The Longest Way Home

by Andrew McCarthy

  She kisses me back. “Do you think so?”

  “I do.”

  “Do you like the poem?”

  “I love it.”

  “And the peacocks?”

  “Love them.”

  “Any input?”

  I’m silent for a minute. “Don’t only the male peacocks have colorful feathers?”

  “Yeah, I think so.”

  “Do you think anyone will notice that it’s two males?”

  On the morning of my departure for Costa Rica, I’m eating breakfast with D and our four-year-old daughter.

  “Well, at least you were home for almost a couple of weeks this time,” D says.

  With a mouth full of cereal our daughter looks at me. “Do you know when I like you best, Daddy?”

  “When, pumpkin?”

  “When you come back from staying at the airport.”

  I have often wondered why certain acting jobs come my way when they do. What’s the lesson to be learned aside from the obvious challenge of the work? Why, for example, am I cast as a widower while I’m in the process of getting divorced? Or in a silly comedy while I’m going through a particularly tough stretch personally? With travel writing it has been the same.

  In Patagonia, I indulged my desire for solitude, and the boat up the Amazon thrust me into the heart of the group dynamic—obviously not the reasons why I first proposed these trips to my editor.

  Usually I have an idea for a story I want to tell that is tied to a particular location—a place I either love or have long wanted to visit. My rationale being that I will have more to say if I have a passion and a curiosity about where it is I’m going. But Costa Rica is different. I simply said yes when my editor asked me to do a story about it. I have never had any desire to go there, or anywhere in Central America for that matter. My uninformed preconception of the region is of a swampy little bog that attracts a mangy crowd looking to do seedy things on the cheap.

  The plane to San José lives down to my expectations. It’s filled with squat men with thick necks and their women, wearing velour warm-up suits. Tall, skinny frat boys in yellow V-neck sweaters, probably heading down to take advantage of Costa Rica’s booming sex tourism trade, slouch up the aisle. “Fishing trips” is the term I believe men use to describe these expeditions to their wives and girlfriends back home.

  At Juan Santamaria airport I pass a life-size, cardboard cutout of a delicate-looking young woman propped up beside the customs desk, reminding everyone that sex with a minor is illegal and punishable by a stint in local prison. I wonder what it is exactly that I’ve been sent to Costa Rica to learn.

  I make my way to a small hangar beside the main terminal and find an old man with tousled gray hair and a drooping mustache. He’s waiting for me. Beside him stands a teenager—no more than fifteen; they both wear white, short-sleeved shirts, with blue and gold bars on their shoulders. They’re standing beside a twin-engine, six-seat prop plane.

  “Puerto Jiménez?” I ask, pointing at the small plane with paper-thin wings.

  The old man nods.

  I’m heading to the Osa Peninsula, on Costa Rica’s southwestern Pacific coast. The underdeveloped Osa is far from the well-worn eco-circuit of volcanoes, zip lines through cloud forests, and surf schools along the northern coast, for which Costa Rica has become famous.

  “Solo?”—am I the only one? I point to myself.

  Again, the tired old man nods. I approach the plane and give the fragile-looking wing a gentle shake. The entire plane rocks badly. The old man holds up a finger of warning.

  Before I climb aboard I check my e-mail. D has just sent a message. It hasn’t downloaded completely, only the subject line has come through: “WARNING,” it reads.

  I’m hoping she hasn’t had one of her dreams of premonition, but in order to buy some time for the message to download, I ask if I can go to the bathroom. The captain shrugs and points to a door in the corner of the hangar. I scamper off and lock myself in the filthy toilet. The message never comes through and eventually the young man knocks on the door. Reluctantly, I exit the pungent room, shuffle across the blistering heat on the tarmac, and climb on board. The plane is stifling; no air moves. In thickly accented English, the old man finally speaks. “I am George,” he says. He then slams the door shut, locking me inside.

  George trudges around to the cockpit, fires up the engines, and the high thin hum of the props rips into my ears. The plane begins to vibrate—my teeth would clatter if my jaw weren’t already locked shut. We roll out toward the main runway and stop. George looks left and right.

