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Excerpts from a Costa Rica Journal
The man sleeps under his hat. He misses the bird-swarm that darkens the sky. He misses the quetzal on the bicycle's bar. He misses the bushmaster--over eight feet in length--which passes slowly between the iron legs of the granary. The light is dying. The valley will darken in one stroke. Quickly now--the night birds are appearing--the day will soon be over. In the tropics the half moon lies on its back, showing in a gentle way its willingness to accept charity.
A woman at the pool gathers her things. They keep blowing away with the wind. She says, "I hate this place, it's miserable, there's nothing to do. You can blow in here, and then blow away. Like the sand." The sand keeps getting blown off the beach and into the surf--only to be pushed back up again in a never ending cycle. The prevailing wind gives the beach a variety of sands: fine sand like pumice, brown volcanic sand, thick gravelly sand, sand of wentletraps and oysterdrills, and pebbly sand, all in strata--zoned.
The wind piles up the breakers, slows them down, and brushes off their tops. It's difficult for boogie-boarders to get a good ride. Surfers had a good curl the afternoon we arrived, but since then they only stand with their boards, drinking from plastic cups, wondering if they should move on.
"This beach," the woman says, "is not good for anything except sanding your body."  | | Blue and Orange |
She lies on her back on the padded lounger by the pool. She watches me. She doesn't know what I'm doing. Then she's spread eagle, sucking on the sun. She swims and spreads. Even her husband, who sits distantly in his moustache, is not impressed.
Happy-hour. Some tourists come to life when drinks are two for one. "Amigo," she shouts to the waiter, impressing her friends with her Spanish. "Fantastico," she says when he brings the coco-loco. "Moochas grathias," she says when the waiter brings her the Off (the mosquitoes come out at happy-hour, too). Her husband's head is still in Toronto. Someone comes up to the bar in the restaurant and asks, "Would you have a copy of the Globe and Mail?"
They spend a lot of time talking about food. A man without a plate sits at the table while his wife and another couple proceed with the dining. Doctor's orders. "By the time you take off the fat and remove the bone--there's just a tiny bit of meat," he explains, using his hands more than he would at home, as if he would take off the fat. His wife's eyes apologize, filling in the blanks for the other couple. She is even heavier than he is. "The Costa Ricans don't know how to cook.," he says, "Can you believe their French fries?"
He is allowed to smoke, and he does it constantly, pinching the cigarette, kissing it. His chair is well back from the table, as if the table affronts him, as if it's the enemy. He is quite red--it looks like he might soon be found dead in his shorts. The others eat handsomely, and loudly--they are still allowed.
 | | Brahma Pattern |
It's time to rise and go from the air conditioned room, the windy pool, the elderly lady with the bad leg from Geneva, the rich man with the pretty friend with the big hair from Seattle. (He is not yet down to the pool.) It's time to check the tires and head back through the ruminating fields of Brahmas, into the baking, clicking, rolling furnace of Iguanaland.
One in the afternoon. Lots of bicycles in this flat Guanacaste town. Cane cutters, black and dirty from the fields pass by with their water-bottles and machetes. A short-skirted woman bicyclist with two children on the bar and one behind pedals around the square, ringing. There are very few cars. Some cattle trucks pass through,  | | In the shade |
loaded with agricultural workers. In the shaded park white-shirted men nod off on the cement seats. Passing conversation brings them to life. Women stroll lazily past old drill-vented clapboard houses--hard to tell if they're inhabited. The green and pink Officina de Creditos opens up for somebody. The Cruz Roja, an ancient storefront, gapes at loitering students, partly paired, laughing in the bloom of friendship. A guy sits in the shade and opens coconuts with a machete. His chop, chop, chop is like the ticking of a slow clock.
A green and white building is a political meeting hall, designated "2" and displaying "Figueras" signs. Men in white shirts and big-belted pants come out of the building, carrying beer-cans to their bicycles, riding off without hands, drinking as they go.
There is slow movement everywhere. Like half-asleep sunning iguanas, they seem in tune with their environment. A woman sits beside me. She is perhaps thirty, looks fifty. She is someone's mother--her legs are tattered. A bearded man watches us. He winks and the woman moves on, leaving me an empty, sticky, paper bag.
Many towns in Costa Rica have a standardized domed band-shell in their plazas. It is of pre-cast concrete, like the top third of an egg, and sculpted out in four parabolic arches. These structures sit on their four corners, surrounded by a dry moat, and the floor is approached by four curved bridges. All is symmetrical in the plaza; the paths radiate from the center to the four corners of the plaza, and the abundant concrete benches are evenly placed.
In the park there's a tourist. He's from China. He has long hairs coming out from several moles on his face. He's engaged a gardener to knock mangoes out of the trees with a long stick. He catches them, laughing every time, and tosses them to his wife who puts them in a plastic bag. They have dozens of park mangoes. They seem to be overwhelmed with the abundance.
