The Road to Samara

I was beginning to regret the whole thing.

It was just about 10 years to the day and I was back on the dirt road from Tamarindo to Samara. I hadn't taken the beach road since Mario and I had been looking for businesses ten years before. The trip had taken us 9 hours the first time, 9 hours to cover 68 miles. 9 hours of bumping down a dirt road with two little kids in car seats. 9 hours of seeing lots of trees, a few beaches, and endless clouds of dust. An endless road with no view ahead but dust.

We stopped for lunch in the middle of nowhere, everywhere was the middle of nowhere. There was a car parked outside and we asked the man who was leaving how was the food. His answer was Tipical. We didn't know at the time that was what they called local food. We walked up into what seemed to be someone's house where they had put out plastic chairs and tables. I remember ordering a bottle of water and when the glass of ice came I tipped the ice out afraid that the ice would be contaminated and drinking the water warm out of the bottle.

The food when it came was mostly rice and beans, it was warm, filing, tasty in a spiceless kind of way. I relaxed a little and it was not until I wanted to go to the bathroom that my fears returned. When I asked where the bathroom was the woman pointed to an outhouse. When I went in there was no toilet seat, and no flushing ability. Actually no running water was connected as far as I could tell. Next to the toilet was a bucket of water to flush with. Of course I didn't understand that was what the bucket was for.

I walked out of the shack of an outhouse and had to walk into the woman's kitchen to wash my hands at her sink. I hoped she'd washed her hands before she'd made the food.

As I walked back to my table I heard yelling. The sound of an intense argument, screaming, howling. I looked around and the woman pointed up. There above us in the trees were howler monkeys barking at each other and at us. They were my first monkeys and in their cries I didn't hear the warning sounds.

The first time I'd driven this road I had just wanted to get to Tamarindo. I didn't think about what it would be like to live in the country where driving through rivers was a normal occurrence. I didn't think what living in the middle of nothing with a dirt road before you got to anywhere really meant. I thought the monkeys were cute, the food was scary, and somehow in 9 hours of driving I never connected the dots. I never absorbed the reality of the poverty where the only running water is in the kitchen, where rice and beans were the only staples three times a day.

Driving it the second time I looked around at all the things I had learned to put up with. At all the poverty you learn to accept, at the clouds of dust that seep into your car even with the windows closed. Clouds of dust that cover the trees and contaminate the houses of everyone living on the road and I thought, “why the hell did I ever move here.” Ten years later I'd had plenty of time to regret moving to Costa Rica, and I had to wonder why I didn't begin to regret the whole thing then, why I didn't stop everything before it was too late.

We took our time driving south this time instead of north. It felt like closure. My daughter sat next to me 16 now, not 6 we talked while her boyfriend drove, navigating the potholes, the rivers and the dust clouds. We stopped at a few beaches, taking our time, it was an 11 hour trip this time. Only this time I'd known it would be. We weren't going anywhere, we were just going for a day trip to beaches we didn't know. It was an adventure, a day off.

It felt like closure. Like something I needed to do in order to be done with the country.

We stopped for lunch. A nice clean new open air restaurant. The place we had stopped at previously probably didn't exist anymore. Some things had gotten better over the years, and we ate rice and beans and chicken, warm, filing, tasty in a spiceless way. Then I went to the restroom where they had no toilet seat but there was running water and soap and I could wash my hands.

I saw beaches I'd never seen before then at sunset we stopped in Nosara. The beach felt like California. There were hundreds of surfers in the water, more people than I had seen for months lining the beach, there was a recycling and waste disposal center in the parking area. The thing was Nosara had no paved roads leading in or out of it and I had to wonder how or even why all these people, all these white, non Costa Rican people were there, there in the middle of nowhere.

Nosara is a yoga retreat/eco lodge/surfing capital and I'd heard it said the rich people who live there have paid the government not to put in roads, because they don't want more people to come, actually that they don't want Costa Rican people to come and if the road gets paved there will be bus service and they will have Costa Rican's littering their eco friendly little world. I also heard it said when I first was visiting CR that Nosara is full of rich old men and old women and their young Costa Rica boyfriends and girlfriends. Looking around the beach as the sunset it looked like everything I had been told was true. And the ugliness of the vivid beauty hit me.

