by Tim Cahill
There was a sense of great things about to happen in the region, a feeling of hope. I also sensed a wave of great pride among the Costa Rican people, who saw Oscar Arias as a figure comparable to John F. Kennedy.
IT IS SAFE to drive at night in Costa Rica. There are no armed insurgencies, and the country long ago abolished its army. According to Oscar Arias, “in my homeland, you will not find a single tank, a single artillery piece, a single warship, or a single military helicopter.” Costa Ricans are forever telling visitors that there are more teachers in the country than policemen; they point out that the country has the highest literacy rate in Central America and the best health-care system in the region.
The government attempts to remain neutral politically, though it has strong ties with the United States. It has been a democracy for over a hundred years, making it the oldest democracy in Latin America, and one of the oldest in the world.
In the 1850s, the government offered free land to those who would grow coffee. The crop brought near-instant prosperity, and the peasant class became landowners. Except for the town of Limón, where the people are primarily black, most of the people are white or mestizo. In recent years, Costa Rica has established several remarkable national parks, which are responsibly administered. (Many areas in South and Central America are designated national parks. These are usually remote, underpopulated areas where life goes on as always. People living on the land often do not know they are living in a national park. Mining, timbering, and petro development are all generally allowed, but the government can always point to national parks on its maps and talk about concern for the environment.)
Costa Rica is sometimes described as the Switzerland of Central America. On this day, when the president had been honored, we expected to see dancing in the streets when we hit the capital city of San José.
What could possibly go wrong?
The road to San José runs along the top of a ridge, through orchid-growing country, on a mountain called Buena Vista: good-view mountain. We would, of course, be driving through the orchids on good-view mountain in the middle of the night.
The road crosses the continental divide at about ten thousand feet. They say from that point, on a rare clear day, you can look in one direction and see the Atlantic Ocean, then turn 180 degrees and see the Pacific.
There is another, informal name for Buena Vista.
“Why,” I asked a Costa Rican gas-station attendant, “do they call it the Mountain of Death?”
He was a short man of Italian ancestry and he wore the sleeves of his T-shirt rolled up to reveal bulging biceps.
“Why?”
He stared at me. “The road to San José,” he said slowly, as if to a very young child, “is very steep, very narrow, very foggy, and very dangerous. Many have died.”
We were used to people dying from gunshot wounds and I wanted to be sure about this: “They die in automobile accidents?”
The man jerked back, as if dumb questions were punches, like left jabs.
“In automobile accidents,” he said very slowly, “many have died.”
SO GARRY, who was still jittery and tense from the run to the Panamanian border, felt he should drive the Mountain of Death.
There was no one walking on the shoulder because there was no shoulder. Trees and foliage lined the road, and it was very dark. It had rained earlier, and the cooling mountain air was heavy with the sensual fragrance of orchids. A short time later, it was too cold to drive with the windows open. At six thousand feet, there was a customs check and the young officer was wearing a parka and wool cap.
We were rolling through long uphill climbs followed by short stretches of flatland that invariably led to another steep pitch. Pockets of thick fog sulked in the drainages of the rivers, on the mountain curves, in the flats.
It was slow, torturous driving through these areas the yellow road signs identified as ZONAS DE NEBLINA. I liked the word neblina for fog. Every time we saw one of these signs, we were plunged into a thick pewter-gray fog that limited our visibility to no more than ten feet.
“Another nebulous area,” I’d tell Garry.
We were crawling through a fog as thick as porridge on an uphill stretch. There were three big trucks ahead of us and we were probably making all of six or seven miles an hour when a new Toyota pickup truck pulled out and passed all four of us on a blind uphill curve, in the fog. It had been a white truck, its side panels barely visible through the fog. Trees and foliage lined the road, but I had a sense that, just beyond the greenery, there were drop-offs everywhere. It felt like bus-plunge country.
“That guy must be drunk,” I said.
“Either that or suicidal.”
I was playing word games in my mind—nebulous, neblina—when we rounded another corner on a high ridge that was clear of the hellish fog. Two trucks and a car were pulled up on the side of the road. Men with flashlights were standing by a break in the foliage. A truck, they said, had come speeding around the corner, didn’t make the turn, and had gone off the road here. It had just happened.
We were somewhere near the ten-thousand-foot level. Four or five of the thin trunked trees were broken off near the ground, the jagged stumps very white in the light of our flashlights.
I followed the beam of one of the lights down until the darkness swallowed it. There was no fire, nothing. I imagined this was one of the places where you could see both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The vehicle had sailed off the ridge on the Atlantic side.
“Was it a truck?” I asked one of the men.
“A white Toyota,” he said.
So the driver who had passed on a blind uphill curve in the fog had taken a ten-thousand-foot dive into the Atlantic from the top of the Mountain of Death. There was a strange absence of emotion about this. I looked down into the black void and felt insubstantial, nebulous.
WE PULLED INTO SAN JOSE, which was set in a mountain basin, like Quito. The weather was cool enough for a light jacket, and a woman who sold diesel at a convenience store that might have been an American 7-Eleven used her only phrase of English about a dozen times. “Welcome to Costa Rica, my friends,” she said.
