Author: Bob Benz

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

Sunday, September 2

The nearby hoots of howlers burst into my room this morning. Those are my peeps. I know those guys. I wonder if that’s Big Balls leading the chorus …

The rest of yesterday felt anticlimactic after my monkey encounter. I went on a supply run earlier in the day and spent most of the afternoon reading. When it came time for evening vespers, I almost bailed, listening warily to distant thunder-rumble in the mountains, dreading the thought of getting caught under a metal-roofed shack on a hill.

But then I said, what the hell. You only live once.

It looked as if the storm might skirt north of me so I ascended the driveway. But at sunset — 5:43 p.m., to be exact — the clouds closed pincerlike, forcing sol to sink with a whimper.

Thunder bolt and lightning

very very frightening me

This poor boy fandangoed down the gravel driveway amid bangs and flashes and rainfall. After a dinner of leftover veggie calzone, I listened to the next lecture of Writing Great Fiction, the Great Courses audiobook I’m working through. That spawned a few hours of fevered keyboard pecking as I did that lecture’s exercise and started fleshing out a few key characters I want to introduce in The Book. The whole time, the sound of rainfall punctuated a series of albums I listened to — Open (Cowboy Junkies), Maggot Brain (Funkadelic), and Faithless Street (Whiskey Town). Three very different yet common-themed masterpieces. Eddie Hazel’s guitar work on the song “Maggot Brain” is simply brilliant. It’s criminal that he doesn’t fully get his due while we drool over every outtake available from Jimi Hendrix.

All of this, sadly, was heard via portable speaker. While it sounds good, it’s no match for my AirPods. After 72 hours on rice, I pulled my recently laundered gadgets out, plugged them in and … nothing. DOA. They did not survive a vigorous spin in the washing machine. Can’t say I’m surprised. But I already miss them.

AirPods, a Eulogy (2016-2018)

Rest in Peace, my friends. Your time on this mortal coil was not in vain, short as it might have been.

You let me smile benignly at 30,000 feet while infants screamed and jet engines droned.

You filled me with the History of English as I walked SunnyDog through bucolic Athens.

You helped me get my head around Alan Moore’s epic, wonderful, astounding, confounding Jerusalem

You pissed me off when you popped and blipped and fizzed, trying to stay in phase

You made a middle-aged man look kinda cool while he rocked across campus with a head full of Hot Tuna.

You freed me from the tyranny of the tether, letting me pace the halls during endless conference calls.

You roamed the beaches of Uvita, filling my head with Mexican revolutions and revisionist histories.

You proved these damned millennials aren’t so bad, especially the one who endured my Apple Fanboy taunts and finally convinced me to buy you.

You converted me from hater to evangelist, preaching your merits to my wife and all who would listen

Fare thee well. I’ll think of you every time that damned cord rips the earbuds out of my head, making the music stop.

Odds and sods

I’ve spotted two new-to-me birds in the past few days. The first were a pair of kites who were being harassed by yellow fly-catchers up near the shack. I heard them first, which prompted me to start scanning for hawks. I know that sound. Then I spotted them. The agitation of the nearby fly-catchers confirmed they were raptors, and based on size and color, I’m confident they were kites.

The second was a pair of birds it took me a while to ID, and I’m not certain I have it right. But I’m pretty sure. They were hopping around in the trees long the driveway, eating berries and making a godawful racket. I believe they were brown jays based on the white underside, brown top and shrieks which sound very much like the bluejays at home.

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

Saturday, September 1

I’m lounging in the hammock after a sweaty 6-mile traipse across Uvita, lost in John Gardner’s most excellent The Art of Fiction. As I swipe my Kindle to go to the next page, I hear something scratching tree bark over my left shoulder.

I twist in the hammock, awkwardly looking back to discover a howler monkey methodically moving up a tree about 15 feet away. This is by far the closest I’ve come to one of these guys. And of course, I left my phone in the room, part of my ongoing attempts to get my Internet crack habit under control.

At first glance I think sloth. His movements are that slow and deliberate as he climbs. This monkey is in no hurry. He has no idea El Gringo Feo is nested nearby.

Then more noise, this time higher up, in the trees over my right shoulder. As I slowly pivot in the hammock, realigning so the climbing howler is on my right and the commotion in the trees is on my left, I spot monkey number 2. I hunker down to observe.

More howlers appear. At this point, I’m glad I don’t have the camera. I’d be fidgeting with the damned thing rather than watching the monkeys, ending up with a crap iPhone photo instead of this sublime experience.