We drove out into the darkness, Costa Rican's on bikes were still trying to get home from their jobs as maids and gardeners, choking on dust as we drove past them I hoped the flashlights they were carrying would keep them safe till they got home and none of them would be run over trying to get home. In the 10 years I've been in CR I've known, or known of so many people who have died. Silly things, one of my ex's girlfriends 22 years old was decapitated by a bus while walking up the road because the bus didn't close it's door and there are no sidewalks, my 40 electrician was killed by a car while walking home drunk, my 33 year old surveyor who died in a head on collision on his motorbike, or the 25 year old gringa woman who fell off her horse and died of head injuries front of my hotel while my staff tried to help her. Ten years before I didn't see how dangerous it was, I saw girls standing together talking waiting for the bus and I never thought I hope they get home alive tonight and the bridge the bus is on doesn't collapse.

We reached Samara and went to eat bad Mexican food for a ridiculous price served by surfer waiters who were stoned. And I kept wondering, why didn't I begin to regret this back then?

Then I remembered that I'd had a dream. I had woken up in a panic after dreaming that Mario would leave me alone in Costa Rica and I had made him promise that no matter what happened he wouldn't leave me there alone. And I remembered that I had regretted everything, right from the beginning. That I had silenced that little voice, told her that everything was going to be all right. I'd turned down the volume of the howling screaming creature in my head because I needed to believe. I needed my marriage to be better, I needed my life to be better, I needed my husband to be happy. And then later when it was all over, my marriage, my husband and my life as I knew it It was too late. Too late for regrets. Too late for anything but to keep going down an endless dirt road with no view ahead but dust.

I'll leave the rest to your imagination

I'll leave the rest to your imagination

I meet a lot of people most of whom I never know anything about, most of whom I will never see again. And the reality is that I don't want to know. They leave me with pieces of their stories and their lives and leave with “and I'll leave the rest to your imagination”

Honeymoon couple

Once upon a time there was a honeymoon couple staying at the hotel. She was in her 20s he was in his 30s or more. Checking in she had her eyes glued to her cell phone the only thing she asked while speaking staring at the screen was the WiFi password. She never looked at him, or touched him. When they entered the room he complained because it had two beds, a queen and a single and they had asked for a room with one bed because they were on their honeymoon. Personally I enjoyed messing up two beds on my honeymoon but we moved them. They spent their days outside in the hammock chairs while he read a book and she stared at her phone. I never heard them speak to each other, never kissed, never touched. Three days later he came and said they needed to change rooms to a room with better Wifi, if they could please have that room with two beds. That was all I knew but I think we can leave the rest to your imagination.

A week ago there was a French man in a room upstairs. We get a lot of French tourists now the thing about the French is that they don't speak English, or Spanish. Most European countries speak at least English in addition to their language, the Germans as a rule speak to me in equally excellent English or Spanish. The Italians don't speak Spanish but think that yelling loudly in Italian is just the same as Spanish and understand enough Spanish to get by. But the French they really don't understand or speak any language outside their own. This makes communication difficult. Quite difficult. Conversations with French tourists are usually carried out in a mixture of Franish with a little Franglish , I know about 20 words in French including hotel, restaurant, room, bed, air conditioning, dinner, lunch, breakfast, price, tax, please, thank you, with these I understand most of that they are saying and can more or less respond. Now the week before I left the hotel was full of workmen working on our new water treatment plant, one of them came to me and said “The french guy wants you to call the police.”

I walked up to his room wondering what it was he really wanted or what had happened. I knocked on his door and the French guy peaked out the window at me. He was an attractive guy, about 30. He'd originally booked for two nights but had extended his stay for an extra week. I was really hoping he hadn't been robbed. After he saw me he opened the door a crack. “They are going to kill me. Kill me. Call police. Kill me. Say going to kill me.”

I called the police and he hid in the room.

