Crazy Good Fortune Out of the Blue - 7*
Jane and I had agreed to meet at the gate of the flight that we were taking to Miami, so that’s where I headed. Unsurprisingly, she hadn’t arrived yet—Jane occupied the other end of the punctuality spectrum from my family—and in fact, she still hadn’t shown up as they boarded the last passengers, increasing my normal level of flying anxiety considerably.
I don’t know what it is about plane travel. It’s not that I’m afraid to fly, exactly. At least, theoretically. I have no theoretical problem with the idea of flying. But in fact, it makes me incredibly uptight. Perhaps because it’s one of the most out-of-control situations that I ever find myself in. If something bad happens, I have to rely upon psychic abilities, fate, karma, and/or guardian angels, every one of which I feel dubious about. I mean, all kinds of ulterior motives, past lives, spiritual purposes, cosmic dates in other parts of the universe, etc., can get muddled in there with a conscious desire not to die or get maimed. These concerns existed even before all the terrorist crap. But I think the main reason I find plane travel so nerve-wracking is that I’m afraid my luggage won’t make it to my destination. I mean, no one likes losing their stuff, right? Even temporarily.
All these uncomfortable feelings were now becoming mixed with the fear that Jane wasn’t going to make this flight, which meant that I would be stranded in Miami if I boarded this plane without her since Jane had the tickets for both of us to travel from Miami to San José. As I stood uncertainly in front of the jetway, trying to decide what to do, I heard a commotion coming down the concourse and then Jane bellowing, “Wait! Wait!” She came charging up to the gate, waving her ticket, positively dripping in perspiration. Her head, that is. Jane seemed to perspire only from her head, a fact she often liked to comment upon. Everyone drew back except for me and the stewardess accepting boarding passes, who reached out in a gingerly fashion, and took Jane’s pass.
“Hi, baby!” Jane cooed, leaning forward to give me a big, sopping hug. “The traffic was just god awful!”
She tucked my arm in hers and we sashayed onto the plane and got settled, both of us ordering a Bloody Mary as soon as the beverage cart made its way down the aisle. We had an uneventful flight to Miami, but when we went to the gate for our flight to San José, we received some bad news. Our tickets were for yesterday, somehow, and the flight was filled to overflowing. There was no way that we could get on. We tried all the other airlines that flew to Costa Rica, but it was an incredibly popular destination. We couldn’t get on anything.
Jane booked us both rooms at the airport hotel, telling me just to order something from room service for dinner, but I was so wrought up from traveling and so disappointed not to be seeing Richard that I took out my flute and played a few songs to try to relax. Unfortunately, by the time I finished playing, room service had closed, so I went back down to the concourse, where the only food I could find was a slice of pizza. This was a far cry from the shrimp cocktail and stuffed mushrooms that I had planned on eating, but the young man who served it to me was so kind and so anxious to please that I perked up for his sake and acted overjoyed with my lone option. Then I headed back to the room and tried calling Richard in Costa Rica. Oddly enough, though, he wasn’t home. Lijia answered the phone, but since she didn’t speak English and I didn’t speak Spanish, she couldn’t tell me anything except that he wasn’t there. Neither Paul nor Horace was there, either, which seemed strange.
What I found out later was that Paul had talked Richard into doing a little four-wheeling that afternoon. Richard had at first refused to go, saying that he wanted to be sure to meet me at the airport and he didn’t want to risk getting stuck some place that would make it difficult to get back in time. There wasn’t any version of AAA in Costa Rica, and even working telephones could be hard to come by, especially in remote areas. But Paul promised that they would be careful and so off they went. Unfortunately, when they got into a mountainous area behind Escazú, a crevice appeared in the road, which they ended up straddling. Paul, who had been living in Costa Rica far longer than Richard, insisted that the crevice would close back up at some point, and Richard assumed that he knew what he was talking about. Instead, it just got wider and wider and wider until two of the wheels slid into what was now a fissure, stranding them.
