by J T Kalnay
“Not even here? On the ocean? With me?” Shannon asks.
“Sharks. Every time we’re in the ocean I think of sharks.”
“So not even here,” Shannon says. “But I know what you mean. I have a feeling about the rain forest too. I feel like if I sit still for too long it will take back wherever I am sitting and reclaim me with it. So it makes me feel like I always have to be in motion here. I don’t feel like that in Ohio, or at Topsail. I can just sit. I can just be. I know where things are and how things are and how they’re going to be an hour and a week from now. But here it seems that even though you can predict the next tide exactly you can’t tell what the next minute or hour will hold. It feels like the jungle is just waiting for us to turn our back or to disregard it and then it will have us,” Shannon says.
Joe paddles gently with his left hand to point more towards where Shannon sits on her surfboard. He sees that her gaze is focused miles away in the mountains, over the unfinished hotels on the beach and the concertina wire that guards the beachfront houses. Over the rusted tin roofs of the cinder block shanties in which the majority of the locals live. Over the small palm trees that rise out of the black sand and over the poison Manzanita trees and their swarms of termites. He sees her in profile, sitting quietly, but sitting on a surfboard that is alive with the receding tide of the ocean.
He gently sculls one hand, then the other, keeping his surfboard oriented so he can see both her and the sunrise. He squints his eyes to refocus and everything but Shannon and the thin strip of beach goes out of focus. Everything but her and the diffuse sunlight disappears.
He will keep this vision of her in his mind forever.
Joe
I am seated in a rope seat that hangs from the central beam in the open sided yoga building. It is a roof supported by six posts and three beams. It has a dark hardwood floor with tiny gaps through which legions of black ants emerge to devour a scrap of food that a yogi has left behind. The ants emerge, collect pieces of food larger than their own bodies, and then disappear back through the gap in the slat.
The roof is an orange brown corrugated tin roof. The pelting rain pings and tings in an ever changing rising and falling symphony. Several pillows are piled in the center where the rain cannot reach them. Flame red flowers ring the three or four feet of manicured green lawn that surrounds the yoga platform. A single fruit tree that is laden with a green fruit that I cannot identify sits directly west, between the yoga place and the ocean. My gaze is fixed on the fruit, where before the rain a parade of brightly colored hummingbirds darted in impossible paths in and out of the tree, hovering over and all around the pinkish white flowers on the fruit tree. The hummingbirds are territorial and will chase away the yellow butterflies that try to share the nectar from the fruit tree.
My back and shoulders are tired from surfing, and more tired from yoga. Nine of the ten yoga poses were pure relief, but the down dog was agony, my arms and shoulder were already exhausted from surfing. Which is why I am still here, waiting for the massage therapist who will rub my shoulders and back and hopefully put me back together so that I can surf tomorrow and so that I can make love with Shannon tomorrow. She is insatiable here and I am happy to accommodate, no matter what the physical toll.
I am older than her, a decade older, and she has worn me out even more this week than she did last year. My added fitness has not saved me. If she ever discovers the Kama Sutra I will be in real trouble. I need to get even more fit, or I will have a heart attack while making love with her. But what a way to go.
Shannon
My lover is gone from Costa Rica for another year. I have stayed behind to buy a house and to move into my new house. He doesn’t need to know. I barely need to know that I am buying this house.
My new house is ten miles from Salvaro’s camp and is in the same little collection of houses where his mother still lives. It is away from Jaco, towards Hermosa, on the beach side of the road, but not on the beach. There is a two hundred yard trail through the ocean side forest to the black sands of a tiny cove where three or four small fishing boats bob on the swells and tug on their anchor ropes as the tides ebb and flow.
These are working boats, not the gleaming forty five foot Hatteras and Boston Whalers for the sports fisherman. These boats belong to Salvaro’s people who fish for the tourists’ dinners and for their livelihood. I have figured out how Salvaro decides to which restaurant he will guide his guests on any given day. It depends on which fish have been caught and to which restaurant they have been delivered. He looks after his family of fishermen while he looks after his guests.
There is another American who has purchased a small house in this area. Another man who, like me, has connected with surfing and with the Pacific and with this place and who visits for a few weeks here and there but likes to have his own place. He likes to sketch the plants in the rain forest.
Salvaro’s people care for his house like they will care for mine. I think that Salvaro only guides certain people to these houses near his family. I thank him for having guided me here. His mother is lovely and peaceful. It is no mystery from where his respect for the ocean and for this place began. And it is no mystery where his quiet listening ways were born.
After I close the deal on the house and receive the keys, I move my two suitcases from Salvaro’s camp to my house. A few small pieces of furniture, a bed, a table, a few chairs, a couch, a hammock and two hanging chairs are being delivered later today. Salvaro has helped me arrange it all. He won’t accept a tip or anything from me. But he will let me buy him dinner.
We go to a different restaurant, a restaurant for locals. I get some looks from the locals as I walk in, but the looks are quickly put away as Salvaro greets each of the locals by name and introduces me as “his friend, his wife’s friend, and his mother’s guest.” Apparently this is code for “she’s okay” and “I’m not fucking her.” The territorial looks turn to Costa Rican smiles.
