Crazy Good Fortune Out of the Blue - 10*
We roared off from los Kelton in high spirits, the jeep packed full of camping gear, our bags, and an ice chest stuffed with Fanta Orange and Fanta Grape. Jane suggested that we drive over to the coast and then start traveling south until we found a spot we liked where we could set up camp. So we headed over to Puntarenas, the port town at the terminus of the east-west highway, where we had a nice lunch of grilled sea bass loaded with minced, seared garlic, some absolutely outstanding mashed potatoes (Ticos love potatoes and fortunately, the vile, egregious concept of instant mashed potatoes, which I feared for awhile might herald the downfall of Western civilization, was not in vogue), and some shredded, marinated cabbage. Cabbage was big down here.
Then we cruised down the coast, checking out beaches, all of them beautiful—fine, sensual sand the color of coffee ice cream, curving around glittering cobalt blue bays where spindrift danced frothily on the waves and the swaying palm trees tossed their fronds in the breeze like seductive maidens.
Unfortunately, they were all packed with people.
Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people. Apparently, not only did the entire country take the entire week of Semana Santa off, the entire country came and camped out on the Pacific Coast. Or booked a room in a hotel on the beach. Or rented a house. Or came and stayed with relatives. They filled up every single available space for a human.
We drove farther and farther south, where the terrain became increasingly exotic and lush, and the animals became larger and more colorful. Iguanas six feet long with chartreuse bodies and flaming crimson heads—not to imagine impressive, webbed, dinosaur-like crests along their backs—came bolting across the road in pursuit of one another, scrambling up the trunks of trees, and then leaping, oh, fifteen, twenty feet back onto the ground where they landed with an extremely loud thwack. Now I understood where the phrase “leaping lizards” came from. Man, did they ever leap! And they were so huge! My fondness for reptiles notwithstanding, I was glad that we were inside the jeep when we encountered these creatures.
Still we couldn’t find any place to stay, and when we pulled into a gas station to get some diesel, we had to talk the attendant into selling it to us. When I say that the entire country took the week off, this was literally true. So that meant all the gas stations closed down. You couldn’t buy gas for a week. You got somewhere and then you stayed put and partied for a week, like a rational person.
We decided to turn around. There was no guarantee that we would find a place to stay no matter how far south we drove, and we didn’t want to get stranded with no lodging and no gas. We considered going to Monteverde, the cloud forest preserve, the road to which was a little north of Puntarenas and which we figured couldn’t possibly be crowded since the entire population of the country was at the beach. But we weren’t able to find any gas on the way, and when we got to the turn-off to the cloud forest, we only had just enough gas to get to Monteverde or to return to San José. Again, there was no guarantee that we could find lodging (there was no phone service in Monteverde at this time) nor obtain gas if we got there and couldn’t find a place to stay.
By now all the Fanta Grapes and Fanta Oranges were long gone. And we were feeling disheartened. We’d driven all day long in the heat and the dust and were having to turn around and go back to where we’d come from. We really, really wanted a beer. Not just to quench our thirst but to raise our bedraggled spirits a little. Every single bar/restaurant that we passed, however, had closed already for Semana Santa. We’d just about given up hope when we spotted a large thatched-roofed structure with a café sign outside; the parking lot was packed with cars. Delighted, we pulled in and parked, then went inside and found a table amidst the jovial, festive, holiday crowd.
A friendly waiter came up and asked us what we would like to order and Richard rasped, “Dos cervezas, por favor.” We both felt practically faint with desire for an ice-cold Bavaria.
So when the waiter sadly skooched his eyebrows together and said, “Oh, I am sorry, señor. We cannot serve beer during Semana Santa,” we felt like bursting into tears. Instead, we just stared at him bleakly. “May I recommend the tamarindo juice?” he suggested. “We serve delicious tamarindo juice.”
We nodded, trying to contain our disappointment. Tamarindo juice was certainly better than nothing, but man, this day was not turning out well. We waited in dejected silence until the waiter returned with two large white plastic cups on a tray. He served the drinks to us with a flourish and said, “Enjoy your tamarindo juice.”
We mustered a wan smile as he bowed and left, then picked up our cups to take a drink. To our surprise, the cups were full of beer. We took a sip, afraid to look anywhere but at each other; but then the man at the table behind us leaned over and boomed, “So, you like tamarindo juice?” With a big beaming grin, he raised his cup to us and we saw that it, too, was filled with beer. We glanced around the restaurant, and realized that every single person was grinning at us, drinking beer out of white plastic cups, pretending it was tamarindo juice.
By the time we left, it didn’t matter any more that we’d met defeat in trying to find a place to spend Semana Santa; we just felt tickled to live in a country where playfulness ranked so high in importance. Ticos thought nothing of bending the rules. In fact, in a country where fifty percent of the work force had jobs with the government, it represented practically a national sport. At the same time, they were good-hearted, so their bending of the rules rarely hurt anybody. Costa Rica! Pura vida!
We used our remaining gas to straggle home to Jane and Horace’s sympathy. There, since all the servants had the week off, we fended for ourselves for dinner. Afterward, we headed down to the pool room to watch a video on the television there. Videos were new enough at this time that only staunch technophiles and the wealthy had VCRs, and of course, the Keltons had two. They also possessed a wonderful collection of tapes, including Jane Fonda’s new exercise tape which I had started using since it turned out to be tough to get exercise any other way. Of course, all the servants would gather around outside the glass doors to watch me with puzzled curiosity when I did so. As pleased as I was to provide entertainment for them, I felt way too self-conscious, so I started drawing the blinds. (Lack of privacy was one of the unanticipated aspects of having live-in servants. Duh!) Jane had also picked up a tape of The Chippendales’ work-out tape, because, she said, she got tired of “looking at Miss Perfect all the time.”
