9-7-00 A Present From Puerto Rico

 

9-25-00

We’re back in LA now. I don’t seem to have my regular journal. It’s not in my backpack. It has to be either at home or at school. I only hope Rochelle’s not reading it. So I guess I’ll do my three pages in here tonight. I never did finish writing about the last few days in Costa Rica. I can smell the bananas right now. Hmm. I wrote a bunch of fragmentary impressions of Tortuguero. I couldn’t write for a while, but now it’s coming back. We sped down the waterway back toward Moin. It had stopped raining. Our guide’s eyes were as red as they had been the day before (Maybe it was from the diesel exhaust from the boat’s engine), but he was sharp-eyed, spotting sloths, spider monkeys, capuchins, and caimans amid the thick flora along the banks. At one point, he suddenly cut the engine and reversed to a tree on the water’s edge. I didn’t say an monkeys, sloths, gators or anything. I couldn’t figure out what had caught his eye. “Murcielagos,” he said. Bats. Then I saw them. A column of them lined up the trunk of the tree, perfectly spaced. I would have expected them to be hanging from the branches, but was so odd to me was the perfect linearity and measured structure of their distance from each other. I took some tape, and on we sped again. Electric blue morphos butterflies, some the size of saucers flitted by, cranes herons, and egrets patrolled the mud flats, roseate spoonbills and kingfishers perched on logs and overhanging branches. Weird pink buds hung like exposed sex organs from long stalks connected to some banana like tree.  Eventually, we came to a place where a sort of waterborne lawnmower, a paddleboat with a long-bladed wheel, was cutting the mats of hyacinth that grew in great profusion and threatened to clog the river from either side. Soon, the water plants had enclosed us on all sides, and stretched upriver as far as you could see. The pilot worked his craft forward and back, trying to escape the tangle without fouling the propeller. We crept along, pushing masses of plant matter ahead of us. You couldn’t even see the water. Grasshoppers jumped into the boat. I leaned over and plucked a purple flower to give to Rochelle. She seemed distant.

After about forty-five minutes, we finally broke free of the hyacinth. We chugged past clapboard dwellings on stilts and rusty, corrugated tin abodes, hammocks hung in front. Pigs wallowed on the banks with their piglets. We stopped at a jungle outpost where a “pet” monkey is held captive, chained to a Coca Cola sign. A rough, open-faced shed contained a rough bar, on which a toucan sat eating nuts. The man at the bar served beer and guaro. I wanted to be thrilled by the place, but the monkey looked bummed. I slammed an Imperial, and soon we were on our way again.

 Hours later we pulled back into the riverport at Sarapiqui. We gave a girl a ride into Limon before hitting the highway, sipping through the Dole plantations, passing slow, exhaust-belching big rigs piled high with bananas or pigs or cattle. Up the pot-holed roads, over rocky rivers, past the peak of Irazu, coming down out of the clouds.

9-7-00 Th 1:24 PM

The 00-01 school year begins. These kids seem relatively mellow. I have a kid with a tracheotomy tube in her throat. Air whistles through it all day. She comes with an aide who sits like a statue in the corner of the room. I also have a pair of identical twins. IDENTICAL. The most identical twins I have ever seen. They come to school dressed and groomed identically. Stephanie and Fanny. They war the same shoes and socks, the same skirts, the same shirts, they have the same haircuts and barrettes, the same watches, and the same backpacks. As I passed the principal in the hall, one of my students from last year, Francine, ran up. “Mr. Zurn! Mr. Zurn! I brought you a present from Puerto Rico!” The nine-year-old cherub handed me a straw hat with two bottles of Bacardi rum in it. Sweet kid. She gave me a hug and ran off. The principal gave me something, too: a funny look.

