“Was that gold?”
Sandra stares at me, weighing the possible responses to such an idiotic question. “Yes,” she says finally.
“Could I see it?” I have never seen a piece of raw gold, direct from the ground.
Sandra slowly lifts the small, irregular-shaped chunk and holds it out to me. She then reaches under the counter again and comes up with a pistol, an old six-shooter. She places the pistol on the countertop without a word. Her hand rests beside it. When I give the nugget back, Sandra takes it with one hand while replacing the pistol with her other.
“I hate gold,” she says, and then directs me up the hill to a shack where she thinks someone might be willing to take me over to the river. I thank her and head out. But just outside, I come upon a sturdy young man.
“Edwin,” he says when I ask his name. His mitt of a hand engulfs mine and he agrees to take me a short way up the El Tigre River to try my luck. Knee-deep in the rushing water, bending from the waist with a tire iron and shovel, Edwin pries large rocks free and we hurl them aside. We create a small eddy and he lays down a metal trough through which the water funnels. Without warning, a blanket of rain falls. We are drenched within seconds. Edwin doesn’t say anything, doesn’t look up. He doesn’t seem to notice. We continue to dig and hurl rocks aside. Then, using a circular tin pan that looks suspiciously like a hubcap, he dips into the side channel we’ve created and begins to sift the larger stones away. His thick hands work with delicate precision. It stops raining as suddenly as it began. Eventually the grain of soil in the pan becomes fine. The sediment swirls. Tiny shimmering specks begin to appear within the muddy mix. Edwin’s fingers dance over the tray, and a dusting of fine golden grains settles at the bottom. Edwin looks up at me for the first time since we arrived here. He nods. He is pleased.
He empties the dust into a small vial he produces from his pocket and shoves it into my hands. When I try to give it back, I can see that he is offended and I tuck the vial away. As I take leave of him, I put ten thousand colones—roughly twenty dollars—into his hand. He accepts it silently, with a curt nod, and I’m back in my car cutting through the field, past the skinny cows. Back in town, time passes slowly. I go to sell my gold at a shop on the main drag and am offered roughly ten dollars. I meet an Irishman with weathered skin, shaggy blond hair, and a rugged way about him ambling down the main street. His name is Pat Murphy and he’s been in the Osa since the mid-nineties.
“There’s no going back,” he says. I think Pat has seen Crocodile Dundee a few too many times, and when he offers to take me out into the rain forest for a close encounter with an alligator, he can’t understand my resistance to the idea.
“Oh, yeah, gators are his thing,” Tom tells me when I run into him a little later. “You might want to stay away from him.”
Otherwise, life around Puerto Jiménez proceeds with laid-back regularity. I see someone else paying in gold at the El Record shoe store. At a storefront restaurant, where I’m sitting on a plastic chair eating rice and beans, I overhear one man ask another if his pig has given birth yet.
“Not for another few weeks,” the friend replies.
The first man considers this and after a time says, “That’s a nice pig.”
I go next door to buy ice cream.
A large white plastic cooler with a hand-painted sign in English, written in a rainbow of colors and listing a dozen flavors, sits on a patio in front of a door with a doctor’s name on it. No one is around. With nowhere else to go, I wait.
Eventually a tall, broad-shouldered woman with long brown hair walks up from behind me and steps around the cooler. She wears a floral hippie blouse. She has hazel eyes, and her skin is deeply tanned.
“Hi.” She doesn’t explain her long absence.
“How’s the mango flavor?”
“Sweet.”
“I’ll take one.”
“Sure you will,” the woman says with a lazy directness, like a Jersey girl who’s lost her edge, which is exactly what Karen Brown is.
Karen came to the Osa from New Jersey ten years ago, met a local guy, had a child with him, and is now raising her daughter on her own with what she makes selling her homemade ice cream. The mango isn’t very sweet at all and lacks any real flavor, but this is the only place in town to get ice cream and no one else seems to be buying it. And since Karen is easy company, I make it a habit of stopping by every afternoon.
