Back of Beyond Page 10

  Doe-eyed Brahma cattle lolled about in the moist green fields of the coastal plain, attended by their retinues of white egrets. Most of the peasant homes were simple, colorful clapboard structures with tin roofs, hidden in profusions of palms and banana trees.

  At Puntarenas I left the land behind and sailed off on a small launch across the Gulf of Nicoya, into a hazy blue-on-blue limbo. Pelicans perched on quano-coated islets, occasionally dive-bombing the waves for snacks. Cormorants skimmed like shadows, low over the swell.

  The mainland was soon lost in warm mists and we eased among islands, dozens of them, into hideaway-heaven. Most of them had a few fishermen’s homes on them, simple driftwood shacks shaded by coconut palms, looking out over strips of pure white sand. The boats were often nothing more than hollowed-out tree trunks; nut-colored children splashed in the surf, waving. Behind the beaches the jungle rose up in a tangle of vines, covering high rocky hills.

  A few islands were free of inhabitants, lovely lonely places where you could live out beachcomber fantasies among the butterflies and orchids, eating the always-abundant wild fruits, fishing whenever the mood was right, and generally bidding farewell to the fripperies of the high-tech life for as long as it took to touch and know again the things that really matter.

  You lose track of time out here. The haze, the moist heat, and the gentle rolling of the boat move you into a different reality; the endless yammer of the mind ceases as you drift from one island to the next and the next, watching the greens move back into the blues, and on through shimmering silver to a gold so soft and translucent you feel you’re disappearing into a Turner landscape of pure light….

  The next day I drove south from Puntarenas down the Pacific coast, through the hot and funky little town of Puerto Quepos, deep into the jungle wonderland of the Manuel Antonio National Park.

  I stayed in a small cabin high on a hillside overlooking arcs of white beach and turquoise ocean. While the park was not as remote as the Nicoya islands, I still managed to find my own stretch of pristine sand here, snorkeling the day away, climbing up through the dense clammy jungle on Cathedral Point for even more spectacular vistas of cliffs and ocean. I shared the walk with hundreds of scarlet-and-black land crabs who live in little burrows among the roots and have a frustrating disdain for photographers.

  Closer to the beach, I was joined by statuesque iguanas who exhibited just the opposite reaction and spent most of their time posturing their prehistoric profiles like movie star has-beens. One rather large three-foot-long male became incensed when I took portraits of his female companions but ignored him. So he followed me fifty yards along the beach until I finally succumbed to his persistence, then swaggered back to his harem, brandishing his sharp spines pompously.

  Around eight o’clock the following morning I knew something had gone decidedly wrong. My mouth was dry and then full of saliva, then dry again. My body sweated like a bilge pump, streams of it, and the day’s heat hadn’t really hit yet. My simple cabin was still cool.

  I had to get to the bathroom—fast. And then again. And again. By midday I’d spent most of my time there and, so far as I could tell, I had nothing more in my body to expunge. But still I sat. Waves of nausea flowed over me, sending hot and cold ripples up my spine. The mirror on the wall showed a deathly face edged in a moldy-green sheen and eyes so tired and egglike that I began to wonder if survival was in the cards at all.

  Hour after hour passed. Time twisted in cobra coils; my brain wandered around its confines like an inebriated slug. Crazy thoughts kept popping up—utter free association. I was definitely in the throes of some emerging fever. All energy had long since been dissipated.

  I moved to the bed and twisted and turmoiled. Occasional shards of sound came from outside: the surf, gulls, someone passing my cabin. The sounds became a series of symphonic variations, sometimes so distorted that I couldn’t recollect what the original sound was as my brain now became a freewheeling bagatelle. The voices of passing children reverberated like Buddhist bells and gongs—booming, peeling, cymbaling into switchbacking roller coasters of sound.

  By evening I was far out of the realms of reality. The fading colors played kaleidoscope forms on the walls; shadows became ogreous and then stretched out into landscapes with giant cacti, stunted trees, and shattered mountain ranges.

  A butterfly fluttering through my open window became a kite, then a jeweled bracelet freely floating, then a silhouetted hawk, and finally a sinister shadowy presence lurking high in the upper corner of my room. I think a lizard came in for a while or a dragon or just another dream.