Back in Costa Rica: We stopped in Limon, and I cast mine eyes upon the Caribbean Sea for the first time in my life, more notable fact than epiphany. We needed a bank, but it was Sunday, and all were closed. We drove past the port along the seawall trying to figure out what to do. We stopped in some Panama-City-Sailor-Wanna-Hump-Hump bar to have a beer and plot some course of action. We decided to push south to Cahuita. The road paralleled the coast, jungle on the right, beach on the left. The dwellings we passed here and there were all on stilts. We turned off at Cahuita, a pit of a third-world coastal village where dogs are said to run rampant and the dealers’ll get you if you’re not careful. It was a haphazard criss-cross of dirt roads, and thought it is small, it was chaotic. I got a bad vibe, and we decided to keep moving down to Puerto Viejo de Talamanca. A steamy rain fell for a while, but by the time we arrived twenty minutes later, the sun was burning down. There was a big carnival in town to protest oil drilling. A banner was strung over the road with a skull and crossbones protesting “Petroleo.” We stopped off at a seaside tavern looking out through coco palms to the sheltered beach and sea beyond. A barge had run aground long enough ago for a tree to be growing out of it. Its abandonment seemed to symbolize the sense of progress down there. I drank a few Imperials and a redhaired German barmaid said she had come to visit for a few days a few years ago and had never left. She wasn’t the only one.

Ten Fe

 8-4-00 M 9:54 AM

 Labor Day. We bumped up and down mountain roads into the fenced off green hills of Tilarin's ranchlands, neon butterflies flitting across our path. An old cowboy was limping along the side of the road, so we stopped and gave him a ride, too. When we got to the little town, we let our passengers out and drove along the shore of stunning Laker Arenal with the conical volcano rising across the water. The houses here are well kept with yards full of flowers that made me want to live there. We stopped at some cool stone bar and barbecue pit on the edge of the lake called Eqqus. A multi-layered dance floor built into the hill behind it made me wish it was a Saturday night. The whole place was constructed of volcanic rock from Arenal. Hints of fragrant wood smoke perfumed the air. Soon there was nothing left to do but continue on. The reeds, palms, and bamboo closed in on the road as we approached the Tabacon Hot Springs. A naturally heated stream cascades down from the volcano, forming pools in which you may soak and watch the fireworks show of lava spitting from the cone--or so I have read; it was too overcast to see the peak. We had lunch there: chicken cordon bleu and shrimp-stuffed steak. We strolled the grounds and took some pictures before getting back in the Terrio. We drove on to Fortuna where we stopped for gas, and then on through ranches and farm towns, scattering cattle and geese as we went. It began to rain as we neared Ciudad Quesada. I took the wrong road out of town and ended up on another cliffhanger where there was nowhere to turn around until we reached a toll road at a lonely mountain pass where a lady confirmed that I needed to turn around. We slalomed back down and found the way to San Miguel where we stopped so Rochelle could go to the bathroom. I locked the keys in the car. Fuck and shit. I stomped down the road in the rain until I found a garage. The guys there were eager to help. They had no slim jim, no nothing but a copper wire. "Ten fe," one said. "Have faith." We drove in a beat-up, backfiring truck back to the Terrio. A man was already trying to help Rochelle with a bit of wire he had found in the trash. They were bending it down through the window that was open an inch. The lock button had no head. I was certain the copper wire could only slip off. I guessed we were going to have to break the window. I don't know how it was possible, but the guy did it. He managed to get the loop in the end of the wire over the stub of the lock and pull it up. It just didn't seem possible. When the look pulled up, everyone cheered. I asked what I could do for them. They wanted nothing. "How about some beers?" I asked in Spanish. They consented to some Pilsens which we drank on the sidewalk. "I can't believe," it I told Rochelle as we were driving away.

"I could," she said. "I had faith."

A big anthill, about the size of a Volkswagen hulked nearby.