“This is the world’s largest open-air asylum,” she says. “But hey, you can address a letter to ‘Karen, Puerto Jiménez,’ and it’ll get to me. Can’t do that back in the Garden State.”
Karen, like Tom and Pat, is yet another person I meet who walked away from it all with a dream of something better than what she left behind. Whether they found it or not is the question.
I have long harbored similar notions of escape, of walking away and not looking back. It’s not a fantasy that holds much relevance these days. I’m not about to go anywhere with two small children to raise. Their lives are, to a very large degree, my responsibility for another decade at least and not something I care to miss out on. And my life with D—it’s just as important.
However, the secret yearning that can linger just behind each responsible action, the mental flights of fancy, the hunger for otherness, the sexual fantasies that can blossom and undermine any real intimacy, the simple dream of flight, can be nearly as fatal to a relationship as physical departure. You can’t be two places at once—even mentally or emotionally.
So maybe that’s what I’m doing down here in the Osa—getting a good look at those who did escape and to challenge my own propensity toward utopian fantasies that can corrode any chance at real happiness.
A few days later, when Crocodile Dundee corners me again just off the main street, I decide it’s time to take Tom up on his offer. I head out over the only road that goes deeper into the Osa, past balsa and fig trees crowding the road, out toward Tom’s eco-lodge. Before I get there, I see a rental car by the side of the washboard dirt track. Since I haven’t seen any other cars on the trip out, I stop. A young couple, tourists, emerge from the rain forest. They’re moving quickly.
“Everything all right?” I ask.
“Yeah,” the man says, but I miss the rest of his sentence as they rush into their car and race off.
I park. A few feet from the road, the rain forest is dense; another ten feet in and I wouldn’t be able to see the road at all. I don’t see anything unusual, but I don’t really know what it is I’m looking for. I take another few steps and stop, sensing something moving to my left. I turn. Two feet away, at eye level, a fifteen-foot boa constrictor is coiled around the dead limb of a tree. His head is lifted off the branch and is arching back. He is taking a good look at me, and has been for a while.
“Whooooa,” I blurt out, and jump back. The snake and I stare at each other for a while. I gasp for breath and say some more useful things, like, “Jesus Christ,” and “Holy shit,” and then, “Why didn’t you say it was a fucking boa constrictor?” Eventually the snake loses interest in me and lowers his head back down. I take out my phone and turn on the video, to show off my courage in front of the killer snake for my kids back home, and then drive on.
Tom’s lodge is another five minutes down the road. It’s a tasteful operation, set atop a hill looking out over the rain forest and down to the breaking surf. The lobby/dining area has a fifty-foot vaulted and thatched roof, and it’s there that I find Tom, who eases his way over to me with his trademark laconic circumspection.
I mention my close encounter with the boa. “Oh, yeah?” He shrugs. “Want to eat?”
We’re joined by his manager, a stocky young Costa Rican named Carlos, who has all the passion for the rain forest that Tom seems to lack. “I’ll take you out for a nighttime walk,” Carlos says, “and really show you some things.” Once it gets dark, he does.
The night is humid and close. It needs to rain. We drive for a while down a terrible dirt track and ditch
the car by the side of the road. How this particular spot differs from any other in the utter blackness is something I don’t ask.
“Put these on,” Carlos says, handing me a pair of tall waterproof boots. “And this.” He proffers a headlamp.
In one hand he carries a long, extendable pole with a hook on the end, and in the other hand he has a long knife. A headlamp is glowing from the center of his forehead.
“What’s the pole for?” I ask.
“Snakes.”
We crunch over dead leaves and dense undergrowth. I jump at every sound. The trees hang heavy and cast strange and forbidding shadows as our headlamps pass over them.
“So, are there any poisonous snakes around here?” I ask.
“The only one we need to really worry about is the fer-de-lance,” Carlos says. “It’s unlikely you’ll die from its bite, but it’s not good to get bit.”