Costa Rica is a country that doesn't believe in direction signs, license plates, road maintenance, hurry, and condoms. It believes in conversation, shouting, Mary the Mother of God, looking the other way, repairing tires until there are patches on the patches, lots of amore, and kids.
Fans move the torpid air around the rooms. They move the sweat, the flies, the cooking smells. Some of these fans have been moving for a century. Others are quite new at the game--they just look old. Fans should look old. I get up on a chair and examine one. The screws that hold the blades on are loose. They are Phillips and they're loose.
 | | Decorated Cart |
There's a grackle rummaging in the grass roof in the afternoon when I'm trying to concentrate. This great-tail isn't going to let me have any peace. Every once in awhile he sticks his black head over the eave and looks at me sidewise with a curious white eye--I'm sure he's checking to see if I'm properly aggravated. Nothing lasts forever, I tell myself. Up there on the roof there's a convention of ants, enough to outlast my needs.
While it's hotter than a firecracker I'm on a dusty road. A decorated cart with solid teak wheels seems to take an hour to pass.
A busload of naturewatchers. These are a distinct species; they have all migrated from the USA. They tuck their pants into their socks. Everybody wears hats. Birders always wear hats. Regulation hats. The guide is a good looking young woman wearing a nice hat. She points up. "By the red flower at the top of the tree. A white tipped dove." She speaks with a Spanish accent--the musical sweetness of her voice adds magic to the sighting--and it also packs a nice authority. All binoculars move to the white tipped dove. Some hats fall off.
One man has a camera with a big lens. By the time he gets his tripod set up the bird and the others have moved on. His hat falls off as he tries to catch up. Some of the birders look back and laugh.
A tall man is cool to everyone else on the tour. He walks ahead. He looks like he  | | Evening Stroll |
knows a lot about birds, and he doesn't bother with a book. The other birders give him the space he needs. Black-faced solitaire--oropendola--purple crested gallinet--quetzal--groove billed ani. One woman is never able to look at the birds--she's always too busy writing--but I don't think she's the bookkeeper for the tour--I think all these names are strictly for herself. She's in a state of hyperactive acquisition. I think she is elderly, but it's difficult to tell in that hat. Later, in the evening, she is quite young and walking on the beach with someone.
The jungle is an eerie place. It's silent except for the clicks and leaf rustling made by the jaguars, pumas, boa constrictors, ocelots, peccary, etc. Fresh capuchins are a hazard. When I sit down on a rock at the edge of a stream one of the visiting naturalists says: "I'll keep an eye on you for alligator." Alligator is plural. "Both mom and dad are upset if you get near the young 'uns, and are known to attack in unison, as a family unit you might say."
The jungle is fluttering with butterflies. Orpheus, swallowtail, morning cloak, fritillaries. The last chap who tried running nude with a butterfly net in a Costa Rica National Park was shot by rangers. Unlicensed butterfly catching down here is the next worst crime to bumping off your mom. How far is this green stuff going to go?
The jungle costs a thousand Colones to get into, and is impossible to get out of. Even though the path is marked salida. For some reason the path marked to the rio goes to the arroyo, and the path marked entrada goes to the men's washroom. When you do finally crawl out, dehydrated and disoriented, (you can't remember how a toucan is any different than a Toyota) the park guides and wardens (there are many) are in siesta mode in their offices and are not aware of any place you can purchase refrescas.
I have strong suspicions about these authorities who wait for you in their creaky wooden huts laden with dusty skulls of peccary and jars of pickled fer-de-lance. There's no military in Costa Rica.
Two green parrots are in a cage in the garden. When I talk to them they look at me and say nothing. When I walk away they call out "Ola." I'm unable to strike up a conversation. The gardener moves the parrots so they receive the intermittent spray of a sprinkler. Out of my sight they are having an animated conversation, like children playing in water. "Oo, oo, oo, Ha ha ha ha, Ooooowee! Ola, Ola, Ha ha ha ha ha, (Whistle) Ubba ubba, Ooooo-WHEE! Hee he he he." They are two miserable creatures, waterlogged to their quills, and shivering, and while they stonewall the spray, they continue to verbalize the persistence of joy. "Ooo, oo, oo, Wheee, Ha ha ha ha, he he he he, WHEEE! (Whistle) Owwwww, Oooooo."
Slothfully, arm over arm, slowly, thinking out its future in slow motion, upside down, through the dappled jungle came the long grey sloth. The National Animal.
