Crazy Good Fortune Out of the Blue - 23*
I should probably state right up front, just so no one gets their hopes up, that nothing as weird as the malevolent jeep episode occurred during Artie’s visit. That was a particularly strange event that even Artie would have had a hard time replicating, even in this magical realist land. However, he did do an amazing job of attracting tarantulas.
Remember when I said that he did tarantula imitations with his hands that were so convincing they were scary? This is despite the fact that anyone could see that the “tarantula” was really Artie’s hand, attached to his arm, beige-colored and tipped with well-manicured fingernails. First, a mock tarantula would start crawling across the table in your peripheral vision when you least expected it, causing you to freeze in alarm. It might halt then, too, aware that it had been glimpsed. But then it would resume scuttling again, slowly and patiently, until it came to another standstill. Then it would pulsate … bounce! then —aargh— leap! onto your arm or shoulder or neck!! Even maintaining eye contact with Artie, who at this point looked remarkably like Snoopy in a pounce, you couldn’t help but shriek in fear when the tarantula made contact. He possessed exquisite timing and inhumanly flexible joints in his hands.
Of course, he had variations. He had the dying tarantula that toppled, twitching, onto its back, its legs quivering revoltingly before it finally gorked and stiffened in rigor mortis. He had grandmother tarantulas who hobbled decrepitly over whatever surfaces their aging adhesive pads would allow them to, occasionally slipping and falling, only to gain purchase on your pant’s leg and start hauling themselves up. He had parachuting tarantulas that floated ever so softly through the air, tilting this way and that as the wind currents caught their chute. He had tarantulas with exaggerated startle reflexes that did a lot of hunched-up, jumpy leaping in one place. Tarantulas occupied a very important place in Artie’s life.
Despite the fact that plenty of these creatures existed in Costa Rica, we had hardly seen any except for Alan’s hairy little buddy and the ill-fated arachnid that Jerry the nonviolent vegetarian pummeled into mush with a broom. When Artie arrived, however, it was as if the entire tarantula population decided to come out and welcome a kindred soul. He found them in his bedroom, like Jerry did. But he also found them in his hotel rooms when we took outings and he even found them in his shoes one morning when he left them outside his door to dry overnight at a beach resort. (In a bizarre, over-the-top addition to this occurrence, some unknown animal came along the same night and deposited one small turd on the tip of each shoe.)
The number of tarantula sightings were so exceptional that I observed to Artie at one point, “You must be really pleased, running across all these tarantulas! I mean, I’m amazed—we’d only seen one tarantula the whole time we’ve been here and now that you’ve come to visit, we’ve seen at least eight!”
Artie remained silent, working his jaw, perhaps something he developed in dentistry school in order to prevent Tempero Mandibular Joint Syndrome. He didn’t look very pleased. In fact, he looked traumatized.
“Don’t … you like tarantulas?” I asked.
He turned to me, the whites of his eyes showing above his irises. “I’m terrified of them!” he exclaimed.
Well, be that as it may, the tarantulas certainly seemed fond of Artie. And they continued to cozy up to him the entire time he visited.
For the first half of his visit, Artie came accompanied by two friends that he knew in medical school, Nathan and Chloe. Artie, of course, was always a treat, but his friends turned out to have a strange, slightly antagonistic attitude toward us that I had a hard time understanding, especially given the fact that our connection to the Keltons made it possible for them to have a free place to stay. I could only think that it might be related to the fact that they were medical students, although their stance seemed a little extreme, even for that privileged crowd. We found out later from a mutual friend, however, that somehow Nathan and Chloe had gotten it into their heads from Artie’s description of our circumstances that Richard and I were down here exploiting the natives—greedy fruit magnates, I suppose, hogging up all the profits for ourselves, assigning forty lashes and cruelly reduced rations to banana pickers who fell behind on their quotas. According to our mutual friend, they were planning to set us straight.
They didn’t realize, obviously, that we were as dependent as any “natives” upon the largesse of the Keltons, who were extremely generous. For instance, when school lunches were discontinued in Escazú due to budget woes, the Keltons simply picked up the tab and continued the program. And they treated us like part of the family, just as they did everyone who worked for them. Not to mention the fact that they were providing three meals a day for Chloe and Nathan while they stayed with us.
