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  The path was muddy. My boots were soon caked in the stuff and I skidded like a drunk. What am I doing now? Part of me wondered if I should be here. The other part knew I really had no choice. Everyone else walked in bare feet, huge splayed feet, hard as rock on the sole with pink-edged toes. I was tempted to imitate them.

  The next few hours were utter confusion to me. Subsequently I’ve learned more about what I actually saw and experienced, but at the time, I was ignorant, cynical and, occasionally, scared stiff. At the Oloffson in Port-au-Prince I’d seen an evening folk dance show that purported to have voodoo elements in it, but, while being colorful and energetic, it felt harmless, sanitized. A safe entertainment for the amusement of blans.

  But this night was all fire and power and magic. The spirit I sensed went far beyond any showbiz extravaganza: the villagers were tapping into vast reservoirs of energy, energy that in no way correlated with their thin and often prematurely aged bodies. It was as though the quiet, smiling, candle-carrying inhabitants of this lonely mountain valley had become transformed, possessed by primeval forces that hurled them into dances and spasms and gyrations that, in their everyday world, would have left them drained and gasping after even a few minutes, but which here flung them into higher states of being, made them superhuman, with seemingly boundless energy.

  Yet it all began so quietly, almost boring, with three drummers beating out ragtag rhythms and people chatting outside a small mud hut, eating fritters and pork gigots, and placing candles in the trees and around the door of a hut.

  It became obvious that this modest building, a peristyle, not much larger than a family kay, was to be the center for the evening’s event. Somehow fifty or so people managed to cram themselves inside around the walls, which were painted in violent purple-blues, lemons, and reds, with primitive figures representing the loas of voodoo but with amusing Catholic overtones—Erzulie, the god-spirit of the heart and love with overtones of the Virgin Mary; Damballah Ouedo (the Snake) with the staff of St. Patrick, and St. Peter as Papa Legba, a sort of master of ceremonies at voodoo rites.

  Worshippers believe in the “great God”—Gran Mèt—but see him as too aloof, too concerned with universal challenges to worry about the day-to-day problems of his earthly supplicants. So that’s where the loas come in—the lesser spirits of the plants, the streams, fire, death, and love, and the fierce Guédé, voodoo lord of the crossroads to the underworld. These are the forces that must be recognized and kept in balance and harmony. These are the spirits that are “called” and dominate the fiery ceremonies. Said to enter through the roof of the peristyle down the painted pole, the poteau-mitoo in the center of the room, they possess worshippers, seemingly at random, and fling men and women, whirling like dervishes, around and around the cramped space, sending them into paroxysms, reaching out to touch the forces that felt so tangible in that tiny room.

  As a novice I understood nothing of the careful sequencing of the ceremony led by the houngan. The incredible noise, the dancing, the sweat, the elaborate drawings of vévé patterns in cornmeal in the earth floor, the trembling bodies possessed by the loas, the whirling of machetes, the frantic clapping and chanting in the ancient languages of Benin and Western Africa, the constant boom of the maman (the largest drum) behind the sharper sound of the seconde drum and the bula, the ritual exchanges of sweat, the violent sacrifice of two chickens, the offerings of food at the central post, the strangeness of the interludes when the sounds ceased but continued on in my head…then the crash of the maman and the whole rhythm beginning again, on and on, hour after hour.

  It was too much; I couldn’t think. I wasn’t even sure what I was seeing was real. All I could do was let go and feel, remembering the words of one of the CARE workers in Port-au-Prince: “Voodoo is everything—it fills every part of the life of believers—it’s faith, it’s medicine and very necessary medicine in a countryside with hardly any doctors; it’s justice; it’s the ultimate faith and yet it’s tangible—if you ever get to see one of the ceremonies you’ll feel those loas are real—real flesh and blood and with a power you won’t believe….”

  Much later on there were more rituals around an altar in a side room, the houmfor, filled with sealed urns (said to contain the spirits of the loas), tied bundles of dusty sticks and leaves, plates of flour that had been used for drawing the vévés, and a stone bath set in the floor for sacred washings, rattles made out of gourds, and, most strange of all, neatly framed prints of Christ (with a glowing pink heart), the Virgin, and statuettes of Catholic saints, all under a low ceiling decorated with paper streamers like leftover Christmas decorations.