 

9-1-00 1:30 PM F In the air over Nicaragua

I was waiting at the gate at the Finca Ecologia on Monteverde. I kept hearing the weird metallic bonk of the worm-face bird, but I couldn’t spot it through the dense foliage. An agouti, like a cross between a little fawn with no antlers and a giant, long-legged rat, emerged from the forest onto the the dirt trail. A guy on a motorcycle showed up and opened the gate. He gave me a map, and I set out on the longest trail. Being the first one there (it was seven in the morning), I walked through a few hundred spiderwebs. I heard symphony of whistles and calls as sun rays began to penetrate the jungle. A few of them sounded like San Jose construction workers. A few more agouti wandered among trees choked by vines. Big whoop. Where were the monkeys, sloths, coatis, and parrots? I came to a lookout point high on a cliff. You could see the Gulf of Nicoyo beyond the lush green canyon and verdant farmland in the distance. A swallow-tailed kite soared on the air currents. A big anthill, about the size of a Volkswagen hulked nearby. I continued along through more webs and came across a convoy of leafcutter ants hauling their bounty across the forest floor. I switched to the red trail. A sign read that it was difficult, but intrepid Indiana Zurn fears nothing. He laughs at difficulty. How difficult could it be? Ha! I was crying for my mommy. It was cut into the cliff about two feet wide, slippery, and muddy with about a thousand-foot drop off one side. I was sweaty and panting within minutes as I descended a series of muddy switchbacks. I could hear a waterfall. I wished I had my hiking boots, but they were forgotten back in Montezuma. I slipped and fell hard, gashing my wrist and spraining my thumb. I pushed on. The falls fell about a hundred feet. Okay. I took their photograph and panted back up the canyon. BFD, I thought. Three hours hard work, no coati, no monkey, no sloth, no exotic birds. Pbbfft. I staggered back to the farm. “Hey, Kids! Thirsty?” Once again, I’d brought tobacco but no water on the Bataan Death March. I talked to a guy at the finca entrance and told him I hadn’t seen shit. He said que era un perezoso muy cerca. A sloth nearby. He led me to a barely discernible furball a hundred feet up in the trees, completely unmoving. Ooh. Phbbt. Okay, I’ve seen a two-toed sloth now. I guess. I started heading back up the trail. “Coatimundi,” said the guy. A Wily Coyote-looking thing, with pointed snout, a white mask, brown coat and a long tail sticking straight in the air ambled out of the brush to forage some fruit in a feeder. I took his picture, a cool-looking rascal. A veces los monos carasblancas vienen muy cerca, said the kid. Sometimes, the white-faced monkeys come very close. I hung around a while, but they didn’t come. I limped the two miles or so back to the pensión. We packed up, had a beer, and headed for Arenal, the recently exploded volcano. We were trying to go via Tilaran, but weren’t sure of the way. We came to a crossroads and asked a boy. He pointed the way and said he was going to Tilaran. We gave him a ride.

8-31-00 4:21 PM Th

We’re back in San Jose on the sixth floor of the Del Rey overlooking Avenida 2. Last Saturday, I think, we pulled into Monteverde in the late afternoon. A hip Central American rainforest mountain town full of European backpackers, youth hostels, and canopy-tour come-ons.  We had spaghetti for lunch on the fifty-meter main street in a place called Daiquiri. I had a beer and we looked over the guidebook, trying to orient ourselves. Rochelle still had trouble walking with her swollen sunburned ankles. We ended up checking into a pension. It had hot water, a bed, and a private bath. Across the street were a book store and coffee shop. I got a book of poems by Jose De Bravo, the most famous poet of Costa Rica, and I bought a New York Times and a Miami Herald, and the pretty gal who worked there smiled like she meant it. I got the feeling the hottie who ran the horses at the hostel was of yogurt-eating wimps, but was turned on by beer bellies. I read and wrote by candlelight after sundown. We went out for burgers at Teens. They were not good. Costa Rica is not a place for burgers. We went to bed early.

I’m writing this a week later, and it’s just mush in my psyche now.

