“People Said to Avoid This Place”
The day after I return from the Amazon, D e-mails me a sample of our wedding Evite she created. I don’t respond for two days.
“Did you get my e-mail?” D asks finally.
“E-mail?”
She glares at me.
“Oh, the wedding invitation?”
“Yes, Andrew. The wedding invitation.”
“I did, yeah.”
“And?”
“Well, when I read it I fell down and hit my head and got amnesia and I’m just now coming to and starting to remember things, so that’s why I haven’t said anything.”
“You’re lucky you’re funny.”
“We’re not going to have regular invitations?”
“You said you didn’t want it to be a formal, big huge deal.”
“I know, but . . .”
“But what?” D says.
“Do you think anyone will take us seriously with just an e-mail, ‘Hey, come to Ireland for our wedding, it’s in a park, and bring a picnic’ invitation?”
“Is that what it looks like to you?”
On the invitation that D created, two bold peacocks flank the screen; their colorful tails hang down, framing a poem by Hafiz. The pertinent facts are placed discreetly below. It is an elegant, simple, and poetic invitation. “It’s beautiful, sweetheart,” I say, and kiss her.
She kisses me back. “Do you think so?”
“I do.”
“Do you like the poem?”
“I love it.”
“And the peacocks?”
“Love them.”
“Any input?”
I’m silent for a minute. “Don’t only the male peacocks have colorful feathers?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Do you think anyone will notice that it’s two males?”
On the morning of my departure for Costa Rica, I’m eating breakfast with D and our four-year-old daughter.
“Well, at least you were home for almost a couple of weeks this time,” D says.
With a mouth full of cereal our daughter looks at me. “Do you know when I like you best, Daddy?”
“When, pumpkin?”
“When you come back from staying at the airport.”
I have often wondered why certain acting jobs come my way when they do. What’s the lesson to be learned aside from the obvious challenge of the work? Why, for example, am I cast as a widower while I’m in the process of getting divorced? Or in a silly comedy while I’m going through a particularly tough stretch personally? With travel writing it has been the same.
In Patagonia, I indulged my desire for solitude, and the boat up the Amazon thrust me into the heart of the group dynamic—obviously not the reasons why I first proposed these trips to my editor.
Usually I have an idea for a story I want to tell that is tied to a particular location—a place I either love or have long wanted to visit. My rationale being that I will have more to say if I have a passion and a curiosity about where it is I’m going. But Costa Rica is different. I simply said yes when my editor asked me to do a story about it. I have never had any desire to go there, or anywhere in Central America for that matter. My uninformed preconception of the region is of a swampy little bog that attracts a mangy crowd looking to do seedy things on the cheap.
The plane to San José lives down to my expectations. It’s filled with squat men with thick necks and their women, wearing velour warm-up suits. Tall, skinny frat boys in yellow V-neck sweaters, probably heading down to take advantage of Costa Rica’s booming sex tourism trade, slouch up the aisle. “Fishing trips” is the term I believe men use to describe these expeditions to their wives and girlfriends back home.
At Juan Santamaria airport I pass a life-size, cardboard cutout of a delicate-looking young woman propped up beside the customs desk, reminding everyone that sex with a minor is illegal and punishable by a stint in local prison. I wonder what it is exactly that I’ve been sent to Costa Rica to learn.
I make my way to a small hangar beside the main terminal and find an old man with tousled gray hair and a drooping mustache. He’s waiting for me. Beside him stands a teenager—no more than fifteen; they both wear white, short-sleeved shirts, with blue and gold bars on their shoulders. They’re standing beside a twin-engine, six-seat prop plane.
“Puerto Jiménez?” I ask, pointing at the small plane with paper-thin wings.
The old man nods.
I’m heading to the Osa Peninsula, on Costa Rica’s southwestern Pacific coast. The underdeveloped Osa is far from the well-worn eco-circuit of volcanoes, zip lines through cloud forests, and surf schools along the northern coast, for which Costa Rica has become famous.
“Solo?”—am I the only one? I point to myself.
Again, the tired old man nods. I approach the plane and give the fragile-looking wing a gentle shake. The entire plane rocks badly. The old man holds up a finger of warning.
Before I climb aboard I check my e-mail. D has just sent a message. It hasn’t downloaded completely, only the subject line has come through: “WARNING,” it reads.
I’m hoping she hasn’t had one of her dreams of premonition, but in order to buy some time for the message to download, I ask if I can go to the bathroom. The captain shrugs and points to a door in the corner of the hangar. I scamper off and lock myself in the filthy toilet. The message never comes through and eventually the young man knocks on the door. Reluctantly, I exit the pungent room, shuffle across the blistering heat on the tarmac, and climb on board. The plane is stifling; no air moves. In thickly accented English, the old man finally speaks. “I am George,” he says. He then slams the door shut, locking me inside.
George trudges around to the cockpit, fires up the engines, and the high thin hum of the props rips into my ears. The plane begins to vibrate—my teeth would clatter if my jaw weren’t already locked shut. We roll out toward the main runway and stop. George looks left and right.
“See anything?” he shouts over his shoulder. Is he talking to me? Without waiting for an answer he slams the throttle forward.
Once we are airborne I try to focus my attention on a small rivet on the wing, to stop my mind from wandering to images of disaster. The rivet begins to vibrate, badly. Is it coming loose? I look away and then return my focus to it a minute later. Was the rivet jutting out this far before? Should I alert the captain? I decide to focus on something else. We’re between two cloud banks, cruising on a river of blue sky. Soon we’re flying over the mountains of Talamanca, and the plane begins to bounce. Every time the plane jumps, I lift my feet as if I’m hopping over something. There is no need for this, and I’m not sure why I do it, but I can’t stop. When we hit a particularly bad patch of turbulence, my head bangs on the ceiling six inches above me. I decide to tighten my seat belt. Then, just off to our left, a small plane, similar in size to ours, comes zipping out of the clouds. The plane buzzes past close enough that I can easily read its call letters. Did someone inside wave? At least I’m no longer worried about turbulence.
Twenty minutes later George begins to tap a circular screen in the center of the instrument panel. He does this for a while, shakes his head, and then stops. After a few minutes he taps the screen again, harder this time. Then he instructs the young man in the seat beside him to bang the panel while he steers. We sweep out over the deep blue water of the Golfo Dulce and then in an arcing dive we turn back toward the dense canopy of green. A thin ribbon of open ground sliced into the jungle comes clear directly ahead, and then a loud and piercing buzzing fills the cabin. George slaps the young man’s hand away from the console. He jabs at a few buttons. We lose altitude fast. George pulls back hard on the controls. The sea below is getting very close; I can plainly see the coral beneath the now-turquoise water. Then we’re inches above the trees and we bounce our way to a less than delicate landing on the small and narrow airstrip conveniently located beside a wide and crowded graveyard.
I like this place immediately.
