantula waved its legs in delight, I didn’t think that Jerry was going to have a similar experience. Especially not with a dust pan and broom.
Richard swallowed a smile and voiced my thoughts. “I don’t know that you’re going to be able to sweep it into a dust pan,” he said.
Jerry, the tarantula expert, pursed his lips and replied, “I don’t think it’ll be a problem.”
“Okay,” said Richard. “Good luck.”
Jerry strolled nonchalantly into his room and closed the door behind him while we couldn’t resist waiting outside to see what would happen next. First, we listened to the brisk, bristly sound of a sweeping broom. Then we heard a shrill and panicked “Eek!” followed by a protracted series of hysterical smashing, whapping, and pounding noises. Unable to tear ourselves away, we were still standing there when the door opened and a white-faced Jerry emerged gripping the dustpan, upon which rested a completely mangled, smushed tarantula.
“It leaped!” he declared defensively.
Sadly, this was Jerry’s last day in paradise. He and Renee were off to pursue adventure somewhere else. But this was only the beginning of our visitors. It seemed that every other person we knew had always wanted to come to Costa Rica and had only been waiting until a friend, family member or mere acquaintance moved here to give them the excuse to visit. Richard’s and my parents arrived next, all of them a little concerned, actually, about the fact that we had a) moved out of the country and b) taken up residence in war-torn Central America.
My parents, the most concerned, arrived first, with no idea whatsoever what to expect from this little corner of the universe.
Above: A beach in Cahuita.
*Intro:
At the end of 1982, both Richard and I had been out of work for a year, despite constant looking, and the best we had been able to come up with was scrounging for odd jobs. It was an economic climate much like the one we’re in now, and we were feeling both dejected and panicked about what the future might hold for us. We certainly could never have imagined what happened next: a dream job in a dream country for a dream boss.
This is Chapter 17 of the memoir I wrote about the year-and-a-half that Richard and I spent living in Costa Rica. It was quite the adventure, living with a an eccentric and flamboyant heiress** from Dallas, her elegant and erudite husband who wrote Westerns, and their handsome, bad boy son, whom Richard used to babysit. Oh, yeah, and next door resided the safe house for Eden Pastora, aka “Commander Zero,” leader of the Contras who were waging a civil war with the Sandanistas in Nicaragua at that time.
This was a particularly golden era in Costa Rica’s history, before it became “discovered,” even before the introduction of television there, really (it started coming in during the time we lived there). It was wild and exotic and magical and amazing.
So once a week, I’ll be excerpting a chapter from Crazy Good Fortune Out of the Blue until I’ve told the whole tale. I hope you enjoy these stories!
**Jane, sadly, passed away not long ago, but she left a legacy as colorful as she was. In 1984, she commissioned one of the largest environmental sculptures in the Western Hemisphere, a set of standing stones in Arlington, Texas that were designed and built by sculptor Norm Hines. Caelum Moor has been a source of enormous controversy over the years, which I’ll write about one of these days. In the meantime, feel free to Google “Caelum Moor” and see what turns up. It’s fascinating.
Thursday, June 25, 2009