(To read El Gringo Feo’s Costa Rica Diary from the beginning, start here.)
Friday, September 28
This little guy was hanging around when I came down for breakfast this morning.
I’m sitting here writing, not even 8 a.m. yet, when I hear a squawk. Then another. Then a third. A branch crashes down, landing less than 20 feet from where I’m sitting. And that sound. Very familiar. Like Sydney, our umbrellas cockatoo, when he’s extra full of himself. I jump up (praying Sydney hasn’t somehow found me) and peer up into the tree in time to see a toucan — a Fiery-billed Aracari — raising hell about 30 feet above me. Then another. And then two more. That’s the most I’ve seen together here. Mostly they come through in pairs, but this morning there are at least four. And they’re whipped up. They don’t hang out long before soaring up the hill, deeper into the jungle.
What a great wake-up call …
Banana update … major progress since last weekend.
(To read El Gringo Feo’s Costa Rica Diary from the beginning, start here.)
Thursday, September 27
Pineapple in progress here at PurUvita.
As I hunker down to let my ankle heal and attempt to spit out The Book, there hasn’t been a lot to report. So updates are becoming less frequent.
I have about 20,000 words written and spent about 6-8 hours both today and yesterday writing away. More accurately, perhaps, I’ve been rewriting, editing and researching. Themes are becoming clearer and characters are growing more well-rounded. The Scrivener software I mentioned the other day has proven invaluable. I still have a long way to go, but I’m up above the trees now, getting a sense of the forest.
The ankle continues its slow progress. It’s a struggle to stay off it instead of testing it, but I’m sticking to the former. I sat in the bar area last night and watched a drenching rain, punctuated with considerable trueno and relámpago. After waiting about 90 minutes for a break so I could walk to the Treehouse, I gave up and got drenched. The rain continued until well after I went to sleep, though today we were rewarded with a cool, breezy respite filled with sunshine.
Tomorrow I’ll give Yair the taxi driver a shout and get a ride into town for food and prescription refills. It’s hard to believe that I’ll be heading to the States a week from Monday for a business meeting, returning here the following Saturday. From there, it’s just a few more weeks until Lara visits and then we return home together. I’m now in my sixth week in Costa Rica, and even with the mangled ankle, I have no regrets. This has been a phenomenal experience, and I can’t honestly recall I time I was more productive.
I launched into another book yesterday, Matthew Restall’s When Montezuma Met Cortes: The True Story of the Meeting that Changed History. It’s a fascinating attempt to dispel what he calls the “mythistory” of the meeting between Cortes and Montezuma and the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire. In short, he’s arguing, with extensive evidence, that Cortes was not the godlike conquerer of a leader who cowered at the sight of his galleons, guns and horses. Quite the opposite, he claims Montezuma toyed with Cortes, luring him to Tenochtitlan to study him almost as if he and his crew were zoo animals. Restall also notes that Cortes was not the mastermind warrior history remembers him as, reminding the reader time and again that the winners, in this instance, Cortes, control the historical narrative. In reality, Cortes was a barely competent Spanish commander, one of many vying for power and prestige in the New World. His real gift was his persuasive powers and his duplicity. The Spaniards spent almost as much time undermining and fighting among themselves in the early stages of the conquest as they did fighting native peoples. And the initial meeting, which has been portrayed as a surrender by Montezuma, was no such thing and that Montezuma wasn’t subjugated until after the actual war broke out, which was more than 200 days after Cortes, his men and members of the Triple Alliance entered the Aztec capital.
One of my favorite sections thus far is in his debunking of the myth of Cortes brilliantly burning his boats to ensure his men had no option but conquest. As has been noted before, the boats weren’t burned. They were sunk. And Restall cites evidence indicating they were actually grounded, not sunk, because several of them were rotting and no longer seaworthy. By grounding them, it was easier to harvest the hardware and rigging for future use. In fact, one ship remained seaworthy, and there was a force sailing from Cuba that could have rescued them (albeit a force sent by Cortes’ nemesis, Diego Velázquez, to rein him in, even though that force ultimately joined forces with Cortes’ men to help overthrow Tenochtitlan.)