Standing under a cashew tree beside the cemetery, I count twenty-six scarlet macaws squawking so loud from its branches that I don’t hear the small, square-shouldered man with the thick glasses stepping up to shake my hand. Tom Connor lives in a simple home beside the landing strip and likes to stroll over whenever a plane lands, “just to see who’s crazy enough to want to come here.” An expat from Cleveland, Tom has lived in the Osa for more than twenty years. He tells me the airstrip was paved a few years ago, and that a spinning prop recently decapitated a man—it’s unclear if the man was buried in the adjacent cemetery.
“How about some lunch?” Tom asks. With nowhere to go and no idea what I might do otherwise, his invitation is easy to accept.
“Want to see town first?” he asks after I climb into his pickup. We bump over a dirt road through dense vegetation, beneath palm and bamboo and acacia, and in two minutes we emerge onto the one paved road in Puerto Jiménez, the only town of any note in the Osa. The road’s cement gutters are so deep to accommodate runoff during the rainy season that if Tom were to misjudge a turn and his pickup were to fall into one, his axle would be in serious danger of snapping. The three-block main drag has no name and few services.
“We’ve got no KFC here, no dry cleaners,” Tom says in a wry tone. A man pedals a rusting bike past us, dangling a three-foot-long fish over the handlebars as he goes. We pass the medical clinic; opaque plastic sheeting is taped over the windows where glass is missing. “They have some equipment, but no one knows how to use it. I got sick once, needed some care, and got out of here in a hurry.” We pass a gas station, “the only one in the Osa,” and come to the end of the town, where the obligatory soccer field is located, across from the Catholic church. There are some unfinished houses. “We have a lot of construction, but not a lot of progress.”
“Is there a strong community here?”
“The main pastime is talking about other people’s business. Who’s dating whom.”
We turn off down a dirt lane.
“Where are you staying?” Tom asks.
“Nowhere, yet.” I mention the two places I read about in my guidebook.
“Stay at the cabins, they’re cleaner. It’s right there”—he points out the window down a short, dead-end road—“and once you’ve had enough of the big city, come be my guest out in the jungle.” We bounce along farther and suddenly the bay opens out to our left. The unpaved road hugs the coast until we come to a shack beside a large palm-frond roof covering a patio. As we climb out of his truck I hear a thud over my shoulder.
“There’s an event,” Tom says lazily, “a coconut fell.” It’s impossible to know how Tom really feels about his adopted home. His true opinions about this, and everything else, seem locked behind a knowing and detached irony.
We take a seat out of a hot sun that’s trying to burn itself through a thin layer of clouds. The humidity hangs heavy. There is no breeze under the overhang. Sweat rolls freely down my back. Tom orders a beer, I ask for a soda water. My body is disoriented and my mind disjointed from lack of sleep and jet lag.
“Not quite a dream state, but it’s certainly not wakefulness,” is how writer Pico Iyer describes the malady that has afflicted the traveler for only the last half century. It’s a state I find myself in often and it only seems to be getting worse, never better. I’ve tried sleeping on arrival and staying up for twenty-four hours. I’ve taken melatonin and vitamin C. I’ve stood barefoot in a green field and watched the sunset. I’ve drunk gallons of water. Nothing works. I get jet lag, bad.
When I’m under jet lag’s spell I often feel as if I have the clarity to see between my thoughts, a clarity that I usually lack. These insights invariably fill me with feelings of loneliness and melancholy, often accompanied by a shrugging sorrow that engulfs me. I’ve tried to embrace this state, but when my jet lag passes my thinking is often revealed to be deeply indulgent and sometimes just plain wrong. Consequently, I try not to take myself too seriously for a few days upon arrival at any distant locale.
But it’s in this altered state that I hear Tom’s story over lunch. A Peace Corps volunteer in the late sixties, Tom became a lawyer, defending large corporations. After a decade he grew disgusted, switched sides, and fought for the little guy for another ten years.
“But I just never got out of the Peace Corps mentality. So my wife and I came down here in 1990. We were looking for a third-world adventure; we wanted to contribute something. We wanted something fast moving and challenging. We had an idea to start something in ecotourism—very few were doing that then, and virtually no one in the Osa. In fact, people said to avoid this place. We were told it was full of jaguars, snakes, and no humans. When we heard that, we came here as fast as we could.”
Tom and his wife built their eco-lodge—one of the most successful in the Osa. She has since returned to the States, but he never left. It’s clear from the way Tom tells me this that their marriage is over—we stare out across the water in silence for a minute. He lifts his sweating bottle of beer, takes a long pull, and sets it down. He pushes his thick glasses back up his nose and wrings his hands. With his heavily creased forehead, Tom still looks very much like the lawyer he once was. I sit with his tale.
He seems content enough with his choices, and yet something about his story bothers me. I’ve admired similar individuals who went their own way, but in my current mood, sitting here, sweating by the sea, eating cold ceviche and drinking warm club soda, Tom’s saga strikes me as quixotic, a search for an elusive freedom, only to wind up a lonely old man tilting at windmills in a small house beside an airstrip in a remote backwater.
“Do you miss anything about back home?” I ask.
Tom shrugs. “Just the conveniences.”
A few tables away, over Tom’s shoulder, two young women are seated with a man who keeps looking around with quick glances. One of the women has her back to me, but the other, with long, loose black hair and coffee-colored skin, wearing a red, low-cut T-shirt and black shorts, is staring directly at me and has been throughout the meal.
“I know I’ve only just arrived, but there are some very pretty women here,” I say.
Tom looks around and sees the two women and the man at the table near us. He laughs. “Zorras.”
“What are zorras?”
“Well”—Tom shrugs—“they’re not exactly prostitutes, but it’s not exactly free either. My understanding is you pay a little bit.”
“If you ‘pay a little bit,’ how is that not prostitution?”
He raises his eyebrows and lifts his bottle. “The Osa.”
Tom drops me off in front of the cabins he recommended. They’re not really cabins at all, rather a half dozen detached and semi-detached bungalows on the water’s edge.
A trim, frail man with thinning, sandy-blond hair is standing behind the counter of the open-air lobby to greet me. John Planter is originally from Cape May, New Jersey, and came to the Osa nine years ago on vacation. “I never left.” He shrugs. “Never went back for anything. There’s not a lot going on here, but it does me a lot of good.”
I drop my bag and John offers me a rusting bicycle. I pedal into town a few blocks away, and there really isn’t much more to see than what Tom already showed me. When night falls, I park my bike and wander the streets.