At any rate, we were watching Steelyard Blues or Start the Revolution Without Me or some such movie when I gradually came to notice an odd pinging sound. It sounded like the noise the metal ring on the end of Ana’s mop made when it struck against the handle as she dust-mopped the parquet floors upstairs. But it was late at night. And I thought she was off-duty anyway. Only Don Marcos, the man who never slept, remained on the premises. The rest of the staff had gone to Cartago to spend the holiday with their extended family, while Ana had her own family gatherings to attend in Escazú. As I continued to listen, I began to think it strange that if Ana were dry-mopping the floors, she was doing it right above the spiral staircase, and she was working over the same spot again and again. This was not like the efficient Ana I knew.
I started to say something to Richard, but then I noticed that the bed I was sitting on had begun to jiggle. Jane had set up two single beds in an “L” for viewing the television, and I occupied one, while Richard sat on the other. I had one of my legs stretched out in front of me, resting on Richard’s thigh, so when the bed started to shake, he glanced at me suspiciously. “Are you jiggling your foot?” he asked, a trifle annoyed.
“No, I’m not,” I told him, laughing at his misplaced grouchiness while trying to figure out why, in fact, the beds were jiggling. Then they began to buck underneath us. The lamp hanging over the pool table started swinging in wide, spasmodic arcs. We both regarded each other in dismay and simultaneously cried out, “Earthquake!” We jumped up and staggered across the lurching floor, racing outside as fast as our legs could carry us over what felt like the back of a furious, writhing dragon. When we emerged from the house, we gazed in alarm at the swimming pool, which had waves in it that were sloshing over the sides. We froze in our tracks while we could hear Don Marcos shouting over the thunderous roar emanating from the earth, “Get outside! Get outside!” Jane and Horace presumably exited out the front door upstairs while Richard and I grabbed each other and held on for dear life until the temblor finally subsided, which felt like fifteen minutes later (in real time, ninety seconds).
When the ground finally stopped shaking and everything had settled, a brief moment of utter silence ensued. Then every single animal in the neighborhood began bleating, crowing, neighing, chirping, bellowing, mooing, howling, clucking, squealing and barking at the top of their lungs. I had never heard such a cacophony in all my life and I never have again. I can only imagine that they were all shouting, “Jesus Christ! What in the hell was that??!!”
We stayed where we were, ashen-faced, until Don Marcos came striding around the corner of the house, his flashlight in hand, to make sure that we were okay. When we saw him, we started to feel a little better until the fearless Don Marcos caught sight of us and exclaimed, “Tuve mucho miedo!” —“I was very afraid!”
It turns out that the earthquake registered 7.2, the same magnitude as the devastating Kobe earthquake in 1995 that killed over five thousand people, slightly more powerful than the Loma Prieta earthquake in San Francisco that collapsed a section of the Bay Bridge and closed down the World Series, and somewhat less than the catastrophic 7.4 earthquake that occurred in Turkey in the summer of 1999, killing tens of thousands. Amazingly, however, few deaths were attributed to this earthquake in Costa Rica and very little structural damage, although it severed the Pan American highway north of Panama, which effectively closed it down for months.
Apparently, Costa Rica is fortunate in that the type of rock it sits upon transmits seismic waves in a rolling fashion that minimizes damage. In addition, the Ticos have taken earthquake-proofing their buildings quite seriously, using great quantities of steel rods to reinforce their cinder block dwellings. And the epicenter had been in a thinly populated part of the country, away from San José. So Costa Rica came out amazingly unscathed.
Of course, for the rest of the time that we were there, aftershocks rumbled through, some of them quite sizable. They were all different in duration, intensity, sound, and feel: One sounded like an approaching locomotive, while another resembled thunder and some had no real sound to them at all. Some were fierce, sharp jabs and others made the ground feel like quivering gelatin. It tended to make everyone a little crabby, I noticed, including myself. Perhaps like high winds, earthquakes generate cations, positive ions which stimulate irritability (negative ions, associated with moving bodies of water like oceans, waterfalls, and rivers, have a soothing effect on human emotions). Or perhaps it was just the uncertainty of never knowing when the earth, which I was used to thinking of as rock-solid and immovable, would decide to perform an imitation of quick sand hooked up to a set of Magic Fingers.
There is another factor, too, and that is that seismologists never know at the time whether an earthquake is a main shock or a foreshock, no matter what its magnitude. A particular earthquake is determined to be the main shock only after some time has passed and no tremors have come along that were bigger. So, even if you’ve gone through a 7.2 earthquake, there is always the possibility that Mother Earth was just warming up for an 8.6.
At the same time, no real damage occurred from these aftershocks, and after a while, I began to find them interesting. It kind of felt like Nature giving me a shake every now and then and shouting, “Hey you! I’m alive! Pay attention!” And her vitality is, in fact, what makes life possible. And eventually, the cation-induced crabbiness I experienced became overshadowed by wonder and awe.
*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 10 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, May 7, 2009