  “See anything?” he shouts over his shoulder. Is he talking to me? Without waiting for an answer he slams the throttle forward.

  Once we are airborne I try to focus my attention on a small rivet on the wing, to stop my mind from wandering to images of disaster. The rivet begins to vibrate, badly. Is it coming loose? I look away and then return my focus to it a minute later. Was the rivet jutting out this far before? Should I alert the captain? I decide to focus on something else. We’re between two cloud banks, cruising on a river of blue sky. Soon we’re flying over the mountains of Talamanca, and the plane begins to bounce. Every time the plane jumps, I lift my feet as if I’m hopping over something. There is no need for this, and I’m not sure why I do it, but I can’t stop. When we hit a particularly bad patch of turbulence, my head bangs on the ceiling six inches above me. I decide to tighten my seat belt. Then, just off to our left, a small plane, similar in size to ours, comes zipping out of the clouds. The plane buzzes past close enough that I can easily read its call letters. Did someone inside wave? At least I’m no longer worried about turbulence.

  Twenty minutes later George begins to tap a circular screen in the center of the instrument panel. He does this for a while, shakes his head, and then stops. After a few minutes he taps the screen again, harder this time. Then he instructs the young man in the seat beside him to bang the panel while he steers. We sweep out over the deep blue water of the Golfo Dulce and then in an arcing dive we turn back toward the dense canopy of green. A thin ribbon of open ground sliced into the jungle comes clear directly ahead, and then a loud and piercing buzzing fills the cabin. George slaps the young man’s hand away from the console. He jabs at a few buttons. We lose altitude fast. George pulls back hard on the controls. The sea below is getting very close; I can plainly see the coral beneath the now-turquoise water. Then we’re inches above the trees and we bounce our way to a less than delicate landing on the small and narrow airstrip conveniently located beside a wide and crowded graveyard.

  I like this place immediately.

  Standing under a cashew tree beside the cemetery, I count twenty-six scarlet macaws squawking so loud from its branches that I don’t hear the small, square-shouldered man with the thick glasses stepping up to shake my hand. Tom Connor lives in a simple home beside the landing strip and likes to stroll over whenever a plane lands, “just to see who’s crazy enough to want to come here.” An expat from Cleveland, Tom has lived in the Osa for more than twenty years. He tells me the airstrip was paved a few years ago, and that a spinning prop recently decapitated a man—it’s unclear if the man was buried in the adjacent cemetery.

  “How about some lunch?” Tom asks. With nowhere to go and no idea what I might do otherwise, his invitation is easy to accept.

  “Want to see town first?” he asks after I climb into his pickup. We bump over a dirt road through dense vegetation, beneath palm and bamboo and acacia, and in two minutes we emerge onto the one paved road in Puerto Jiménez, the only town of any note in the Osa. The road’s cement gutters are so deep to accommodate runoff during the rainy season that if Tom were to misjudge a turn and his pickup were to fall into one, his axle would be in serious danger of snapping. The three-block main drag has no name and few services.

  “We’ve got no KFC here, no dry cleaners,” Tom says in a wry tone. A man pedals a rusting bike past us, dangling a three-foot-long fish over the handlebars a
s he goes. We pass the medical clinic; opaque plastic sheeting is taped over the windows where glass is missing. “They have some equipment, but no one knows how to use it. I got sick once, needed some care, and got out of here in a hurry.” We pass a gas station, “the only one in the Osa,” and come to the end of the town, where the obligatory soccer field is located, across from the Catholic church. There are some unfinished houses. “We have a lot of construction, but not a lot of progress.”

  “Is there a strong community here?”

  “The main pastime is talking about other people’s business. Who’s dating whom.”

  We turn off down a dirt lane.

  “Where are you staying?” Tom asks.

  “Nowhere, yet.” I mention the two places I read about in my guidebook.

  “Stay at the cabins, they’re cleaner. It’s right there”—he points out the window down a short, dead-end road—“and once you’ve had enough of the big city, come be my guest out in the jungle.” We bounce along farther and suddenly the bay opens out to our left. The unpaved road hugs the coast until we come to a shack beside a large palm-frond roof covering a patio. As we climb out of his truck I hear a thud over my shoulder.