On the main drag people loiter under dim streetlamps. A group of women convene and talk lazily outside the window of the Tienda de Ropa, where football jerseys and sequined T-shirts and mini-shorts are on display. At Juanita’s bar, a cement box painted yellow, a few teenagers bang away at an old-fashioned pinball machine. Around the corner an open-air pool hall with three tables draws a half dozen men. I play a game of eight ball with one of them, while a pair of chickens strut around on the dirt lane out front. I let myself lose and wander off. Except for the bold stares I get from a couple of dark-eyed women hanging around in the shadows, I drift through town unnoticed. At the soccer field, I watch three generations of locals kick a ball with playful gusto under a weak yellow light. I cross the street to an open-air restaurant beside the small library and eat pizza.
This kind of aimless drifting has always been at the center of my traveling. The freedom of being a stranger in a strange place, knowing no one, needing to know no one, with no obligations, elicits deep feelings of liberation, and the farther from the beaten path I go, the quicker the attachment to any idea of how I should be treated is discarded—I’m grateful merely that my needs are met. Without an agenda, or company to distract me, I invariably feel a certain hopefulness that can appear contrary to my aimlessness. Perhaps it’s just the simple joy of being alive.
Finishing my pizza, I watch a cat, walking low and hugging close to the library wall. There is little to clutter my mind. Several of the younger men who were playing soccer across the street earlier slip onto the patio and wash their hands at the sink beside my table. I make my way back into the night.
Even in the peaceful, solitary bubble of Puerto Jiménez, I can feel something tugging at me. Often, a sudden recollection of responsibilities back home falls down on me hard, like a burden I’ve neglected that needs my attention. Feelings of guilt and affection, resentment and love, will often vie for dominance in my suddenly addled mind, but tonight, retrieving my bicycle and pedaling along the dirt road to my bungalow by the sea under a dripping gauze of stars, thoughts of people who need me, and tasks that require my tending, only add to my general contentment as the warm breeze in the night air blows softly past.
In the 1980s, gold mining became big business in the Osa; rivers were dredged and the sides of hills hollowed out. Tougher laws came into play to protect the land from reckless plundering, but Tom told me there are still some diehards out in the hills, occasionally pulling out a big score.
“The problem with gold miners,” he said in his usual laconic, teasing tone, “is that they’re always broke. When they find some, they’re in town, drunk, buying drinks for everyone, and when they don’t, they don’t eat. But go on out to El Tigre, try your luck.”
With visions of golf-ball-size chunks of twenty-four-karat cash falling into my pan, the next morning I rent a jeep on main street and head out of town. Just beyond a newly installed—and wildly out of place—cement bridge, I turn onto a dirt lane cutting through a pasture filled with bone-thin cows and bounce along until I arrive at the cluster of buildings that is El Tigre. During the heyday of the rush, the gold-mining settlement was home to seven thousand souls, but that number has dwindled to a sleepy hundred.
There’s a school across the dirt track from a cement hut with a corrugated iron roof. A hand-painted sign out front says PULPERIA EL TUCAN. A small Costa Rican woman named Sandra is behind the counter of the general store, selling sacks of rice and cartons of eggs, beside cans of motor oil and fishing lures.
I ask her if there is anyone around who might be willing to take me out and do a little panning.
Sandra shrugs. Then a young girl, maybe eight, walks in with a list scribbled onto a scrap of paper and hands it to Sandra. Sandra gets up reluctantly from her perch and shuffles off to a far corner of the cluttered room. She returns with a chicken in a plastic bag, a few potatoes, and then some very limp celery. The small girl pulls out a pinky-nail-size chunk of gold and puts it on the counter. Sandra reaches below the counter and comes up with a small plastic scale. She weighs the raw nugget, makes change in cash, and the little girl takes her haul and goes on her way.
“Was that gold?”
Sandra stares at me, weighing the possible responses to such an idiotic question. “Yes,” she says finally.
“Could I see it?” I have never seen a piece of raw gold, direct from the ground.
Sandra slowly lifts the small, irregular-shaped chunk and holds it out to me. She then reaches under the counter again and comes up with a pistol, an old six-shooter. She places the pistol on the countertop without a word. Her hand rests beside it. When I give the nugget back, Sandra takes it with one hand while replacing the pistol with her other.
“I hate gold,” she says, and then directs me up the hill to a shack where she thinks someone might be willing to take me over to the river. I thank her and head out. But just outside, I come upon a sturdy young man.
“Edwin,” he says when I ask his name. His mitt of a hand engulfs mine and he agrees to take me a short way up the El Tigre River to try my luck. Knee-deep in the rushing water, bending from the waist with a tire iron and shovel, Edwin pries large rocks free and we hurl them aside. We create a small eddy and he lays down a metal trough through which the water funnels. Without warning, a blanket of rain falls. We are drenched within seconds. Edwin doesn’t say anything, doesn’t look up. He doesn’t seem to notice. We continue to dig and hurl rocks aside. Then, using a circular tin pan that looks suspiciously like a hubcap, he dips into the side channel we’ve created and begins to sift the larger stones away. His thick hands work with delicate precision. It stops raining as suddenly as it began. Eventually the grain of soil in the pan becomes fine. The sediment swirls. Tiny shimmering specks begin to appear within the muddy mix. Edwin’s fingers dance over the tray, and a dusting of fine golden grains settles at the bottom. Edwin looks up at me for the first time since we arrived here. He nods. He is pleased.
He empties the dust into a small vial he produces from his pocket and shoves it into my hands. When I try to give it back, I can see that he is offended and I tuck the vial away. As I take leave of him, I put ten thousand colones—roughly twenty dollars—into his hand. He accepts it silently, with a curt nod, and I’m back in my car cutting through the field, past the skinny cows. Back in town, time passes slowly. I go to sell my gold at a shop on the main drag and am offered roughly ten dollars. I meet an Irishman with weathered skin, shaggy blond hair, and a rugged way about him ambling down the main street. His name is Pat Murphy and he’s been in the Osa since the mid-nineties.
“There’s no going back,” he says. I think Pat has seen Crocodile Dundee a few too many times, and when he offers to take me out into the rain forest for a close encounter with an alligator, he can’t understand my resistance to the idea.
“Oh, yeah, gators are his thing,” Tom tells me when I run into him a little later. “You might want to stay away from him.”
Otherwise, life around Puerto Jiménez proceeds with laid-back regularity. I see someone else paying in gold at the El Record shoe store. At a storefront restaurant, where I’m sitting on a plastic chair eating rice and beans, I overhear one man ask another if his pig has given birth yet.
“Not for another few weeks,” the friend replies.
The first man considers this and after a time says, “That’s a nice pig.”
I go next door to buy ice cream.
A large white plastic cooler with a hand-painted sign in English, written in a rainbow of colors and listing a dozen flavors, sits on a patio in front of a door with a doctor’s name on it. No one is around. With nowhere else to go, I wait.
Eventually a tall, broad-shouldered woman with long brown hair walks up from behind me and steps around the cooler. She wears a floral hippie blouse. She has hazel eyes, and her skin is deeply tanned.
“Hi.” She doesn’t explain her long absence.
“How’s the mango flavor?”