  Sometime just before dawn the ceremonies ended and the people began drifting down out of the forest and back to their homes in the village below. For a while I walked behind a frail elderly man with bowed shoulders and a limp. He turned to me and smiled a wrinkled smile, and I knew I’d seen him before, only then he’d been Papa Legba and he’d been dancing like a disco-crazed youth around the post, crashing into bodies, his face filled with sweat, his eyes bursting with fire and life….

  The rest of the drive back through the mountains was uneventful. The fords had become mere trickles again, the sky was aqua blue, and the rain-washed trees sparkled. Eventually I arrived on the coastal plain, passing more world-class beaches, all pristine and all empty.

  At last—Cap Haitien. An active and colorful port city of narrow streets lined with Spanish-style stucco buildings, all couched in a bowl of jungly hills. A large white cathedral with a prominent dome sat at one side of a shady plaza.

  Here I played the hedonistic tourist for a while, splashing in my hotel pool set on a steep bluff overlooking the town and harbor, eating elegant five-course dinners while a Haitian band played out-of-tune folksongs.

  King Henri Christophe, one of the first rulers of Haiti after its fiery independence in 1804, chose this area for his regal headquarters and had an enormous Versailles-style palace built at Milot, about twenty miles east of Cap Haitien, where he entertained his court and foreign admirers with all the elegance and extravagance of French royalty.

  He had great dreams for his new nation and formed a fitting model for Eugene O’Neill’s Emperor Jones. “Haiti and the Haitians were born to glory,” he reputedly stated, “to greatness, to life, to immortality.” He forgot to emphasize though that such glory would only be won by keeping the poor Haitians working as virtual slaves in the old colonial plantations and sacrificing the lives of twenty thousand of his countrymen in building one of the largest fortresses in the world—Citadelle La Ferrière—on a mountain peak, high above his palace, as a bastion against any neocolonial invasions by Napoleon or others.

  His suicide in 1820, at a time of peasant rebellions, began Haiti’s long tradition of errant leaders, most of whom have been violently disposed of by a populace still seeking its own “glory and immortality.”

  Standing among the crumbling rooms and terraces of Christophe’s palace ruins and looking down on the tiny shanties and patchwork of gardens and sugarcane fields far below, I let the contrasting images of this strange little country flash by: a nation of artists in love with vibrant color and form; a nation of enormous inequities between the peasant farmers and the “mountain monarchs” in their mansions and walled compounds high above Port-au-Prince; the explosions of flamboyants, bougainvillea, and hibiscus against deforested and eroding hills; the power and energy of country voodoo ceremonies against the slovenliness and sloth of city “bidonville” slums; the fiery souls of peasants, haunted for generations by the “specter of the master,” hidden under a surface patina of smiles, laughter, and laissez-faire lethargy.

  “Deye mon, gen mon”—“Behind the mountains, there are mountains”—goes the saying. And it’s true. The enigmas endure. Haiti is still mystery, complexity—and pure adventure.

  3. COSTA RICA

  Misadventures in an Oasis of Peace

  Iceland—ah, Iceland!

  A vast, treeless terrain filled
with all the teeming folklore figments of the wild Viking imagination—a place of boyhood fantasies—a place to roam across wind-scoured wastes, scaling glaciers, wandering the great ice dome of Vatnajökull.

  “Sorry, sir. Iceland is closed.”

  Two days before departure and the nice lady from the national tourist office calls to tell me that there’s been a general strike. All flights are canceled.

  So here I am with a free week between Major Commitments and nowhere to go.

  I trust my travel agent implicitly. He and I have worked our way through many sticky schedules, and when he suggested Costa Rica I thought, what the heck, it’ll be fun to go somewhere I know nothing about.

  “Central America? You gotta be out of your mind. That whole place is nothing but bananas, guerilla wars, and loony drug-dealing dictators!” Friends can be like that—very bigoted in a protective kind of way.