I woke up early the next morning and walked about three miles to a place called La Finca Ecologia where I hoped to see some wildlife: sloths, monkeys, coatis, quetzals, parrots…

Sunburned to Hell

 8-29?-00 W 8:00 PM Hotel Del Rey, S. J., C. R.

The sailfishes looked gold when they jumped, pump, reel, pump, and reel. We boated four of them and let them go. They were around a hundred pounds each. It took ten or fifteen minutes of pumping and reeling to get each of ‘em in. Roch had one hooked that felt like a twelve-hundred-pounder. Twelve hundred was the biggest fish Mikhail said he’d seen the Talking Fish ever catch. Said it took four hours. I worked and worked on this fish. My muscles were screaming. I didn’t care anymore, but I didn’t want to give up. When I finally got the fish close enough, we started catching glimpses of it, we saw that it wasn’t a big fish at all, it was hooked through the dorsal fin and was coming in sideways. We gave it up around one o’clock and headed back to port. We had kept our tuna and dropped them at the Sunrise Café before walking back up the beach to Tamarindo town. We had to check out right then. I found the keys on top of the car! We went to the Hotel Zully. It has a nice pool in front, but the room was simple: no air, no TV, just a bed. I took a swim in the pool and then a shower. Roch took a nap, and I walked to the Third World Bar. Saw some live dog porn. I drank and wrote while the sun sank into the sea. A lightning storm kicked up a fireworks show. It got dark around six, and I went back and got Roch to go over to the Sunrise Café and get our tuna grilled. Bats flitted about after moths in the rain. We talked with a family that had just come back raving from Osas and Drake Bay while I kept an eye on the Cowboys and Rams on a TV over the bar. We went back to Hotel Zully and crashed. We woke the next morning around ten. Rochelle was sunburned to hell and her ankles had swelled and she could barely walk. I walked to a little joint next door and drank coffee and studied the Lonely Planet we got to replace the Frommer’s. We picked up some apples and water and bounced back out to the highway through Santa Cruz, south to the Tempisque Ferry. Got my ass pulled over by the transit authority and had to pay a bribe of twenty thousand colones to some Jeri-curled fuck in uniform that I’d not get out of the country without paying a lawyer and waiting two weeks. On the other hand, I could just pay him 15,000. I had two ten-thousand colon bills. He kept the change.

We had a weird lunch at the ferry, waiting in the oppressive, hot, humid overcast. We were heading for the Monte Nube Cloud Forest. The way there was The Most Fucked-Up Road I have ever been on. Pot-holed, rocky, narrow, with a death-drop on one side, not enough room coming the other way, rainy, foggy—who knows what adjectives I’m leaving out.

8-28-00 10:27 AM M

We made arrangements win the lobby of the Tamarindo Hotel to Wilson Roger’s skiff the next morning around seven thirty. So, we went to bed early. The next morning, We got up and walked down to the main hotel for the breakfast buffet, which was included: Eggs, rice, beans, tocineta, papaya, banana, guava, mango, cantaloupe, watermelon, banana bread, omelets, and more. I couldn’t find the room key. Whatever. We walked down along the beach to the skiff. Two dogs were locked together by the ass, post coitus. The bitch wouldn’t relinquish the male’s dick. He tried vainly to pull away. It was tough not to notice the metaphor. We boarded the skiff and motored out to do the Talking Fish where Wilson Roger waited. He had a strong, square jaw, gray hair, and leathery skin. The two hands’ names were Ethal and Mikhail, both native Tikos, darkened by exposure to the sun. Wilson welcomed us, said we’d fish around for tuna and such for while before going out to look for “bigger stuff,” i.e. Billfish. We drew the anchor and headed out. He gave us some last-minute instructions about reeling up any slack so that when they jumped, they wouldn’t be able to throw the hook. He told us to pump the rod, reeling on the way down, slow and steady. The hands prepped the lines and lures while we motored a few clicks offshore before turning parallel to the coast and letting out the lines. We had only been trawling about five minutes before we hooked up. “Fish on!” I called, jumping to a rod. “Reel! Reel!” Wilson yelled even though, that’s what we were doing. Roosters? Tuna? Wahoo? Dorado? Whatever it was, it wasn’t big enough to pump. I just kept turning the crank. Suddenly, it dove, taking a hundred feet I’d already cranked. I reeled faster, burning blisters into my fingers. Finally, I saw a gold flash tearing around beneath the surface: Yellowfin. I pulled it to the boat and Mikhail gaffed it. It was about a fifteen pounder.