At any rate, Artie’s friends regarded every suggestion we produced with suspicion, and it usually worked out better for them to come up with their own plans. When the weekend came around, however, we suggested that we might all like to head over to the Pacific coast, either to Quepos or to Guanacaste, a beautiful, unspoiled beach province north of Puntarenas. But they had a better idea.
“We heard that the Jungle Train was fantastic,” Chloe told us.
Richard and I exchanged glances. We could only imagine that this recommendation came from some travel agent in the States who’d never been on the Jungle Train and never talked to anyone who actually had, either. “Really? Who’d you hear that from?” he asked.
“Our travel agent,” said Nathan.
“Well, it’s okay, but—”
Chloe bristled. “We heard that it was not to be missed!”
In the end, Richard, one of the world’s most tolerant individuals, talked me into accompanying them on the Jungle Train. After all, he argued, we wanted to spend as much time with Artie as we could and he was a little concerned for their safety. So I settled on a compromise. Richard and I would escort them to Limone and stay there overnight, then take the plane back to San José the next morning. They planned to stay on for a few days.
The trip started out just as festive and lovely as the first time … the happy, excited crowds, the colorful vendors selling their aromatic wares, the heart-stoppingly spectacular views as we climbed into the mountains … But midway into the trip, Chloe discovered what the bathroom situation was and she had recently had knee surgery. In addition, because she knew that the Ticos used lard to fry their food (she was a vegetarian) and she didn’t want to eat sugar, there wasn’t anything she could eat during the trip. And of course, something happened along the way that delayed the schedule considerably. By the time we reached Limone, I don’t think anyone was enjoying the Jungle Train.
As we walked along the road to the garage hotel, we became the target of much more intense scrutiny than we had last time, perhaps because of Chloe’s blond hair. More vans with blacked-out windows and booming, bass-heavy sound systems drove by us with a sinister lack of haste, sometimes crawling along at the same speed that we walked, following us for quite some time, sometimes driving past us a ways, then turning around and cruising back by. When we sneaked a peek inside the windows, all we could see were the red lights on their sound systems, winking ominously in the dark.
Since our last visit, we’d heard a few more stories of tourists getting mugged and a couple of hot-blooded, macho types getting knifed in this area, so we were feeling even more uncomfortable about being here. When one particular van slowed down to check us out and/or scare us for the fifth time, Artie cleared his throat and said nervously, “They wouldn’t actually stop the van and get out, would they?”
Richard shrugged. “They might.”
“But—they … wouldn’t actually hurt, us, would they?”
He shrugged again. “They might.”
Artie swallowed and fell silent until we got to the hotel. We decided to eat in town after we checked into our rooms, so we took a cab to a local place recommended by the desk clerk and then hailed another cab to come home after. Nothing much happened, although the smelly fish guts lying rotting in the gutters seemed to have grown a little smellier than the last time we were here. That could have just been my frame of mind, though.
Luckily, there were no fist fights in the middle of the night, and we awoke refreshed in the morning. When we tootled down to the front desk to check out, we were surprised to find Artie, Nathan, and Chloe waiting for us, having changed their minds about staying, evidently. So we all rode out to the Limone airport where we got patted down by unsmiling security guards while a terse-faced young man in camo fatigues stood watching, holding a semi-automatic weapon at the ready. This was the first time anything like this had happened to us in Costa Rica, and it shocked me tremendously. Since the country had no army, I wasn’t sure where the guy with the gun came from. Richard thought that the extra security precautions had to do with the proximity to Nicaragua here, and of course, a small, domestic, developing-nation airport like Limone couldn’t afford to have any kind of sophisticated monitoring devices. It’s a peculiar feeling to be frisked, though, I must say. I’m the kind of person who feels culpable from the implied guilt of the procedure itself, terrified that I might materialize a switchblade or bomb on my body out of thin air. (It has to do with my religious upbringing. It’s a long story).
