Author: Bob Benz

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El Gringo Feo Travel Bob

¡Viva Costa Rica!

(To read El Gringo Feo’s Costa Rica Diary from the beginning, start here.)

Saturday, September 15

Google’s tribute to Costa Rican Independence this morning.

Ticos are celebrating independence day today. It’s a remarkable story, one of the few instances where a revolution actually resulted in a stable, functioning democracy. As I listen to the Revolutions podcast about the tumult and unfulfilled promise of Mexico’s myriad revolutions, the Costa Rican story becomes even more remarkable.

While today marks 197 years since Costa Rica and the other countries of Central America won their independence from Spain, the key event, in my mind, occurred in 1948 when José Figueres Ferrer took up arms after a disputed presidential election. He prevailed, but instead of going the route that victors in these instances often take, he disbanded the military and granted universal suffrage. The country remains a democracy to this day, and instead of a standing army, money is spent on education and social welfare.

Sadly, we’re in the midst of a national strike here over President Carlos Alvarado’s proposed fiscal reforms. National unions have taken to the streets, and there have been reports of bad behavior on both sides of the picket lines. Here in Uvita, I’ve not seen much sign of this. Most of the action has been centered in the capital, San José. And it could be argued this is the sign of a healthy democracy. The bad behavior thus far has been the exception rather than the rule.

Here’s hoping Ticos find a way around their current plight. There definitely are problems here. But there’s also massive potential. From my brief experiences, this is an experiment in democracy that is invigorating and worth defending.

(As an aside, I was reading up on Costa Rican history this morning and came across something my Gringo friends should take note of when people from the Americas express skepticism about our intentions. William Walker, a Tennessean who had dreams of creating a series of slave states in Latin America, managed to get control of Nicaragua in 1856 and marched on Costa Rica. The Ticos defeated Walker’s advance army at Santa Rosa and chased them back into Nicaragua, where Walker was ultimately forced to turn himself over to the U.S. Navy, which took him to New York City, where he was “greeted as a hero,” a welcome that he quickly wore out by blaming the Navy for his loss in Nicaragua. Of course, he wasn’t done there and returned to cause problems in the Americans, where he thankfully was executed in Honduras in 1860.)

My step counts this week.

Yesterday, I called a cab and went to the grocery store, where I stocked up on ibuprofen and enough food to last me a while. The driver, Michael, was awesome. I’m glad to know I now have a reliable ride I can call on. I also have a full fridge, so I don’t need to worry about conserving my last two cans of tuna, har. The foot is doing slightly better. I’ve been icing it throughout the day and I walked a good bit yesterday in the course of buying groceries without any noticeable ill effect. The key, I think, is to avoid any sort of twisting or sudden turning motion. That’s where sharp pain stabs me, reminding me to take it easy. At this point, I’d say I’m cautiously optimistic that if I don’t do anything stupid (big “if”), I can get this thing healed.

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El Gringo Feo Travel Bob

Another day of literature and ice packs

(To read El Gringo Feo’s Costa Rica Diary from the beginning, start here.)

Friday, September 14

I’m not going to lie. I’m already a bit stir crazy. I miss my walks on the beach. I even miss my death marches into town.

On the bright side, I’ve spent more time reading in the past few days than I have since I did my master’s work in Birmingham almost 30 years ago when I was devouring the Western canon, preparing for my comprehensive exams. I holed up in my claustrophobic apartment on the city’s Southside, reading one book after another by day, editing new stories at the now-defunct Birmingham Post-Heraldby night. I did little other than read and eat. It worked. I earned the degree.

Compared to my Birmingham reading frenzy, this is an upgrade. I saw a pair of Toucans yesterday while reading, not to mention countless yellow flycatchers. And while the howlers have moved on for the next several days, my house gecko, Chuckles, has been doing a good job of keeping me amused. He was even joined by an impudent frog who leaped on me while I was reading in bed. At first, I thought he was one of those nasty green cicadas who seem to be everywhere here. But then I saw him hopping across the floor and realized it was a frog. I tried to capture him but he was incredibly fast and agile. Unlike me.

Gratuitous beach dog photo. I shot this the other day right before me lastimé el tobillo.

I finished Knausgaard’s Spring and recommend it highly. It’s an amazing work. As I started considering my next book, I realized I’d been reading male authors. thus far so I switched it up with Middlemarch by George Eliot, the pen name of Mary Ann Evans. It’s telling that she chose a male pen name in an effort to have her work taken seriously. It took a bit to get into the flow of the book. Her writing is serpentine and rich in classical allusions, not to mention the fact that she weaves in an array of characters moving through multiple plot lines. But I’m already in awe of her ability to capture the nature of her characters through their speech patterns in the dialogue she writes. The book is about 750 pages, so that will give me something to chew on for a while.