“Sweet.”
“I’ll take one.”
“Sure you will,” the woman says with a lazy directness, like a Jersey girl who’s lost her edge, which is exactly what Karen Brown is.
Karen came to the Osa from New Jersey ten years ago, met a local guy, had a child with him, and is now raising her daughter on her own with what she makes selling her homemade ice cream. The mango isn’t very sweet at all and lacks any real flavor, but this is the only place in town to get ice cream and no one else seems to be buying it. And since Karen is easy company, I make it a habit of stopping by every afternoon.
“This is the world’s largest open-air asylum,” she says. “But hey, you can address a letter to ‘Karen, Puerto Jiménez,’ and it’ll get to me. Can’t do that back in the Garden State.”
Karen, like Tom and Pat, is yet another person I meet who walked away from it all with a dream of something better than what she left behind. Whether they found it or not is the question.
I have long harbored similar notions of escape, of walking away and not looking back. It’s not a fantasy that holds much relevance these days. I’m not about to go anywhere with two small children to raise. Their lives are, to a very large degree, my responsibility for another decade at least and not something I care to miss out on. And my life with D—it’s just as important.
However, the secret yearning that can linger just behind each responsible action, the mental flights of fancy, the hunger for otherness, the sexual fantasies that can blossom and undermine any real intimacy, the simple dream of flight, can be nearly as fatal to a relationship as physical departure. You can’t be two places at once—even mentally or emotionally.
So maybe that’s what I’m doing down here in the Osa—getting a good look at those who did escape and to challenge my own propensity toward utopian fantasies that can corrode any chance at real happiness.
A few days later, when Crocodile Dundee corners me again just off the main street, I decide it’s time to take Tom up on his offer. I head out over the only road that goes deeper into the Osa, past balsa and fig trees crowding the road, out toward Tom’s eco-lodge. Before I get there, I see a rental car by the side of the washboard dirt track. Since I haven’t seen any other cars on the trip out, I stop. A young couple, tourists, emerge from the rain forest. They’re moving quickly.
“Everything all right?” I ask.
“Yeah,” the man says, but I miss the rest of his sentence as they rush into their car and race off.
I park. A few feet from the road, the rain forest is dense; another ten feet in and I wouldn’t be able to see the road at all. I don’t see anything unusual, but I don’t really know what it is I’m looking for. I take another few steps and stop, sensing something moving to my left. I turn. Two feet away, at eye level, a fifteen-foot boa constrictor is coiled around the dead limb of a tree. His head is lifted off the branch and is arching back. He is taking a good look at me, and has been for a while.
“Whooooa,” I blurt out, and jump back. The snake and I stare at each other for a while. I gasp for breath and say some more useful things, like, “Jesus Christ,” and “Holy shit,” and then, “Why didn’t you say it was a fucking boa constrictor?” Eventually the snake loses interest in me and lowers his head back down. I take out my phone and turn on the video, to show off my courage in front of the killer snake for my kids back home, and then drive on.
Tom’s lodge is another five minutes down the road. It’s a tasteful operation, set atop a hill looking out over the rain forest and down to the breaking surf. The lobby/dining area has a fifty-foot vaulted and thatched roof, and it’s there that I find Tom, who eases his way over to me with his trademark laconic circumspection.
I mention my close encounter with the boa. “Oh, yeah?” He shrugs. “Want to eat?”
We’re joined by his manager, a stocky young Costa Rican named Carlos, who has all the passion for the rain forest that Tom seems to lack. “I’ll take you out for a nighttime walk,” Carlos says, “and really show you some things.” Once it gets dark, he does.
The night is humid and close. It needs to rain. We drive for a while down a terrible dirt track and ditch the car by the side of the road. How this particular spot differs from any other in the utter blackness is something I don’t ask.
“Put these on,” Carlos says, handing me a pair of tall waterproof boots. “And this.” He proffers a headlamp.
In one hand he carries a long, extendable pole with a hook on the end, and in the other hand he has a long knife. A headlamp is glowing from the center of his forehead.
“What’s the pole for?” I ask.
“Snakes.”
We crunch over dead leaves and dense undergrowth. I jump at every sound. The trees hang heavy and cast strange and forbidding shadows as our headlamps pass over them.
“So, are there any poisonous snakes around here?” I ask.
“The only one we need to really worry about is the fer-de-lance,” Carlos says. “It’s unlikely you’ll die from its bite, but it’s not good to get bit.”
“How big are they?”
“They’re small, actually.”
“That’s good,” I say.
“Not really.” Carlos shrugs. “Makes them harder to see. And they’re very well disguised.”
“Why are we here, Carlos?”
There are frogs and spiders, columns of cutter ants marching under their heavy loads. We walk down into a stream and find large crayfish. Carlos is thrilled by the discovery of some apparently rare type of tadpole. The rain forest is alive and pungent and inviting, yet I’m strangely detached. Any real curiosity or sense of wonder is absent. Instead, mundane images of home scroll through my mind—a colorful and detailed drawing of a house and tree that my daughter made, a karate move my son has been perfecting in the living room, an image of D sipping tea from her favorite blue mug. Something large moves to our right in the blackness; I jump and we turn our lights toward the sound, but it’s gone. We come upon a small bird, perched on a twig, motionless, asleep. I lean in, inches from its beak. I have never seen a sleeping bird—I’ve never even considered one.
We have long left the trail and for all I know we could be walking in circles.
“Turn off your flashlight,” Carlos says.
“Excuse me?”
“Turn it off.”
When I do, the blackness is complete. I hold my hand six inches in front of my face and can’t see it. I look up and can see only a tiny patch of night sky directly overhead, through a break in the dense canopy of trees. A single star shines.
“You know, Carlos,” I say, “if you have a heart attack and die, I will be lost in here for a very long time.”
From a few feet away in the dark I hear his laugh. Eventually we make our way back to the car.
“I’m really sorry we didn’t see any snakes,” he says.
The intrepid traveler Freya Stark once said, “To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.” The uncomplicated joy of meeting a new day with no past, with no plan, and with no one in the world knowing where I am can be compared only to waking up on Christmas morning when I was a child. It’s the closest I have ever come to understanding the word “freedom.”
I’ve never been homesick, at least since I went away to camp at age ten—save for my children. This morning, however, standing on the deck outside my room, looking out over the rain forest down to the sea below, I find myself not exactly wishing I were home but at least aware that I’m not traveling with the same sense of abandon and unencumbered ease that I experienced as recently as my trip to Patagonia.
I spend the day exploring the surf community of Matapalo, trying to rouse a little more interest in my surroundings, and once it gets dark I join Carlos and his wife, Adrianna, at a tin-roofed bar with no walls, just down the road from Tom’s lodge, in the middle of the rain forest. Tibetan prayer flags hang beside mounted surfboards under colored Chinese paper lanterns and a spinning disco ball.
