TWELVE NOON. THE SECOND TOUR OF THE DAY WAS UNDER WAY AND Logan was over at the tour grounds assisting Earl with that. Winkie was there, too. Carol was on the other side of the Gulf, picking up a few supplies, and Traca and Sweetie were doing a little yoga up at our cabin. As for Jackson … I wasn’t sure. She’d just been eating a huge plate of pasta (in an effort to “feel full,” as she said) before offering me the last few bites (in an attempt, I suspect, to have me wash the plate). Now she was somewhere outside and I was sitting at the end of the Human Kitchen table, alone. Well, sort of alone.
On the table before me, a few random creatures were keeping me company. Traca’s last remaining parakeet, Big, was doing well, filling out his fancy green pantaloons nicely, resting in a small pet carrier. Farther down, another cage held a baby jaguarundi, like a small black house cat but with sharp claws, a desire for raw meat, and a vicious if squeaky little growl. The final tabletop residents were also our newest arrivals: two baby owls who were delivered to the sanctuary a few days back.
When I was a kid, my mother collected owl figurines. I think mothers start collections like this to give their kids an easy gift idea, and it worked like a charm for my brothers and me. Virtually every Mother’s Day, birthday, and Christmas, all three of us dutifully (and cheaply) handed over the big-eyed goods until she had a display case aviary with well over one hundred specimens. Having seen so many garish cartoon replicas, I wasn’t prepared for how much more garish and cartoonish baby owls were in real life: huge staring eyes, odd panting beaks, and funky rhythmic head bobs. In honor of my mom’s interest in and devotion to all things owl, we named one of these intense little fluff balls Esther.
Outside the Human Kitchen, it was the kind of day the office of Costa Rican tourism likes to brag about: blue sky, warm sun, tropical perfection—but I was sitting this one out. Since my third set of monkey bites, I had decided to make the remainder of my stay a monkey-free zone. Pitiful, yes, but much less stressful for me. Each morning I stayed in my bedroom-cage until breakfast. Then Traca took Sweetie for a walk down the beach. When the coast was clear, Jack or Logan gave me the signal and I ran like hell to my kitchen-cage. After that, I just repeated the process every time I needed to go anywhere all day: no jungle paths, no carefree excursions out in the open, no monkey contact of any kind, period. Honestly, I couldn’t take it any more. I had PTSD: posttraumatic Sweetie disorder. Though the bites weren’t life-threatening or really even all that painful, I found myself reliving the attacks again and again. I dreamed about them. I saw monkeys in the shadows of our cabin at night. I even started bawling like a baby while listening to my iPod one afternoon. It was Sara Bareilles singing “Gravity,” a beautiful song with piano and cello. And the lyrics, a desperate plea from a powerless lover:
Set me free. Leave me be.
You’re on to me, on to me, and all over me.
Maybe it was the haunting mix of keys and resonant strings. Maybe it was the message. Maybe I was just ready to snap. Whatever the trigger, I fell apart. Without restraint, I released all my pent-up fear and sadness into that song, squeezing years’ worth of therapy out of a single four-minute ballad. I cried for feeling trapped and vulnerable; for being scared to go outside; for growing old; for wasting so much time disconnected from Traca. I cried for how much I loved my kids and for how much I would miss them when they were gone. I even cried for the childhood cat my parents made me take back to the animal shelter after she clawed up all our window screens. It was not an organized grief; I was all over the place. But when the song ended and I pulled myself together, I knew one thing for sure: I was done with the monkeys. If I needed to cower in a cage to avoid another Sweetie bite … so be it.
The good news was—at least from what I could observe from inside my various cages—my new isolation was working out just fine for the troop. After three days of self-imposed exile, the sanctuary was at peace; no fighting, biting, or bleeding. And while it sucked to be essentially another animal in a cage, there were so many great things happening in the free world, I was content for the moment to let Traca and the kids have all the fun.
Though I missed my time exploring the jungle with Logan, I was thrilled that he was now on camera trap detail with Pincho. Pincho knew the rain forest better than anyone else, and he taught as they walked, all in Spanish, which was even better. They wielded machetes, tracked agoutis to their dens, drank with leaves from mountain streams, and generally acted the way real Costa Rican men of danger were supposed to act. To see Logan emerge from the jungle at the end of these treks, sweating, triumphant, and smiling from ear to ear, was an image that was easily worth a couple of monkey bites to me.
Jackson, meanwhile, was really starting to embrace her time with her monkey sisters, especially Winkie. They played a new game that was pure comedy. I’m not sure why or how it worked but it went like this: Jack cornered Winkie and made the typical monkey greeting face—squinty eyes, chin out, kissy lips. Then, for some reason, Winkie reacted like a silent movie comedian. She fell back, stumbled, threw her arms up, staggered, backed into the wall, desperately lunged for the window cage wire in front of me, then flopped to the floor, crawled like a snake, and on and on. Jack laughed nonstop through the whole performance, and so did her monkey friend—all of which was unplugged music to the ears of the Attacked White Male nearby.
And Traca was practically family to these little hairy children, if not a mother, then definitely a favorite aunt. In the exact opposite way that Sweetie enjoyed chewing on my extremities, she unconditionally adored Traca. They even shared the same T-shirt at times, presenting a human and a monkey head out the same neck opening like some freaky two-headed science experiment gone wrong. It looked like my worst nightmare come to life, but for Traca, it was a beautiful dream come true.
As for Traca and me … we were getting there. As expected, in spite of all the drama, life was easier for us on the road. With so many new, exotic distractions, our tired old domestic patterns felt silly, dissolving away like jungle mist, leaving behind the two friends that we’ve always been. We talked, laughed, and seemed to move a little closer every day. After my third set of bites, when I stood up from the drainage ditch, I staggered into the ocean where I knew Sweetie would not follow. I was shaking and scared, and Traca met me there. “That’s it,” she said protectively. “We’re not doing this anymore.” She looked me in the eye, all barriers gone, and stood beside me, knee-deep in the water, ready to take on the world together.
It was my decision to finish out our commitment at the sanctuary, even though it meant my hiding in the Human Kitchen like another exhibit on tour. So while the rest of the family enjoyed a carefree, once-in-a-lifetime experience, I just waited and watched and learned what I could. If nothing else, my life in captivity did give me a complete and thorough understanding of why Carol and Earl work so hard to release animals back into the wild.
Bottom line: It’s way more fun on the outside of the cage.