by Rainn Wilson
He tells of listening to one of the moon landings on the radio, and how when they translated to the tribesmen that there were men actually walking on the moon, the men started pointing at the moon and laughing at the ridiculousness of that concept.
Once, my dad tells me, a Miskito man came up to him and said to him with confused disbelief, “Mr. Bob. Is it true that in America there is actually a man who doesn’t believe in GOD?!”
My dad responded that there was indeed a person like that and the man walked away shaking his head incredulously.
Because I was so young, my memories pop like Technicolor acid-dream postcards, spliced and pasted together, flickering in a mental strobe light.
I remember Kristin getting caught in quicksand on the muddy beach and being pulled out of the sinkhole by a guy with a tree branch.
I remember a friend of ours emerging from the ocean after a swim. He was screaming and falling to his knees, covered in jellyfish stings.
I remember running and flying kites on the hilltop with the local kids, all of them barefoot, me in giant rubber boots that cheese-grated my ankle bones.
I remember “Devil Day,” the local equivalent of Halloween, when terrifying men dressed as devils in outfits adorned with wings ran around with fireworks. They would chase kids, pick them up, and scare the holy bejeezus out of them by tickling them and screaming in their faces. I was so horrified that this would happen to me that I refused to go outside. (I’m pretty sure this was the work of the Catholic Church, turning a fun pagan festival into a helpful, traumatic reminder of the evils of Satan.)
I remember bulls being driven and herded up and down the mud streets by Nicaraguan cowboys who lived in the jungle.
I remember the best oatmeal ever made, served up by our cook, Antonia, and the taste of fresh shrimp and fried plantains.
But what I remember most about Nicaragua is the critters. Creatures abound in the muddy tropics. We had a tremendous variety of pets and animals and pests sprawling every which way around our tropical compound.
Here’s a compendium of my history with the varmints of Nicaragua:
Mosquito
I remember awakening every morning to a fog of whining mosquitoes clamoring around the mosquito netting that surrounded my bed. I’m talking hundreds of the things. And they were quick too. Not the fat, lazy, drolling mosquito DC-10s of North America. No, these were the malaria-bearing, dive-bombing, demon-hummingbird mosquitoes of the Caribbean swamps. Fierce, bloodlust-filled insect TIE fighters. I would spend about an hour after waking trying to kill each one of them by slapping them through the netting and watching them fall, curled and dry, to their tiny deaths. Who needed video games?
My dad actually caught malaria from one of the buggers and almost died after recurring bouts of 103-degree tropical fevers and shaking and cold sweats and delusions. I remember him on his sickbed and remember trying to piece together in my four- or five-year-old brain that he had gotten this terrible illness from one of those little annoying insects that I slapped silly every morning. It just didn’t add up. He’s fine, by the way. He didn’t die. In fact, he’s probably reading this right now. Hi, Dad!
Dog
We had a stray dog named Hieronymus Bosch. You know, the insane, postapocalyptic fifteenth-century Flemish painter obsessed with the nine circles of hell? He looked exactly like you’d think a stray mutt eating garbage off the streets of an impoverished port city would look like. I’m betting that to this day we are the only people in the history of Central America who have ever or will ever own a dog named Hieronymus Bosch.
Parrot
Besides the flocks of actual jungle parrots that would cackle and zoom about the swampy, jungle-y trees, we had a “pet” parrot named Jose who would only say one word: Jose. Over and over and over again. “Jose!” “Jose!” It got pretty annoying. Even for a four-year-old. “Rrrawk! Jose!” He spent most of his time with a sheet over his cage, as that would effectively shut him up. I would feed him bananas that grew on the giant green banana trees in our backyard and would try to get him to say “Hola” or “Rainn” or “Buenos días.” Anything other than “Jose.” To no avail. Now that I think about it, maybe his name wasn’t Jose, but his previous owner might have been named Jose. Or maybe he was a racist parrot and just called everybody Jose in a kind of contempt for all things Latin.
Sloth
We had a pet sloth named Andrew. Sloths are bizarre. They are SUPER slow and nocturnal. (Like a lot of my Midwestern relatives, now that I come to think of it.) Andrew was kept in a cage on our front porch. Sloths, if you don’t know this, are ridiculously strong, and EVERY night, Andrew would slowly, slowly, slowly bend the bars of his cage, make his way out, and seek food or whatever the hell he would seek on his lugubrious nightly escape. Every morning we would gaze at the bent bars on the top of the cage and scout around for our lethargic escapee. They are so incredibly slow that he would only get about thirty feet away, max. We would find him in a banana bush or a palm tree or a tropical shrub, having fallen asleep with a twig or a leaf in his mouth. We would then return him to his cage, bend the bars back into place, and start the whole nightly Sartre-ian exercise over again.
Oyster
My dad didn’t really know what he’d do for work when he got to Nicaragua, but when he saw the endless oyster beds lying off the coast he got a brilliant idea: Put those suckers into jars and send ’em up to the big city for cash, baby, yeah! He employed several dozen Miskito workers and even had a profit-sharing program for them. This worked out well for several years, but he got tired of bribing all the corrupt Nicaraguan officials, and his enterprise shut down after about a billion oysters and a couple thousand dollars.
