by Teresa Bruce
Rain is pounding the streets, but the atmosphere is so intoxicating we will happily swim back to the camper later. If I were Nicaraguan, schoolchildren would know by heart the words of my ode to this meal and this city. My image of Nicaragua has been shaped by the bleak entries in my mother’s journal, but Gary and I are traveling through kindness and beauty she could not see. The poetry of Nicaragua is in Yanina’s strength and Rodolfo’s courage—and in León we find it splashed on every wall and spread on every table.
Chapter Twenty
BUTTERFLIES
Northern Nicaragua defiantly straddles a hump of mountains that slopes to the seas on either side. It has always been a breeding ground for revolutionaries; leaving León we drive through villages that seem like backdrops of a war movie long ago abandoned. We pass cooperative coffee farms and dilapidated Sandinista relocation camps with billboards touting the country’s impressive literacy rate.
We are trying to find a place called Miraflor. In the newest Nicaraguan guidebook it is billed as a nature reserve in the cool mountains with solar-powered bungalows. But when I stop to ask directions from farmworkers picking coffee beans, they have never heard of it. So it’s up to me to decide which of the turnoffs vaguely leading north to take, interpreting the book’s glowing descriptions by gut feel and crossed fingers. We lock the truck’s hubs into four-wheel drive, and the F-350 picks its way over roads made more of boulders than of gravel.
Two kids, in ragged clothes and bare feet, stand like sentries in the dusty distance. When they see us approaching, they run out into the road and fill a pothole with shovelfuls of dirt and hold out their hands for tips as we pass. When the dust clears and we can see through the side-view mirrors, the kids have stopped counting coins and are retrieving the dirt. There will be an even deeper pothole whenever the next truck comes along.
In three hours we travel twelve miles. Even butterflies keep pace, bobbing alongside our open windows. At least they won’t impale themselves in the truck’s front grill, extracted by Gary in what has become a morbid twilight ritual. While I enter notes about each day’s travels and epiphanies in my laptop, he collects the day’s smashings and compares them to images in the one hardcover book he insisted on bringing: an oversized, illustrated text called Butterflies of the World. Across the camper’s tiny kitchen table he begins to sketch, and before he puts his set of colored pencils back in its thin tin box, he makes notes of details like the temperature and elevation at each campsite. He is creating his own slide show, paying respects to those creatures who suffer for our progress.
We are making precious little of it today. The light is fading when we drive up to a group of villagers standing in the road and I hop out, hoping they will know the way to Miraflor. But even though they all speak Spanish the conversation is futile and one-sided.
“Isn’t there a phone number listed in the guidebook?” Gary asks me when I return. He digs out the satellite phone. “If you get someone from the resort on the line then maybe they can talk to one of these locals and get us pointed in the right direction.”
It is a good plan, but none of the men in the group will touch the phone. I try the only woman instead. She looks at me as though I have passed her a hand grenade. She stares at the phone in her palm as if deciding whether to fling it into the rocky field in front of us. Then she tentatively presses the keypad into her forehead. When nothing happens she turns it around the other way and presses it to her forehead again. I realize she has heard of phones but never used one. The men back away and she hands the phone to me without a word.
For only the second time on our trip, we have to camp on the side of the road. It is getting dark, and we begin a dialogue of rationalization.
“The last time we did this our steps got stolen,” I remind Gary. We’ve been substituting a twenty-pound tree stump ever since the little-devils incident in Todos Santos, Guatemala.
“If you want to drive back in the dark we can try,” he says. “But if I can’t see to dodge the potholes, the water tank might crack all the way.”
It would be crazy to continue; we can’t risk losing the tank. Without the ability to store and chlorinate our own water we will be tethered to towns, restaurants, and hotels for the rest of the journey. We are surrounded by fragrant mountain orchids, but I feel on edge, conspicuous. The Avion is bigger than every hut we’ve passed. In a country with a population of five million people there are fewer than three hundred thousand cars, let alone one-ton trucks with four-wheel drive. We’re glaringly wealthy North Americans in a place where the United States sabotaged a revolution.