Spinner dolphins gathered round the boat to laugh and play and show off, performing their signature move: flying straight up out of the water, glistening, spinning half a dozen times before falling back. They did synchronized pairs as if they had been in training. We also spotted spotted dolphins, but they weren't nearly as exuberant or acrobatic as those amazing spinners who clearly know joy. Still, I didn't think I was feeling as exhilarated as I should have been. Even when we hooked up with a sailfish, one of the deckhands would set the hook, and all I did was sit in the chair and reel it in. The sail leapt from the sea and shook the hook. I was disappointed but inside of another minute were hooked up again. "Derecha! A la derecha!" screamed the skipper and everyone sprang to action. Ethol yanked the rod to the side to set the hook and handed the rod to me as Mikhail commenced to reel in the other lines. I fumbled with fitting the tip of the rod handle into the cup on my belt and lost a fish to the ire of Captain Rogers.

No Honest John Goes Unpunished

 8-27-00 Su 6:55 PM

The Caribbean! "Have you ever had a mind eraser?" We're in Puerto Viejo de Talamanca, few clicks from the Panamanian border en el Mar Caribe. Where did I leave off? I wrote in the big book about the horse ride [rainforest adorned ticket to el museo nacional de Costa Rica] to the ocean falls. When I got back to town, I was running all over like Honest John, trying to pay for my horse when I could have easily run off, since no one but me seemed interested in my payment. Meanwhile, Rochelle had packed up the car, and we were ready to head up the Nicosia Peninsula and find a town we liked to spend a day or two. We bumped along under leaden skies that dulled the jungles. The highway soon paved the way through clearcut cattle land up into Nicoya. Bouncing over the pocked main street, we came to a fork in the road: Samara or Nicosa? We turned back to a roadside soda to have a beer and consult Frommer. Problem was, we'd left Frommer at the Sano Banano while I paid for the horse. I silently blamed la esposa. I was devastated. I felt blind and naked without the book. How were we to make informed decisions? I tried to play it off like it was no big deal. We asked an extremely friendly cab drive for directions to the road to Tamarindo. I thought he might blow me and buy us a meal, but he just gave us twenty minutes of directions that amounted to "Go that way and turn right at the sign." Friendly guy. The road was good up to the turnoff to Tamarindo. I agonized over whether to turn toward Flamingo instead, which I did, then changed my mind and made a u-turn, then stopped and did an eenie meanie that told me to go on to Tamarindo. We had a sunset dinner along the wide bay where the boats are moored in the open water. I had fish, rice, beans, and beer. When we were done, we drove up and down the dusty street checking room rates. We decided to splurge on the $69-a-night Hotel Tamarindo, with its marble-floored lobby and pool on the beach, A/C, hot water, and ESPN! Too bad our room was in the servant's quarters across the street. I caught the A's losing to Cleveland and Iowa advancing to the Little League World Series. 

They're All Cowards, He Said

 He was trying to hide from his wife how much the narrow dirt road through the fog and rain up into the mountains to the Cloud Forest of Gunacaste overwhelmed him. At times, he wasn’t sure he was on the road at all and oaths chipped through his cheerful façade. The road was not a lot of gentle slopes with hairpin turns but seemed rather to slither straight up the steep incline like a snake. In the back of his mind, he knew the money was disappearing, his wife was uncomfortable, and this was not her idea of a fun vacation. He wondered if apologizing for subjecting her to the sweaty, dusty, wet, jarring punishment she had endured in her advanced stage of pregnancy would only make things worse.