When the police came I took them up to his room and I caught only parts of the story. There was a girl, at the bar, and well he thought she was a good girl. But she wasn't a good girl. Not a good girl. And now they told him they would kill him. Leaving the rest to my imagination apparently he'd picked up a prostitute and in his arrogance and attractiveness he hadn't thought he needed to pay. So her brothers had threatened to kill him. Which he believed. Like I said when you don't speak English or Spanish things can get a little complicated.

Fat again, naturally

My weight is up again, up about as high as I let it go before I totally freak out, but over the years it's easier and easier to get heavy and harder and harder to let it go. So how did I do it, how did I rush one more time past a comfortable weight, past a weight where my clothes fit, past a weight where I feel even slightly attractive.

This time I can say it's not really my fault.  Sort of.

Four months ago I fell. Fell about 12 feet.  I was on top of a ladder painting the top of my wall and the ladder slid, it just slid down the wall and I landed 12 feet or more down on my feet. I didn't break anything, or so I thought, I hurt but I went on with everything as if nothing had happened.  I kept painting my house so I could move in, I kept working, I kept doing everything and a couple of weeks passed and the pain in my right foot didn't end.  So I got an x-ray, the woman in the emergency room said it was nothing and told me to take Ibuprofen  Another 2 months passed and the pain got worse. I wasn't walking, I was moving as little as possible, although I wasn't limping the way I had for the week or so after the accident my foot burned and ached and hurt.  Hurt enough to keep me from moving, hurt me enough that when someone wanted to know where to go I'd point rather than show them, hurt enough that the regular walking I would do around my office was reduced to rolling my chair from one area to the next.  I just wasn't moving.  I went to get another x-ray, now they saw the new bone, a heel spur they called it.  A piece of bone that my body had grown because I'd had a hairline fracture that they had never seen on the original x-ray. Now it made sense, it was like having a rock in your shoe all the time except that you couldn't remove it.

A World of Orphans

A few years ago the TV show "That 70's Show" ended and the LA Times ran an article about it, they asked each of the actors how their lives had changed since the show began. On of the lead actresses on the show was someone I knew pretty well Debra Jo Rupp.  I read through the whole thing and it was now famous stars like Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis talked about their careers and money and fame.  Then I got to Debra Jo's reply.  She said that in the eight years since the show began she had become an orphan.

It was the first time I'd ever heard a grown up use that word to describe themselves.  And it struck me.  I'd known her mother had died but that was just part of the natural cycle of life, she wasn't young, burying your parents is just something you do.  Yet this show had been the break Debra Jo had waited a lifetime to get, a regular part on a regular show guaranteeing her an income for life, she wasn't some young kid who had just struck it rich she was a professional who had worked hard in her industry her whole life and now she was financially secure.  But that wasn't what she marked as the biggest change in her life.  The biggest change was becoming an orphan.

My parents are in their 70s and the last couple of years have been filled with some major health scares.  My mom's 6 month check for her cancer came back yesterday and it was clean. So it looks like cancer (the one she had had only a 15% 5 year survival rate) will not be what kills her.  Still she's 71 years old, in 5 years she'll be 76 how much longer than that will she realistically live?  I've had to face the very real possibility of losing not only her but also my dad in the last year or two.   It's been terrifying.

I was having this conversation with a friend of mine.  She lost her dad without warning two years ago when he was only 61.  She told me that she missed him everyday but the strangest thing for her was that the dynamics between her and her mother had changed since his death, that she felt she was also letting her mother go too.  She said to me "We are all orphans in the end, and we all go through the process of becoming one."

It was the second time I'd heard it put that way and again it struck me.  Because that is how it feels.  Not that it should, I am not Oliver Twist, my parents have done their job and I am strong and independent. But still the idea of losing them makes me feel vulnerable and alone.  And in the end I know I'll just be another orphan left behind by time.

Ghosts

It is a little known and completely unpublicized fact that I own a haunted hotel. Not haunted in the big creepy Shining way instead it is quietly haunted. And I have asked everyone who knows to keep it quiet.

The only evidence for the haunting was the people who saw it and the security cameras that showed it. Nothing major really, just the spoons on the wall swinging back and forth in different directions. It scared my office boy William. For myself I knew long before this that the place was haunted.

