Crazy Good Fortune Out of the Blue - 34*
Okay, sure, there were a couple of drawbacks to the Guanacaste experience. One was the long and fatiguing drive—six hours over four-wheel-drive roads, gouged out here and there by the torrential rains during the rainy season, studded with large boulders and knobbly tree roots. (I started wanting a special bra that would completely flatten my breasts against my rib cage and not permit any sort of movement whatsoever. This kind of violent activity can be painful and I don’t know how any woman who wears a cup size larger than AA can bear to jog.) And as it turns out, the water pressure during the dry season was such that the water from the shower at the hotel merely dribbled down the side of the rock wall, so that to rinse off, we had to plaster ourselves against the wall and stick our fingers into the shower head, hoping to encourage a few rivulets to trickle over us.
But apart from that, this place lived up to its billing. Our hotel sat right on the beach, with a bar/restaurant occupying an open, covered patio that looked right over the cream-colored sand to the pounding surf. When you wanted another beer, all you had to do was hold up your hand and shout, “Cabino cinco!” and a cold, frosty one would magically appear on the table. Hammocks were strung up between palm trees for anyone to use, and the body surfing was outstanding. The owners even had a white-faced monkey as a pet who would climb over you as if you were a tree stump. This was my first glimpse of a monkey, in fact. None of our subsequent trips to the cloud forest had yielded a howler sighting, and I was having to reconcile myself to the idea that I might leave Costa Rica without ever spotting a howler monkey.
This white-face was a tamed monkey, of course, so the interaction wasn’t quite as exciting to me as spotting wild monkeys in the trees would have been, but it was still quite wonderful. Monkeys are truly amazing creatures, so beguilingly sentient. To meet a monkey’s gaze is a startling experience, and to feel their deft, smooth hands and feet grasping onto you as this one did, is a kick. White-faced monkeys have dark fur all over their bodies except their faces, which is framed with a white oval of fur, emphasizing and highlighting their facial features, especially their curious brown eyes.
Down the beach from the hotel lay a marshy area and this was a rich, magical spot as well. It contained all manner of birds: kingfishers, egrets, cranes, parakeets, and herons. But most spectacular of all was a flock of spoonbills. Spoonbills look like pink flamingos but the tip of their beaks swells out into a spoon shape—just like you’d expect from the name.
A few beaches away there was a spot named Flamingo Beach, as a matter of fact, earning this title from the millions of pulverized pink conch shells that comprised the sand. It was rumored that Elizabeth Taylor had once tried to buy this beach to build a house on, but no one can own the beach in Costa Rica. It’s all public land. We drove over to check it out one afternoon, and as we had been body surfing in front of our hotel all morning, we thought that it would be fun to try this stretch of water, too.
The grains of sand were larger here than just about any other beach I had been to, but it was still very soft and caressing. All the individual pieces of broken shell had been polished by the ocean, so they slipped around sensually beneath our bare feet. In addition, the contour of the beach was somewhat complex, lending a picturesque, ruffled look to the edge where it met the water. It was a slightly steep beach, too, tilting toward the waves.
I hadn’t grown up on the ocean, but various friends who visited had given me instruction on how to read the waves and a beach. So I knew that the steepness and unevenness of the shoreline could create more challenging conditions. But I had been surfing long enough now that I was feeling pretty confident. I plunged into the water along with Lawrence, Nathan, Hal, and Richard, even though the waves here were bigger than those near the hotel. Making my way out to the surf line, I felt jostled by the water, pushed and shoved, in fact, as if I occupied a gigantic washing machine. This began to make me feel a little nervous, actually, but I decided to forge onward for the kind of reason I always have trouble remembering afterward.
I did take my time in picking my wave. The surf was getting heavier and heavier and I was looking for something as petite as possible. Finally, a swell came along that I thought I could negotiate and I kicked my legs and swam into the crest, at first pleased when I caught it, only to be thoroughly dismayed when the wave picked me up and began bending me inexorably backward as if it sought to break my spine. I struggled as hard as I could, but the power of water is an awesome, elemental force. It felt like I was being crushed inside a colossal fist. It just kept bending me back, back … while nightmarish fantasies of being confined to a wheelchair like my dad crowded into my mind’s eye. The wave seemed to last forever, and I tumbled below the surface, unable to take a breath.