It was just after midnight, but people were indeed dancing in the streets, celebrating the honor their young president had brought to the country. We stopped on a corner to ask directions. People wanted to banter, to joke, to ask us what we thought of Costa Rica and Oscar Arias. It was a very good-natured crowd and we were handing out lapel pins, pledging eternal friendship and Pan-American unity when a flashy red Toyota truck pulled up in front of us and everyone disappeared. The truck was jacked up on monster tires and carried a lot of shiny chrome.
There were three men in the Toyota. All at once they were crouched behind the open doors of their vehicle like men expecting a gunfight.
Garry put his hands, both of them, on the wheel at eleven and one. I put mine flat on the dash. When the men saw we were unarmed, they moved out from behind their doors. One of them—a big man with a scar that ran from his ear to the tip of his chin—came at us from the passenger’s side. Another approached from our left. He had a ponytail, a furious untrimmed beard, and wore a faded denim jacket which was open to the waist so you could see expensive gold chains against a black T-shirt. You tended to focus, however, on the gun tucked in the front of his pants. It was a big automatic, a nine millimeter that might carry a fourteen-shot clip.
Here we were in a country with no insurgencies; a country that had more teachers than policemen.
So who were these guys with the guns? Teachers?
The third man—younger than the other two—stood by the red truck. He wore a blue short-sleeved polo shirt that set off his brown leather shoulder holster and the wooden handle of a large revolver. Probably a forty-four. He never moved, and his eyes never left mine.
The man with the scar wore a light-beige rain jacket and there was a gun-sized bulge just under his left arm. He approached Garry, put his right hand into his jacket, and flashed a
badge that was in his wallet along with a picture of the scar-faced man and some official-looking stamps. “Police,” he said.
The man checked our papers. A few minutes later, he handed everything back and apologized for the inconvenience. The officers said they were looking for drug dealers. We had aroused their suspicions: two bearded strangers in a big truck talking with people after midnight in an unsavory section of town. There had been objects passed back and forth: the seemingly surreptitious exchange of what the officers now knew were lapel pins and milk shakes.
The big man with the scar spoke good English and suggested that we not park our truck on the street. We told him that we were pushing on for Nicaragua anyway. Well, he said, that was going to be a problem. “If you take the Pan-American, you’ll drive for three hours and then be turned back.”
The highway to the north, he explained, was blocked by a rock slide that would take several days to clear. There was however, a back road. It was gravel and dirt, very bad, but if we wanted to get to Nicaragua by eight the next morning, it was our only chance.
The man took our map from the suckerboard and, in consultation with the bearded man, traced a new route over a spiderweb of back roads.
“But look,” he said, “even here in Costa Rica, if you’re driving at night, don’t ever stop for someone in an unmarked car.”
“But you guys have an unmarked car,” Garry pointed out.
“We’re looking for drug dealers,” the man explained. “It helps,” he said, “not to look like a police officer.”
“But what would you have done if we tried to run?” I asked.
The man shook his head slowly, and in a negative manner.
“SCARFACE,” Garry said. “Guy tells us not to stop for unmarked cars. Don’t stop for anybody unless he’s driving a red pickup and has a badge. How are you supposed to know?”
We had found the Canadian embassy and picked up a manila envelope containing the letter from Honduras and the one from Nicaragua. I had opened the big three-ring binder that contained all our letters for all the countries we were driving through. Customs officers seemed to like to look through it, and the sheer volume of official correspondence, festooned with the great seals of various countries, often impressed them favorably. On the other hand, the Sandinista government in Nicaragua accused Honduras of harboring contra camps. If a Nicaraguan official saw a letter of recommendation from Honduras, we might be denied entry into the country. No friend of Honduras, the man might feel, is a friend of Nicaragua.
The letters were inside clear envelopes, one on one side, one on the other. I placed our letter from Honduras in one of the envelopes, between two letters from Argentina, so that it was reasonably well hidden.
We made coffee, but it turned out that I had not bought drinking water in Panama City. It was sparkling water. When you tried to make coffee with it, it foamed up like an experiment in the mad scientist’s lab.
It was beginning to get roto on the down side of the Mountain of Death, and we drank our furiously foaming coffee cold, without pleasure, for the caffeine. It was the essence of roto.
THE ROADS WERE BAD and Garry was driving, as he had been since noon. It was now two in the morning.
“The road sign says eleven,” Garry said. “Aren’t we supposed to be on three?”
“I looked at the other map, the colored one. Three is marked eleven.”
“What’s the next town?”
“San Mateo. If we hit San Mateo, it doesn’t matter what the road is called, we’re going the right way.”
There was an unmarked crossing and both roads plunged steeply downhill.
“These maps,” I said, “say the road we want will run north.”
We checked the compass. The road to the left looked to run more generally north. We drove for half an hour and the road jigged east for a time, then jagged west, but it never turned south, which was mildly encouraging.
“If the Pan-American is closed,” Garry reasoned, “why don’t we see any traffic? Wouldn’t truck drivers know about this route?”
“Good point.”
“Navi nightmare time.”
“No, wait. There’s a sign for San Mateo up there.”