“Babe, it’s been twenty-five years. They may not have phones, but I’m sure someone’s told them the war’s over,” Gary says.
Tonight his sketchbook entry reads, “80 degrees, 4,200 feet.” Next to “Location” he writes only, “Somewhere?” We lower the miniblinds of the Avion’s windows like it’s an ostrich trying to stick its head in the sand. There are footsteps and whispers around the camper, but I am too drained to go outside and shoo onlookers away. When the night cloaks the camper in comforting anonymity, we climb into bed and I reach for Gary. No one will hear us. There are no streetlights or glowing televisions, and the star-splattered sky is cavernous and endless. It is so quiet I can hear Gary’s quickening pulse, like the breeze fluttering through the stems of orchids.
And then, a single shot from a high-powered rifle splits the silence. There is nothing natural about that sound, no way for orchids and dirt roads to absorb its mechanical, threatening crack. It is close and intentional. We wait for another round but nothing comes; it is as if the ghosts of revolutions simply want to warn us they are watching. We are intruding in one of the most remote parts of the least populated country in all of Central America.
What seemed like a spontaneous detour twelve hours ago has turned a corner into reckless danger. Not a soul in the world knows where we are, including the two of us. Our bodies could decompose under fluttering clouds of butterflies before our absence would even be noticed, leaving my parents with nothing to bury next to my brother.
It takes me a full minute to process the fact that this is the second time guns have fired over our heads. But this time I am consumed more by remorse than the primal fear that gripped me by the guts in Mexico. I am clinging to the man I love instead of digging through a stack of paperbacks, searching for a weapon. My instincts have changed from reactionary to resigned.
This time, I can’t imagine gripping that cold steel weapon in my hands. It would steal Nicaragua from me, and it is better simply to spend the night awake.
Chapter Twenty-One
INNOCENCE
I am filled with Nicaragua’s earnest verse, toughened by its lopsided struggles, frustrated by its secrets. We leave this country of warriors and poets never knowing if the bucolic-sounding respite of Miraflor even exists. It is only when we stop at a lodge just across the border in northern Costa Rica called Hacienda Inocentes that my shoulders relax and my jaw unclenches. It’s a base camp, occupied mostly by visiting biologists, in the shadow of a volcano. Scientists gather around us to watch, as curious as if an Asian one-horned rhino had wandered into their midst, while we back up the camper to a trellis of night-blooming dragon-fruit flowers and a glistening blue swimming pool.
“Whatever they charge per night I’ll pay double,” Gary says.
I’m not certain I will ever want to leave. After Nicaragua’s relentless tension and poverty resulting from decades of civil wars, Costa Rica seems almost obscenely tranquil. Instead of guidebook warnings to avoid camping, there is an embarrassment of options. More than 25 percent of Costa Rica’s land mass is protected in national parks and preserves, a bigger commitment to conservation than that found in any other country on earth.
Gliding through cool, chlorinated water as the sun rises the next morning, I can’t fathom why my parents are trying to build a tourist resort on an almost inaccessible, impoverished Nicaraguan island instead of in the primeval paradise t
hat is its southern neighbor. In the course of one morning walk we are:
1. treated to the flutterings of giant blue butterflies called Morpho peleides;
2. followed by chattering orange spider monkeys through refreshingly cool jungle canopy; and
3. guided back to the hacienda pool by the calls of a pair of chestnut-mandibled toucans nesting in a guanacaste tree.
After a dinner served on a veranda with tropical hardwood floors and views of Mount Orosi in the setting sun, we sleep with the camper doors wide open. But this country has not always been as pure and blameless as the name of our first stopover implies. The United States–backed Contra rebels used a drug-smuggling airstrip near here to launch attacks against Sandinista forces in southern Nicaragua. Its discovery was one of the smoking guns in the Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan years. But the Costa Rican government claimed no knowledge of the airstrip, somehow not noticing the rumble of planes in almost nightly takeoffs between volcanoes.
