11 Days in Costa Rica

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.

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            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.

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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.

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            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.

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“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.

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            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.