(To read El Gringo Feo’s Costa Rica Diary from the beginning, start here.)
Friday, August 24
Yet another sublime sunset …
My first “down” day. Two things conspired to mess with my head. The first was Spanish. I spent a good chunk of the afternoon working on exercises and listening to a few audio resources, and it was daunting, to say the least. In addition, the water was out all day, and my typically pessimistic-paranoid nature turned to what happens if it doesn’t come back on. It went off once while Jeff was here, too, and I think it was exactly a week ago. But it came back on relatively quickly. This time it was all day, and I started worrying about what I’d do if it didn’t come back on before it got dark. Somehow I doubt this is the kind of place where it’s easy to get things fixed on weekends, even if you speak the language and know whom to call to report it.
So as sunset neared, I did the only thing that made sense — hiked up to the shack to watch the show. It worked. Shanti, Shanti, Shanti. And when I returned to The Treehouse the water was back. ¡Que Milagro!
I think my down day also was driven by how much I miss home, especially Lara and Sunny (and yes, even Sydney). I caught myself looking wistfully at photos of the big dog after a friend on Facebook posted a challenge to upload dog photos. I found the perfect one. It’s from when I was walking Sunny and a little girl wanted to pet her. Sunny is timid and quickly shies away from strangers, but the little girl walked right up and presented Sunny a dandelion. It was a really sweet moment that made me a tad misty.
Sunny is a shy, timid great Pyrenees rescue who generally retreats when a stranger approaches. This little girl walked right up and presented the gentle giant with a dandelion. Melted my heart …
A few random things … I saw a beautiful black squirrel outside the treehouse yesterday. Haven’t seen one like him since we lived in D.C. And then I saw a pair of strange rabbitlike critters hopping around as I walked up to the shack. Best I can tell from the resources I have at hand, they were agoutis but I want to do a little more research before I’m firm in that conviction.
Tomorrow I plan to insert my U.S. SIM card into the phone for a few calls home. And since I can leverage my U.S. data plan when I do that, I’m also planning a flood of Internet surfing.
I finished the day on the deck with my AirPods stuffed in my ears, blasting Wake Up to Find Out, the Grateful Dead’s Nassau Coliseum show (3/29/90) where Branford Marsalis joins for several numbers, including transcendent versions of “Estimated Prophet” and one of my favorites, “Eyes of the World”:
There comes a redeemer, and he slowly too fades away
And there follows a wagon behind him that’s loaded with clay
And the seeds that were silent all burst into bloom and decay
And night comes so quiet, it’s close on the heels of the day
(To read El Gringo Feo’s Costa Rica Diary from the beginning, start here.)
Thursday night’s sunset view from the shack.
Friday, August 23
After hearing howlers almost nightly while catching only fleeting glimpses of them, I finally got a good, long look at monkeys. But they weren’t howlers.
I heard commotion in the trees after arriving at the shack for my sundown services and quickly spotted a band of simians weaving its way through the canopy, which was more or less at eye level thanks to the elevation of the shack.
I made a clicking noise at one who was in plain view. He turned and looked at me, completely unperturbed or surprised, perhaps a tad curious. But his facial fur was white. Maybe a capuchin? He and his cohorts probably had watched me lumber up the driveway, but I was listening to an audiobook on fiction writing and was oblivious to any noise they might have made until I crested the hill.
I counted at least four but I suspect there were a few others I couldn’t single out.
I wasn’t completely confident my ID was correct, but time and a bit of research convinced me I was right. They had light faces and a sort of cowl, and the one who exchanged glances with me clearly had a prehensile tail that curved up in a sort of question mark.
The clincher was when the sun set. No howling. Just gentle mumbled chattering out in the trees.
Apparently, the name capuchin came from the similarity to Capuchin friars of the Franciscan order. Their name derives from the sharp pointed hoods they wear (derived from Italian cappuccino, from cappuccio — hood or cowl).
I counted at least four simian capuchins. Might have been more.
The sunset was muted, choked by a squall line off the coast beyond the Whale’s Tail. Still beautiful. I can’t really describe the calm that descends each night as I watch the horizon, listening to the surf pounding the shoreline over at Playa Colonia … until some asshole trucker engages his burp-farting jake brakes while rolling down the mountain into Uvita from the South. Jeff was incensed about that frequent occurrence.. I wasn’t completely sure what a jake — or jacobs — brake is until I looked it up. It’s diesel-engine braking, basically, using compression in the engine to slow the truck without having to ride the brake. (Jacobs is the company that invented the prevailing method of doing this). Works wonderfully, but the sound is horrendous. Human howlers on the highways.
Until the jake brake butted in, I was channeling that line in T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” — “Shanti, Shanti, Shanti” … the peace that passeth all understanding. In all those dark, apocalyptic images, the poet still found the potential for transcendence, even if it was more the thundering promise of fertile rains than the actual moisture. No coincidence “The Waste Land” was written in 1922, another reverberation from the horror of World War I. That’s one of the reasons I’ve read so widely about that war in particular. It shook Western Civilization to its core and helped give birth to Modernism.
Last night had the added bonus of a waxing moonrise. Banks of clouds rolled in off the Pacific to snuff it soon after it rose. But I got to stand between its glow and the fading day for a brief moment. Shanti, Shanti, Shanti.
