Author: Bob Benz

Categories
Books Day of the Dead Bob El Gringo Feo Transcendental Bob Travel Bob

A haunting, hilarious talk on the beach with George Saunders

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

Tuesday, August 28

I’ve been thinking a lot about ghosts.

We passed a Tico cemetery at some point while Jeff was driving me from the airport in San José to Uvita, and I noticed the graves there were above ground, a cluster of concrete, casket-sized houses scattered about, similar to the way they do it in New Orleans (though not as grandiose).

I read somewhere that Ticos celebrate El Día de Los Muertos. One of the most moving things I’ve ever seen was in a Mexico City cemetery on the Day of the Dead. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of Mexicans were there, clustered around the graves of their loved ones, eating their favorite foods, singing their favorite songs. The ground was a veritable carpet of marigold flowers. I used the word “celebrate” above deliberately. The Day of the Dead isn’t about mourning. It’s joyous. Bittersweet.

Sitting on the beach yesterday, I watched the Pacific roll ashore at low tide, but the roar of the surf wasn’t the only thing in my ears. I had my AirPods in, playing a New York Public Library Podcast recorded in June. George Saunders, one of my favorite writers, was being interviewed by Paul Holdengräber, who asks Saunders if he believes in ghosts. The writer says yes almost immediately, but then provides this nuance :

I certainly believe in ghosts as a literary thing because they’re here,. I mean, in other words, which of us, sitting here, doesn’t have several dead people whispering lovingly or harshly in your ear, and which of us doesn’t sense ourselves as one of those people eventually. Again, in terms of making a scientific view of the universe, you can’t discount the dead. They don’t disappear in any sense. They’re in your neurons. When I use them it’s mostly to say, if i just write a story in a realistic frame, I feel like I’m not quite telling the whole truth — that we all carry dead people around with us, and we carry the prospect of our own death around with us so that, somehow, has to be brought into play a little bit. Plus, they’re fun. They’re a riot.

I keep thinking the book I’m writing is really a ghost story. But I have no interest in cranking out a work of Gothic fiction, and I don’t have the talent to pull off something like Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo (which was absolutely brilliant). But the quote above got my wheels turning. There’s something there. I just need to figure out what it is …

(BTW: If you’re into podcasts and literature, I highly recommend that Saunders interview. There were times when I was laughing out loud as I watched the waves. He’s hilarious, brilliant, accessible, yet grounded and down-to-earth.)

As I walked Playa Colonia, I wondered why I’m not hitting this beach every morning. It was low tide, peeling back a long stretch of sand that had been under water just a few hours earlier. I looked for shells, flotsam, jetsam, whatever, but I’d stopped for breakfast on the way and other beachcombers had beaten me to the punch. All that was left were fragments of sand dollars. A washed up stingray. A single, pearly pink shell, which I picked up and pocketed.

I passed novice surfers struggling to master the waves and was delighted to see several people walking with their dogs, including a small white terrier who had no use for the sandpipers scurrying ahead of him.

The dogs here seem well-fed and well cared for overall. I encountered several on my way to breakfast. Most wore collars and all were friendly or indifferent, more focused their morning routines than some random passing Gringo.

It’s hard not to love a place that loves its dogs.

After a simple dinner of pineapple that I picked here on the property and a papaya that would make my umbrella cockatoo drool, I retreated to a deck with a Pacific view to listen to podcasts and battle my book. It wasn’t long before the rain came in torrents, so loud on the metal roof I couldn’t hear the podcast, prompting me to hit pause until it passed. Is this what the rainy season is like? Sweet, clear mornings that yield to stifling humidity in late afternoon and an atmospheric tantrum. to end the day. I can live with this. But I suspect the worst is yet to come. If April is the cruelest month, September is the soggiest. At least here in Central America.

This rain is having an impact on my evening vespers. For the second night in a row, a deluge canceled Sunset at the Shack. No regrets. I’m enjoying the rains, especially the calm that descends after, when crickets, cicadas, frogs and other night creatures rise up to fill the night with their own buzzing din, singing me to sleep in the Treehouse.

Categories
Books El Gringo Feo Travel Bob

What the thunder said …

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

Monday, August 27

Drenching, thunderous rain gave me a welcome excuse to read and write yesterday. I couldn’t help but allude to Eliot’s “The Waste Land” in the title of this post after thinking about his poem the other night at the shack. The thunder bowled through the valleys in long, guttural grumbles that shook the ground,. It was disconcerting, but not in the way a sudden bolt slaps you in the face. This was visceral, an earthquake rattling your core and leaving you wondering if it’s going to stop.

Phone calls with Lara and my parents were the highlight of the day. All is good back home, and I think everyone was relieved to know that I’m not only surviving here, I’m thriving. The beauty of the jungle hasn’t worn off.

