Crazy Good Fortune Out of the Blue - 15*
By now, we had resided in Costa Rica long enough that we started to receive visitors from the States. Jane and Horace were extremely gracious about housing our company, although our first guests turned out to be a couple that we didn’t know all that well. We had attended a friend’s party shortly before Richard left for Costa Rica, and there we had met a guy named Jerry, our friend’s neighbor, who seemed very excited to hear that we were moving to Costa Rica. Now we knew why he was so excited. He had someone to visit in paradise. He appeared to be a nice person, however, and we were homesick enough at this point that any company from the States sounded appealing. He came with his girlfriend, Renee, a massage therapist, as coincidence would have it. Unfortunately, I had come down with a case of the flu shortly before their arrival.
They entertained themselves while I was sick and Richard was working, until I felt good enough to get up. One morning I was feeling relatively chipper, so I suggested that we go for a hike in the mountains behind the Kelton compound. We needed to get an early start, though, as rainy season had begun in earnest. In the valley, this meant that every day around noon, clouds would burgeon overhead, a huge clap of thunder would rend the skies, and a deluge would pour down for a couple of hours while everyone took a little nap. Then it would stop raining, the clouds would disappear, and it would be just lovely for the rest of the day. However, in the mountains, one had to take care to avoid lightning, just like in any high country anywhere in the world. You could get zapped here just as easily as you could in the Rockies. So we needed to get down out of the mountain peaks before the afternoon storms gathered.
Renee was visiting a friend in San José that morning and Richard was working with Paul, so Jerry and I accepted Horatio’s kind offer to drive us three miles up the side of a nearby mountain to a trailhead that he knew about where he dropped us off. We could hike into the mountains as far as we felt like, then we would walk the three miles back to the Kelton’s. I was still feeling a little weak from the flu and didn’t intend on going too far, and I knew that we had to get down from the mountains before noon in any case, so we didn’t pack any food, just some water. We planned to be back in time for one of Lijia’s scrumptious lunches.
We hiked along the road for a ways, and then we came to the trail, a narrow, muddy track that rose straight up the side of the mountain. In my punky condition, I wasn’t thrilled to find that the trail was so steep, but it was a gorgeous, clear morning, and it felt good to be out and moving. We hiked steadily for three miles until we were deep into the high country, but by then, I was starting to feel tired. When we emerged from some highland forest and came upon a nice grassy area, I collapsed onto the ground. Jerry remained standing, waiting.
“Jerry, I’m sorry,” I said, “but I can’t go much farther. We’ve got a six mile hike back to the house and I’m still feeling a little weak from the flu. What do you say we go back?”
His mouth tightened in disappointment and he twisted around to take in our surroundings. “I think we’re really close to the summit,” he said.
I shook my head. “It’s a false summit. I don’t think we’re all that close, believe me.”
He stroked his chin thoughtfully. “Well, how about if we just go a little farther and see?”
His reluctance began to annoy me. He had basically invited himself down here even though we didn’t know him all that well, he was being completely insensitive to the fact that I had been sick for the last few days, and I was also starting to feel hungry. Moreover, I really didn’t want to get drenched on the way home. Skipping up and down the gutters in a rainstorm was one thing, slogging miles along muddy streets in a tenuous post-flu condition was another. “I’m not going any farther,” I told him. “I’m beat.”
He shrugged out of his day pack and placed it on the ground next to me. “How about if I just go up the trail a little ways and see how far it is to the summit?”
A small voice in the back of my mind urged me to smack him on the head with a rock and drag him down the mountain, but against my better judgment, I agreed. “Well—all right,” I muttered reluctantly.
“I’ll leave my pack here,” he said, as if this represented some sort of cosmic silver cord that would automatically draw him back at just the right moment.
“Don’t go too far. The clouds are already starting to build up,” I warned.
He tromped off up the trail in his little tan hiking shorts and hiking boots, looking like an intrepid Boy Scout. I knew that it was stupid to separate in rugged, unfamiliar terrain, but I figured nothing could go too wrong. He’d hike a little farther, see that we had indeed reached a false summit, come back down the trail, and we’d go home.