It would feel disloyal to the struggling country to our north not to try to find the airstrip. We stock up on fresh panadería rolls and Costa Rica’s national beer, Imperial, and head deeper into the Guanacaste Península. My teeth grate at every police checkpoint, but instead of bribes we are asked only for verification of insurance and if we need help with directions.
We do, actually, because the airstrip we are searching for is not on official maps. The closest village is one I can’t pronounce, Cuajiniquil, where the dirt road turns into a series of river crossings. The first one is shallow enough to cross with four-wheel drive, and it is easy to imagine supply convoys fording it under cover of darkness. A few miles farther and we come to evidence we are on the right path: an abandoned military police academy that was once a CIA training camp.
“You can’t convince me no one knew what was going on here,” Gary says. “They just looked the other way.”
But in another few miles the dirt road washes out again, and this crossing is one that would certainly turn back curious villagers with no transportation options other than horseback or motorcycle. Gary wades out to test the depth and comes back wet to the waist. The truck would flood. If we are meant to find proof of our country’s secret sabotage we will have to swim for it.
Gary holds his camera high above his head with one hand, like a war photographer in the Vietnam jungle. I am in charge of keeping the truck keys dry. The water is viscous with sediment but cool against the skin, and we scramble up the opposite bank with shoes squelching river goo and clothes plastered to our bodies. The canopy narrows into an arch overhead, and it is sauna steamy and sweat-lodge dark. That something sinister and secret played out here is not hard to fathom.
In another thousand meters we notice light filtering through the jungle to our left.
It is a clearing, overgrown but uniformly lower than the surrounding vegetation. I let Gary’s body knock aside spiderwebs and clumps of willowy bamboo and follow him into the opening. The sun is so bright it takes a second for my eyes to adjust. We are at the edge of what was once a six-thousand-foot runway, easily capable of landing C-130s.
It feels uncomfortably complicit, two unaffected Americans standing out in the open of an ugly, forgotten war. It’s as if the jungle is trying to cover up the evidence and render what happened here irrelevant in the grander scheme of natural splendor. From the air, only the runway’s shape would give it away: a dead-straight scar slicing through the remote fringes of what is now a national park.
The outdoor showers at the Santa Rosa National Park campground are a perfect way to wash away the remnants of a day filled with muddy truth. By the time we arrive it is too dark to see the howler monkeys in the branches above us, but they are close enough that their hoots and grunts seem personal, even judgmental. It makes me nervous.
“Gary, is it true the males will piss on you if they think you’re a threat?”
The monkeys hush, as if they’re listening for his answer.
“Only if they don’t have any shit handy to throw.”
We wrap our sunburned, naked bodies in towels and dart back to the camper by flashlight.
FEBRUARY 14, 1974
What a trip. Had to ford two streams. Thought it might be deserted beach—
Hah—a real tourist trap
My mother’s journal is like a checklist challenging us to measure up. We’ve already crossed off river fording, but we haven’t camped at a beach since Mexico, so we set out the next morning to find one. Within hours we are as disappointed as my mother was. I’m not sure what she meant by “tourist trap,” but today the deserted beaches are off limits to tourists. They’re part of giant resort developments that have turned the northern Costa Rican coast into a gated expat colony of rich Americans.
It is a bumpy day’s drive south before we find a beach with public access. It is packed with surfers, and we park the camper next to the barbed-wire-topped wall of an overpriced hotel. After a few hours of watching the waves we return to find the Ford’s passenger door pried open and my wallet stolen from the front seat where I had idiotically left it in plain sight. At least the Avion stood its ground. The screened window is slashed but the thieves didn’t make it past the camper’s old-school series of dead bolts. Still, it’s the first break-in of the entire trip and a bleak welcome back to “civilization.”