I finished Poilu, and I’ll have to admit I’ll miss that French barrel maker. I’ve read extensively about World War I, from revisionist ideas arguing the generals and leaders weren’t as stupid and heartless as they’ve been portrayed to a study of poetry written in the trenches. One of the most surprising things to me was how literate this working stiff was. Louis Barthas drops classical allusions constantly and references obscure historical events in his narrative. And then he spins out lines like this while describing an artillery battery:

There were thousands and thousands of shells of every caliber, lined up like monstrous insect larvae which one day would burst forth in a blast of fire and brimstone.

And he offers insights like this while discussing a theft:

When killing becomes a duty, a holy thing, then stealing is no more than a peccadillo.

Incongruously, I then picked up Jack Ewing’s Where Tapirs and Jaguars Once Roamed: Ever Evolving Costa Rica, which moves from a geologic history of the area to an ethnographic study, relating tales of people who lived here around the turn of the century. This confirmed much of what Gian said the other night about this area’s isolation causing it to be a bit backward and insular. In the 1900s, the Whale’s Tail was an island where a family lived, and they were the only residents for miles around. Ewing traces the slow growth of the 20th century, fueled by blazed jungle trails and bongo boats that plied the coast, connecting the scattered people and communities along the way.

The Costanera Sur highway wasn’t finished until 2010, which precipitated the current growth that’s occurring along this stretch of coast, growth that endangers the natural resources. There’s a fascinating passage where Ewing works with the road builders to design and build “wildlife bridges” over the highway to allow fauna safe passage. It hasn’t stopped road kill, but apparently is it reducing it.

To close the day, I listened to a few lectures on character development in the Great Courses audiobook Writing Great Fiction: Storytelling Tips and Techniques. I have to admit it’s been helpful so far and already has me revising some of what I’ve written. James Hynes, a novelist who teaches the course, won me over when he referenced John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction. Gardner’s one of my favorite writers, perhaps my main influence for the type of work I’d like to produce. It’s been decades since I encountered the book, so I downloaded that and dove into it, too. I was instantly glad I did when I stumbled across this aside in Gardner’s preface:

(Not everyone is capable of writing junk fiction: It requires an authentic junk mind. Most creative-writing teachers have had the experience of occasionally helping produce, by accident, a pornographer. The most elegant techniques in the world, filtered through a junk mind, become elegant junk techniques.)

Categories
El Gringo Feo Travel Bob

A Tica pharmacist encounters a Gringo moleman

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

Saturday, August 25

One of the sights along the coastal highway: monkeys and a replica (I think) of on of the stone spheres pre-Columbian people carved here in Costa Rica. There are several places that feature stone carvings like these along the way.
One of the sights along the coastal highway: monkeys and a replica (I think) of on of the stone spheres pre-Columbian people carved here in Costa Rica. There are several places that feature stone carvings like these along the way.

Her look says it all. It’s a mix of confusion and concern. Clearly, this Gringo is loco.

¿Piel de topo? she repeats incredulously, perhaps hoping she misheard.

“Sí,” I say, repeating it, in English this time, hoping that might make it clear. “Moleskin.”

She responds in English. “I don’t know what that is.”

But the fact that this Tica pharmacist speaks English spins me instantly in another direction, away from my need for moleskin to thwart that nasty blister my hiking shoes have imposed on my heel.

“Is it possible to fill this prescription? And if so, what would it cost?” I ask in Gatling gun English, digging around in my bag and fishing out a prescription for Flovent that my doctor in Ohio wrote. “It’s for asthma,” I tell her, thumping my chest and breathing deeply.

She doesn’t need the sign language. Her English is excellent.

“Let me check.”

While she types on her computer, I think about the moleskin. They must call it something else here. I hope she doesn’t think I’m trying to buy the literal skin of a mole. What next? Eye of newt?

“This is like Flovent,” she says. “But the dose is different from your prescription.”

“Ahhh … May I take a photo?”

She nods, and I shoot a picture of the two options she’s placed on the counter in front of me. “Let me check with my doctor to see if this will work.”

She smiles. Moleman isn’t as crazy as she thought.

I had my doctor write prescriptions for my asthma meds so I could check pricing here in Costa Rica. The cost at my local CVS in Athens is batshit, and I’m hoping to save some money. To that end, I’ve been ordering my drugs through a Canadian operation that imports them from New Zealand, among other places, at massive discounts. Not sure if it’s legal. Don’t care. I’m so disgusted with the greed-based U.S. healthcare system I’ll commit any crime to stick it to the man.

Soda La Jungla, a small onle-in-the-wall restaurant that's next door. These types of restaurants are called sodas here, offering local dishes at reaasonable prices.
Soda La Jungla, a small onle-in-the-wall restaurant that’s next door. These types of restaurants are called sodas here, offering local dishes at reaasonable prices.