They hiked to the nearest town where they called Horatio (Horace’s Costa Rican moniker), who was not pleased to hear about their predicament. He and Luis went to rescue them—fortunately, the Kelton household possessed two jeeps—and they were able to reach Paul and Richard. A tow truck wasn’t an option, apparently, but somehow Luis knew just what to do to coax a whole crew of campesinos out of the woods. He paid them to help get the jeep to safety, and Richard stood by, astonished, as they jumped down into the fissure, lifted up the jeep with their bare hands, then continued to hold it aloft as Luis drove until the jeep could get all four wheels onto solid ground.
It’s just as well that I didn’t know any of this was going on, actually, as it would have just made me feel even more anxious. And as it happened, of course, I wasn’t coming in that night, so Richard didn’t have to worry about not meeting me at the airport. So after I hung up the phone, I played my flute a little more, which wasn’t the most satisfying activity in the world since I was a novice and I had a limited repertoire. But finally I fell asleep, contemplating the fate of my trunk, and the next morning, Jane treated me to a really nice breakfast.
It felt odd to have the Keltons covering so many expenses for Richard and me—there was no way in the world that we could ever repay them—but they didn’t seem concerned about it. The main impression that Jane gave was simply that she enjoyed having plenty of money and being able to help people out who didn’t have so much. She even talked our waiter into sneaking me a kiwi fruit that I coveted from the central display. Jane was middle-aged and she did not fall into the model-slim category by any means, but she was incredibly sexy and clearly had not lost any of her touch since her youth. She flirted with the waiter shamelessly, which he seemed to enjoy quite a bit.
“Valentino,” she reflected, when he complied with her request to tell her his name. “What a beautiful name!” He blushed with pleasure. “Your mother must have loved you very much to give you that name.”
“Ah, sí, señora,” he replied, tickled pink to contemplate this fact.
After breakfast, Jane devised a strategy for getting on a flight to San José. “Okay, here’s what we’ll do,” she told me, lighting up a cigarette and waving her hand around in the air to dissipate the smoke. “I’ll try to hustle some young ticket agent who can sort of think of me as his mother. That way he’ll think about his own mother and how he would feel if she were in my situation. And you go pick some nice-looking grandfatherly sort. Between the two of us, we should be able to come up with something.” She stubbed out her cigarette after taking a couple of drags. “I wonder where our bags are right now,” she mused.
Where indeed?
Not being terrifically adept in the art of feminine wiliness, I’m afraid I approached my mission in a rather half-assed way, and of course, Jane was the one who came up with seats. We got on Tan Sahsa, the Honduran airline, which was a bit of a milk run, Jane told me, but a lot of fun. It definitely turned out to be a different kind of flight than any I had taken before.
For one thing, everyone was in outstanding spirits. It was like the flight was just a big party for everyone on it. For another, there was no beverage cart, which I had mistakenly believed was as indispensable to the aircraft as the wings or motor. If you wanted a drink, you raised your hand and shouted, “Wheeskey!” One of the stewardesses would show up in a few minutes with a plastic tumbler half-full of whiskey. When it was time for a meal, the stewardesses strolled down the aisle and tossed a cellophane-wrapped sandwich in your lap. The latter custom has caught on now with all the major U.S. airlines, of course, but at the time, I was used to getting a well-balanced, horrible meal in a little tray with plastic silverware and a roll that could double as a hacky-sack. I was, in fact, having fun, even if I felt a little disoriented and it looked like I would miss out on the faux hacky-sack.
We made two stops in Honduras (which, for some reason, I kept thinking should be called “The Honduras,” which drove Richard, an ardent geographile and history buff, absolutely nuts: “It’s not The Honduras! It’s Honduras! Where did you get ‘The Honduras?!’”) Again, we were treated to the tanks lining the runways with their guns pointed up at any and all incoming air traffic and after we made our second stop, I heard something over the crackly intercom service about Managua, Nicaragua.