“Pretty much everybody comes here to Greta’s on Friday nights,” Carlos explains. I duck my head when I see Crocodile Dundee sipping a beer at one of the picnic tables, whispering intently to a young couple. Karen is selling her ice cream from the white cooler at the edge of the bar, where the light ends and the night begins, just under the overhang. There are a few tables selling handmade jewelry; I recognize two of the vendors from town. A young and scruffy dude in a baseball cap—the former manager of a famous rapper—who cashed in and checked out and moved to the Osa three years ago plays DJ. Small kids tumble over the two sofas by the dance floor. Just beyond the roof, in a grassy area with a bench, a group of white guys and Costa Ricans share some very potent-smelling grass. A dozen youngish women dance to the techno music that blares out into the jungle.
“Who’s Greta?” I ask.
Carlos turns to look over his shoulder. “Which one do you think?”
I follow his glance to the bar. There, sipping a beer, and staring at me, is a heavily tattooed, chain-smoking surfer chick/earth mother with long loose blond hair wearing a sleeveless black dress with a slit up the side. I nod in her direction.
“That’s her,” Carlos says. “Watch out, she’ll either love you or hate you. You can never tell which.”
I walk over to introduce myself.
“You’re new,” she says before I reach the bar. Her voice is raw from too many cigarettes and too much whiskey. Her skin is tan and her dark eyes glassy. Her bare arms are fleshy under her tattoos, her body lumpy beneath her clinging dress. She’s self-possessed. This is her joint, and I like her instantly.
“Where are you from?”
“New York.”
She nods. “Well, you’re welcome here,” she says, openly looking me up and down. I’m surprised she doesn’t ask me to spin around so she can get a good look at my ass. We chat, the music blares. Greta came from Munich, Germany, nearly twenty years ago. “I came down for the surfing, just by luck. Figured this place needed a bar.” She shrugs. “This is it.”
She pulls out another cigarette and gives me matches to light it. I can’t remember the last time I lit a woman’s cigarette, once a nightly task back in my bar-hopping days. It says lot about someone, the way they light another person’s cigarette, and the way a person receives the flame maybe says more. Greta is good. After I touch the fire to the tip of her cigarette I look up to her eyes and she is already staring at me, squinting slightly. The look holds for an instant and then she winks at me, and then we both burst out laughing. She slaps me hard on the shoulder and marches behind the bar, disappearing into the kitchen.
The techno music suddenly quits and Marvin Gaye comes out over the speakers. I wish I were uninhibited enough to simply walk onto the dance floor, especially considering it is full of a dozen women spinning and twirling and shimmying for each other. Instead I buy an ice cream from Karen and meet her daughter, a chubby, happy child.
When Carlos and his wife leave, I sit down at a picnic table across from the young couple that was talking to Crocodile Dundee earlier. Luckily, he is nowhere in sight. The couple, Tony and Kate, run a small eco-lodge in the area. He came down more than twenty years ago from Vermont; she met him here while on vacation from Colorado. They have two small kids, one of whom they are homeschooling, the other still in diapers. She was an accountant and says she was glad to give up the grind. Tony goes off to the bathroom and Kate leans in toward me.
“And what about you?” she says. Her hand lands on my forearm and stays there.
“Uh, what about me?”
“What’s your story?” And while it’s just the two of us chatting, Kate is caressing my back. Instead of my imagination racing or plotting covert actions and rendezvous—as I might have done in the past—I simply feel bad for her husband and wonder what the hell they’re doing here, living in the jungle, looking for trouble.
When Tony returns, Kate sits back and is affectionate to her husband. I ask myself if perhaps I just made that whole sexual tension up; maybe she was just being friendly. I excuse myself and head back to the bar.
Later, as I’m about to leave, one of the not-so-young women who were on the dance floor all night approaches me. She’s part of a group on a yoga retreat down in the Osa.
“You seem age appropriate,” she says. “You want to dance?”
Politely, I decline, not because of her age, but because she’s clearly drunk.
“Oh come on, you just gonna stand at the bar acting cool?”
“No, I’m just getting ready to go. Next time. Thanks for asking,” I say.
“Hey, you know what,” the yogini protests, “I’m calling you out. I’m calling you out on your very uncool behavior.” She turns and waves a few of her friends over for backup.
One of the women is very attractive; I had noticed her earlier on the dance floor. The ladies escort their friend away, but not before she tells me again how very uncool my behavior is.
Maybe I’ve been with the same woman for so long that I’m rusty on how the game is played. Maybe I’m misreading signals all over the place, or maybe I am just getting too old, but there is none of the forbidden or illicit appeal in these brief encounters that I have felt in the past. I just want to go to bed.
The next morning I head out along the only road that goes deeper into the rain forest. Fig trees drape across the dirt track and wild cotton grows in bunches. Occasionally the rain forest opens up where it was cleared for grazing and cows with protruding hips sit under acacia trees. I ford the Río Pico—this is where Carlos told me his jeep was swept away and carried downstream for a mile and deposited into the sea, with him still in it. “I didn’t want to leave my jeep,” he explained.
There has been no rain and the river is low; I cross without losing my car. Soon, the road fizzles at the settlement of Carate. There’s nothing here really, and no one else, except for a bearded American with a foul disposition who runs a bare-bones shop in a cement hut. I’ve been warned to give him a wide berth.
“I found him walking on the side of the road with a large knife sticking out of his cheek, covered in blood. I picked him up and drove him to the hospital,” Carlos told me. “He got blood all over my jeep, and the next time I saw him he threatened to shoot me if I came near.”
I buy a bottle of water from the sour patron, attempt conversation, receive a few grunts in reply, leave my car, and head into the jungle. A short way down the trail, I come to sign welcoming me to Parque Nacional Corcovado. The trail leads me into dense vegetation, under mango trees and through strands of bamboo. I climb over the sprawling roots of massive strangler figs. Eventually the trail dumps me out onto a long stretch of deserted beach under sweltering sun. Just offshore, a bull shark, its dorsal fin clearly visible, keeps pace. A harpy eagle lands high up in a cecropia tree. Macaws, always in pairs, eat from almond trees. I see toucans, and black and white king vultures. When the trail leads me back into the jungle, I’m attacked by a swarm of stingless bees as I stop to watch an anteater have lunch. I leap around, shaking and pulling at my hair, jumping from one foot to the other, swatting, cursing, spinning. Then the branches above me begin to shake. I duck. A troupe of spider monkeys is throwing nuts at me from above. I run away. A woodpecker is rapping somewhere. Hummingbirds whiz past. I grab a fallen coconut, hack it open with my knife, and drink down its too sweet water. I pull a banana from a tree and eat it. A little farther on, a huge mammal, a cross between a horse and a giant anteater, blocks my path. Apparently this is something called a Baird’s tapir—Carlos had told me I might see one. What he neglected to tell me was whether it was aggressive or not. I stand for fifteen minutes in my tracks and wait for it to finish nibbling at whatever it is it’s eating and move off.