A day earlier, he had left her to sleep back in their room on the coast at Monteczuma while he wrangled up a horse and guide in the village of clapboard shacks and rusty tin roofs to take him to a waterfall about which he had read, that fell over a cliff straight into the ocean. They allowed the horses an easy gait along the rocky beach, the crashing waves sometimes washing over their hooves and carrying all the way to the face of the cliff. At a notch in the cliff wall, they took a trail up into the jungle. It was good. The horse was well-trained. A knot in the reins acted like a joystick. You held the knot to the right or left and the horse would go right or left. If you pushed it forward, she would break into a trot; if you pulled back, she would stop, and if you pulled farther back, she would go backwards. He felt the first stirrings of an ancient bond between man and horse. They were a part of each other. He pushed vines from his face and noted a brown iguana on a dead-looking tree as the trail descended to a clear shallow creek, and they were on the beach again. He eased the knot forward until the horse broke into a gallop, kicking up Pacific spray where the waves thinned and feel back.

              Across the bay, a mile away, under the gray sky, a thin white line was drawn from the jungle to the dark sea. The tide was coming in, and the waves lapped at the horses’ legs with more intensity. The guide, Esteban, pulled his horse to a stop and signaled j to do the same. A set of waves crashed onto the beach and carried hard up to the wall of the cliff. “Cuando digo,” he said, “vamos rapido, asi. Hyaa hyaa,” he said, and bounced on his saddle indicating how fast they should go. Another wave scattered the profusion of driftwood on the beach, some of it as large as logs. As the last wave receded, Esteban said, “Ahora! Hyaa!” and his horse shot forward, galloping in curves around the driftwood. “Hyaa! Hyaa!” called j, pushing the reins forward and kicking his heels against the horse’s side. He bounced on the saddle and used the joystick to steer the horse around rocks and wood for a full minute before the cliff face fell away near another creek, and Esteban pulled his horse to a stop. They waited for another set of waves to crash and recede before sprinting through the driftwood again, and now, they were stopping and starting again between each wave, threading between the Scylla and Charybdis of cliff and ocean. A couple of times the water came up to the horses’ knees and swirled and gurgled a moment before retreating back to the sea.

              Soon they had reached another notch in the cliff, and they picked their way up between boulders to a grove where Esteban dismounted and wrapped the reins of his horse around a tree. J did the same. They scrambled over boulders to a creek which they followed down to a little pool on a rock ledge protruding over the ocean. Through an opening at one end, the water cascaded in a lacy ribbon sixty feet down.

              “Wow,” said j. “Se puede saltar?” he asked pantomiming a dive.

              His guide looked at him like he was crazy, but said, “A veces cuando es tranqilo, pero el agua es muchisimo turbulente ahora.”

              J felt foolish. The water swelled and smacked violently against the walls of the cove. The boy sat on a rock and pulled out a joint. He lit it, took a puff, and offered it to j. One of the boy’s eyes was bloody red. j took the cigarette and puffed. They talked. The boy was nineteen and had a daughter. Once the joint was smoked, j began to worry about his wife. Worry that her resentment was building. “Tengo que regresar,” he said.

              Esteban led him to a perfect. downward sloping ledge, carved into the rock as if by a kind and loving God, by which they walked down the beach as easily as if they were strolling down a sidewalk. “El Camino de Dios,” j mused aloud. Man could not have made a walkway more perfect with jackhammers and cement than the ocean and rain had made.

              “La madera es muy seca,” said Esteban.

              J contemplated the remark, which seemed to him a non sequitur. The wood was dry. He must have meant the forest, but he felt like what it meant was that his, j’s, soul was dry and withered, even though his knew it could mean nothing as cryptic as that.