  I stopped trying to make sense of anything. There was no me left in me—I was no longer fighting back, no longer interpreting and filtering—just letting the tides of images and sounds and smells and colors roll over me in this place where time had long since lost any meaning and I was free of everything.

  On the second day—it seemed like the second day anyway—I had a vision. Something so clearly outlined and tangible that I reached out a long sweaty arm to touch…a basket of ripe bananas. Bananas? Something in the recesses of my battered brain was sending a message. Bananas. I had to get some bananas!

  Someone was passing the window. I could hear voices. But I couldn’t get off the bed. I could hardly lift my head. So I reached out for something hard and found a book I’d been reading before my world collapsed. Gripping a corner as hard as I could I flung it at the window. The noise of the impact was wonderful, the first recognizable noise in almost two days. Swish, thunk, keerplop. Welcome real-world sounds.

  The voices stopped and I heard a slither of feet in sand. A face appeared at the window and a young boy peered into my shadowy room. Big black eyes, pink lips, bright teeth.

  “Bananas, please. And Coca-Cola.” It didn’t sound like my voice talking. The boy didn’t seem sure what to do. I repeated my request slowly and pointed to my mouth.

  A sudden smile and nods. “Si—bananas—si, si, Coca-Cola.” And the face was gone.

  More time passed, frozen shapes of time, each one distinct, glowing with different colors. An utterly new experience. And bananas were in there too. Curved scimitars, gleaming, linking blocks of time like golden chains.

  A knock.

  I said something, but it came out a grunt.

  The door opened slowly. I thought I’d locked it, but it opened anyway and in came my little saviour with an old battered tin bucket.

  He stood by the bed and smiled.

  “Bananas.”

  He reached into the bucket and pulled out a stem of bananas—a dozen or more beautiful ripe fruits.

  “Coca-Cola. And papaya.”

  There it was—sliced, wet, peach pink. The best papaya I had ever seen!

  I pointed to a pile of my usual traveling detritus on the dressing table—pens, notebooks, knife, film, and scrunched-up paper money.

  “Take money,” I thought I said, but it was another grunt.

  “No, I come back—later,” he said shyly and left with a smile, closing the door quietly behind him.

  The next hour (I think it was an hour. Time was still slithering around) was pure joy. Just the sight of the bottle and the fruit made me feel better. And never has Coke tasted so magnificent, that first fizzing gush, listening to it going down, down, filling all the oh-so empty spaces in this useless lump of wet flesh I assumed was my body.

  And the bananas! Such sweetness and softness. I could feel my digestive system eagerly sucking in every molecule of nutrition, every protein, mineral, vitamin, and whatever else that miracle fruit contains. Then the soft sensuality of the pink papaya—if there is such a thing as a fruit orgasm I had one as the sloppy pulp ran down my throat, my chin, my chest….

  I slept a sleep of utter peace.

  Much, much later, deep into the evening, I awoke to find a plate of rice and plantains, some rum, and another full bottle of Coke. The boy must have been back—all the banana and papaya skins had been cleared away. A clean moist cloth cov
ered my forehead.

  I was safe. I’d come through the uninvited torment and turned up whole and alive on the other side, hog-happy in banana-papaya-Coke and boiled rice heaven. Who cares about yesterdays and tomorrows? I was here right now and being pampered like a prince in my modest palace, and the sunset was blasting through the window and those wonderful buzzing things outside in the trees were buzzing away again and doubtless more bananas were on the way….

  A few days later I could—maybe should—have taken Minor Keith’s famous railroad to the Caribbean coast (eight hours minimum and fifty-two stops) but chose a three-hour car ride instead to Puerto Limón, down the long slopes of the Cordillera Central, through endless miles of banana plantations.

  Limón at night is three parts Graham Greene, two parts Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a hot dash of Vonnegut and a flash of Apocalypse Now. It’s funky, greasy, sweaty; lopsided turquoise-blue buildings grow mold as thick as ivy creepers; raunchy bars burst onto the street in flurries of reggae and florid-faced punchups; the eyes of young girls in bright, tight dresses seem old before their time; deals of a distinctly illicit nature are made by huddled Caribbean men in broad straw hats shadowed under the fluorescent glow of tamale and empanada stands.