Even more disturbing is how quickly I revert to my type A, need-to-feel-in-control personality. All it takes is one call on the satellite phone to my aunt back in Oregon and my credit cards are deactivated, but I still insist on filing a police report for the stolen cash. It is Sunday and I should be grateful that a cop, in shorts and a soccer shirt, even opens the door to the un-air-conditioned, one-room Matalpo police station. But instead I’m irrationally irritated that he just adds our form to an overstuffed three-ring binder of thefts and break-ins. There isn’t even funding for a computer, yet somehow I expect round-the-clock patrols and signs warning visitors of the danger. I demand an insurance form. We’ve been pulled over at every town in Costa Rica and asked to produce proof of the insurance we had to buy at the border, and I’m determined to get my money’s worth. The cop hands over a photocopied form to fill out and tells me the nearest city with a fax machine is Liberia, halfway back to Nicaragua.
I can’t let it go, and that night I’m both indignant and jittery. It seems like a lifetime ago that we slept with the door of the camper wide open just to smell the night-blooming dragon-fruit flowers of Hacienda Inocentes.
“What if they come back at night and try to finish the job?”
Gary groans but agrees to set the truck’s alarm just in case. I have accounted for everything but the fact that two restless bodies lying directly over the cab create more movement than accomplished thieves. I roll over to get a sip of water and set off the alarm. It is earsplitting punishment for my paranoia, and I find it impossible to fall back asleep. Even the sound of tree branches scraping against the camper’s roof unnerves me, and Gary climbs on top of the Avion in the middle of the night to break them off. Crawling back into bed, he doesn’t have to say a word. I know I’m being unreasonable, but a few months on the road has not yet taught me to accept setbacks with equanimity.
The truck door’s damage means that we will have to get repairs at the Ford dealership in the capital. On the drive to San José, we cross a bridge controlled by a troop of male howler monkeys. They balance along the cement railing on leathery buttocks, legs splayed wide enough to allow them to stroke their oversized testicles as we pass. Costa Rica’s lushness seems a tad too lurid now, and I am relieved when we finally pull into a run-down, American-owned RV campground in a suburb called Belén. There’s even a mall within walking distance, and I file the insurance claim that a more sanguine traveler would admit is ridiculous.
It has been a week since we’ve had Internet access, and opening e-mail is an unexpected attitude check. When we skim through news from Washington, DC, the exhibitionist monkeys of the Costa Rican countryside seem less vulgar by
comparison. We are missing scandals, disasters, protests, and retaliations more consequential than anything that has happened to us on the road. But instead of my usual visceral reactions, I let myself feel the gratitude of distance. This trip is a chance to loosen the grip of outrage, and I will not rob myself again.
The parents of my best friend in high school have sent us the name and phone number of a foreign exchange student they once hosted from San José.
“We took in Arnoldo long after you girls went away to college. Look him up!” the e-mail urges.
I almost delete the message; I don’t know Arnoldo or whether we will have anything in common other than brief teenage sojourns in Hillsboro, Oregon. But then I think of Ernesto and Yolanda and Rodolfo and Yanina and how much I would have missed if my parents hadn’t wandered into their lives, however briefly. I cut and paste Arnoldo’s address and send him an e-mail.
The next day, he picks us up at the Belén RV Park in a black SUV with tinted windows. Arnoldo has transformed from a shy high school exchange student to a Latin recording star with a hit CD. The liner notes are filled with smoldering, moody portraits, but in person he is teddy-bear cheerful and cheek-pinching cute.
He is married to the Costa Rican equivalent of a young Kelly Ripa. Mariamalia is seven months pregnant with twins and on maternity leave from her television show. She is craving Lebanese food and gracious enough to let two complete strangers tag along. They take us on a circuitous route through Escazú, their trendy, upscale neighborhood, the Beverly Hills of San José, only more historic. Exquisite colonial churches and leafy parks are connected by streets barely wide enough for their SUV.
“In Escazú they say all the women are witches.” Mariamalia winks in the rearview mirror as we wait behind a horse-drawn cart filled with necklaces of dried onions. “My grandmother, my mother, even me—you never know.”