More monkeys appear in the kaleidoscopic swirl of leaves, branches and tree trunks surrounding me. When they stop moving, they disappear, even when they’re close. I watch carefully for any hint of movement, quickly learning to discern the difference between branches rustled by a breeze and those brushed by a monkey.

In all, I count at least 12 in this group, including a youngster and his mother. Several of them are very close — maybe 20 feet. So close I whistle gently at them to announce my presence. I don’t want to startle them, and I definitely don’t want to end up within selfie range. When I whistle, the one who is closest, the sloth-climber, looks into my eyes for a long moment while he hugs the trunk of the tree. My presence doesn’t seem to bother him at all, and he’s soon going about his business, oblivious to my intrusion.

They spend an hour above and around me, munching some sort of berries, lounging , talking softly to each other in what can only be described as monkey sounds, but quiet, intimate, not the braying howls that will emerge in a few hours as they yell at the sun for abandoning them again.

In a higher branch, one of the larger howlers looks down at me. It appears he has some sort of light colored fruit in his lap. Er, wait. That’s not fruit. Those are his testicles, which becomes apparent as he climbs to a higher perch with those puppies blowing in the breeze. He shall henceforth be known as Big Balls.

After tiring of this spot, they move on up the hill, following an arboreal path through the trees that they’ve likely traversed countless times. Not sure how widely they range, but their morning and evening howl fests grow closer over the course of several days before bursting into my room one morning as if they’re on the deck. Then the howls fade over the next few days, only to repeat.

This is, hands-down, the most moving thing I’ve witnessed so far In Costa Rica. I now totally understand that beatific look Jane Goodall had whenever she was communing with her monkeys.

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

Saturday, September 1

I spent most of yesterday writing, or more accurately, rewriting the first chapter of The Book. I’m really happy with where it landed, but it’s just a second draft. It still needs a lot of work. And about 20 more chapters.

The rain let up around noon, so I ventured to Pizza Time, a nearby restaurant I’ve been meaning to try. It’s the real deal. I had a vegetarian calzone and a caprese salad that both were excellent. I really liked the place. It’s a short walk from here (not much is) and they have wireless. Might become a new haunt.

I finally finished Jack Ewing’s Where Tapirs and Jaguars Once Roamed: Ever Evolving Costa Rica, which I highly recommend. He has a scientific mind and a writer’s gift for description. His anecdotes about local people are fascinating. More than once I put the book down wondering how folks can be so mentally tough when facing physical adversity.

In one section, he tells the story of Alvaro Mesa, who is bitten on the arm by a tericiopelo, a type of pit viper. There are a few types of them here, and they’re incredibly nasty. After the bite the swelling starts almost immediately, and his friends try to get his wristwatch off:

The swelling had enjulfed the watch band in flesh. When Daniel gave up trying to remove it, his hands were covered with blood. It was oozing from Alvaro’s pores.

I once had a lab cross, PigPen, who was bitten by a rattlesnake on Skyline Drive in VIrginia. It took about an hour, all in, to get him to the vet, who told me the real danger at that point was infection. Snake bites can cause skin necrosis that leads to a lot of nasty infections and complications. If PigPen was still alive by the time he got to the vet, no need for antivenom. The vet did hook him up with antibiotics, and the poor dog’s leg swelled to twice its normal size. But within a week or two he was back to normal.

Pit vipers are much worse.

As his friends scramble to find a way to get Mesa to a doctor, they come across his archenemy, Eliecer Castro, who has a Jeep:

Eliecer Castro looked at the swollen form of Alvaro Mesa sitting at the edge of the road, blood dripping from his nose and dribbling down his shirt.

The sight was disturbing enough to prompt Castro to provide a ride despite his past differences with Mesa. It takes four hours from the time he’s bitten to the time he gets medical treatment. And it still isn’t enough to save his arm, which he loses to infection and gangrene.

That’s why Jeff strongly advised against bushwhacking here. I’ve even noticed that when someone’s running a weedwhacker they tend to armor up like a medieval knight — full face mask, chaps, the works. It’s like going to war.

As an aside, the most fascinating thing in that pit viper story (I guess I buried the lede here) is that after the bite, one of the men’s pregnant wife approaches and Mesa freaks out.

God, no! Stop her! Don’t let her get near me! If she gets too close I’ll die on the spot.

Apparently, it’s a common belief that being near a pregnant woman will instantly klll a snake bite victim. How strange. I’d love to know the origins of that …

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Recommendation: Last night, I listened to a 2014 New York Public Library podcast interview with John Waters that was uproariously funny. Somehow, the sounds of the jungle all around me only added to the hilarity. Waters was discussing Carsick, the book he wrote about hitchicking across America, and it’s everything you’d expect from the man who made Devine famous. Definitely worth checking out.