We have mango salsa, ceviche, and fresh tuna. It is simple, fresh, and delicious.
“You surf with us tomorrow?” Salvaro asks.
“My camp days are up,” I say.
“So you come surf as my friend. Maybe you talk to some of the women, talk to them about the waves and about balance.”
“Sure,” I say.
“Good. Is better for you to surf in a group. Is good for the women to see a woman who surfs so well. Who is part of the ocean. And is good for you to surf every day you can. The ocean knows when you leave it, even for a little while.”
My days gain a regularity and before I know it a few days have turned into two weeks. I have breakfast with Salvaro’s mother either before or after the morning low tide. She makes breakfast for me and for the men who will go fishing. Like me they head out on the low tide. Many of them speak only Spanish, so my Spanish is improving rapidly, some days I speak only Spanish.
I ride my new bicycle the few miles down to Playa Jaco, and thankfully only have to go about one of those miles on the road. I am still not used to the road. There is everything from over-loaded eighteen wheelers to cyclists to men on horseback. And Salvaro is right, someone dies nearly every day on the coast road. Someone dies somewhere in the twenty miles between where the new road to San Jose joins the coast road and Hermosa. Sometimes in groups when cars and trucks collide head on. Sometimes singly when a cyclist or walker is hit. But always someone. If there was any other way between my home and the beach I would take it. But there is no other way. I am considering sponsoring a bicycle path that parallels the road between Hermosa and Jaco. I can see that it would employ a hundred workers and would make the trip between the two towns much safer.
After turning off the coast road I pass by a school where boys and girls dressed in pressed and starched uniforms sit in open air classrooms. The school is surrounded by a ten foot tall chain link fence with concertina wire on top. The entrance has two guards. Many children are dropped off and picked up at the front gate, a few arrive on foot, and
only a few on the bus. Burnt out cars litter the field on one side of the school. An open field that people have warned me away from because of poisonous snakes lies on the other. The jungle is in back, and the road is in front. This school is quiet and so unlike the big brick buildings in Ohio that I wonder how anyone can learn here. Somehow my mind thinks that schools require red bricks and sprawling parking lots and football stadiums and tracks. This school has no swings, no soccer field, just open air classes and children in uniforms and armed guards at the single gate.
Perhaps in coming years I will rent a car, or a small truck, so that I will not be such a target as I am while I am on my new bicycle. If I get a car it will take time to get used to the full serve gas station where half a dozen uniformed workers descend on every vehicle that stops in to buy gas. Unlike Ohio the price of gas is not posted. But there is full service, where windows are washed, oil is checked and topped off, tire pressure is checked and replenished, and wipers are cleaned all while the mysteriously priced gas is pumped. I will have to remember to get out of my car to pump my own gas when I return to the States.
My bicycle is perfect for the steep hills on the other side of the road. The steep hills that rise up into the rain forest and then just end. By the time I have ridden up I am as wet as if I was in the ocean. Sometimes I feel like I am swimming up those hills. Humidity is not the correct word and I have not yet figured out the correct word. Tropical isn’t good enough, and “in the rain forest” only has meaning to people who have experienced this. I will continue to think about the right word.
After surfing the low tide in the morning I clean up and then sit in the hammock or the rope chairs and think. Sometimes about my research, sometimes about what “one billion” means, but mostly about other things. From the corner of my left eye I see the ocean framed by the heights that are more than hills but not quite mountains. I feel the air scrubbed clean by the afternoon showers that have opened the hibiscus that have invited in the hummingbirds. Pairs of toucans fly by. So too do pairs of parrots and other birds I cannot name. Before the rain has a smell, the rain itself has a smell and after the rain has a smell. But how do you describe the smell of the rain, or of its absence?
When the electricity is on I work on my computer and review data. I plan meetings and research for when I return. I even email my sister to let her know about my extended stay. The electricity is only on for a few hours a day, and this isn’t generally a problem. With the onset of the rainy season, which the locals refer to as ‘the green season’, and which includes the onset of the thunder and lightning season, the electricity has been on less frequently. Again this generally isn’t a problem because there do not seem to be many pressing problems in Costa Rica. Everything seems to be able to wait until the conditions, like electricity, are appropriate.
I receive an email from my sister.
“You are full of surprises,” she writes.
“Yes,” I answer. These are short emails. Just enough to let her know I am alive and well and returning shortly.
It is my last night in my new home. I return to Cleveland by way of San Jose and Houston tomorrow. I will ride with two campers that Salvaro’s driver is taking to the airport. Salvaro joins us for breakfast before the surfing and before I leave. We gather buckets of mangoes that have fallen in the strong breeze that blew last night. Salvaro picks the four or five least damaged mangoes and pours the rest into a pile near the road. The men who constantly walk up and down the road with machetes to keep the jungle off the road will take the mangoes home to their families, or eat them while they break from their work.