Home sweet PurVita
I stayed on the reservation yesterday, partly because I was awake later than I’d intended the previous night and was running on about 5 hours sleep. A siesta during the heat of the day helped alleviate that.
I spent time paging though the guide books I bought. The print version of the Fodor’s book hasn’t been terribly useful, to be honest. The section on this stretch of coast is lackluster. But the Lonely Planet guide I downloaded to my Kindle is much more useful. I just wish the bozos had taken time to fix some of the formatting issues that slipped in when they converted it to Kindle format (the colones sign, for instance, didn’t come through, and a lot of the subhead formatting is mangled). I understand the pressures the publishing industry faces, but if you’re going to offer a Kindle version — and charge me for it — at least give it a cursory look to clean up the more glaring issues. Maybe this is something specific to my barebones Kindle Paperwhite, which I love because it’s compact and the battery lasts forever if you turn off wireless.
Hungry hungry bandwidth hippo
One thing is certain. I can’t keep devouring bandwidth at my current pace. In about 24 hours I chewed through 6,000 colones (about 11 bucks) worth of the 20,000 I added Wednesday. No doubt it’s from uploading images and video for use in these blog posts, so I’m going to start putting them up as text only and then doubling back when I hit a wireless connection where I can do the heavy lifting for free. So if you see “Insert XXXX here” in the text, that’s what’s going on. I’ll add them. But it might lag a few days.
Building a better Bob
I’ve started two parallel tracks in my self-improvement plan. I spent a solid hour buried in my Spanish workbook today, dutifully writing out the exercises on my computer. I’m hoping to do that every day, which should start expanding my limited grasp of Spanish. I also started listing to one of the Great Courses I downloaded on fiction writing. I’ve generally been dubious of these things, but I figured it’s not a bad idea to see advice as I dive into this book I’m trying to write. Based on the first lecture, I’m already going to revise some of what I did Wednesday night.
And finally, I was pleased to see a hummingbird while up at the shack. I’m surprised how few I’ve seen in the time I’ve been here. Counting that one, only two. I know they’re out there. I’m just not seeing them. I’ll have to look closer …
(To read El Gringo Feo’s Costa Rica Diary from the beginning, start here.)
Thursday, August 23
Spotted the “Sea Shrek” on my way to the farmers market. A few of my former students who are Shrek fanatics would be thrilled to see that …
I walked to the Wednesday farmer’s market yesterday for some fruit, then hiked over to an ATM to ensure I’m flush with colones. I also recharged the Kolbi card that gives me a local number and data access for my phone. You have to go to a store to do that, and when I told the clerk I wanted veinte mil colones added to the card, he looked at me incredulously, thinking that perhaps this Gringo Feo was confused. I suspect Ticos recharge in much smaller increments.
“¿Veinte mil?” he asked.
“Sí,” I told him. “Veinte mil” (about $40).
Kolbi texted me almost immediately to let me know the 20,000 colones was now at my disposal.
I logged about 10k steps, or four miles, on the excursion and returned to the house tired and sweaty. I’d soaked dry beans the night before, so I made a batch of gallo pinto, the comfort food of Costa Rica. Gallo pinto means spotted rooster in Spanish, perhaps because the mix of rice and beans has a spotted look to it. But it’s vegetarian until you add meat, which I didn’t in this instance. Mine was nowhere near authentic, but it was as close as I could get with the ingredients on hand, a key component of which is Salsa Lizano, a Worcestershire-like sauce made with vegetables, mustard and assorted spices. I had Lizano, so in that respect, at least, it was authentic. There’s a “soda” (small restaurant where locals eat) near here. I’m going to stop in there to check out the real stuff soon.
Spotted this along HIghway 34 on my way to the farmers market. Wonder how I’m going to get it back to Athens …
After lunch, I opened a Spanish grammar book I bought to study while I’m here. It was humbling. I knew my Spanish was abysmal. But it’s worse than that. I’ve forgotten what little I knew. It’s a workbook with exercises, and after a few of those my brain started to ooze so I retreated to the Treehouse for a nap.
I awoke to rustling outside my window. Coatimundi making their daily rounds. The sky started crying, prompting the coatimundi to scatter and run back to wherever coatimundi seek shelter from the storm. Thankfully, the rain stopped in time for my evening trek up to the shack. It was a subdued sunset, still shrouded in the rain that was tracking offshore. As lightning flashed like distant shell explosions over the Pacific I thought of Poilu and poor Louis Barthas, who is struggling to survive the horrific mayhem that was the Somme in 1916-17 in the current section of his memoirs I’m reading.
Wednesday night’s last gasp …
No horror here. No mayhem. Just the cranky screams of howler monkeys at sunset while irascible parrots flocked overhead, ready to roost. Night descended on bat wings as the little buggers flew acrobatically around me.
Perhaps this is burying the lede, but after watching the sunset I returned to the house where I cranked out the first chapter of the novel I’m working on. Very rough, but encouraging. We’ll see if I still think so later today when I revisit it.
And then, for the first time since I’ve been here, I got out my AirPods and listened to music. Mostly, it seems silly to listen to music when the jungle provides its own. But t was late, and I was craving a dose of Courtney Barnett. I’m obsessing over her lately, especially her ode to asthma, Avant Gardener. I can relate, especially when she spins out lines like this:
The paramedic thinks I’m clever cause I play guitar