After gazing out onto the central valley for a few minutes, where San José and its surrounding urban areas looked like sugar cubes sprinkled over a putting green, I took the day pack and scrunched it under my head for a pillow, closing my eyes for a bit. I heard a few percussive booms at one point, which in the past would have alarmed me, but which I now knew were from cannons that the Ticos loved to fire in celebration of just about any kind of holiday or festival that they could dream up. The warm sun beat through my eyelids, turning my inner vision crimson, while more and more clouds began to drift lazily by, creating a hypnotic, alternating pattern of light and dark. I fell into a reverie which deepened into a snooze. A creeping chill startled me awake with a jerk and when I opened my eyes, I saw that the sky had completely covered over with ominous-looking thunderheads. I took out my pocket watch and saw that over an hour had passed, which exasperated me no end.
I left Jerry’s pack on the ground and started up the trail to see if I might run into him coming down, but about 200 yards from where I had been resting, the trail ran into a barbed wire fence along some thick brush and simply stopped. This pissed me off even more. The guy was bushwhacking! What a jerk!
I called and called but received no answer, so I decided to wait fifteen more minutes for him to return and then head down the mountain whether he’d shown up or not. I was definitely not tempted to wade cluelessly around in unknown tropical brush while the thunderheads were getting ready to unload. I returned to his pack, which was starting to symbolize something infuriating, and waited another twenty minutes.
When he still hadn’t appeared, I started back down the mountain, where at one point I was treated to an enchanting meteorologic effect. I encountered a zone where a bank of clouds was scooting up the side of the mountain. The trail was steep enough that when I looked down, my eye level matched up with the bottom of the clouds, which were dark and gorgeously charcoal-colored and possessed a straight, sharp edge. Underneath the cloud bank, the expansive view of the central valley far, far below twinkled in the remaining sunlight with its sugar cube buildings. The clouds moved quite swiftly, too, as they came rushing toward me before surfing right over my head and scudding up the mountainside, giving me an odd sensation of falling or floating.
I managed to make it back to the Kelton’s before the rains started, but by the time I got there, I was famished and exhausted. I gobbled down some leftovers I found in the refrigerator and then staggered into bed where I fell into a deep sleep. Three hours later, Richard awakened me.
“Where’s Jerry?” he demanded, as I sat up groggily, feeling as if I’d just regained consciousness from a coma.
“What do you mean? Isn’t he around?”
“No, he never came back from the hike you guys went on. What happened?”
I snapped awake then. “What? He never came back?”
He shook his head grimly. “How did that happen? How did you guys get separated?”
“Oh, shit!” I exclaimed. “Oh, God.” Jerry had been an asshole, but I knew that I was the one at fault here. I never should have let him go off alone. I explained to Richard what had happened, and he decided that we should go back and try to find him. I’d already hiked nine miles that day and I was still feeling pretty saggy, but adrenalin got me going. Luís offered to drive us up to the trailhead and accompany us, for which I felt grateful, but I was also feeling guilty and very bad. I felt even worse when we got started on the trail and I saw that Luís was wearing slick-soled cowboy boots.
Still, he didn’t have too much trouble navigating the slippery, clay-rich soil. About a third of the way up, however, he asked me how much farther it was to the place that Jerry and I had gotten separated.
“Muy cerca,” I told him: Very near.
He nodded and kept climbing, but then half-way there, he asked again. How much farther was it?
“Muy cerca,” I told him again. I don’t know if I actually believed that or whether I thought it was the only acceptable answer. A few hundred yards later, he asked again, and when I gave him the same answer, he shook his head, grumbling, “Oh, sí, muy cerca, muy cerca!”