William thinks the hotel is haunted by the last owner, a German man who died before his time in Germany of cancer. I don't agree.

I don't know that we have a ghost. A single individual living in the walls, I believe that these exist but it's not how it feels to me. I think more that the hotel has the residual energy of many many people. That energy and matter are, as Einstein proved interchangeable. I think that long after people leave somewhere some of the energy they left there remains behind.

The hotel has been there a long time, many people have come and gone. I think that some of their energy lives on, stuck perhaps in time or space. Some of this energy is good, happy people on vacation, some is not. Somewhere stuck in cement is ever tear I cried there, somewhere in the walls is all the frustrated rage I felt when I moved here. Nestled in the mortar is the loneliness of knowing you are with someone who doesn't love you.

I never felt comfortable in the kitchen of the restaurant. Not when I lived there. I would enter it to cook and always feel that I wasn't alone, that it wasn't a welcoming space. When the hotel is empty it scares me. When it is full it is a fun place but when it is empty the ghosts fill the holes left by the guests. I feel this way about any place that normally has a lot of people, schools after hours terrify me, public buildings on public holidays are places I walk past uneasily.

When I was a child there were two “ghost houses” on our street. They were old houses that had been abandoned and closed up and kids weren't supposed to enter. The first one was knocked down before I was old enough to be dared into doing something so stupid as enter an abandoned house. The second one I only went in once.

In it's day it had been a nice house, a white Victorian similar to the cold unwelcoming house my mother had grown up in. Pretty lattice work on the front, a small porch. My brother and I climbed over the fence through the hole in the wood past the “No Trespassing” sign with his friends. I must have been 10 and Michael 8, old enough to be bullied into doing something you knew was wrong but not old enough to understand the consequences of doing it.

We didn't have to break in the door, it hung on an angle not quite closed and we walked in. As soon as we entered I knew why the house had been abandoned. The floor was wrong. It sloped away from us and down towards the back of the house. We followed it down, through the kitchen, downward to the back door, and through the door we could see the hole the house was slowly falling into, the embankment that was eroding away taking the house with it.

I walked back slowly into the living room I didn't want to go any further. I peeked in the bedrooms to say I had done it but all I wanted to do was leave that house. It felt like the house was screaming around me, like it was a living entity in despair, or perhaps it was just my imagination. Michaels' friends dared us to enter the house with them at night. But there was no amount of peer pressure that would ever make me enter that house again. I exited as rapidly as possible pulling Michael with me and telling myself that the reason I was scared was because the house was unsafe.

I never went into that house again, and neither did Michael. I would see it every day when I walked past it and I would walk faster until I was past the house. When they finally tore it down I was happy but the air of sadness seemed to linger even over the empty lot.

The last house I lived in in LA was like that. I bought the house not because it was beautiful, or nice but because it was cheap and close to my work. It was never a happy house. I thought it was just that I was not happy there but when we moved out and moved next door none of us wanted to go back into the house. It scared us all too much. We had moved out and only the ghosts remained.My daughter whose home it had been her whole life would not re-enter it even though we were only living across the driveway. And when the house was torn down I was glad. But to this day 4 years later the lot is still empty, unbuilt, cursed. There is something living there still, some energy, something that didn't leave when the timbers of the house were crushed and taken away.

I like my house in Costa Rica not because it is a beautiful house but because it feels good. Every time I enter it I feel a warm sense of welcoming. When I am alone in the house I am alone, no-one follows me around and everything is peaceful. My daughter complains about the house all the time about how she wants to leave, how she wants to move to a new house, a nice house like her friends. She bitches that our house is too old, too broken. She wants a new house with a pool and I can't get it for her. I would like to. She underestimates what our house has. She says it is boring. I can only respond that it is a happy house even when she is not happy in it. I wonder if her continuing dislike and my continuing loneliness will wreck our house, fill it with a sense of lonely abandonment and destroy the sense of home I feel within it.

The wet season is coming and again the hotel will be empty. Filled with only the sounds of absence. With the economy the way it is it may be a quiet time. The restaurant as much as they annoy me create noise and the ghosts in the kitchen are quiet in comparison.

