Ah, bureaucracy! What is it about human nature that so loves to create such convoluted, obfuscatory, maddening, utterly unnecessary activity? Is it our sense of the absurd? Is it because we’re no longer threatened by predators in our daily lives so we feel we must construct paper tigers with which to get our hearts racing, our blood pressure rising, our flight-or-fight instinct so jittery and juked-up? Or does it result from some sort of malfunctioning miswiring of our evolving brains, creating phantom impulses and bogus strategies that we actually believe we have to follow in order to live? Whatever it is, the Costa Ricans have developed bureaucracy into a fine art.

 

Richard, Paul, and I decided to brave the monster together. We had been forewarned that the process took an entire day, but we figured that this must be an exaggeration. Still, we each brought a novel to read, although this had actually become de rigueur for any outing we chose to undertake. We knew that we had to bring our return plane tickets with us as proof that we would, in fact, be leaving the country some day, and we knew that we had to bring eight passport photos with us as well as our passports. So we stopped by a photo shop on our way to Imigración and each got a set of eight cheerless mug shots, Richard’s making him look like Charles Manson, Paul’s making him look like Ted Bundy, and mine making me look like a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army after spending two months locked in a closet. Armed with these, we felt rather smug about our preparedness level.

 

Perhaps it was destined, then, that we should run into a snag right away. Imigración occupied a large, square edifice with a central courtyard where each window to each department for each step of the visa renewal process faced out onto the plaza. Of course, none of the windows were marked to give any indication of what purpose they served. It took us a few tries to get in the right line, and when we finally got our turn with the bureaucrat seated at the window, we were dealt a crippling blow.

 

“Where is your one-colon note?” asked the clerk.

 

Assuming he meant a one-colon bill, we each produced one from our wallets. But that wasn’t what he wanted. It turned out that what he wanted was a sheet of paper that had a picture of a one-colon bill at the top of it, on which we were supposed to write our plans for our time in Costa Rica. We couldn’t use any other kind of paper. And of course, they didn’t sell these notes at Imigración. We had to buy them at a bookstore downtown, which was blocks and blocks away. So we got back in the jeep, drove to the bookstore, each purchased a one-colon note, wrote down our plans, and returned to Imigración.

 

After we turned in our one-colon note, we were directed to the fingerprinting department, where we had each one of our fingerprints carefully recorded. After covering our fingertips with black ink and taking the prints, the clerks then squeezed some kind of slippery, camphorous soap onto them and directed us outside to a leaky faucet that barely spit out enough water to wet our hands, let alone clean off the vile cleanser—forget the black ink. We found some paper towels and wiped off our digits as well we could, noticing that just about everyone milling about the courtyard had black fingertips, then proceeded to the next step in the immigration process. For some reason I didn’t quite understand, we were directed to buy large quantities of beautiful, ornate stamps of birds and botanicals, some of which made their way onto the pages of our passports, some of which disappeared mysteriously.

 

At one window with a particularly long, slow-moving queue, we reached the front of the line and were given a form we needed to fill out. But they had only one copy of this form, the master. Once we obtained the form, we were instructed to go to the next window to have a copy made. Then we were supposed to fill out the copy and return the master to the first window. Bizarrely, the clerk who handed out the master vanished into the darkness of that office and then reappeared at the copy window, making me wonder if we hadn’t accidentally landed in a Monty Python skit being shot Candid Camera-style in the immigration department of San José, Costa Rica. Why this clerk couldn’t have spent an hour in the morning making up copies of the master to sell to people, I have no idea. But a very terrible thing happened when Paul got his hands on the master.

 

He filled it out.

 

When he stepped up to the copy window with the master all filled out and scribbled on, I thought the clerk was going to have a stroke. This, of course, brought the entire Imigración administration to a complete, grinding halt. It reminded me of what happens when an intruder gets too close to an ant hill. The clerk frantically gathered together as many other members of immigration as he could from all the other windows and offices, and they bunched together in a panicked huddle, trying to figure out what to do.

 

Finally, they decided to type up another master, which would have seemed to me the obvious thing to do right from the beginning, but intimate exposure to another culture was helping me to realize that nothing is ever obvious. This simple step, however, took quite some time, executed, as it was, on a rickety old manual Underwood— which, as anyone knows who has used one, practically needs a sledgehammer in order to get the keys to stroke. Or a good left hook, anyway. During this time, the line at the master form window got longer and longer while observant visa-renewers glared at us, sensing that we were somehow responsible for throwing an enormous monkey wrench—so huge it was really more of a gorilla wrench—into what had to be one of the most tedious, protracted bureaucratic procedures in this quadrant of the Milky Way.

 

Well, the clerk eventually emerged triumphant with the new master copy, and I expected him to rush right over to the copy machine and make some copies right away. But he didn’t. He ambled back to window #1 and took up where he left off, while we skulked over to the final window where we were finally, after a very, very long wait, issued new tourist visas.

 

By now, the sun was sinking low on the horizon, and we felt thoroughly chastened and frazzled, so we repaired to a bar in downtown San José which was set up to look like Rick’s place in the movie Casa Blanca. It resided in a white-washed adobe building, with white plaster walls inside as well, and it featured those oversized wicker chairs whose backs are shaped like a cobra in full flair. It was something of a gringo hang-out, and North American rock music blared from the sound system. The most popular rock song at the time was “Land Down Under” by Men At Work, that band from Australia which seemed to have a hard time ever coming up with another hit. However, I feel certain that this lack was more than made up for by the air time that this one particular tune received in Costa Rica. The Ticos played it over and over and over and over. They loved that song!

 

After a couple of beers, we found ourselves re-inflating, and we began to giggle about our experience at Imigración, including, even, Paul’s terrible gaffe. Of course, it wasn’t the last time we would have to undertake this procedure. When we returned during subsequent trips, we found that a) they fingerprinted us every time, so I can only imagine that they threw the prints away the minute we walked out of the fingerprinting office with our black-tipped digits, and b) they moved the departments around behind the windows. So we couldn’t ever figure out where we were supposed to go first. It was different every time.

 

But after all, paradise without a little hell thrown in would undoubtedly prove too bland over time. Costa Rica was definitely not bland. No, bland it was not. And it was about to get less bland, because Artie, our compatriot in the Phantom of 505 caper, was coming to visit with some friends.

 

Above:  I found some old photos of the time we were in Costa Rica; this is the administration building of our language school Conversa at the time that we were attending.

 

*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 22 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.

 

 

**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.