  “There’s an event,” Tom says lazily, “a coconut fell.” It’s impossible to know how Tom really feels about his adopted home. His true opinions about this, and everything else, seem locked behind a knowing and detached irony.

  We take a seat out of a hot sun that’s trying to burn itself through a thin layer of clouds. The humidity hangs heavy. There is no breeze under the overhang. Sweat rolls freely down my back. Tom orders a beer, I ask for a soda water. My body is disoriented and my mind disjointed from lack of sleep and jet lag.

  “Not quite a dream state, but it’s certainly not wakefulness,” is how writer Pico Iyer describes the malady that has afflicted the traveler for only the last half century. It’s a state I find myself in often and it only seems to be getting worse, never better. I’ve tried sleeping on arrival and staying up for twenty-four hours. I’ve taken melatonin and vitamin C. I’ve stood barefoot in a green field and watched the sunset. I’ve drunk gallons of water. Nothing works. I get jet lag, bad.

  When I’m under jet lag’s spell I often feel as if I have the clarity to see between my thoughts, a clarity that I usually lack. These insights invariably fill me with feelings of loneliness and melancholy, often accompanied by a shrugging sorrow that engulfs me. I’ve tried to embrace this state, but when my jet lag passes my thinking is often revealed to be deeply indulgent and sometimes just plain wrong. Consequently, I try not to take myself too seriously for a few days upon arrival at any distant locale.

  But it’s in this altered state that I hear Tom’s story over lunch. A Peace Corps volunteer in the late sixties, Tom became a lawyer, defending large corporations. After a decade he grew disgusted, switched sides, and fought for the little guy for another ten years.

  “But I just never got out of the Peace Corps mentality. So my wife and I came down here in 1990. We were looking for a third-world adventure; we wanted to contribute something. We wanted something fast moving and challenging. We had an idea to start something in ecotourism—very few were doing that then, and virtually no one in the Osa. In fact, people said to avoid this place. We were told it was full of jaguars, snakes, and no humans. When we heard that, we came here as fast as we could.”

  Tom and his wife built their eco-lodge—one of the most successful in the Osa. She has since returned to the States, but he never left. It’s clear from the way Tom tells me this that their marriage is over—we stare out across the water in silence for a minute. He lifts his sweating bottle of beer, takes a long pull, and sets it down. He pushes his thick glasses back up his nose and wrings his hands. With his heavily creased forehead, Tom still looks very much like the lawyer he once was. I sit with his tale.

  He seems content enough with his choices, and yet something about his story bothers me. I’ve admired similar individuals who went their own way, but in my current mood, sitting here, sweating by the sea, eating cold ceviche and drinking warm club soda, Tom’s saga strikes me as quixotic, a search for an elusive freedom, only to wind up a lonely old man tilting at windmills in a small house beside an airstrip in a remote backwater.

  “Do you miss anything about back home?” I ask.

  Tom shrugs. “Just the conveniences.”

  A few tables away, over Tom’s shoulder, two young women are seated with a man who keeps looking around with quick glances. One of the women has her back to me, but the other, with long, loose black hair and coffee-colored skin, wearing a red, low-cut T-shirt and black shorts, is staring directly at me and has been throughout the meal.

  “I know I’ve only just arrived, but there are some very pretty women here,” I say.

  Tom looks around and sees the two women and the man at the table near us. He laughs. “Zorras.”

  “What are zorras?”

  “Well”—Tom shrugs—“they’re not exactly prostitutes, but it’s not exactly free either. My understanding is you pay a little bit.”

  “If you ‘pay a little bit,’ how is that not prostitution?”

  He raises his eyebrows and lifts his bottle. “The Osa.”

  Tom drops me off in front of the cabins he recommended. They’re not really cabins at all, rather a half dozen detached and semi-detached bungalows on the water’s edge.

  A trim, frail man with thinning, sandy-blond hair is standing behind the counter of the open-air lobby to greet me. John Planter is originally from Cape May, New Jersey, and came to the Osa nine years ago on vacation. “I never left.” He shrugs. “Never went back for anything. There’s not a lot going on here, but it does me a lot of good.”