Amoeba
Amoebas are the jellyfish-like microscopic creatures you study in seventh-grade biology. They blurb around, sucking up and surrounding things like in the fifties horror movie The Blob. Apparently they sometimes lodge in your gut and make you crazy sick. This is called amoebic dysentery. Apparently it comes with jet-stream diarrhea. And I got it. I get heartsick just thinking about how hard that must have been for little Rainn, lying limp in his humid mosquito-encrusted bed, shooting an occasional fire-hose spray of diarrhea out of his little ass-trumpet with amoebas gurgling around in his innards, devouring things.
Monkey
The neighbors had a monkey named Chacho. He rode on their dog’s back. He would swing over to our house all the time and eat our sugar cubes, beg for food, and poop in our kitchen. He was pesky and my parents hated him and would shoo him out the window by banging saucepans.
Outhouse Vermin
We didn’t have indoor plumbing. We had a rickety outhouse. And the poo-and-pee hole was filled with ridiculous amounts of creatures that would scatter when you flashed your flashlight down there: lizards, spiders, roaches, and albino frogs. Yes, that’s right. White, cave-dwelling frogs that had never seen the light of day and habitated in our poop. Where the hell did those things come from? How did they find our outhouse? Were they in every outhouse in Nicaragua? Unknown. White poo frogs. Think about it. Sketch one in the margin of this book!
Boar
There were many Indian members of the Baha’i Faith up the Mosquito Coast in a place called Monkey Point, and we would often visit them in boats. You could take a little motorboat up the coastline, close to shore, which was very long and grueling, or a big fishing boat, which was less long and grueling. Kristin and I took the fishing boat and got terrifically seasick. If you’ve ever gotten seasick before, you’ll know it’s like an inescapable torture of constant nausea where you can’t move without puking and your head throbs mercilessly. Like watching Dancing with the Stars.
On one of these visits the Indians shot a boar with a .22 rifle for a big feast. They were very friendly and had a fascinating culture. Except for the .22, they were extremely primitive, and the children loved the gifts we would bring them of balloons and little toys and
sparklers. They would gather around these miraculous objects and their brains would explode in delight. I remember there were these giant glowing beetles that would light up and fly around like lightning bugs. The Miskito children would tie a string around their necks, and the beetles would float aloft, being held by the strings, buzzing and leaving a trail of light in the air. Us gringos would gather around these miraculous objects and our brains would explode in delight.
We all got our thing.
I remember that the banana-leaf-and-plank huts had dirt floors, but the women of the village would spend a lot of time sweeping them with a straw broom. This brought me no end of amusement as I thought it ridiculous to sweep dirt since there was only more dirt underneath. It still doesn’t completely make sense to me.
I’ve only had boar meat once in my life and it was when I was four or five, that feast night on the Mosquito Coast. I remember eating the roasted boar steak and it had a gross metallic taste to it. Turns out I had been given the piece with the bullet lodged in it. I think after crying I was given some oatmeal or something, and I went to bed in a hammock watching the giant, luminous beetles arc across the night sky.
Worm
My most vivid memory of my life in Nicaragua involves worms coming out of my butthole. If you’d had worms come out of your butthole, I’m sure that’d be a vivid memory for you too. I’m not exactly sure how I got the worms that eventually came out of my anuscus, but their exit couldn’t have been more memorable.
Apparently, at some point in time, my parents must have caught on to the fact that I had worms and had me take some medicine. The kind of intestinal parasite that I had was called the large roundworm. That’s an excellent description by whoever named said worm. It was large (like ten inches long), round, and definitely a worm.
(All animals should be named that way, now that I think about it. The elephant should be called the HUGE GRAY BIG-EARED TRUNK MAMMAL, for instance. The cougar could be called BIG TAN MOUNTAIN FELINE and the alligator the LONG SNAP-MOUTHED RIVER REPTILE.)
My parents did not warn me that I had taken deworming medication and what would happen once I did. So one day, Kristin and I were walking down the muddy street in Bluefields when I felt a curious sensation down around my little fart chimney.
All of a sudden, it felt like a snake was in my undies. I yelped and reached into my pants to pull out a ten-inch, white (round) worm, which thrashed around in the air quite violently. I threw the grotesque parasite onto the ground and a bunch of neighborhood kids witnessed this act and crowded around accordingly. My stepmom shouted, “¡Matalo!” or “Kill it!” and a kid brought out a shovel and Kristin stabbed the offending large roundworm over and over, slicing it into still-wiggling sections, which she buried in the ground.
The neighborhood kids looked at me like I was possessed by Satan and spitting demon worms from my pants. And in a way they were right.
This whole event happened all over again when we were living back in the States. This time I was fortunate enough to be sitting on a toilet, and as quickly as it emerged from its moist, dark kingdom it was flushed away into the mysterious sewer system of Olympia, Washington.
