I can’t tell you all of this story.
There are parts that I can’t tell
because I don’t remember them: the airplane ride down to Central America, for
example. I distinctly remember getting
picked up by the charter bus from my senior year dance recital (the finale of
my career as a ballerina), and finding an open seat while tussling my hair out
of its bun—but as for the airplane ride, all I’ve got is a blank.
It was the end of my senior year of high
school, a tumultuous time when I was eager to leave home for college—so I
suppose I can forgive myself for having forgotten a few details of leaving home
for Costa Rica. I remember nothing of my
flight down the Americas: no sweeping vistas from the window of the plane, no
allegorical incidents when traveling through Customs. I’ll have to let another author speak for me:
“America
begins and ends in the cold and solitude.
America, with her torso of a woman with an hourglass waist, a waist
laced so tightly it snapped in two and we put a belt of water there… Its central paradox resides in this: that the
top half doesn’t know what the bottom half is doing.”
That was the ever-brilliant Angela
Carter, in a 1988 short story about the prairie. She hit the nail on the head, in terms of
North American ignorance. I didn’t even
know what I was doing, visiting a
country in tropical zones, a country with pickpockets and volcanoes and
rainforests and giant spiders. The trip
was a graduation present from my parents, and I embarked on it with a lack of
forethought that insured that everything (even the fact that Costa Rica borders
both the Pacific and the Caribbean) would take me by surprise.
Headed by my former AP Biology teacher,
I made the journey with fifteen of my classmates, riding a rickety bus between
five points on the map: Tamarindo, where I tried to surf; Mt. Aranol; San Jose,
the capital city; Tortuguero, haven of the giant sea turtles; and the Parque
Nacional Santa Rosa, where we walked inside the cloud forest canopy.
Costa Rica is an amazing country, in
that it has preserved huge sections of rainforest as protected land. Neither its northern neighbor, Nicaragua, nor
southern one, Panama, has been so environmentally prescient. Animals and the environment were a huge part
of my Central American sojourn: both in their audible presence (howler monkeys;
tree frogs), visible presence (alligators, reptilian and somnolent; the
emaciated, aggressive dogs), and absence.
We spent one evening with linked hands, walking down a beach looking for
giant sea turtles come ashore to lay eggs.
We were blind: it was night, and synthetic light—even the small light
cast by our cell phones—would have frightened the turtles and disrupted their
reproductive cycle. It was a grand
adventure of tripping over logs and twisting our ankles in sandpits, followed
always by the thrum of the invisible sea…but the only turtle we found, in any
state, was a corpse that had been half-eaten by a jaguar.
&
Mt. Aranol, which I’ve rendered in
fiction at least three times, was definitely my favorite part of the trip. On one hand, it was a towering mountain that
I saw from a spindly, monolithic viewing-platform, clenching my teeth against
the wind. On the other hand, it was a
green-blue immensity that jutted over me while I swam, along with my
compatriots, in a naturally warm lake.
On a third hand (I write science fiction, after all, so why not add that
third appendage to hold perspective?), it was a fiery red tip, surging and oozing
and visible even through smoke that blotted out the stars—a concentrated point
within the darkness of the night.
Mt. Aranol is an active
volcano.
Green and muscular, I would later
conjure its image whenever reading Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, my favorite book, even though the geological
formation in that book is located in Oaxaca, Mexico.
Volcanoes have a way of leaving their
mark.
&&
I don’t remember the face of a single
Costa Rican—except maybe the toothy smile of a young man who sat in a laundry
mat, his back to a beer poster, when my friends and I wandered through the door
to ask for directions. He thought we
were funny, no doubt. Amusing and lost,
trying to get to the mercado (where I got an intense lesson in the popularity
of Fanta, as a soft drink).
Being a tourista is a defining characteristic: enter into the tourist/native relationship for too long, and you end up only being able to see your
own brashest characteristics. And then you find
yourself asking, “Should I feel sorry for the Costa Ricans, with their commodified
culture? Their Pura Vida?” That’s the
national slogan: we couldn’t go anywhere without seeing T-shirts with it
scrawled across the chest. “Or do they
feel sorry for me?”
Tourism is a complex entanglement. Good thing I was too tired, most of the trip,
to give it much thought.
&&&
We were kept to a tight schedule: no
sleeping past seven, no un-chaperoned field trips, no sneaking off to buy
Jagermeister (as a few of my classmates tried.
And why they’d choose Jagermeister, of all drinks, has always befuddled
me).
I always slept on the tour bus as it
rumbled cross-country, along puddle-strewn dirt roads and among green, treeless
mountains. I forced myself to wake only
whenever we stopped at a tourist outpost to get fruit juice and bric-a-brac.
The variety of fruit juice was
amazing. Papaya, mango, watermelon,
passionfruit, banana... The variety of
the bric-a-brac was somewhat more curtailed.
The night after the anticlimactic turtle
adventure, I returned to the cabin in which I was bunking with six other girls,
had a glass of watermelon juice, and took a humid shower in a bathroom where a
lightbulb buzzed and sparkled cheerfully.
I went to bed and woke up early, because one of my classmates insisted
on seeing the sunrise over the Caribbean (this was right after that first Pirates movie had swept through
theaters, giving that gulf sea a kind of roguish mystique). Like the giant turtle, however, the sunrise
evaded me: as soon as I’d trekked out to the beach, I lay down on the sand and
went right back to sleep.
&&&&
“The farther you journey from home, the
more the tale of the journey becomes a tale about yourself.”
I wrote that earlier today. Is it true?
Let’s save the discussion for next week.
&
There was one morning, in an
open-topped tour boat on a river, that I sat earnestly trying to stay awake
through my biology teacher’s lecture on local flora. I had a notebook open on my lap and a pen in
my hand. I’d close my eyes, jerk them
open, close them again and dream of being depressed… I’d found out, the previous night, that one
of the classmates I’d taken as a friend didn’t care for me at all.
So there I was wrapped up in self-pity
and lethargy, a seemingly inescapable duo—when all of a sudden, the clouds
spewed forth a torrential rain. I was
soaked in seconds. Everything in my
backpack, including all of my notebooks and books, was soaked in seconds. It was as if the world was laughing at me for
being so mawkishly self-absorbed.
That rainstorm had the power of a
parable; it destroyed my previous two months' worth of note-taking.
And it was one of the best moments of my life.
