The Tugboats of Costa Rica

Many of us like to think we own some unappreciated talent, modestly concealed and perhaps lacking the urgency to rise toward the light. Youngsters playing catch on the lawn make elaborate movements, hoping that the passing green 1949 De Soto contains a pro scout who might take notice of them, even at this early age. It is said that Henry Kravis, the fabled Wall Street predator, can pick up a coin without bending over.

While I have the gravest doubts about the durability of any of my writing, few can beat me at the graceful dance of knife, fork, and spoon across the plate or the capacity to make a pickle last as long as a sandwich. I have thought of rigging tiny lights to my eating utensils and getting myself filmed while eating in the near dark: imagine, if you will, the dancelike swirl of these points of light. Just last evening in my cabin, the performance took place over a humble, reduced-calorie Tuscan stew (very lean Muscovy duck, pancétta, white beans, copious garlic, fresh sage, and thyme). Since I was alone in the twilight, the applause rang a bit hollow.

To be sure, our limitations strangle us, letting us know who we are. On a semireligious level, normally we have a secret animal we favor, but this is dangerous territory. Never tell a government official your secret animal, since it will one day be used against you. On a more mundane plateau, if you were a boat, what kind of boat would you be? You must be honest, since I can't interrogate you, what with each of us being alone. No dream boats, grand sloops, ghostly galleons, if you please. As for me, and I'm doing the writing here, I have long confessed to being a tugboat: slow, rather stubby, persistent, functional, an estuarine creature that avoids open water.

This is all prefatory to my irritation on being asked if I was a good fly-fisherman. I had just returned from a trip to Costa Rica with the painter Russell Chatham and the sportsman Guy de la Valdène, where we were fly-fishing for billfish up in Guanacaste Province on the Pacific. A little of my testiness might have been caused by garden-variety dysentery and a skin rash that turned my entire torso into a pizza. The consolation is that dysentery is a grand leap forward on a brand-new diet, though Chatham noted that the connection between his dysentery and diet was like pitching a shufleboard puck off a cruise ship. I shall never forget his pathetic yelp in the night as he pooped his bed during a feverish dream. My skin rash, incidentally, left doctors helpless, but I cured it myself with a slush devised out of baking soda and Epsom salts, patent pending. Chatham and I questioned why de la Valdène remained disease-free, but then it occurred to us that he no longer eats his way through a menu merely out of curiosity. We wished him an attractive middle age at La Cascada, outside San José, a fabulous place with good wine and a boggling array of fresh seafood and beef. For some reason, Costa Rican beef is exquisitely flavorful, though very lean. It tastes like the best beef of your childhood, before the advent of short-cut packing, feed lots, chemicals, and no aging.

But to address my irritation about whether I'm good at fly-fishing: why bother if you haven't taken the time to learn to make the throw? Beyond that point, any spirit of competition in hunting or fishing dishonors the prey. It means that you are either unaware of, or have no feeling toward, your fellow creatures. Fishing tournaments seem a little like playing tennis with living balls, say, neatly bound bluebirds. Competition also engenders anger, and there's little point in being out in the forest, in a river, or on the ocean if you're going to be pissed off.

It just occurs to me that I shouldn't tell you where we went fishing in Costa Rica. There's no travel writer's obligation here. Find your own place. The location isn't lacking in business, and I'd hate to return and find the place mobbed. Anyhow, there are certain disadvantages: the charter plane from San José had no working gauges, and the land beneath the plane, a lovely green hell, lacked landing strips. Just hills and gorges. There were scorpions on the path from the marina and restaurant to the hotel, shaking their malevolent asses at sea-weary drunks. We did miss the bandied-about march of tarantulas. Our presiding captain had a softball-size, pitch-black sore on his arm from a “little spider” he rolled over on in his sleep. Our wonderful captain of the last day, a surgeon who took early retirement from the frenzy of the States, said that the occasional missing arms and feet in surrounding villages were from the fer-de-lance, an aggressive viper. To me this added to the fabulous beauty of the place, the green mountains meeting the blue sea, the deserted beaches, the hundred-acre schools of spotted dolphin, the 353 green parrots sitting in a shoreline tree above an immense green marine iguana sunning on a rock. The location is doubtless safer than crossing Lexington on Seventy-second or turning left on Laurel Canyon off Sunset Boulevard.

Modest dangers make you attentive, while extreme danger can explode your equilibrium, sometimes permanently, as we see in certain Vietnam veterans. When your engines quit far out at sea, you become a great deal more conscious of the immensity of the ocean. But then you have a ship-to-shore radio, though this is scarcely foolproof. One afternoon we monitored a Mayday from another charter boat. It had broken a shaft, lost a propeller, and couldn't offer a navigational fix for rescue craft! Moreover, the current was drifting the boat toward Nicaraguan waters. Our Spanish captain assured us that the latter wasn't significant, since the two countries aren't hostile. Looking north across the expanse of water, I found it difficult to feel the threat of this country, which, as William Greider pointed out, owns only two workable elevators. Perhaps the Russian atomic subs cruising the Jersey waters are more important. Perhaps the Nicaraguan threat was a red herring to cover up the massive savings-and-loan swindle, the HUD pillaging, the Pentagon procurement scandal, the eight solid years of ignoring the environment.

The purpose of my trip, however, was to fly-fish for billfish, which might be called stunt fishing. I had done it a decade before in Ecuador, where the current run of striped marlin had proved unmanageable. In Costa Rica we hooked some Pacific sailfish, and for an hour I fought one that was over 150 pounds. The excitement is intense when fish are rising to the baits, which are large rubber squid. You tease the fish with the squid, and when the fish are properly turned on you stop the boat and fly cast. It sounds quite ordinary, but several times the fish in question were blue and black marlin weighing in excess of five hundred pounds, bigger around than an oil barrel and over ten feet long. The blue marlin in particular seems perpetually angry. I watched from the flying bridge as an enormous blue slashed at the baits, half out of the water, then took de la Valdène's streamer fly, thrashing his head and breaking the line. Marlin flash iridescent blue and green when they attack a bait, startlingly beautiful against the darker water. Our surgeon-captain told me he had seen spotted dolphin bump marlin away from baited hooks.

Curiously, our most pathetic meal on the coast was also our best. Hubert and Agnes, the proprietors of the Amberes Restaurant, had made a stew out of the fresh local catch and shellfish. It was pathetic because Agnes was doctoring Chatham's dysentery and allowed him only plain rice with a ginger ale on the side. He glowered, beet red from the sun and fever and in pain from boating a fish while aching with a bad back, fighting the sailfish, hunched over like a nautical Quasimodo. I expressed my sympathy by losing a lot of money at the casino.

1989