After nearly six hours of walking I come upon a river, the Río Claro. It’s thirty yards wide, and since I’m only a hundred yards inland and close to the ocean, it’s a tidal river, and it’s rising. I’ve been warned of alligators in the rivers of Corcovado. And sharks, like the one I just saw out in the ocean, are known to frequent the rivers’ brackish waters as well. But it is late in the afternoon, the ranger station I’m headed for can’t be more than another hour away, and I’ll never make it back to where I started before darkness falls.
The riverbed is slick. Quickly, I’m waist-deep in the Río Claro. I can’t see into the murky brown water. With as much speed as I dare, I pick my way across, looking neither left nor right, knowing there’s nothing I could do if I were to see a fin or a pair of beady eyes gliding my way. National Geographic has dubbed Corcovado “the most biologically intense place on earth.”
I arrive at La Sirena ranger station soggy, sore, and satisfied.
The Osa Peninsula is largely off the grid. Most places outside Puerto Jiménez operate on generators or are solar or hydro powered or some combination of the three. I’ve had no cell phone connection and only very occasional Internet service since I arrived. I did receive one message from D, telling me that I need to fill out forms for our wedding in Ireland. The forms need my parents’ names and ages, my witness’s name, the date of my previous marriage, and the date of my divorce. My signature is needed. Nothing can move forward until these forms are filled out. Because processing paperwork like this in Ireland can take several months, all this needs to be done now. Repeat, now.
This is simply D’s way of saying, “Don’t forget us back here, carrying the load. There’s work to be done. And you are getting married, you know.” What exactly she expects me to do about this at La Sirena ranger station in the middle of Corcovado National Park, miles from a proper Internet connection or even a phone, is unclear.
Accessible only by a day’s walk, similar to the one I have just made, or, in an emergency, by small aircraft—which explains the long patch of low cut grass doubling as a front lawn—the ranger station is a humid oasis, a series of low-slung, plantation-style huts painted green. There are bunk beds in dormitories and communal bathrooms. The shower is an open pipe protruding from the wall. Hikers’ clothes hang from lines out back in a futile attempt at drying in the near 100 percent humidity. There is no electricity here. When it gets dark, you go to bed. Yet there’s an air of survivors’ fellowship among the thirty or so hikers who have made it here. Somewhere, somehow, someone is playing Eddie Vedder.
In an Adirondack chair on the deck, I rub my swollen feet and prop them on the rail. I make passing conversation with a woman from Canada, and then a family of dark-haired Spaniards—a mother, a father, and their two teenage children—take seats near me. I watch their uncensored irritation and familial ease with each other.
When I was growing up, my own family never strayed very far from home. Each summer when I was still quite young, my father would take my two older brothers and me on the one-hour car ride down the Garden State Parkway to the shore, where we stayed with my uncle’s family for a few days at their home on Long Beach Island. My father’s brother frightened me—he was rough in a way my father was not. He had a deep scar that ran from above his right eye far down into his cheek. His hair was unruly, his manner brusque and direct. His chain-smoking and well-meaning wife had deep black rings under her eyes and drifted through the house like a specter. Their many children ran wild and struck me as peculiar. The ocean, two blocks from their house, often swarmed with jellyfish and the sandy bottom was potholed, so that I was never sure, when I stepped, how deep my steps would go.
My mother, who didn’t care for either the shore or my uncle, never joined us on these trips, but she did come with us on our annual journey across New Jersey, west to the Pocono Mountains in neighboring Pennsylvania. Each winter we would load into the Country Squire station wagon with the faux wood paneling, and my brothers and I would try to spot license plates from different states to make the seemingly endless two-hour ride pass. We always went to the same lodge, high up on a hill. It was an all-in-one facility—three meals a day in the sprawling dining room. My father’s chest visibly swelled when the maître d’ remembered his name each year.
In the evenings before dinner my mother liked to go ice-skating. She was a solitary person, and skating revealed a playful exuberance that I rarely saw otherwise. My glimpse into this hidden side of her made me want to skate as well. She told me I was a natural, but I was never very good—though I was proud she wanted me to join her. She recognized in me a solitary quality similar to her own, and it created an unspoken bond between us. It was a closeness unique within the family—one that did not go unnoticed by my father.
My younger brother, Justin, was born when I was eight, and soon thereafter, my mother became ill. This, coupled with a new baby, essentially ended our modest travels. Except for when my father took my two older brothers and me to Bermuda—a trip designed to give my mother some much-needed rest. I was nine. None of us had ever been so far from home, and my father had never had solo care of the three of us. He juggled our divergent desires as well as could be expected given his limited day-to-day experience of our needs.
Stephen was set up at the golf course each morning and then not seen again until dinner. Peter wanted to go scuba diving and since my father couldn’t leave me alone, he lied and told the instructor that I was ten. We took lessons in the hotel pool before setting out for the sea.
“Jump in and wait under the boat,” the instructor told my brother as he helped me with an air tank I was not strong enough to support.
“Wait under the boat?” I remember my brother repeating, his eyes wide. Then, for half an hour, we dove in the cloudy water and I heard my own breathing with an acute regularity I never had before. Only once did I panic and dart to the surface.
But it is riding on the back of my father’s rented moped that dominates my memories of that trip. I wasn’t old enough to ride my own, but I was old enough to feel uncomfortable holding on to my father’s midsection as we darted through the streets. He would occasionally turn his head in the breeze and say, “I love you, pal.” Only as an adult did I come to realize what it was that made me uneasy about my father’s declaration. What I heard was not the simple statement of his affection but the desperate need for appreciation behind his words. I didn’t want my father to be desperate.
Sometimes I can feel a similar yearning for validation when I tell my own son that I love him. To place the burden of emotional bolstering on a child is unreasonable and confusing, yet my son seems to have a better sense of himself and his place in the world than I did at his age. He simply ignores me when I express my love for him from this place of need, or he dismisses my prompting with a distracted, “Okay.”
One afternoon in Bermuda, my father stopped the scooter at a port and we met a man with a long and bushy black beard who said he was a captain. My father was, and still is, a gregarious man with an easy charm. He is instantly likable, and the years have softened him. But in my youth, his explosive and terrifying anger ran roughshod over our home—its potential emergence, provoked often by things of which we were unaware, hovered over every encounter. Only later did I come to realize that his anger rose from his fear—fear that he wouldn’t be able to care for his family, fear that he would never be who he felt he should be as a man, fears I now understand. But that his anger did not stem from some dark and secret place made it no less terrifying.
My father chatted with the captain at the port for a long time, like he chatted with so many people, and despite my protestations he insisted I have my photograph taken with the bearded man.