Once airborne, we settled in to watch the view out our windows, but soon after take-off, Richard noticed that we were flying north, toward Nicaragua, not west toward San José. And we knew that this was supposed to be a nonstop flight to San José. This made us all a tad anxious, particularly Artie, who had had his nerves rattled by all the visits from tarantulas, poor guy. All we could see were the tops of banana plantations, for miles and miles, but at one point, we came to a square cut out of the banana trees. As the plane descended sharply, we realized that this square constituted a runway and that we were landing. When we bumped down onto the ground, the pilot applied the brakes so hard it threw us all forward. We glimpsed the banana trees flying past the windows with growing trepidation as we realized that we were hurtling toward the edge of the runway with a great deal of speed and it wasn’t at all clear that there was enough room to stop the plane in time. Miraculously, the crew brought the plane to a halt at the very last moment, the propellers clipping leaves off the trees that stood on the runway’s edge. Then they turned the plane around and taxied toward a small hut that served as the terminal.
There a group of guys brought out a man lying on a stretcher who had his leg in a splint. They delivered him on board and settled him in a seat near the back. The man had suffered a compound fracture of his femur, we gathered from the conversation between him and the crew, and in order to set it properly, he needed to fly to San José. Once this was all taken care of, we expected to take off again. But instead, as we turned our attention back to the “terminal,” we observed eight grillion Ticos streaming out of the hut bringing all manner of farm animals with them in cages—chickens, rabbits, pigeons, small pigs … Then they proceeded to squeeze onto the plane just like the soccer teams onto the bus we took to Cahuita until there was standing room only and not a lot of that. Evidently, planes landed in this remote location so rarely, everyone in town was going to take advantage of the opportunity to fly to San José. To our utter consternation, no one was making them get off, either.
We barely got the plane stopped on this tiny little runway when we landed. I could not imagine how on Earth we were going to clear the plantations in time when we took off again, now loaded to the gills with people and animals like some kind of kamikaze ark. I couldn’t decide whether to close my eyes as we began taxiing down the runway so that I wouldn’t see our doom approaching, or whether to keep them open, in case there was something I could do to save my life. We gathered speed as we rumbled along, but it didn’t seem like enough. And when we began our ascent, I could swear that I heard the plane groaning in protest. We pulled up little by little, but we were headed straight for the trees! Artie, I could see, did have his eyes closed. Nathan and Chloe looked blanched and stricken. Then, at the last minute once again, slicing and chopping up banana trees as we went, we soared into the air and managed to stay aloft until we landed at the San José airport. Whew!
After our trip to Limone, Nathan and Chloe softened and warmed up a bit, so I imagine that they not only revised their opinion of us, they revised their opinion of a great many of their preconceptions. As my aunt Connie was so fond of pointing out, having one’s preconceptions confounded is one of the best things about travel. I myself was certainly having a lot of my mine rearranged. I wasn’t sorry to see them go, however, and once they left, we made arrangements to go to Quepos with Artie and obtain a heavy dose of total luxury. We could only hope that there the tarantulas would leave him alone.
*Intro:
At the end of 1982, both Richard and I had been out of work for a year, despite constant looking, and the best we had been able to come up with was scrounging for odd jobs. It was an economic climate much like the one we’re in now, and we were feeling both dejected and panicked about what the future might hold for us. We certainly could never have imagined what happened next: a dream job in a dream country for a dream boss.
This is Chapter 23 of the memoir I wrote about the year-and-a-half that Richard and I spent living in Costa Rica. It was quite the adventure, living with a an eccentric and flamboyant heiress** from Dallas, her elegant and erudite husband who wrote Westerns, and their handsome, bad boy son, whom Richard used to babysit. Oh, yeah, and next door resided the safe house for Eden Pastora, aka “Commander Zero,” leader of the Contras who were waging a civil war with the Sandanistas in Nicaragua at that time.
This was a particularly golden era in Costa Rica’s history, before it became “discovered,” even before the introduction of television there, really (it started coming in during the time we lived there). It was wild and exotic and magical and amazing.
So once a week, I’ll be excerpting a chapter from Crazy Good Fortune Out of the Blue until I’ve told the whole tale. I hope you enjoy these stories!
**Jane, sadly, passed away not long ago, but she left a legacy as colorful as she was. In 1984, she commissioned one of the largest environmental sculptures in the Western Hemisphere, a set of standing stones in Arlington, Texas that were designed and built by sculptor Norm Hines. Caelum Moor has been a source of enormous controversy over the years, which I’ll write about one of these days. In the meantime, feel free to Google “Caelum Moor” and see what turns up. It’s fascinating.
Thursday, August 13, 2009