              They reached the horses again and remounted, picking their way back across the long beach as before. The tide seemed to be ebbing. When they reached Playa Grande, he spurred his mare into a gallop and left his guide a quarter mile behind. He passed the same lazy iguana and the same simple shacks and finally came again to Playa Monteczuma. Across the sand, on the far end of the beach near town, he was relieved to make out the form of his wife, sitting on a towel, skin burned.

8-25-00 F 7:50 AM Tamarindo, C.R.

More dreams, like it has been days rather than nearly a year. Bizarre. I wrote awhile in my big notebook about the hike to the falls. After that, I went up to the room. Rochelle was asleep under the mosquito net. She freaked out on the way here when a cicada flew in through the car window. She freaked when a praying mantis flew into our room the other night. She was fastidious about making sure the net is fastened tightly over the bed. So, she woke up when I came in. I wanted to show her the video I made of the hike to the waterfall, but the brand-new, six-hundred-dollar Sony camera I bought expressly for this trip, started acting up. The tape wouldn’t rewind or play. All it will do is fast forward. We spent an hour trying different things, but nothing worked. The tape fast forwarded all the way to the end, and there’s no way to rewind it, so it’s useless now. That’s a real pisser. A hairy-legged Tika just brought me some coffee. I’m sitting at a table on a patio alongside the dusty, brick street. The little village is coming to life. The shopkeepers are sweeping their storefronts. I’m waiting for the farmacia to open next door to see what I can get for Rochelle’s sunburn and swollen ankles. These same three dogs keep cruising up and down the street together, checking everything out. A scuffle breaks out among a couple of cats, but soon they go on their own disagreeable ways.

Anyway, after the hike to the falls, I showered, and we strolled down to the little library run by an expatriate from Connecticut. I traded her a New York Times for a Tico Times.  We took the Tico Times to Chico’s, where half the town was raptly watching “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen,” laughing and applauding.  I read in the Tico Times about the Human Genome Project, and about how Costa Rica is becoming a sex tourism destination. We got hamburgers and fries, and I had a couple of pilsners, and then we were stuffed. We went back up to the Hotel de la Aurora and lay in the hammocks and took turns reading to each other from Marquez’s Of Love and Other Demons while gecko acrobats hung around the light on the ceiling dining on moths.

Soon a Tiko named Carlos, who amounts to the hotel’s house dick, came up to the veranda to tell us what is wrong with the world. He had been a beekeeper, and he thought there was something sacred in that, and he recommended honey for all kinds of ailments. He said the world was becoming too technical and too money driven. He said he would never go to America because Americans (I’m paraphrasing his Spanish) don’t like Latinos. He wants to visit Canada. He said women don’t want to be women anymore; they want to be men now. He and his wife had no children because all the kids are on drugs these days, and they get tattoos and piercings and so forth and on and on. He said his father rescued a puma from a fire, and it lived with them a couple of years. He talked a lot about bees. He didn’t like Nicaraguans. They’re all cowards, he said.

With that, I stood up and excused myself. Rochelle took me up on my suggestion that we go back to Chico's for a nightcap and to watch the dogs dance with the people. The crowd had metamorphosed into something of piratical mien. We had one beer and went back up to our room to go to sleep. The next day: horseback riding on the beach and in the jungle. I'll write that in third person in the big orange travel notebook. I wonder if the pharmacy is open yet. I think we're going to go to the Monte Nube Cloud Forest tonight.

Stranger Than the Dream

 

8-24-00 Th 4:03 PM 15 minutes Tamarindo, C.R.

I haven’t written in two days. There’s so much to catch up on. I’ve got blisters on my fingers from reeling in so many sailfish this morning, and my back is sore from riding a horse to the waterfall south of Montezuma; I’m sunburned; My lungs are clogged with fumes; The bugs on the bar where I’m sitting keep crawling over this page; My pina colada is not strong enough, and Arenal, our next destination, blew its top, burning three tourists and necessitating the evacuation of the area.