  My travel agent held fast. “Costa Rica is different from anywhere you’ve ever been—it’s one of the most peaceful and lovely places on earth. Trust me.”

  Florida flashed by from thirty-six thousand feet—miles of empty sunburned scrub with occasional rococo swirlings of subdivisions scratched in the dry earth and no houses on them (I bet the fancy brochures make them look like bits of paradise). Mexico was much the same color without the subdivisions; occasional wrigglings of mountain ranges gave the martini-mellowed passengers some startling landscapes to look at. Guatemala was on fire. Thousands of tiny slash-and-burn milpas were clearing virgin jungle for peasant farmers (deforestation chomping through the mountains like King Kong at a wedding breakfast).

  Honduras came as a surrealist pause in the middle of endless plains of banana trees; a ramshackle airport littered with sinister, slouching police; snoozing staff who forgot to fuel the plane, and one terrified native who tried to make a dash for somewhere across the runway and was dragged off by soldiers in green fatigues bristling with grenades and automatic weapons. Nicaragua was invisible—not an acre of that war-torn place could be seen through the gray haze.

  Then came Costa Rica, sparkling-clear with vistas of open-mouthed volcanoes along the cordilleras and a marshmallow-soft landing at San José in the middle of the cool central valley. I felt like a kid with a Christmas stocking full of unopened presents.

  The presents came brightly wrapped, intense little moments on my first day in the capital of a million or so inhabitants. Comfortably settled in the delightfully old-fashioned Gran Hotel (with casino!), in a room overlooking the main square, I flung back the tall windows and found a miniature version of the Paris Opera House facing me, the Teatro Nacional. A Verdi opera was advertised for that night to be followed in a couple of days by a group of Central American folksingers notorious for their left-wing views on everything from bananas to bombs. It was my first introduction to the democratic verve of this tiny nation of 2.5 million people.

  Directly below me, street vendors sold replicas of black-clay Indian whistles, flowers, string hammocks, and mini-mountains of fresh fruit to couples strolling by hand-in-hand. Cicadas buzzed furiously in the shade trees. There were lovers everywhere—smooching, hugging, whispering and swooning into each other’s eyes. (“Making love is the number one pastime in Costa Rica,” I had read somewhere.)

  It was the evening rush hour. Traffic snarled and honked all the way down Avenida Central; elegantly coiffured ladies jay-walked, jiggling slim hips in tight skirts, a neon temperature sign flashed 75° (it’s always 75° in San José); inelegant tower blocks rose into the brilliant blue sky behind a jumble of smaller stucco buildings adorned with shutters and pantile roofs. And beyond all this were the soaring cones of the great volcanoes, Irazú, Poas, and Barva, whose occasional irritable shrugs and burps are a reminder to the Costa Ricans, better known as “Ticos,” of the tenacity of life in their capital.

  “Our volcanoes give one a distinctly existential perspective.” Ticos can be very eloquent, at least around San José, and in Guillermo Santamaria I had obviously met one of the more loquacious examples at the hotel café on the square. “When Irazú blew in 1963 she covered most of the city and our valley with ceniza [ash] day after day for months. It was terrible. Thick fog all the time.”

  Guillermo drank his tiny cup of black coffee with three fingers extended like porcupine quills. When he first introduced himself I expected some sell-job of a touristy nature. Now it was obvious he merely wanted to talk.

  He continued. “And poor Cartago [a colonial city ten miles east of San José], almost completely destroyed in 1841, then again in 1910, then half-buried in ceniza in 1963.” He sighed a long Latin sigh. “So sad. It was such a beautiful city.”

  A policeman walked by with dark glasses and a big revolver, high on his hip. I made some inane remark about Central American dictators and their impressive armies.