It is the only time I remember him taking my picture. I was embarrassed—for myself, but also for my father. He seemed so vulnerable taking my picture, and it paralyzed me even further. In the photo, a small and skinny boy wearing a bright yellow sweatshirt that says BERMUDA on the front is standing like a stick figure, arms hanging straight down, staring at the camera without expression, beside a squatting man with a full beard and a big grin.
Sitting now, rubbing my feet and listening as the two Spanish teens say something to their parents I’m not fluent enough to decipher, but understanding exactly what they mean when they shake their heads, hunch their shoulders, and stomp away from them, I lean over and reassure the parents what a memorable thing it is that they’re doing.
“Well, it’s almost destroyed us,” the Spanish mother says without a trace of humor. But, later, at the communal dinner, they are all laughing together, the loudest, happiest group in the room. I wonder how long it might be before my small family is up for a similar trip. Before the sun goes down, the mosquitoes descend and a girl from Colorado offers me her herbal insect repellent. I spray it on, to no effect.
Coming up the lawn, a group of ten young men stride toward one of the outbuildings with the casual assurance of a pack. I haven’t seen them before. They fan out in an almost perfect pyramid behind the obvious leader. Several men are shirtless. Some wear hastily knotted ponytails. Most have tattoos and nearly all of them are sporting leather anklets or necklaces, many with small totems hanging down, obvious trophies of their rugged travel to remote destinations like this one.
I am instantly made uneasy by the gang. They are all at least ten years younger than me, but I feel childlike and inadequate in their presence. I have never traveled in or been a part of such a group—not even as a child running around my suburban neighborhood.
That I have been so strongly identified in my acting career as a member of the Brat Pack is one of the stranger ironies of my life. And that no such tightly knit unit of actors existed in reality mattered little; it was a snappy nickname and it captured both the fascination and the judgment foisted upon a group of fortunate young actors. The last thing any actor wants is to be stereotyped and pigeonholed; this, coupled with the pejorative aspect so many associated with the term at the time, made it a moniker I tried to run from. But as time has worn on, both the label and the actors branded with it have grown in my affections (although there are members of the Brat Pack with whom I purportedly spent many a wild night whom I have never met). Most have had long, varied, and in some cases very interesting careers. It’s a testament to a talented cluster of actors that movies made nearly three decades ago still hold such resonance for several generations. And maybe because I know what the label felt like, and how we all struggled with it in our own ways, when I see other Brat Pack members now, in films or on television, I feel a kinship with them I feel with no other actors. Perhaps we have finally become a pack at last.
But did I become a self-reliant loner because I was never welcomed into such a tribe, or did I realize early on that my desires could never be met in the rhythm of a group? The answer is impossible to discern from the myriad adjustments I’ve made through life. What is certain is that the sense of vulnerability that gathers between my shoulder blades as the gang of young men stride by—unaware of my individual gaze, but very conscious of their attractiveness as a group—is that this feeling is nearly as old as I am.
Yet unlike in my youth, when this sense of insecurity could pervade my consciousness for days and weeks at a time, these phantoms of my past move through quickly, without any real power to harm. I observe myself with a slight detachment. My thoughts then veer to something my nine-year-old son said to me recently, as I was tucking him into bed for the night.
“Dad, I feel like there’s a distance between me and the rest of the world.” His clear insight and simple articulateness shocked me, then saddened me and made me fear for him. When my reflexive reactions subsided, I relaxed and identified with him.
“I’ve always felt the same way,” I told him. I wasn’t sure what else to say. “But it’s part of what makes me me, so it’s okay. You know what I mean?” I said.
My son was quiet for a moment. “Yeah,” he said, and then surprised me by reaching out and hugging me close.
This sudden mood switch, the fact that the sense of isolation and inadequacy I was experiencing while I was watching the gang of young men was quickly supplanted by this memory of close connection with my son, does not slip by unnoticed. I slap a mosquito and blood splatters on my calf.
Screaming howler monkeys wake me before dawn, and I have a problem. I had intended to head back in the direction from which I came, but I had no cell phone reception on that side of the peninsula. It’s Mother’s Day. I need to make a call.
After breakfast I hustle a ride on a small supply boat that’s heading north. I’ve been told that I might get a signal once we come around the point leading into Drake Bay, the other port of call in the Osa. Both my children would be wild with excitement at the sight of the dolphins leaping out of the water and racing just off the bow; I have other things on my mind. When I scheduled this trip I was unaware Mother’s Day would fall during the time I was away, and when I realized it, and broke the news to D, I received only a frosty, “Oh, really,” in reply.
From the sea, the coastline is a series of rugged, densely vegetated hills leading to jagged cliffs that occasionally open out to empty beaches. The wind begins to pick up and the water grows choppy. The bow of the boat slams down into the whitecapped waves. When we come around a point and enter a large bay, the wind dies and the surface of the water settles to a glasslike reflection of the hills above. A few houses become visible among the palms. Several boats are moored not far offshore. There is life here.
Whereas Puerto Jiménez is a rough-and-ready backwater, Agujitas in Drake Bay is a banana-republic-type idyll of dirt lanes and heavy palm trees, climbing up the hill from a crescent-shaped beach (that the beach is infested with small, red, biting ants is not apparent at first glance).
I disembark and march to the top of the hill, looking for a signal. Halfway up, two bars of reception flicker onto my phone; I dial, hear it ring, and I get D’s message. I force my voice into a casually upbeat tone and promise to call again.
I call my mother and leave her a message as well.
Suddenly there’s a chorus of voices singing and I follow the sound to an open-air church. Hundreds of people fill it. When the singing subsides, the preacher begins to shout into a microphone, too close. His voice is distorted with static and feedback over the damaged PA system. Whenever his voice drops lower, a muffled woofing echoes out. Occasional calls of “amen” come back from the crowd as he preaches. Farther up the hill I find an open restaurant and order a pizza—but am told there is no cheese in the village.
When I finally get D on the phone, she is not happy. Not because I’m away on Mother’s Day, but because my son has upset her.
“I’m trying to make a video for Mum’s seventieth birthday and I’m getting people to sing to her. And he was just really rude about it.”
“What did he say?”
“Nothing, it’s fine, he eventually did it. It’s fine.”
The child/stepparent relationship is a balancing act that can leave everyone feeling in the middle and often powerless, especially the child. But it doesn’t stop me from being angry with my son from afar. “What did he say?” I ask again.
“When I asked him if he’d like to be in the video, he said, ‘I’m not in your family.’ ”
Considering the affection my son has for D’s parents (he is constantly asking to go see them in Ireland), and theirs for him, and given D’s attachment and commitment to family, there is nothing he could have said that would have upset her more.
This behavior reminds me of my son’s reaction upon hearing that D and I were finally getting married.
“Why?” he wanted to know when we told him about the wedding. “Everything is good the way it is, why do you have to get married?”
“Everything will still be the same, nothing will change,” I explained.