Today was another adventure day. I decide to hike all the way to my new favorite liquor store, which is north of where Rio Uvita flows under the coastal highway. I start with a traditional Tico breakfast at Soda La Jungla, right next door to PurUvita.

Two eggs. Fried plantains. Gallo pinto. Coffee. For about four bucks. It’s one of the few bargains I’ve found here. Overall, prices are very comparable to the States, often higher. Some of that clearly is logistic. Some of it is the inflationary pressure caused by a bunch of Gringos — and other non-Ticos — flooding the area.

The gallo pinto is good. It’s basic rice and beans designed to fill you up and send you on your way. I had been wanting to stop at this soda (a small, traditional Costa Rican hole-in-the-wall restaurant). Today I was determined to do that. It doesn’t hurt that the place is empty at 7:30 a.m. If I make an idiot of myself, there’ll be no one here to cluck and laugh at the dumb Gringo. I’m going to make this place one of my regular haunts. They also have an array of lunch dishes, including ceviche, a Peruvian delicacy that Costa Ricans have adopted whole-heartedly. Raw fish “cooked” by soaking in lime juice and spices. Perfecto.

Breakfast at Soda La Jungla. Nothing fancy, but it was four bucks and filling. Fried plantains, two fried eggs, gallo pinto (beans and rice), and coffee.
Breakfast at Soda La Jungla. Nothing fancy, but it was four bucks and filling. Fried plantains, two fried eggs, gallo pinto (beans and rice), and coffee.

From the soda, I waddle off down the highway in search of batteries, moleskin, groceries, etc. I also intend to hit the Saturday farmer’s market, where my new friend, Italian expatriate Sara, is selling her bread.

I pick up a ciabatta and another loaf of bread and ask how Gian is doing. Jeff introduced me to Sara and Gian before he returned to the States and I liked them instantly. Gian and I share Pittsburgh and Destin connections.

After putting the bread in my backpack, I walk over to the market, where I talk to a Boruca woman selling gorgeous carved masks. The one that catches my eye is a devil. Easily worth the $80 U.S. she’s asking, but worry about carrying it home and ask if she is here every week.

Like me, she’s not a native Spanish speaker. Her native tongue is the indigenous Boruca. But through a series of workarounds we manage to communicate in a mix of Spanish, English and gestures. The rainy season makes it difficult to get to Uvita from her remote home, so she’ll probably be here less frequently as the rains become more prevalent. I decide to risk it and wait till later. I suspect I can catch her next week or the following. I really want that astounding devil mask. In retrospect, I should have coughed up the 80 bucks and figured out how to get it home in one piece.

I also manage to procure a bottle fo Flor de Caña rum, AAA batteries, eggs, cheese, organic carrots and fresh-squeezed orange juice that was crying to be mingled with that rum.

Rio Uvita as seen from the bridge on the coastal highway.
Rio Uvita as seen from the bridge on the coastal highway.

The hike home isn’t too bad, though as always the climb to PurVita at the end is a sweaty slog. In all, I log about 10k steps, or 4 miles. I walk that daily at home with Sunny the Great Pyrenees, but the humidity here is soul crushing. Thankfully, today is clear and not too humid. And maybe I’m starting to acclimate a bit. Despite that, I still need siesta in the afternoon to cover from the morning adventure. That siesta is spent in a hammock, finishing Poilu, Louis Barthas’ World War I memoir. What an incredible story. This French barrel maker survived the Somme, Verdun and four years of bloody engagements. The book wavered between boring stretches of logistical details and riveting stories about soldiers who were “turned to marmalade” by bombshells falling in torrents.

My evening vespers are a perfect finale to a perfect day. While we had a stretch without water again today, it didn’t darken my mood the way it did yesterday. I knew the water would come back on. I had faith. And in the end, hay aqua.

I walk up to the shack a bit earlier than usual, expecting the relatively clear skies to put on a show. I’m not disappointed. Perhaps the best sunset yet. Sol’s last gasp sprawls across the Pacific while flashes of lightning erupt behind me in the east, creating the impression that someone is vainly trying to take flash photos of day’s fleeting final sigh.

I think this is my favorite sunset so far. I had a hard time choosing from the photos I took. That's the silhouette of the shack on the right.
I think this is my favorite sunset so far. I had a hard time choosing from the photos I took. That’s the silhouette of the shack on the right.

As the darkness deepens, an insect hum rises out of the jungle. Birds call out one final time like a child demanding a glass of water to delay the inevitable death of day. I hear music in the distance, probably one of the bars down on the highway, and fireflies bubble up from the weeds.

Just another day in paradise.