“How big are they?”
“They’re small, actually.”
“That’s good,” I say.
“Not really.” Carlos shrugs. “Makes them harder to see. And they’re very well disguised.”
“Why are we here, Carlos?”
There are frogs and spiders, columns of cutter ants marching under their heavy loads. We walk down into a stream and find large crayfish. Carlos is thrilled by the discovery of some apparently rare type of tadpole. The rain forest is alive and pungent and inviting, yet I’m strangely detached. Any real curiosity or sense of wonder is absent. Instead, mundane images of home scroll through my mind—a colorful and detailed drawing of a house and tree that my daughter made, a karate move my son has been perfecting in the living room, an image of D sipping tea from her favorite blue mug. Something large moves to our right in the blackness; I jump and we turn our lights toward the sound, but it’s gone. We come upon a small bird, perched on a twig, motionless, asleep. I lean in, inches from its beak. I have never seen a sleeping bird—I’ve never even considered one.
We have long left the trail and for all I know we could be walking in circles.
“Turn off your flashlight,” Carlos says.
“Excuse me?”
“Turn it off.”
When I do, the blackness is complete. I hold my hand six inches in front of my face and can’t see it. I look up and can see only a tiny patch of night sky directly overhead, through a break in the dense canopy of trees. A single star shines.
“You know, Carlos,” I say, “if you have a heart attack and die, I will be lost in here for a very long time.”
From a few feet away in the dark I hear his laugh. Eventually we make our way back to the car.
“I’m really sorry we didn’t see any snakes,” he says.
The intrepid traveler Freya Stark once said, “To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.” The uncomplicated joy of meeting a new day with no past, with no plan, and with no one in the world knowing where I am can be compared only to waking up on Christmas morning when I was a child. It’s the closest I have ever come to understanding the word “freedom.”
I’ve never been homesick, at least since I went away to camp at age ten—save for my children. This morning, however, standing on the deck outside my room, looking out over the rain forest down to the sea below, I find myself not exactly wishing I were home but at least aware that I’m not traveling with the same sense of abandon and unencumbered ease that I experienced as recently as my trip to Patagonia.
I spend the day exploring the surf community of Matapalo, trying to rouse a little more interest in my surroundings, and once it gets dark I join Carlos and his wife, Adrianna, at a tin-roofed bar with no walls, just down the road from Tom’s lodge, in the middle of the rain forest. Tibetan prayer flags hang beside mounted surfboards under colored Chinese paper lanterns and a spinning disco ball.
“Pretty much everybody comes here to Greta’s on Friday nights,” Carlos explains. I duck my head when I see Crocodile Dundee sipping a beer at one of the picnic tables, whispering intently to a young couple. Karen is selling her ice cream from the white cooler at the edge of the bar, where the light ends and the night begins, just under the overhang. There are a few tables selling handmade jewelry; I recognize two of the vendors from town. A young and scruffy dude in a baseball cap—the former manager of a famous rapper—who cashed in and checked out and moved to the Osa three years ago plays DJ. Small kids tumble over the two sofas by the dance floor. Just beyond the roof, in a grassy area with a bench, a group of white guys and Costa Ricans share some very potent-smelling grass. A dozen youngish women dance to the techno music that blares out into the jungle.
“Who’s Greta?” I ask.
Carlos turns to look over his shoulder. “Which one do you think?”
I follow his glance to the bar. There, sipping a beer, and staring at me, is a heavily tattooed, chain-smoking surfer chick/earth mother with long loose blond hair wearing a sleeveless black dress with a slit up the side. I nod in her direction.
“That’s her,” Carlos says. “Watch out, she’ll either love you or hate you. You can never tell which.”
I walk over to introduce myself.
“You’re new,” she says before I reach the bar. Her voice is raw from too many cigarettes and too much whiskey. Her skin is tan and her dark eyes glassy. Her bare arms are fleshy under her tattoos, her body lumpy beneath her clinging dress. She’s self-possessed. This is her joint, and I like her instantly.
