Crazy Good Fortune Out of the Blue - 6*
Before we knew it, our two weeks in paradise were up. Of course, we had known the minute Jane called that we were going to take her up on her offer. So when we headed back home to spend the holidays and get our affairs in order, we were in exceedingly high spirits.
One fortunate aspect of our living situation was the fact that we had built our house with Richard’s sister Kathleen, my best friend from college, and her husband Joe. The four of us had formed a family unit for the last few years, moving out to California together, to Redding where Joe was undertaking his residency as a family practitioner. We had always dreamed of building our own home and we had found a nice piece of land with a spectacular view of Mt. Lassen and the southern Cascades. While Joe worked as a doctor, the rest of us built the house until Richard got a job as a geologist, and then Kathleen and I finished up with the help of various subcontractors.
Joe faced quite a challenge in fulfilling his residency as we embarked upon this building project, borrowing money from friends and family, trying to do as much as we could ourselves and incurring as few extra expenses as possible. For a while, the only phone we had was in a tool shed that we had built as a little practice project. This was a very humbling experience, actually, as we bent more nails than we drove true—crummy nails!—and the first walls we constructed were not square, but trapezoidal in shape. We knew the moment we stood them up that something was terribly wrong. We slept in sleeping bags on the slab foundation, surrounded by stud walls, and when Joe was on call and the phone rang in the middle of the night, the poor guy would have to bolt from his sleeping bag and sprint to the tool shed to answer it. When it was hot we got scorched, when it was rainy we stayed damp and miserable, and when the wind blew—well, actually, the wind never stops blowing, but you don’t realize that if you have never lived outside. Building the house under such Spartan conditions ended up being a real growth experience, and it is now quite clear to all of us why shelter is one of those basic requirements for human survival.
But the good news was, Richard and I could take off for a couple of years and we didn’t have to worry about what to do with the house. Kathleen and Joe were getting ready to start a family, and they were happy to have the extra space.
There was a small complication on the building front, however. Before we received the offer to move to Costa Rica, I had started constructing a writing studio. When I finished up my master’s degree in botany, I realized that a) I hated working in a lab, b) I wasn’t cut out for the politics of academia, and c) what I really wanted to do was write, as I’d been writing since second grade and had only gone into science because I had a knack for it and I was terrified that I wouldn’t be able to earn a living as a writer. This fear turned out to be quite well-founded, but I couldn’t help myself. I had to write. It was a heartbreaking addiction and a waste of a good mind, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. When I wrote, I felt like I could make it through the day. When I didn’t write, I felt like Godzilla with PMS.
Since the house was a two-bedroom/one-bath, open-plan house designed for economy rather than privacy, I realized that I needed to provide a place for myself where I could write in peace and solitude. In a moment of visionary insanity, I decided to design and build a one-room hexagonal structure on an old mining road about 500 ft. above the house. It would be really quiet.
However, there was no electricity up there. And everything that ended up there had to be hauled there. I had help from several friends in toting bags of concrete for the foundation, and sweet Richard helped me stand up the walls and install the rafters. But he was committed to going back to Costa Rica right after Christmas to get started on the business with Paul, and everyone else I knew had to work during the day.
The problem was, I couldn’t leave the structure as just a frame. If I didn’t make it weather-tight, all the back-breaking work I had done and all the money I had spent on lumber and materials would go to waste. In the rain and sun, the boards that comprised the frame would warp and twist, dry out and split. So I decided to stay in California an extra six weeks in order to finish up the hexagon—side it, sheath it, roof it, caulk it, install the windows and the door. Oh, and build the cupola that in another moment of visionary insanity I decided was indispensable to the design.
At this point, I was a pretty good carpenter. But after Richard left, I was on my own. After the first day of packing boards up to the site that ended up needing a second cut, dragging them back down, re-cutting them, and hauling them back up, I realized that there was no way in the world that I could finish this project in the time I had allotted. But I was meeting Jane in Dallas in six weeks and traveling to Costa Rica with her. Besides, the thought of spending more than six weeks away from Richard wasn’t appealing at all.
There was a second complication. Turns out, the winter of 1983 was an El Niño year. This means that practically the entire Pacific Ocean gets sucked up into rain clouds and then dumped on the Pacific Northwest, of which far northern California is a part. Shortly after I got started, it started raining. I decided to wait a day and see if it let up. It didn’t, so I waited a second day. On the third day, I started to get a sneaking suspicion that it might not stop raining. And in any case, I was already despairing over the highly likely possibility that I wasn’t going to finish as it was.
So. I worked in the rain. In the pouring down rain. I would get up in the morning, drink a couple of cups of the strongest black tea I could brew, steel myself to the elements and trudge outside. I remained soaking wet for six weeks. And when I nailed up the siding, the water cascaded off the roof, streamed down the inside of my sleeve as I raised my hammer, and gushed into my eyes.