The ankle is about the same, maybe a bit improved. Or maybe that’s wishful thinking. I’m hitting it with ice packs three or four times a day and I’m doing my best to stay off it. I spent a good bit of time yesterday in the hammock reading Middlemarch, and I take my Kindle along with me when I hobble down to the kitchen to eat. In the evenings, I’m still plugging away at The Book. I’ve stopped writing and am currently working on plotting. John Gardner’s section on plot in the Art of Fiction was revelatory, and I’m rethinking things based on some of what I learned there. With luck, I’ll be ready to make a run a a first draft of Chapter 3 this weekend.

I plan to call a cab today to go into town on a supply run. I’m hoping to find a driver who will be willing to wait for me while I run into the grocery store to stock up. Should be an adventure. I’ve created a list of Spanish phrases to use with the cab driver, including me duele el tobillo (my ankle hurts) and me lastimé el tobillo (I injured my ankle). With luck, I’ll find someone who speaks a smattering of English and we can meet in the middle.

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El Gringo Feo Travel Bob

The healing power of howlers and books

(To read El Gringo Feo’s Costa Rica Diary from the beginning, start here.)

Wednesday, September 12

Well, it’s been 48 hours since I tore up my ankle, and I’m encouraged by the fact that it hasn’t gotten worse. I didn’t expect much improvement in the first few days, but I figured if things degraded I’d need to head to a doctor. It’s swollen and hurts, but not excessively so on either count. I can hobble down to the kitchen to make food, and I’m spending most of my time reading and hanging with the howlers. It was almost as if the monkeys knew I needed a friend. They came around yesterday and hung out in the trees right next tot he Treehouse, where I watched them for over an hour as I felt sorry for myself. Then they woke me this morning and graced me with a few more hours of their antics before moving on via the arboreal highway through the jungle. They’ll be back.

I’ve already chewed through three books. The first, Cherry, is by first-time author Nico Walker, who I believe is doing time for the antics described in the book. The New York Times talked it up when it was published, and while it’s interesting it also annoyed the hell out of me. It’s a first-person account of a feckless kid from Cleveland who drifts into drugs and then the Army, where he ends up serving as a medic in Iraq circa 2005. (The troops call newbies “Cherries” when they first arrive in Iraq, thus the title of the book.) His descriptions of Iraq are mind-numbing. He returns after his tour and quickly gets caught up in opioids, leading to a career as a heroin addict and bank robber. I’m assuming the narrative is largely based on his actual experiences since he, you know, is doing time for holding up banks. The narrator isn’t terribly likable (even though he says he revised it in the editing process to make the narrator more likable), and the details of the junky life actually get pretty damned boring, or more accurately, predictable. If you’ve read one account of junkies being useless lowlives, you’ve read them all and this one does nothing to diverge from that pattern. (I’d much sooner listen to Ike Reilly’s “Heroin”; same general idea but distilled into 3 minutes and 20 seconds of heartbreak.) His Iraq experiences are interesting, but it leaves you hoping his account is specific to the types of people he gravitated toward and not all the young men and women who served there. It’s extremely depressing. But while he links his service to his addiction, I’m not convinced he wouldn’t have become exactly what he did without ever having seen the horrific stuff he witnessed in Iraq. He was heading down that path anyway, and the Army really just delayed his trajectory for a few years.

Next up was E.M Forster’s A Room with a View.As I’ve been reading and listening to lectures on fiction writing, Forster’s Aspects of the Novelpops up frequently so I downloaded it under a public domain license via Project Gutenberg. While I was digging up Aspects, I stumbled across Room so I downloaded that, too. It’s an interesting look at class, social norms, gender and mores in Edwardian England. I liked it much better than I’d anticipated. Very well written and plotted.

And finally, I’ve launched into Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Spring. I just finished the second section — where he describes his wife’s depression and overdose — with tears in my eyes. Thus far, the book is an extended letter to his infant daughter. It’s also part of a suite of books he’s created, I guess you could call it his version of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. After Spring, I’ll probably chew through Autumn, Winter and Summer. I’ve taught Knausgaard to journalism students (a piece he did for The New York Times magazine on the doctors who do brain surgery) and I’ve read the first installment of his autobiography, My Struggle: Book 1. There’s a dark Proustian quality to his writing that I find irresistible, mining the mundane for large, metaphysical statements about the human condition. But without the pretense that the sentence I just wrote implies.