“We’re making a stop in Managua?” I gulped to Jane.
“Yeah, it’s the milk run, like I said,” she told me, fanning herself with her tattered paperback. “It’s fun, isn’t it?”
Well, this, actually, didn’t fall into my category of fun. It was one thing to make stops in Honduras, where there was no fighting going on (as far as I knew at the time; I found out later that Honduras was arming itself to the teeth with substantial help from the U. S. and that the U.S. was using southern Honduras as a staging area for raids on Nicaragua). But it was entirely another to make a stop in war-torn Nicaragua. I read the news. I knew what was going on. Once the Sandinistas took over, the antagonism from the United States as well as right wing governments in other Central American countries had created tremendous instability and now the Contras were attacking Nicaragua with a vengeance. There was a war going on there, for God’s sake, and we were just going to make a stop there like it was Duluth, or Wichita, or Hoboken? I didn’t understand how Jane could be so incredibly blasé about our next stop.
When we landed, I was surprised not to see any armaments at all, unlike Honduras. There was the tarmac and there was the terminal, a small, square building with about eight thousand people jammed on top all waving like mad. It was like the Costa Rican airport, but instead of the greeters being packed behind a cyclone fence, they were standing on top of the terminal. And that was that. A few passengers disembarked, a few got on, and then we took off. It wasn’t exactly harrowing.
It turned out that neither Costa Rica nor Nicaragua were all that scary, although there was definitely fighting taking place in Nicaragua between the Contras and the Sandinistas, primarily along the borders. Nicaragua’s main problem was its terrible poverty, as their erstwhile dictator, Somoza, had absconded with all the international aid given to the Nicaragua for the devastating earthquake of 1972. In addition, the United States had stopped all commerce with Nicaragua when the Sandinistas took power (the U.S. had been one of their biggest markets) and even took to mining their harbors so that they couldn’t conduct business with anyone else, either. The biggest risk in visiting Nicaragua involved poor sanitation, which goes along with poverty, a pretty short-sighted predicament to put any country in, what with all the scary new super-bugs making global appearances, especially in the tropics. But politics has never been known to listen to reason or practicality.
In El Salvador and Guatemala, it was another story, however. Death squads were busily exterminating people with an insatiable, brutal appetite. Refugees from both of these countries were pouring in Costa Rica, straining its resources to deal with them all. It was pretty shameful for me to realize that U.S. policies were responsible for a great deal of the suffering that was going on in Central America, but I never received any anti-North-American sentiment from any of the Central Americans I encountered, even those who had had family members murdered or who had been displaced from their homes and countries. They always said that it was the governments, not the people, who were their enemies.
When we finally landed in San José, Richard was there to greet us, and I was overjoyed to see him. It turned out that Luis had had the foresight to obtain our luggage the day before, and it was waiting for us back at the house. Richard told me the jeep-in-the-fissure story as we drove through the sparkling, emerald-and-magenta countryside; I told him that I was a superwoman and could probably hold my own in an arm-wrestling contest with Arnold Schwartzenegger. Richard had now attended six weeks of language school and he proudly demonstrated to me some of his newly acquired language skills. We were both so delighted to be back together, we were practically bouncing in our seats, while Jane smoked cigarettes, flicked her ashes out the window, and kept up a running commentary on anything and everything as we drove along. And when we pulled up to “Los Kelton,” this was the first time that it really hit me: This eight-bedroom mansion with the kidney-shaped swimming pool, toads the size of footballs, and retinue of servants, was going to be my new home.
Above: A cathedral in Managua, Nicaragua, designed by architect Ricardo Legoreta and built in 1993. It wasn’t there when we were, but when I was looking for public domain images of Managua, this came up. I so loved this building that I thought I would post it to give readers a little bit of a picture of this part of the world. I love what look like 5-gallon propane tanks decorating the roof.
*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 7 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, April 16, 2009