But I couldn’t allow myself to think about this. I was truly, utterly obsessed with buttoning up this hexagon. My mantra became, “I have all the time that I need.” That’s the only thing I said to myself the entire time. “I have all the time that I need, I have all the time that I need,” I would murmur, clicking the sodden heels of my water-logged work boots together. At the end of the six weeks, an incredible thing happened. I finished the hexagon!
Thus, I learned a very valuable lesson. Time is plastic; it doesn’t really exist. All those sci fi writers and nutty physicists were right; and I had firsthand experience of the most visceral, nuts-and-bolts kind: I managed to do twelve weeks of work in six. This realization has come in handy countless times since then and perhaps comprised the main purpose of the exercise. People think that magic doesn’t exist any more, but countless events in my life have shown this belief to be false. It exists, all right. It just exists in a much more peculiar, eccentric, high-tech sort of way than in the old fairy tales.
At any rate, I finished the hexagon, which turned out to be quite a magical little entity all in itself. It hugged the side of the ridge that we lived on, its myriad windows flashing in the sunlight, the copper salad bowl that I had inverted and nailed on the peak of the cupola gleaming triumphantly. (A builder friend of mine was happy to inform me that this solution for flashing a peak that radiated out from a center had a precedent, as a way of complimenting my resourcefulness; he showed me a book on classical Japanese carpentry where there was a picture of a circular, thatch-roofed structure that had a clay bowl capping the top.) It looks so whimsical and curious, it has inspired rumors in my sparsely-populated neighborhood as to who lives there and what it contains for years (my favorite: it houses a big hot tub). And now I could feel comfortable about leaving it and heading off to Costa Rica.
I packed up all my belongings in a big black travel trunk that my aunt Connie had given me and made arrangements to stay overnight with her in the Bay Area. She lived in a gorgeous old rent-controlled apartment that hearkened back to a more genteel era, one that suited her to perfection. It was a third-floor walk-up in an attractive Mediterranean-style building, overlooking Oakland’s Lake Merritt. The living room possessed enormous picture windows still containing the original ripply glass from when the building was constructed in the twenties. She had lived there with her sister, my aunt Marion, until a few years ago when Marion died from breast cancer.
My aunt Connie was considerably older than Aunt Marion, but she was in terrific mental and physical shape. She was in her mid-eighties, but she was doing great for someone in their mid-sixties. She read practically every page of The New York Times and The San Francisco Chronicle everyday. She exchanged letters with over a hundred correspondents. She traveled to exotic destinations such as Machu Pichu and mainland China with Stanford graduate students, and she threw countless magnificent dinner parties. A former suffragette in the twenties and foreign service officer in Paris in the fifties and sixties, she was a delightful combination of intellectual sophisticate, Victorian feminist, and European hedonist. Staying with Aunt Connie was always a blast.
Kathleen and another couple of friends saw me off at the Greyhound bus station the morning I left, and Aunt Connie was waiting to meet me when I arrived at the Oakland station. She came elegantly dressed in a pastel-colored suit, her thick white hair coiffed in a flattering pageboy that looked trés moderne. She always prided herself on being able to keep up with the times, and she did a magnificent job. I picked up my trunk from the side of the bus, loaded it into the trunk of her car, and away we went to her apartment.
Once there, we indulged in cocktail hour, which was one of the aspects of her day which Aunt Connie looked forward to most eagerly. She wasn’t a souse by any means, although she could certainly hold her liquor and she was only a petite 5’ 2. She was just incredibly social, and in her hey-day, the cocktail party represented the best opportunities for conversation. She fixed us both a Perfect Manhattan, one of her specialties, and set out little bowls of snacks. Then she invited me to sit down on the sofa. She took the chair opposite and crossed her legs, tugging on her skirt to cover her knees.
“So tell me,” she began, her usual way of opening a serious conversation with one of her nieces or nephews, “tell me all about your new situation. I just think it’s so exciting!” Connie believed firmly in the value of expanding one’s horizons through travel. Her reaction to my plans was quite different from that of my parents, who had responded with alarm when I told them where I was moving for the next year or two.
So I filled her in on the Keltons, whom she thought sounded “fascinating,” and I described the place where I would be living.
“Now, of course, Costa Rica is a stable democracy,” she commented with approval, “but I have to say that I think this red scare over Nicaragua is absolute nonsense!”
I murmured my agreement.
“They don’t have any money! What kind of a threat could they possibly be? Even the Soviet Union was never a threat. It was simply a ploy by our military to spend ridiculous amounts of money. They knew that an arms race would bankrupt Russia. As, of course, it has.” Aunt Connie was the lone liberal among her thirteen conservative siblings, which included my mom.
“Didn’t you travel over there once?” I asked.