One worrisome aspect of our mission was the fact that it was getting late in the day. Dusk was approaching as we climbed, and we didn’t want to have to stumble down this trail in the dark. Not only that, once darkness fell, our chances of finding Jerry decreased to practically nil. When we got to the place where we’d parted, there was his wretched day-glo green day pack, lying right where I’d left it with the note I’d attached saying I was heading back to the Kelton’s. This panicked me even more. I’d talked myself into believing that he had gotten lost in the warren of roads and houses that comprised the part of Escazú closest to the mountain, which I’d had to wend my way through when I returned earlier that afternoon. As he didn’t speak Spanish, it would be tough to get any guidance from the locals. But now it was clear that he had never made it that far. Jerry was lost in the mountains.
Richard decided to check out the trail where it disappeared into the brush, but Luís, I noticed, hunkered down next to Jerry’s pack. He clearly had no intention of going any farther. He wore such a firm, purposeful expression, I got the feeling that he knew something we didn’t.
“Hay culebras aquí?” I asked him. Are there snakes up here?
He shook his head. “No, no culebras,” he informed me. I felt vastly relieved. “Pero,” he added, and my heart caught on its next beat, “hay ladrones.”
Oh, man … outlaws?? I’d heard about outlaws hiding out in the remote parts of Costa Rica—very bad men who were fleeing justice from just about everywhere in Latin America.
They’ll cut your throat just for your wristwatch, Luís told me. Then he drew his finger across his throat making a juicy, hissing, slicing sound. I stared at him, appalled. To make sure he got his point across, he repeated his gesture, in an even more dire, exaggerated fashion this time. Suddenly, I had visions of horrible, evil, murderous ladrones with five-day-old stubble, rotting teeth, eye patches, and huge machetes lurking behind every tree, but especially behind the trees that Richard was walking past in his search for Jerry.
“Rick!” I screamed, leaping to my feet. “Rick! Rick! Riiiiiiick!!!”
I raced up the path and collided into him as he emerged from the brush. “What?!” he answered.
“Oh!” I gulped in relief. “Well, uh, Luís says that there are ladrones back in here.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised.” Richard sighed heavily. “Anyway, the trail picks up a few yards past that fence, and then it runs into another trail. There’s no way to know which way he went. And it’s getting dark. There’s not really much we can do at this point, so I’m thinking we should get off the mountain while we can still see and then contact the Red Cross when we get back into town.”
We plodded glumly back down the trail, where I suddenly remembered my dreams from the night before: vague, shadowy recollections of a murder taking place in some back alley or dark doorway. The best scenario I could imagine was that Jerry had fallen and broken a leg and was lying in a ravine somewhere, helpless, bleeding, and in excruciating pain. Snakes might not live up here, I thought, but I’ll bet jaguars do. I felt so responsible and terrible that I was in tears by the time we reached the car. No one spoke much. No one had a lot of hope. When we encountered Horatio driving up the road we were descending, we informed him that we hadn’t found Jerry; we were on our way to inform the Red Cross so that they could send out a search party.
“Not to worry!” Horatio told us. “He’s back!”
“He’s back?” I exclaimed, overjoyed to hear these words.
“Yes, he got lost in the mountains, but he found his way back. He’s at the house right now.”
We all heaved a huge sigh of relief and chattered happily as we motored back to los Kelton. But an interesting thing happened to me as we neared the house. Once the relief of knowing that he was all right wore off, I started feeling angry again. I couldn’t believe that he had put me through all that emotional anguish. Not to mention that I had now hiked a total of fifteen miles after just recovering from the flu. When we back to the house and Jane related that he was pleased with himself because he’d had an adventure, I absolutely wanted to kill him. It’s lucky that he was in the bathroom having a soak in the tub when I found this out, or I probably would have. When Jane saw the look on my face, she gave one of her deep, throaty chuckles and declared, “Uh-oh! I better go tell Jerry to lock the door!”
No kidding! At the very least, I wanted to go dump a bucket of ice water into his bath via his stupid head. In fact, I seriously considered it. But the worst part of it was, his visit was only half over.
*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 15 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.
Wednesday, June 10, 2009