—
I often wonder how my identity was defined by my time in Central America. I suppose that underneath my white, suburban, gawky exterior there is a closet of hidden memories that includes monkeys and jungles and worms and glowing beetles. When I was in college and read One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (truly one of the greatest books ever written), a flood of memories came back to me and I felt an odd kinship with the Buendía family. I spoke fluent Spanish as a child that I forgot as soon as I had spent some time in the States and had watched umpteen episodes of The Munsters and eaten enough cheeseburgers and Slurpees to have Nicaragua recede like a distant fever dream. But throughout the course of growing up, I always identified with the people of Central America and have a deep heart-connection to that language and culture. As difficult as I’m sure it was, I’m grateful for the experience and will treasure the mystery, danger, and romance of living in such a remote, forgotten, loco place.
We left Nicaragua in 1971, when I was five years old. There were no decent schools there and my parents wanted to get me back to America for my education. Plus they were beyond broke and miserable.
The colorful, brief bursts of jungle-y memories that I have from that time truly entice me. Someday soon I want to go back to those swampy tropics with my dad and tromp around the old neighborhood, sample some oysters and plantains, visit the monkeys and sloths, and take a good look down a random outhouse toilet at night with a flashlight.
Chapter 3
MY SEVENTIES SHOW
—
We were poor, but we were unhappy.
I’m not exactly sure why, but my family moved to Olympia, Washington, when I was five years old. I looked a bit more normal by then, as my torso had stretched to better align with mi cabeza grande. While attending Garfield Elementary School on the west side of Olympia, I pretended to have a normal childhood.
My parents were not very good or very happy together, you see. Nice people both, they just didn’t click. For their entire fifteen-year marriage. I suppose, when you look back at my dad’s story, you see a man who was bereft and heartbroken, tending to an unfortunate-looking child in Central America. Here was an attractive fellow Baha’i, my stepmom, looking for love and seemingly finding it in the arms of a sweet, bespectacled bohemian with a giant, white son.
Not too long ago, I asked both Bob and Kristin when they knew it was a mistake for them to have gotten married. They both replied: “One year.” One year in, they knew their marriage was a terrible mistake and that they were a misfit match that would never really connect and know love. I think of their prolonged misery as they suffered it out until their inevitable divorce in 1984.
I think of the sadness of their souls, as my stepmom swept the porch of our house in Bluefields and as my dad oversaw his oyster harvest, both of them sighing and looking out onto the dramatic Nicaraguan sky in a separate shared moment, knowing in their heart of hearts that they did not belong together.
There was also a very strange issue at the center of this “lack of love” in their marriage and in our family. We were members of the Baha’i Faith, which professes love as the defining power of the universe, a force that can heal all wounds and is needed to unify and mend our ailing planet. And yet there was not a whole lot of that actual love to be found under our roof. This created a kind of crazy-making dichotomy in our household, where “love” was given a tremendous amount of lip service but wasn’t put into much tangible practice. For a child, it’s a peculiar kind of quandary to grow up in the midst of such desolate spiritual hypocrisy.
I remember awkward spaghetti dinners with halting conversations and that lonely longing in my chest to have a loving, laughing family. The kind of family we watched on all our favorite shows while eating Swanson TV dinners on folding trays. I remember feeling that something was just not right in this familial picture but being unable to put my finger on what exactly it was. Perhaps that’s why I’ve always been drawn to the “sad clown” roles, as it often became my task to liven things up in our dour house with jokes and goofing off. I was loved growing up—stories were read, fevers were tended to, art was made, prayers were said—but there was a bereft, alienated cloud over the three of us that’s palpable to me to this day.
So why did they stay together until I left for college in 1984? For me? For the “stick-it-out-ive-ness” surrounding marriage that they inherited from their parents’ generation? For their faith, which allows but greatly discourages divorce? For the tiny spark of real love that did exist between them that they hoped, through the fog of denial, would grow eventually into the fire of true companionship?
Who knows? All I can say, from personal experience, is that staying together “for the children” is a terrible idea. Don’t get me wron
g, jettisoning one’s marriage because times are tough or you’re too selfish or lazy to do some hard-ass work on your relationship is an even more grotesque idea, especially if there are children, but the kids of the world deserve parents who are living vital, connected, passionate lives, in partnership with a supportive mate.
—
Perhaps we should go back to my namesake, Rainer Maria Rilke, for some insights?
For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.
That’s the kicker, isn’t it? I have great empathy for anyone who struggles with this, this “love,” the most difficult of all tasks.
M. Scott Peck wrote the most beautiful definition of marriage I’ve ever read. His book The Road Less Traveled is known as “self-help” but it really is a spiritual/psychological treasure chest, and I highly recommend it.
Love is the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth. . . . Love is as love does. Love is an act of will—namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.
I’m inspired by the idea of a couple that choose to extend themselves for the spiritual growth of the other person. We CHOOSE to love, and I’m floored by the concept that love is both intention and action. Our challenge then is to do specific actions on a daily basis to nurture our partner’s spiritual growth.