She nodded, taking a delicate sip from her drink. “In the thirties. That poor country, their entire industrialization program was such a sham. Their farm machinery at that time was primarily for show. They were still tilling the soil with donkeys. I was on a tour, since the Soviet officials wouldn’t allow anyone to travel there on their own. And they showed us what they wanted us to see. But I wasn’t about to miss the opportunity to find out what was really going on there.”
I smiled. “So … what, you snuck off on your own?”
“I did.”
“Well, did they know? Didn’t they get upset?”
“Oh, of course they knew! In fact, they assigned a KGB agent to follow me.”
“But he didn’t stop you?”
“No. Actually, I got lost one afternoon in Moscow and couldn’t find my way back to the hotel. And I saw this man lounging around in a doorway, so I went up to him and asked him if he could take me to my hotel. He tried to pretend that he didn’t know what I was talking about, but I told him I knew that he’d been following me, that I was lost, and that I needed to get back to my hotel.”
I giggled, having no trouble at all conjuring up an image of Connie marching up to a KGB agent and insisting that he serve as her escort. “So what did he say then?”
“He said, all right,” she chuckled.
After our second Manhattan (“a little dividend,” she called the second drink), I helped her prepare dinner. She was always trying something new, and tonight was no exception. She fixed a Chinese shrimp salad and then asked me to set the table with her china, linen, and silver. I checked to make sure that the miniature crystal bowls she used for loose pepper and salt were filled and that the tiny silver spoons that accompanied them were in place. We sat down to a lovely meal, served with wine, during which we talked some more about Costa Rica and she gave me helpful tips for living outside of the country. We finished with dessert—both sides of my family possess outrageous sweet-tooths (sweet-teeth??)—and when it was time to go to bed, I sank down into the linen sheets that were one of Connie’s trademarks, ironed, no less, and so smooth and luscious that you couldn’t help but get a fantastic night’s sleep. In the morning, we had a nice breakfast, again served in the dining room with all the accoutrements, and she took me to the airport.
Another thing about my family is that we can’t bear to be late. We hate close calls and we hate worrying about close calls. So we decided that she would take me a couple of hours early and we could just sit and talk at the airport until it was time for me to go. She pulled up to the curb so that I could unload and check my trunk, and as soon as I plunked it onto the sidewalk, a nice-looking, older skycap came along, reached down, grasped the handle, and pulled.
Nothing happened. The trunk just sat there. It was like an episode I had seen on “Candid Camera” one time when they buried a powerful magnet in the sidewalk and in a suitcase and turned them on whenever a kind gentleman would come along and offer to help the little lady who was standing beside the case, looking distraught. Massaging his shoulder, the sky cap glared at me suspiciously, as if I were playing a trick on him.
“That thing weighs more than seventy pounds!” he barked.
I laughed. I’m a fairly petite 5’4. “That’s not possible,” I told him. “I can’t pick up more than seventy pounds.”
He continued to scowl at me. “I’m going to get it weighed,” he announced. He waved over another, younger sky cap and together, they lifted it onto the cart and shuffled it off. Aunt Connie and I looked at each other and shrugged, waiting for them to return. Finally, they did, the wheels on the cart rattling and bouncing.
“That trunk weighs ninety-two pounds!” the sky cap snapped.
“You’re kidding!” I replied, shocked.
The other sky cap eyeballed me, took in my aunt Connie, then returned his puzzled gaze to his fellow worker. “Well, who got it out of the car?” he asked.
“She did!” declared the first man, as if this was the most heinous, irritating thing I could have possibly done. “She’s some kind of superwoman or somethin’!”
This tickled me for a moment but then I realized I had a serious problem. Having super powers was all well and good, but the airlines have a weight limit on luggage. A single piece couldn’t weigh more than seventy lbs., which meant that I had to find something to do with twenty-two pounds of my stuff. So Aunt Connie and I leaped into the car (after I loaded the trunk back up, under the watchful, amazed eyes of the sky caps) and zoomed back to her apartment where she kindly lent me one of her old suitcases. Down on the street, working out of the trunk of the car, I transferred some of my belongings in a bit of a frenzy.
Bizarrely, a good friend of mine from Redding passed by us on the street, so I introduced her to my aunt and we chatted for a moment while I finished my transfer. Then we jumped back into the car and hot-rodded back to the airport. Instead of having plenty of time and a nice, leisurely send-off, I was now in a huge rush and so knotted up from tension that I was practically in contortions, but we made it. Connie gave me a hug and a kiss at the curb and I went sprinting to my gate. Once in my seat, I managed to relax a little (as much as anyone can relax in those hateful seats on airplanes. I mean, honestly, why don’t the airlines just end all pretense and shut us up in Iron Maidens?) I needed to compose myself because my next stop was Dallas, where I was meeting Jane. She would undoubtedly generate some chaos all of her own.
Above: There it is, the hexagon.
*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.
This is chapter 6 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 twice 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.
Friday, April 10, 2009