“Yeah,” Garry said, “but where are the trucks?”
THEY WERE STACKED UP where the narrow winding road—all mud and loose gravel—dove through thick jungle foliage into the lowlands and Nicaragua. The drivers had set out flares: branches that they had broken off trees, doused in diesel, and set afire. We stopped in the back of a line of perhaps fifty semis.
Two of the big trucks, we were told, had had a mishap and were blocking the road. A small car could squeeze between them, but our Sierra was too big. We would have to wait. It would take twelve hours, at a minimum, before the road could be cleared.
We had to meet Chistita Caldera at the border in a little over five hours.
Garry fumed in silence. In the dashboard lights, his face looked feverish and, though it was cool enough for a jacket, he had begun to sweat copiously.
Suddenly he got out of the truck and walked down half a mile to the accident, carrying a flashlight. I made myself a cup of foaming roto coffee and when I had just about finished it, I saw Garry walking back uphill. He was moving fast, like an angry, determined man and I knew that we were going to go for it.
Garry folded our wide side mirrors into the truck. “We have,” he said, “about five inches of clearance between those trucks.”
“You measured it?”
“Eyeballed it.”
He put the truck into four-wheel drive, low. “The problem is,” he said, “that there are sheep guts all over the road. The stuff looks fresh and it’s slippery as hell. I don’t know why someone would do that, but there must have been a lot of animals. The road is ankle-deep in blood and intestines.”
Garry drove past the line of trucks, and the drivers, who had nothing better to do, followed us down to the metal narrows that Garry had eyeballed. Two trucks blocked the road and were sitting back-to-back, one on the uphill side, one on the downhill. It was a very steep section there, and we’d have to try to drive across the road, at a right angle to its direction of travel, in order to squeeze between the back ends of both trucks. It looked too narrow to me. Worse, we would be traveling across the hillside, over a slippery carpet of gore.
The truck drivers stamped around in the foliage and found an area where Garry could back up to get in position. A very large crowd had gathered to watch the show.
“You’ll never make it,” one man called.
Another bet we would. Money began to change hands in the light of burning branches. Garry took it pretty fast, afraid that the truck might begin to slide where the sheep guts were thickest.
We were through in twenty seconds. There were three inches to spare on my side and two on Garry’s. The truck drivers cheered: loud whistles and shouts in the jungle night.
WE WERE IN LOWLANDS. After sixteen hard hours at the wheel, Garry crawled into the back and tried to sleep. I was driving a fine, straight asphalt road that looked red in the headlights.
We stopped for diesel not far from the border. We wouldn’t be able to buy any in Nicaragua, where it was rationed.
Garry looked terrible.
“You know what we could do,” I said. “We could market this drive as a board game. Shake the dice to see if you can get to the border on time. Pick cards that give you all sorts of contradictory information. Drive over the Mountain of Death, dodge the Costa Rican drug police, and slide through sheep guts in order to, ta-da, enter the war zone.”
“I’m sick,” Garry said. “I have a fever.”
I felt his forehead. He was a little hot but his eyes were fever bright.
“You have a little fever,” I said.
“I wonder if it’s malaria?”
“No. It’s not malaria,” I said.
“I feel strange. Bad.”
He spoke in a strained whisper and his eyes were burning, wild things trappe
d inside his head. They moved in a way that had no relation to anything he was saying.
WE ARRIVED at the border early and had to wait two hours until it opened at eight. I spoke with some truck drivers who said that things were very good through Nicaragua. People all over were celebrating the Arias peace plan. It was a fine time to drive through Central America, a very good time, the best.
Garry couldn’t talk with anyone. He was walking back and forth, in the growing tropical heat, propelled by some internal demons that he wouldn’t tell me about.
A grandmotherly Costa Rican lady placed herself in front of him and struck up a conversation. I saw her try to give him something, but he waved her off.
Back at the truck, he told me what had happened.
“This lady,” he said, “had the world’s kindest face. Did you see her?”
“Yeah. She did have a kind face.”
“She asked what we were doing and I told her. Well, she looked at me. I’m standing there, I haven’t changed my shirt since Panama, I’m sick, I can’t talk. She figures I need money. She tries to give me a five-dollar bill. It was all crumpled up in her hand.”
Garry was very shaky and his eyes glistened.
“Jesus,” he said.
The small act of kindness had hit him like a blow and he was still reeling from it.
“I thanked her,” he said. “I told her I didn’t need any money and showed her pictures of my kids. It was all I could think of to do.”
He ran his hand through his hair and said, “The basket case shows pictures of his family.”
Garry looked north, into Nicaragua.
“Goddamn it,” he said.
NICARAGUA
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October 14, 1987
GARRY’S ANTIPATHY toward Nicaragua and Nicaraguans was puzzling. Our reconnaissance trip to Managua had been difficult, to be sure. The city, a graceless lowland steambath that is all of fifty feet above sea level, was a mosaic of empty lots and rubble piles interspersed, now and again, by habitations and office buildings. It was hard to get around. Managua had been decimated in the earthquake of 1972 and had never been rebuilt, though ruling General Anastasio Somoza and his family profited hugely from relief efforts.