In Cartago you have to pay a special policeman to guard your car from thieves while you visit the Virgin in the Basilica. She was first seen in 1635, and she's still as busy as a Costa Rican tire-repair man. At the holy spring of the Virgin visitors gather the water in jars and take it with them. They also splash it on themselves and get the kids to do the same. Many drink the magic. Inside, on the way to the subterranean room where the wondrous rock is exhibited, there are cases filled with tiny arms, legs, hearts, lungs, even a crotch, in gold, silver, and base metal. Each amulet represents a cure, or at least a respite from a malady or misfortune. Tiny aircraft and automobiles attest to journeys safely completed, brides and grooms show that happy marriages have occurred. Trophies and awards show that games and contests were won. Men on crutches, old women with open sores, pale mothers and fathers with sad babies held in their arms can see as they pass by that the system works.
Outside the Basilica, in the burning sun, away from the cool sanctuary of the special  | | Bananaman of Cartago |
favor, lottery tickets are sold to those would make a wish for wealth. Vendors sell shave-ice to healthy kids (red, yellow, or green) and a sign reads: Vente de Objetos Religiosos de la Vergen de Los Angeles. The store has more bins of silver arms, legs, hearts, eyes, livers, lungs, feet, and whole-bodied babies, in fact, anything one might want. A bananaman comes along. You can smell these beautiful bananas. For the price of four bananas he will stop.
Communities of burrowing crabs, some in blue, like blue valises, with yellow and red plastic claws. Some have angry faces and look freshly painted. The characters wait and watch at the thresholds of their homes, and when approached they retreat down their holes, sometimes tentatively, sometimes quickly, but it is always all at once that the whole town moves. "I can see you guys down there in your foyers."
Muscovy ducks are camped near a polluted pond. A pair is in a ritualized dance of love--one takes three steps and then puts its head back and silently waggles its bill in the air. The other bird takes three steps backwards, acknowledges the bill-work with a bow, and waggles its tail. This goes on past the rear of an ecotour minibus with a bumper sticker that reads: "Yo freno por les animales."
Hotel. The Costa Rican International Football team waits in the rotunda for their bus to arrive. They are mostly blacks--from around Puerto Limon, I'm told, but there are a few Hispanics too. They are big fellows and they are in high spirits--with a Bob Marley tape for background. I pass through them--one of them bumps into me and says, "Scuuuuse me." They all laugh. Several say, "Yakkity yak yak," which is what Woody Woodpecker says. That's what they call gringo bird watchers here. Woody Woodpeckers. Then again my nose is pointy. They laugh at me. I keep moving.
The pool beside the dining room is filling up with shiny black beetles, about an inch long--I don't know their name. There are at least thirty of them, paddling, fighting for their lives. They also fly at the pool lights, and the romantic lights around the dining room, and in and out of the fluorescent kitchen--they may even be in the black olive salad. From time to time a bat comes into the dining room to pick one off. I fish one out of the pool, put her on a napkin and bring her to the table. She's stunned and slow moving, recovering. It is not the pool that kills, but the thin slick of Coppertone left on the surface. After dinner I bring my shiny beetle back to my balcony for cleaning and study. Under the glass she is solid and strong, leg-hackled, noble. Her head is small and silent, her antennae active. She has been chosen. I turn her on her back and queue-tip her clogged spiracles. For a few minutes I do the best I can, then I come inside, and write this. When I go back outside she has gone from the balcony. I think that may be her over by the light. I'm not sure how anything so beautiful and so well designed could be so ill advised.
In Puntarenas I engage a young man to take me around in his boat. He takes me  | | Great White Heron |
to a poor section where landless people live in shacks that stand on stilts over the mud. Children play in the inter-tidal, among the flotsam and jetsam, among broken boat-dreams and the washday work of loud women. In squalor, one seeks purity. Nearby, a great white heron, like a goddess, incandescent, poses. Later, from the hotel, I stand on our balcony. Dogs are barking from deep within that airless ghetto. I hear the persistent cry of a small child.
Arenal volcano was grumbling and going on, but it was covered in cloud so you couldn't see the sparks and hot rocks. Women sat around the lodge waiting for the rain and clouds to clear so they could see what hell looks like.
Irazu, on the other hand, hasn't done anything serious since 1963. At 11000 feet, it's cold at the lip, and desolate, like a grey lunar landscape. Down in Irazu's main crater there's a sulphurous lake of yellow-green, bubbling like witches' brew. The women say that sometimes you can get a glimpse through the thin skin.
In the small private zoo there's a capuchin monkey chained into a narrow radius--a  | | The Primate Scream |
barrel for home, a board for sitting, and a worn concavity of dirt for pacing. His dinner of bread and bananas has been put down for him, but he's not eating. He's looking away from me and screaming at the top of his lungs. We study each other. When I move away he tries to get my attention by shaking himself violently, grimacing, lolling out his tongue, and lying on his side. He is trying to tell me something.
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