There’s still more to read, and in the end, the real truth is known only to those who were there. But Restall is making a compelling argument for rethinking much of what we thought we knew about the conquest. He even calls it the Spanish-Aztec war, instead of conquest, reflecting the fact that it was a pitched battle where the Spaniards and their allies ultimately prevailed, not a cowardly capitulation by the Aztec leader.
As I wrote this, the sun set, the clouds crept in and a gentle rain began to fall. Let’s see if it goes nuclear again …
(To read El Gringo Feo’s Costa Rica Diary from the beginning, start here.)
Tuesday, September 25
Bananas are starting to emerge on one of the trees here at PurUvita. (At least I think they’re banans; also could be plantains.)
Yesterday marked two weeks since i sprained my ankle and I’m happy to say I’m making progress. It’s nowhere near 100% but the swelling has gone down a bit and the pain is easing. Several people have told me the biggest risk is re-injuring it so I continue to stay off it as much as possible.
I remain impressed with my doctor here. He reached out yesterday morning on What’s App just to see how things were going. The medicine he prescribed to offset the stomach problems from the anti-inflammatory is working like a charm and I was happy to report that things are heading in the right direction.
To top it off, Gian dropped of one of those yogurty gut bacteria things to help set my stomach straight.
I finished Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind and while overall I enjoyed it, the second half was much less compelling than the first. I found his writing on prehistory much more interesting than the sections on religion, politics, etc. At this point, I’m taking a break to put more focus on The Book. I outran my supply lines there, with files and chapters and notes scattered everywhere across my hard drive. I’ve been using a writing app called Ulysses, which I love for its simplicity, but that simplicity is turning into a liability. I’d downloaded a demo copy of Scrivener in 2017 when I decided to go with Ulysses so I revisited that.
Wow.
There’s a bit of a learning curve. Normally when I get new software, I just launch it and start banging on it. But this time I used the tutorial, which was very useful in understanding how Scrivener thinks and organizes information. After about an hour I started loaded all the the myriad components of The Book into it. I’m jaded where software is concerned, but in this instance I’m smitten and intend to fork over the money for a license. I spent most of yesterday setting things up. Last night, I revisited several of the books I’m using as source material, including Myron R. Stowell’s Fort Frick, or the Siege of Homestead: a history of the famous struggle between the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers and the Carnegie Steel Co. of Pittsburg, Pa. I love that concise title. I’m also relying a lot on Arthur Gordon Burgoyne’s Homestead: A complete history of the struggle of July, 1892, between the Carnegie steel company, limited, and the Amalgamated association of iron and steel workers. Another to-the-point title. Both books were published in 1893, and they crackle with the electric charge of the battle. I’ve read several more-modern accounts, too, but Stowell and Burgoyne bring more of a reporter’s feel to the details since they were on the ground for the actual events. The prose tends to be purple at times, but that’s part of the reason I enjoy their accounts.
Burgh trivia: Apparently, Pittsburgh officially lost its “h” for a while there. In 1891, the United States Board of Geographic names mandated that places using “burgh,” a Scottish derivative, would drop the ‘h,” using the German suffix. So a lot of the source materials from that era, including newspapers, use the Pittsburg spelling. According to Wikipedia, that decision was reversed in 1911. I guess it’s another one of those “Burgh things.”
Finally, I went on a Neil Young binge yesterday, listening to all four of his albums that I have downloaded to my phone: Everybody Knows This is Nowhere, On the Beach, Tonight’s the Night, and Zuma. I’ve always been a fan, despite the inaccurate hippy history he indulges at times (his depiction of the Aztecs in “Cortez the Killer” is freakin’ laughable; they were every bit as savage as Cortez). And while some of the songs haven’t held up well over time, the gut-wrenching pain throbbing through Tonight’s the Night still resonates in today’s opioid plague. He released that album after Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten and roadie Bruce Berry died of drug overdoses. Some things don’t change …
Another view of the bananas. Since I shot this on Saturday, there’s been even more progress.