Maybe I'm crazy. Perhaps there is no such thing as ghosts. Perhaps there is no residue energy anywhere in the world and it is only me who thinks she can feel such things. However don't tell William there are no ghosts, he may have to show you the video of the dancing spoons and then you may have to believe too.

Why it doesn't always pay to get your car fixed.

About 2 weeks ago I got four new tires for the car.  We'd been on our way to San Jose, hit a pothole at 1am and blown out two tires in the middle of nowhere.  The police had circled for an hour while a helpful Samaritan and my kid's boyfriend drove off looking for somewhere to get a tire fixed at 1am in the morning.  Finally the police knocked on the door of a local repair man and told him to get our tire fixed because it was too dangerous for us to be where we were much longer.  Tire actually wasn't fixable but miracle of miracles the guy could sell us a second hand tire.  You have to realize that my tires are special extra wide sport tires and even most of the tire stores don't carry them so to say we got lucky is an understatement.

The month before I'd gotten work done on the front, putting in new steering rods and some other big metal thing and finally the clanking sound had stopped.  Of course they'd done it wrong the first time and put in the wrong steering rod so you couldn't actually turn a sharp turn but the second time they'd put in one that didn't rub, but the people who had done the work had left the wheel alignment so bad that the steering wheel was at a 90 degree angle when we were driving in a straight line. So getting four new tires didn't seem like a bad idea, and they could fix the wheel alignment while they were at it.

Four night ago after my father telling me that his friend had done a screenwriting course and sold three screenplays I drove out into the night angry.  Pissed off, angry, driving fast while rain fell.  Yet when I went around that last corner I wasn't going that fast, the sensation was different than I'd ever felt.  I've skidded but this was unique.  The car didn't start to leave the road when I touched the brakes, the car was leaving the road, I slammed on the brakes and then I was off the road, in a concrete ditch slammed into a concrete wall. 

The first thing I thought was "why didn't the airbags go off?" And then "Christ my head hurts." I sat there for a bit shaking, then I got out of the car to look. I was sure I'd destroyed the headlights, possibly the radiator.  I looked and everything looked ok.  There was a hissing.  I figured it was probably the radiator or the tire.  I was in the middle of nowhere and I decided to drive home.  There was nothing else for it. If the tire blow out on the road had taught me anything it was that I was not strong enough to change the tire.  So I drove with my eye on the thermostat.  No change.

The car kept swerving all over the road, I guessed it was the tire. What I didn't know was that it was the steering rod.  The new steering rod which has a ball joint in it had separated, the ball had come out of the joint. That's what sent me off the road. 

When I finally surveyed the damage the aluminum wheel had cracked on impact.  The shock absorber had exploded, the new bushings had popped but the new steering rod had not one scratch on it, it had just turned into two parts, and it looks like it did that before I hit the wall.

So we put the old parts back on and the car is running.  Still needs a shock absorber.  And in reality working air bags.  Now I have to wonder if it's worth getting it fixed.

Getting up in my grill

There's something to be said about a good fight. A decent clean fight where you scream and they scream and you get up in each other's grill.... there's something to be said for both parties knowing what the hell getting up in your grill means.  There is something to be said about understanding exactly what the fuck the person yelling at you is saying and there is something to be said about having the ability to talk back to scream words that make sense in the way that fuck you bitch makes sense but have sex you female dog does not.

The problem with living your life in a foreign language is that the comebacks of your youth just don't work. You have to fight not just fair but clean.  And while you are screamed at all you can do is slowly assemble words to reply with, words that are too slow to stop the next barrage, words that are too clumsy to stop the assult.

You actually don't swear at all, you are super polite and in the end are left shaking with frustration.

Then when the person who has been screaming at you tells the police that you are just a gringo and don't have any rights you don't even have a comeback. And when the police officer says that everyone has the same rights under the law you know it's a lie because you have no rights, not even the right to yell FUCK YOU YOU FUCKING BITCH, GO SCREW YOURSELF, ROT IN FUCKING HELL.