  Everywhere there’s music; thick, mushy back-beat rhythms in the mildewy air. The banyan trees in Parque Vargas, roots exposed like mountain ridges and sheened in green moss, drip with vines and dead strips of bark like creatures in a Dark Crystal movie. The air is stagnant with old sea smells; no breeze blows in the dankness. It’s hard to believe you’re in the same country—this could be some dockside corner of Kingston, Jamaica. Is Verdi really playing tonight to primped patrons in San José’s Teatro Nacional, only a few hours away by car?

  But in the morning everything changes. An easterly wind blows out all the flotsam of the night and Limón adopts the hustle-bustle “hey, what-happen’, mon” flavor of a commercial port with a lively market, street vendors, everyone seemingly employed in loading and unloading huge cartons from overburdened trucks. A dozen witch-black vultures snack from the garbage pile outside the market. The owner of the café offers me aquadiente (sugarcane brandy); I gasp at its sharp potency, take his photograph, then head south along the coast, past endless banana fields and cocoa plantations, my stomach and face glowing.

  Mile after mile of empty beaches look out over the green-blue ocean. At Cahuita National Park I searched for sloths in the untouched rain forest and snorkeled among the coral reefs, playing catcher-man with the parrot fish and 120 other colorful varieties. No one seems overanxious to develop this part of the country; it’s a sleepy backwater livened by the young San José crowd at weekends, but most of the time it’s just the local fishermen in their tree-trunk canoes still lobstering the same old way.

  “Don’ use traps too much and only one guy uses tanks in Cahuita. Mos’ of us got good lungs, ’nuff for a fifty-foot dive and a long stick with a loop on the end.”

  I was talking with Vernon Barber, a young black fisherman I met after a lunch of fresh crabs and casados (the traditional platter of rice, beans, plantains, meat, and tortillas) at Stanford’s beach front place in Puerto Viejo.

  “You put the lease end over the lobster and pull it on up. And that’s about it. Only once I got a little problem down there. My ears went all wrong and it had me goofy. I was jus’ floatin’ around lookin’ at the fish…you feel nice jus’ looking at the fish…then I said hey, Vernon, something’s going on here and I went to get out but I couldn’t. I didn’t know which way was up. I went this way, I went that way…I was real gone…They hauled me up and pulled me in the boat and my ears was bad—real bad—they was bleedin’. They hurt for a long while. Some say I ain’t never been right in the head since then! But I still go down—not deep though, not for lobster—I jus’ go down for fun, I like the fishes—red, green, blue…some with gold and black stripes…”

  They say the beaches further south around Puerto Uva and south to the Panama border get better and better. I wouldn’t know. I drove for miles on a rutted track until it finally disappeared in a still yellow pool. A truck was stuck right in the middle ahead of me, mud halfway up its doors. It looked as if it had been there a long time. I suddenly missed my pleasant room in the Gran Hotel overlooking San José’s Plaza de la Cultura. The urge to play beach bum for a few days had obviously been satiated by my time in the Gulf of Nicoya.

  But I was to be given no choice. Although I managed to extricate the car from the pool, the rain that had been forecast for the last couple of days began to fall. Actually fall isn’t the word at all. It just tumbled in pummeling sheets, turning the track into a quagmire within minutes. Somehow I made it back to a beachside village I’d passed twenty minutes before and managed to find shelter in a rundown bar to wait out the storm. Only it never ended. The rain just kept coming. So I rented a small room and decided to leave traveling until tomorrow.

  The rain became my jail.

  Solid white bars of the stuff, so many and so thick that they blocked out the view across the road—correction—river. There was no road in evidence. From building to building, a molasses-brown snake of mud, water, and floating debris roared past the verandahs, buffeting a badly carved monument to Simon Bolivar, playing hide-and-seek around the palm trunks, to disappear out of sight around the bend by the beer shop.