  I drop my bag and John offers me a rusting bicycle. I pedal into town a few blocks away, and there really isn’t much more to see than what Tom already showed me. When night falls, I park my bike and wander the streets.

  On the main drag people loiter under dim streetlamps. A group of women convene and talk lazily outside the window of the Tienda de Ropa, where football jerseys and sequined T-shirts and mini-shorts are on display. At Juanita’s bar, a cement box painted yellow, a few teenagers bang away at an old-fashioned pinball machine. Around the corner an open-air pool hall with three tables draws a half dozen men. I play a game of eight ball with one of them, while a pair of chickens strut around on the dirt lane out front. I let myself lose and wander off. Except for the bold stares I get from a couple of dark-eyed women hanging around in the shadows, I drift through town unnoticed. At the soccer field, I watch three generations of locals kick a ball with playful gusto under a weak yellow light. I cross the street to an open-air restaurant beside the small library and eat pizza.

  This kind of aimless drifting has always been at the center of my traveling. The freedom of being a stranger in a strange place, knowing no one, needing to know no one, with no obligations, elicits deep feelings of liberation, and the farther from the beaten path I go, the quicker the attachment to any idea of how I should be treated is discarded—I’m grateful merely that my needs are met. Without an agenda, or company to distract me, I invariably feel a certain hopefulness that can appear contrary to my aimlessness. Perhaps it’s just the simple joy of being alive.

  Finishing my pizza, I watch a cat, walking low and hugging close to the library wall. There is little to clutter my mind. Several of the younger men who were playing soccer across the street earlier slip onto the patio and wash their hands at the sink beside my table. I make my way back into the night.

  Even in the peaceful, solitary bubble of Puerto Jiménez, I can feel something tugging at me. Often, a sudden recollection of responsibilities back home falls down on me hard, like a burden I’ve neglected that needs my attention. Feelings of guilt and affection, resentment and love, will often vie for dominance in my suddenly addled mind, but tonight, retrieving my bicycle and pedaling along the dirt road to my bungalow by the sea under a dripping gauze of stars, thoughts of
people who need me, and tasks that require my tending, only add to my general contentment as the warm breeze in the night air blows softly past.

  In the 1980s, gold mining became big business in the Osa; rivers were dredged and the sides of hills hollowed out. Tougher laws came into play to protect the land from reckless plundering, but Tom told me there are still some diehards out in the hills, occasionally pulling out a big score.

  “The problem with gold miners,” he said in his usual laconic, teasing tone, “is that they’re always broke. When they find some, they’re in town, drunk, buying drinks for everyone, and when they don’t, they don’t eat. But go on out to El Tigre, try your luck.”

  With visions of golf-ball-size chunks of twenty-four-karat cash falling into my pan, the next morning I rent a jeep on main street and head out of town. Just beyond a newly installed—and wildly out of place—cement bridge, I turn onto a dirt lane cutting through a pasture filled with bone-thin cows and bounce along until I arrive at the cluster of buildings that is El Tigre. During the heyday of the rush, the gold-mining settlement was home to seven thousand souls, but that number has dwindled to a sleepy hundred.

  There’s a school across the dirt track from a cement hut with a corrugated iron roof. A hand-painted sign out front says PULPERIA EL TUCAN. A small Costa Rican woman named Sandra is behind the counter of the general store, selling sacks of rice and cartons of eggs, beside cans of motor oil and fishing lures.

  I ask her if there is anyone around who might be willing to take me out and do a little panning.

  Sandra shrugs. Then a young girl, maybe eight, walks in with a list scribbled onto a scrap of paper and hands it to Sandra. Sandra gets up reluctantly from her perch and shuffles off to a far corner of the cluttered room. She returns with a chicken in a plastic bag, a few potatoes, and then some very limp celery. The small girl pulls out a pinky-nail-size chunk of gold and puts it on the counter. Sandra reaches below the counter and comes up with a small plastic scale. She weighs the raw nugget, makes change in cash, and the little girl takes her haul and goes on her way.