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.