“Where are you from?”
“New York.”
She nods. “Well, you’re welcome here,” she says, openly looking me up and down. I’m surprised she doesn’t ask me to spin around so she can get a good look at my ass. We chat, the music blares. Greta came from Munich, Germany, nearly twenty years ago. “I came down for the surfing, just by luck. Figured this place needed a bar.” She shrugs. “This is it.”
She pulls out another cigarette and gives me matches to light it. I can’t remember the last time I lit a woman’s cigarette, once a nightly task back in my bar-hopping days. It says lot about someone, the way they light another person’s cigarette, and the way a person receives the flame maybe says more. Greta is good. After I touch the fire to the tip of her cigarette I look up to her eyes and she is already staring at me, squinting slightly. The look holds for an instant and then she winks at me, and then we both burst out laughing. She slaps me hard on the shoulder and marches behind the bar, disappearing into the kitchen.
The techno music suddenly quits and Marvin Gaye comes out over the speakers. I wish I were uninhibited enough to simply walk onto the dance floor, especially considering it is full of a dozen women spinning and twirling and shimmying for each other. Instead I buy an ice cream from Karen and meet her daughter, a chubby, happy child.
When Carlos and his wife leave, I sit down at a picnic table across from the young couple that was talking to Crocodile Dundee earlier. Luckily, he is nowhere in sight. The couple, Tony and Kate, run a small eco-lodge in the area. He came down more than twenty years ago from Vermont; she met him here while on vacation from Colorado. They have two small kids, one of whom they are homeschooling, the other still in diapers. She was an accountant and says she was glad to give up the grind. Tony goes off to the bathroom and Kate leans in toward me.
“And what about you?” she says. Her hand lands on my forearm and stays there.
“Uh, what about me?”
“What’s your story?” And while it’s just the two of us chatting, Kate is caressing my back. Instead of my imagination racing or plotting covert actions and rendezvous—as I might have done in the past—I simply feel bad for her husband and wonder what the hell they’re doing here, living in the jungle, looking for trouble.
When Tony returns, Kate sits back and is affectionate to her husband. I ask myself if perhaps I just made that whole sexual tension up; maybe she was just being friendly. I excuse myself and head back to the bar.
Later, as I’m about to leave, one of the not-so-young wo
men who were on the dance floor all night approaches me. She’s part of a group on a yoga retreat down in the Osa.
“You seem age appropriate,” she says. “You want to dance?”
Politely, I decline, not because of her age, but because she’s clearly drunk.
“Oh come on, you just gonna stand at the bar acting cool?”
“No, I’m just getting ready to go. Next time. Thanks for asking,” I say.
“Hey, you know what,” the yogini protests, “I’m calling you out. I’m calling you out on your very uncool behavior.” She turns and waves a few of her friends over for backup.
One of the women is very attractive; I had noticed her earlier on the dance floor. The ladies escort their friend away, but not before she tells me again how very uncool my behavior is.
Maybe I’ve been with the same woman for so long that I’m rusty on how the game is played. Maybe I’m misreading signals all over the place, or maybe I am just getting too old, but there is none of the forbidden or illicit appeal in these brief encounters that I have felt in the past. I just want to go to bed.
The next morning I head out along the only road that goes deeper into the rain forest. Fig trees drape across the dirt track and wild cotton grows in bunches. Occasionally the rain forest opens up where it was cleared for grazing and cows with protruding hips sit under acacia trees. I ford the Río Pico—this is where Carlos told me his jeep was swept away and carried downstream for a mile and deposited into the sea, with him still in it. “I didn’t want to leave my jeep,” he explained.
There has been no rain and the river is low; I cross without losing my car. Soon, the road fizzles at the settlement of Carate. There’s nothing here really, and no one else, except for a bearded American with a foul disposition who runs a bare-bones shop in a cement hut. I’ve been warned to give him a wide berth.
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