“So if nothing will change, then why do it?”
“Well, it will bring us even closer.”
“No it won’t,” he protested. “I’m not gonna come.”
Eventually, and after many conversations, it became clear that my son felt he would be left out of the family—after all, his sister was D’s and my child, while he was merely my son—despite D’s obvious love for him. (“I’ve always thought I came into your life because of your son,” she once said to me.) As much as I’ve tried to comfort him and assure him that his being excluded from our family is an impossibility, his doubt obviously still lingers.
The signal during the call is patchy and strains my conversation with D further. Eventually the call drops.
I was scheduled to get back on the boat ten minutes ago. People are waiting. The call won’t go through anymore. I climb to a different spot on the hill and try again, and again. Eventually, it connects.
Luckily, a photo I took of some coconuts and had sent to our daughter several days earlier has finally downloaded during the time I was trying to call again. Our daughter is delighted with the photo and D has relaxed. Soon we’re chatting and she begins to laugh. I ask if the orchid I (somehow) remembered to send before I left home arrived. “It did. It’s lovely, thank you,” D says. “You knew you better call today, huh?” she laughs.
“Uh, yeah.”
“I thought, ‘He better call.’ I don’t care how far off the grid you are, sometimes you’ve got to call.”
We talk some more as I begin to head down the hill to the boat. D recounts the frustrations of trying to get a delivery made. She has recently gone back to her yoga practice on a more committed basis, which has revitalized her outlook. “The best thing about doing yoga every day is that it really grounds you in yourself. It lets you slice through a lot of crap. You just don’t put up with a lot of people’s nonsense,” she explains, and then she laughs. “It’s good you’re making the cut.”
“I’m not sure I am,” I say. “I’m just away a lot.”
“Good point.”
My boat ride back to the other side of the peninsula didn’t wait, and I find myself a room at a rustic lodge on top of a hill looking out over the bay. Unexpected and improvised plans are the luxury of the solo traveler. When I lie down, I hear thunderous stomping on my metal roof. Monkeys are scampering around above me and sleep is a long time coming. Later, I’m woken by a ferocious rain pounding on the roof. I get up and look out my window into the dark and can make out palm fronds and banana leaves bent under the relentless assault. The heavy drops smack the leaves with machine-gun determination. Yet dawn arrives to blue skies and I hop on a supply boat headed around to Puerto Jiménez. The captain drops me near Carate to retrieve my car and I’m on my way back toward town.
At the Río Oro I see a road paralleling the river and heading up into the rain forest. I saw it on my way out—it’s the only turnoff from the main road—so for no other reason, I take it.
The dirt track is worse than the washboard main road. There are deep ravines down the center, carved by runoff cascading down during the heavy rains. A few die-hard gold miners are living and working beside the river. Green plastic sheeting is stretched taut between propped-up sticks. Beneath the plastic roofing, cots are visible, as are piles of clothing. A cooking fire smolders nearby the giant Hefty-bag homes. Two rope-thin and ragged men bend low, thigh-deep, working the river. The road climbs steeply and then turns back on itself and climbs again. The rain forest is thick, the air heavy. Mist hangs in the treetops. My car struggles hard against the steep grade; at one point the incline is so severe it feels as if the car will tumble back on itself. Then there’s a hand-painted wooden sign nailed to a tree: ALMOST THERE, it says. It’s written in English and the first indication of any life up this road.
Suddenly the track levels and a well-manicured circular driveway welcomes me to an elegant and rustic eco-lodge. Hardwoods have been used as pillars and palm fronds thatch the roof of the expansive open-air lobby and dining area.
“How did this get here?” I say aloud.
Then a blond woman, about my age, perhaps a few years older, with ample breasts and piercing blue eyes walks toward me. She’s wearing a light blue form-fitting cotton dress that’s hugging just right. Her teeth are a brilliant white when she smiles at me, and her skin is lushly tanned.
“Wow,” I say inadvertently.
Holly Evans came to the Osa from Boulder, Colorado, for the first time in the early eighties, then bought this chunk of rain forest in 1994 and opened her eight-bungalow lodge in 2000. “This has been my dream,” she tells me, staring deep into my eyes.
“Mine too,” I’m thinking.
Over a cup of tea on the deck overlooking the rain forest Holly tells me, “I broke my leg in four places and my nose twice building this place, but it had to be. Can you understand?” She is still staring deep into my eyes, and now she reaches out and touches my upper arm.
“Um, yes,” I say, “I understand.”
Her lover is off in San José for a few days. “He’s much younger, he needs the city sometimes.” She smiles at me. “Would you like a tour?”
I nod stupidly.
She shows me her favorite suite, with a large bed overlooking the jungle canopy. “Nice, isn’t it?”
“Mmmm.”
Back outside Holly walks in front of me up a long flight of stairs carved into the mountain; the backside of her blue cotton dress dances before my eyes as she goes. We stand on the edge of her yoga platform, gazing out over the jungle down to the sea.
“Whenever I’m confused about something, I come up here and stand on my head, and everything is all right.”
It begins to rain, loudly and with force. We stand and look out in silence. Listening. Clouds and mist race before us. The air around us is charged.
In the past, several of the scenarios I encountered on this trip might have given me pause, and my failure to react to them this time left me wondering if perhaps I was past that temptation. But suddenly my senses are alert and have me reengaged in a way I haven’t been recently. I’m wondering why. Then, as the rain falls down, I realize it’s not Holly’s beauty that attracts me to her—although it does—it is her complete inhabitation of her life. She has the confidence of a person who knows what she wants, has the courage to make the choices to reach for it, and has the satisfaction of her achievement. When she turns to me and smiles, I can only smile back.
After the rain lets up, we slowly descend the slick steps and wander in the direction of my car. I fish my keys from my pocket and we stand for a moment; Holly’s blue eyes burn again into mine. The leaves of the nearby banana trees drip heavily, the birds have begun to squawk again, and the lingering mist is burning off quickly. The air is already steamy. Holly nods and then thrusts out her hand. We shake. I smile at the gesture, and then she does, and then I’m in the car, riding the brake hard, easing my way back down off this slippery slope.
I can imagine lingering images from my brief time here, images that might fester and go deep, images that have nothing to do with reality but can nonetheless assert themselves and influence and alter the reality that does exist, back home, with D.
Yet as I bounce back the way I came, I find myself thinking not of sensuous headstands over the rain forest or of large soft beds overlooking a misty sunrise, but of images of hazy light over cobblestone streets and smoky coffeehouses, images of a swarming square outside a cathedral—images of Vienna, of an earlier trip with D and her family. What happened in Vienna that is supplanting the type of fantasy I used to latch on to and cultivate and cling to and employ when my life got bumpy?
Vienna. It was soon after that trip that D and I decided to get married. What was it, what happened, what signs had I missed while I was traipsing around on the trail of the Hapsburgs?