“I’ll see you next year?” I say.
“Is this how it is with Joe?” Salvaro asks.
“What do you mean?”
“You exist for me for three weeks while you are here. And then you are not supposed to exist for me until next year?” Salvaro asks.
“You’re a married man. An honorable man. We’re friends. We surf. We talk with your mother.”
“And then you go home and leave a hole where you were while you were here,” Salvaro says. “That’s how it is for me. Even though I am married and am in love with my wife and not in love with you. But that’s the way it is. There is a hole where you were.”
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“Don’t be. It’s not your fault. It’s mine. You can’t help being who you are or the way you are. And I can’t help liking you like I do.”
“Why do you like me?” I ask.
“Because you love the ocean, and you love my home. You talk to me like a friend and you talk to my mother with respect. You absorb this place with every breath you take. Because while you are here there is only here and the waves and the rain forest and the rain. There is nothing else. And when I am with you I feel the same thing. Like the entire world shrinks down to you and me and the waves and our walks.”
“That’s a good answer,” I say.
“Why do you like me? When you know I am married and will never stray?”
“I like you because you are the type of man who will never stray, from his wife, from his lover, from his friend, or from what he loves. You talk to your mother with respect. I feel like you are my friend and that as long as I respect our friendship you will always be my friend. That’s why I like you,” I say.
“Also a good answer,” Salvaro says.
Shannon
It is our eighth January at my beach house. Joe and I are sitting together over coffee on my upper deck, out of the wind, letting the weak sun warm us as best it can. The hot coffee helps, as do the layers we have donned after our morning run and morning lovemaking.
The ocean is choppy and grey, with occasional whitecaps erupting up and then being blown over. The beach is deserted. The breeze has whisked away the footprints we made this morning.
I have nothing else to do today, and nothing else that I want to do today. Nothing but sit here with Joe and look at the ocean and drink coffee and maybe read a little in between our time in bed. But Joe has been chatty today. So today I will chat with him. He asks so little of me, practically nothing. And even though he has not asked me to talk to him today he clearly wants to talk. Keeps looking over, seeing what I am doing, seeing whether I want to talk.
I decide to give him an opening.
“Can you remember all the lighthouses we’ve visited?” I ask.
“Yes,” he answers immediately, as though he were waiting for me to ask the question.
“We started on my fiftieth birthday, at the Cape Lookout lighthouse. We visited it after surfing. Our first lighthouse long weekend was on Oak Island.... I can see each of the lighthouses, and sometimes when I run I imagine that each of them or some of them have been transplanted to this beach and that you are in the top of each one waving at me as I run by.”
“I’m in the top waving? Waving you in?”
“You don’t wave me in while I’m running in the morning. But when I am running in my dreams at night you wave me in. Those are good dreams.”
“And after Oak Island?” I ask.
“Point Reyes was second, or third depending on how you count. It was next. We stayed in Half Moon Bay. In a hotel with a suite that had a balcony looking out over the infinite Pacific and up and down the cliffs of the coast. A stone balcony with its own stone fire pit. It’s the most amazing hotel I’ve ever stayed in.”
“The lighthouse sat up on a crumbly cliff, a hundred feet above the ocean, on a point that extended way out into the Gulf of Farrows.”
“Farralones,” I correct him.
“That’s it. The Gulf of the Farallones. It had a red metal roof and white walls. With glass on three side of the keeper’s house and on all sixteen sides of the lighthouse. The tower seemed so much taller than it was because I first saw it from the shore, along the path you had marked on the map. It seemed so tall as I climbed the concrete steps from the water up the cliff to the tower. But the tower itself was really only thirty or forty feet tall. I think the people waiting
for our private tour to end must have heard us. I think the four men who work there knew what we were doing.”
I look at him. So he remembers each of the ‘private tours’ I have arranged. I thought he might, and I thought those might be good memories for him. Apparently I was right.
“I remember when we came back on the last day, when we walked the three hundred steps from where the workers live down to the tower. We saw how it was bolted directly into the rock. I thought it had a solid foundation and it could withstand anything, but then just twenty feet away the cliff was fracturing and slowly surrendering to the ocean. I did some research and they figure it will take five thousand years for those twenty feet to erode. Five thousand years or one good earthquake.”
“I thought about us, and our foundation. I remember the tour guide explaining how Point Reyes was the windiest and foggiest point on the Pacific Coast, where the wind can blow fifty miles per hour for days and then how the fog can blanket everything for ten or twelve days without break. I thought how completely different the Pacific was there than in Costa Rica. How the cold water and the fog were so opposite to the warm water farther south. In a way I wished we could have flown straight from Point Reyes to Costa Rica and gone swimming or surfing and closed our eyes and imagined the wildness of the cliff above the Pacific, just visible in the fog. But I don’t indulge in fantasies that can’t come true,” he said.
I wait to see whether there is more to his last sentence. Because there was something there, a tone I’ve heard once or twice, but only once or twice, but that I have just heard again from my fifty nine year old lover. He will be sixty later this year. We have been together ten years.