Two days ago, I took a dirt road north(?) of Monteczuma toward Cabo Blanco, across dos puentes—there are two—the old one is unsafe to cross. A guy in town told me if I turned past the barbed wire fence there and followed the stream, I’d come to a waterfall. I clambered over slippery boulders ascended nature-made, tree-root staircases through the jungle, crossed the stream on steppingstones in the persistent din of cicadas. Sweat poured from my brow. I came a small falls cascading down to a pool in which a young woman in a bikini frolicked with her lover. I pressed on. Over the river and through the woods. Vines hung in the way. After about twenty minutes, I came to a pool where whitewater gushed over a cliff two hundred feet into a blue green pool. Two mermaids performed a water ballet. Supermodel Elle McPherson swan dived from the rocks. A steep-walled crater nearly encircled the entirety of the pool but for where the stream flowed out the way I had come. A couple of stormtroopers informed me that if I were to scramble up the cliff, an even better waterfall awaited down and up a few small jungle mountains. They said tree roots growing out of the cliff worked like a ladder. I heard Indiana Jones music and considered scaling the wall to the second sacred pool, but the thought of my wife back alone in our room tempered my enthusiasm. She would be worried if I was gone long. It seemed that the second fall was an additional two hours, round trip. I decided to head back. I filmed most of the hike back. A first-person video hike. A virtual jungle stream video hike. I stopped at the first pool. The bikini and her lover had gone. I stripped to my undershorts, put the camera on a rock, and took a cool swim. Ahhh. A brief break from sweat. I sat on a rock and rested. I felt good. Then I continued back. I had to really crawl through the brush when the trail vanished on me at one point, but eventually I came again to the two bridges where the stream opened to the rocky ocean. I walked up the dusty road, past chickens and pigs, back to town and the room where my wife was.

 

Tu 8:46 PM 8-22-00

I dreamt of Shirelle last night. I think it was the first time since she left. We were in some weird dorm-style building in a strange city (not unlike the Hotel Bienvenido in San Jose), and she was with some shadowy guy. I missed her, and I was sad and wanted her back. I saw her through an open doorway, and she saw me. I crooked my finger to her, and she came to talk to me. I told her I loved her, and she said she did not love me. I felt loss and grief. I pleaded with her to come with me, but she refused. I followed her up to the top of the building and she jumped off to get away from me. I woke up her and confused. My waking life seems stranger than the dream. I was bathed in sweat. I pulled aside the mosquito net and went into the bathroom. I splashed water on my face and brushed my teeth. I brought the Miami Herald out to the veranda where the maid had left a pot of coffee. I read the paper sitting in a cushioned for-post chair, the legs hewn from tree branches. About an hour later, Rochelle woke, and we walked down the dirt road to the little restaurant and had scrambled eggs, potatoes, and fruit for breakfast. Rochelle has a hard time making up her mind. I wonder if it’s because she is pregnant. After breakfast, we decided to see if we could find a waterfall we had read about in the Frommer’s book. We packed water, towels, and cameras and headed south, we thought along the beach in search of the mouth of the stream.to head up to the waterfall. We went slowly. Rochelle’s not a good walker even when she’s not pregnant. She has one duck foot that sticks out at a forty-five-degree angle left of street ahead. We walked maybe a mile along the beach past crab-filled tide pools and onto a trail in the jungle running along the beach. We saw some different lizards on the trail, scurrying under brush and hanging onto vines. Eventually, the trail opened up to another wide beach, and we came to a creek that flowed down through a jumble of volcanic rock. We started over the rocks. It was difficult even for me, so you can imagine the time Rochelle was having. After a tough two hundred yards or so, we stopped, and I scrambled up ahead to scout the way. There was a drunk passed out up there using his shorts for a pillow. But other than that, it looked arduous, if not impossible, for a gal seven months pregnant with a gimp foot. We turned back.