  “Army!” Guillermo spluttered over his coffee, sprinkling a little on his crisp white shirt. “We have no army in Costa Rica. You, my friend, are ensconced in an oasis of peace here. Truly. Our colleagues to the north and south have their problems, many problems—El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Panama—but we’ve had peace here since 1948. That’s forty years with no revolutions, no dictators, and no army, thanks to “Don Pepe” Figueres Ferrer. He brought us democracy, free elections, and free education and medicine. He helped peasants to own their own land, he even established a ‘University of Peace,’ which is still here today. And you know about Oscar Arias Sanchez…” He couldn’t resist a little jab, “You have heard of our president, Arias? Well, he is now trying to bring peace to all of Central America. He is a good man, a brilliant man, but—such a task! Our country is surrounded by…” He thought better of explicit epithets. “Momentico.”

  He raised his three spiny fingers again and a waiter appeared immediately.

  “Dos quaros.”

  The drinks arrived in tiny glasses. We toasted Arias with the harsh clear liquor, distilled from sugarcane. Two more arrived.

  “I welcome you to Costa Rica,” he said slowly, “and I trust you will discover and enjoy our very special and very real peace.”

  After a third round of quaros, peace was taking on a very tangible quality on my first evening in Tico-land.

  Costa Rica really is a tiny country, about half the size of Virginia, but that in no way detracts from the amazing diversity of topography and nature. From the “land of eternal spring” at four thousand feet in the high central valley, the topography falls steeply on both sides, fifty miles to the humid Pacific Coast and sixty miles to the even more moist Caribbean. Toward the northern border with Nicaragua, beyond Lake Arenal, is the arid Guanacaste, a mysterious empty region with ancient ties to the Maya and Olmec cultures; in the south, toward the Panama border, are the still-unexplored ranges of the Cordillera de Talamanca and the torrid tropics of Golfo Dulce and the Peninsula de Osa.

  There are over eight hundred species of birds here (more than all of the United States and Canada combined); eight thousand plant species (with over twelve hundred different types of orchids); twenty national parks and reserves covering almost ten percent of the nation; the world’s finest “high-acid” coffee and sweetest bananas; three symphony orchestras; twice as many teachers as policemen.

  Columbus was right when he sailed along the Caribbean side of the country in 1502 and named it Costa Rica, “the rich coast.” Typically, of course, his idea of riches referred more to the possibilities inherent in the gold ornaments worn by the coastal Indians than the natural fecundity of the country. King Ferdinand’s early Spanish colonizers were sadly disappointed by the lack of significant gold sources and the aggressiveness of the natives. Settlement was sparse and half-hearted even after the establishment of Cartago as the capital in 1563. The Spanish felt abandoned and adopted native lifeways (while still managing to decimate the native population); Costa Rica was too poor and too far from the center of Spain’s Central American empire in Guatemala to be of lasting interest.

  Following independence in 1821, t
he undeveloped country was ripe for domination by avaricious visionaries. On my second night in San José I attended a powerfully satirical production in one of the city’s many underground theaters. The young cast presented a musical synopsis of the nation’s history, highlighted by the theme song “Quien Soy?” (“Who Am I?”). The tight-packed audience constantly broke into spasms of laughter, tears, and jeers (how the Ticos love their theater!) as the troupe of eight acted out the arrogance of the nineteenth-century coffee barons, the empire-building antics of the American pirate, William Walker, and the machinations of Boston’s Minor Keith who supervised the construction of the incredible 104-mile-long San José-to-Limón coffee railroad in the 1880s (a most unusual jungle ride experience for adventurous travelers).

  Keith went on to found the notorious United Fruit Company (La Yunai) on 800,000 acres of free banana land in the eastern coastal plain. Even the gradual emergence of democracy here, following the demise of those larger-than-life intruders, was marred by occasional oppressive dictatorships, and it was only (as Guillermo had proudly told me) the unifying gift of Pepe Figueres that ultimately brought social reform and peace to this battered land. When the final chorus of “Quien Soy?” came, the audience rose as one and surged to the stage, embracing the players, some openly weeping, shouting slogans of pride for the peace and democracy of their little nation. That night they knew exactly who they were.

  After two days of museums and remarkably active nightlife in San José, I was ready for sun, sand, and the simple life. So I rented a car and drove the winding road down from the high central valley, through mile after mile of coffee plantations, to the languorous seaside town of Puntarenas on the Pacific Ocean.