  For a while the sight intrigues. You wonder at the power of the clouds capable of holding such vast amounts of water. The patterns in the street-river fascinate, from the gouging surf of the central flow that rolled palm branches, tin cans, and even a dead dog with the skill and dexterity of a circus performer, to the swirling eddies at the edge of the flow, froth-topped and fragrant with the blossoms of bougainvillea and frangipani, patterning in ever-changing colors.

  But then after a while all you see are the white bars of the rain itself, a portcullis, locking you into yourself. The sound of water is everywhere, never changing. The boom on the metal roof above your head; the wind-whipped whine as sudden gusts send the rain prattling and rattling on windows and doors; the slower, solemn drip, drop, drip from a roof leak somewhere in another room (and then in my room), and the hiss, swish, and gurgle as it nudges ever closer up the roadside to your door.

  Rain makes me think of English summer Sundays as a child when more often than not, a planned fun-run into the country or backyard game of cricket had to be abandoned as the gray closed in and drizzling overtures commenced. And you ended up with a house full of people, expectations dashed, wondering what to do next. (You’d think that this regular occurrence in rainy England would have led to an array of interesting alternatives, but it rarely did.) Instead it was back to the newspapers for the men, back to the kitchen or the “lounge” (only used on Sundays, even in the smallest homes) for the ladies, and a sulky search on the part of the kids for some diversion that invariably met with the usual remonstrance of “too much noise,” “go and play upstairs,” or—horrors of horrors—“why not have a nice little nap?”

  “Napping,” a traditional English pastime after an humongous Sunday lunch (always called “dinner”), seemed to me to be one of the most disgusting wastes of time. My sister and I would wait impatiently, horrified, as the mahogany clock ticked away good outdoor time and the air rumbled with tremulous snores and grunts from the grown-ups who had promised faithfully “just forty winks” before collapsing into a comatose state for what seemed like an eternity.

  It all came back to me in this doused Costa Rican village—the aroma of overcooked beef, the cloying aftertaste of treacle sponge pudding. The heat of the fire (when I was young fires were needed all through summer in many English homes to heat the water), the grayness of the wet light, the emptiness of the road outside (no cars to spot), the strange malty smell of stale beer from the dinner glasses, and a sense of doom and boredom as another Sunday afternoon trickled away down the blurred windowpane.

  Rain. I loathe it.

  Ah, but thunder I love. And the thunder came, booming over
the barrage of coastal mountains, crashing over my tin roof, rattling the windows and sending satisfying tremors across the plank floor. Suddenly I felt alive and invigorated—the stuffy, claustrophobic little room became a warm cave, a safe haven to watch the jagged spines of lightning bleach the jungle outside and to feel the surge of nature’s fickle power, boom-boxing and blasting overhead—a bombardment of solid sound. But, it’s never enough. I want it louder, thicker, continuous—I want a climax of clamor and vibration. I want eardrums ringing and teeth jiggling. I want all the pent-up power of the storm to be loosed in one enormous gut-blasting crack and thwack and tumble….

  And then it was gone.

  Skittering and echoing off across the hills, the storm dragged the dungeon bars of rain with it and the last tatters of gray soggy cloud. The blue is back, a clean, fresh, purified blue sky and a haloed sun. And the familiar sounds, which strike up like a record just switched on, the cocks and hens, the cicadas, the doves, people laughing and whistling, a car or two, someone hacking wood, the swish of bicycle tires, doors being flung open. Figures stepping out into the new air, saturated with scents and the smell of opened earth and the sparkle of leaves, freshly sheened. A day begins again—a bit muddy perhaps, but in an hour or two it’ll all be dry and the prisony pall of the storm forgotten.

  And so it goes, each day renewing itself, in this little forgotten corner of Costa Rica.

  The final part of the drive back to San José on the new highway through the Cordillera Central must be one of the most spectacular scenic routes in Central America. Soaring up from the interminable pineapple plantations of the Santa Clara lowlands, I arced through the green-on-green mountains, cloaked in dense virgin rain forest and wrapped in whisps of mists. The road is so well constructed you forget it’s there at all and just float up through the jungle with fleeting glimpses of the great gray-topped volcanoes peeping through the lower ranges. Green-and-red-winged parrots swoop out over the hazy hills; you may spot monkeys and sloths—even one of the rare jaguars (I didn’t).