Just when I thought either my lungs would explode or my back would snap in two, the wave reared up and hurled me onto the beach. I slammed onto the sand so hard it knocked what little wind I had left out of me, and I later found scrapes all over my hands, knees, and chin. In addition, I had about twenty lbs. of sand shoved down the front of my suit. I staggered away from the water and collapsed under a palm tree while I caught my breath and tried to scoop the sand out of my swimsuit. The best solution would have been to get back in the water and rinse it away, but there was no way I was getting back into that ocean any time soon. I was lucky not to have sustained any real injury. One day when we went to surf at the Playa Manuel Antonio in Quepos, we found out from a knot of concerned onlookers that a young man had drowned there only moments before. A friend of ours had his shoulder dislocated on the same beach. And the waves on that playa were nothing like what I had just experienced.
No one wanted to surf for long under these risky conditions, so we headed back to our lovely little hotel where we planted ourselves on the patio and drank ice-cold beers and ate fresh, tender fish and yummy rice and beans. I found myself recovering quite nicely from my tussle with the wave and I watched the sun sink below the horizon, feeling relaxed, worn-out and happy. When the green ray flashed right after the sun disappeared, we all gave a big cheer and then watched in silence as a small fishing boat tootled back and forth in the fading lavender light. This was one of those rare and sought-after “perfect moments” —I felt so ecstatically content that if a comet had come along and smacked me right between the eyes at that moment, I would have died obscenely happy.
The next day we headed back to Escazú over the slow, bumpy, bone-rattling roads. We alternated who sat up front and who sat in back because the difference in comfort was considerable; we tried not to think about the fact that we had six hours of four-wheel torture to endure. At one point, Nathan, who was sitting in the passenger’s seat—with the window rolled down, of course—turned to Richard and said, “What was that noise?”
Richard shrugged. “I didn’t hear anything.”
Nathan glanced into the back to seek possible confirmation but none of us had heard anything, either.
“It sounded really weird,” he said. “Like a really eerie growl.”
Richard slammed on the brakes. “A weird growl?”
“Yeah.”
Richard shoved the jeep into reverse and began backing up.
“What do you think it was?” I asked, but he was concentrating on driving and didn’t reply. He pulled Ruby over into the weeds next to an extremely tall banyan tree and we all piled out of the car, eager for any diversion whatsoever. If it was an animal, I thought it most likely gone by now, but we looked around us in the silence. Suddenly, a big blob came hurtling down from above and splatted right between Candia and me. We examined it. It appeared to be a large, dark turd. Cautiously, we looked up at the lowermost limbs of the banyan tree, craning our necks to see what manner of animal had just tried to shit on our heads. Another missile came rocketing down toward us and we skipped hastily out of the way. Just then, the leaves parted on the lowermost limb about a hundred feet in the air and a dark, forbidding face peered down at us, giving us a grumpy stare.
“Howlers!” exclaimed Richard, just as another monkey muffin came zipping down, making us all dance back even farther, giggling and laughing. The enjoyment we all seemed to be deriving from this activity reminded me of those zilches we used to burn in our college dorm rooms—remember those? We’d get a plastic bag from the dry cleaner’s and tie it in knots, then hang it from the ceiling, place a wastebasket full of water beneath it and set it afire, finding the falling incendiary globs to be enormously entertaining.
After a while, they either gave up trying to drive us away with their nasty little projectiles or they ran out of them, but we had all had our fun so we climbed back into the jeep and resumed our journey. And I had finally seen wild monkeys! Even though they were not behaving in a very friendly fashion, it was an exhilarating experience to encounter such a high intelligence dwelling up there in the trees. It made the forests of North America seem awfully barren all of a sudden. No doubt about it, it was going to be awfully hard to leave.
Above: The Gulf of Nicoya. Photograph courtesy of Ted James.
*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 34 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. Check out my blog entry, “The Amazing Tale of Caelum Moor,” for more information.
Thursday, October 29, 2009