Where I am

My place is in the middle, not so much boundary as mixing point, where country peters out and city starts to fill its many voids. In one direction The Clouds, a village called Las Nubes known for fine cheese and honest horses. The other to San José, sprawling seat of government, capital of Costa Rica.

Most mornings I am awake with street dogs, early and reticent, sniffing at mountain air laced with bus exhaust and baking bread, trying to decide which way to go.

When I go up, the road courts a river through farmland, past hundreds of dairy cows knee deep in emerald swell. I find a trout pond so full I can reach out and touch the fish, fingers sending spasms through the mass of slick muscle. It takes just the flick of my wrist to catch one with a bit of chicken grist and a hook on a string. I eat it, eyeball and all, a few minutes later while a smiling woman of about 70 scrubs the pan, sharpens her gutting knife.

Upwards still the pavement ends, a whole lot of mud and rock held together at certain points by flecking scabs of asphalt. Water takes the right-of-way, road unraveling into tangle of muddy skeins cut from forest and cloud. I have no idea which way is north, only that in profound confusion, I can always follow the water back down.

In the city water has a way of hiding, darting into dark tunnels, buried pipes. It leaves me scratching my head where I swear there used to be a river. But then, I guess everywhere used to be somewhere else.

The children’s museum was a jail. The national museum was an airport. The art museum a liquor factory. At a bar that used to be a radio station I watch the soccer team play the World Cup quarter-finals, this country’s first time to advance so far among superpowers of the sport.

On the barroom screen a distant cheering multitude seems divisible only by the megatron singling out really avid fans. People around me sing along to the national anthem with tears in their eyes. We all rally fiercely around the band of ideal men in white uniforms, the guys nobody thought could do it. We scream for their blood and sweat on a field built especially for that purpose. It's pretty weird, actually. As the zeal grips me, begins to remind me of something else, I think, "Well, at least Costa Rica doesn't have a standing army."

The game stalls to penalty kicks, the agonizing overtime of overtime. When the Dutch keeper blocks a goal, clinching victory for his team, the air goes out of this city like a popped balloon. But in a matter of seconds the barroom breaks into applause, incessant honking on the street.

Minutes, then hours, the cheers don´t stop. I start to wonder: “They know they lost, right?”

People dance in the city’s main thoroughfare, closed to traffic. Confetti rains down on us. A petite woman all in white hands me a flag to wave. I think she says “Welcome to Costa Rica,” but it’s hard to hear over the bleating of vuvuzelas.

-- 

reposted, more or less, here 

volcano=4, we/our/us=18

The distinction between earth and sky seems more negotiation than fact from atop Volcan Irazú this May morning. Clouds below us spread like plush white carpets all the way to the Caribbean on one side and the Pacific on the other. On a clearer day we could see two oceans at once, a staggering perspective unique to this place in Central America, the highest volcanic peak in Costa Rica. No matter. We left our superlatives in the car. Didn't bring a guidebook. Even with fog sniffing around like wind's unmannerly pet ghost we see a dense mosaic of rain forest, farmland, rivers and mountains.

Black sand directly underfoot. Eyes plummet down barren slopes, 1,000 feet to the bottom of Irazu's principal crater. We marvel: what made this monumental hole in the ground so lifeless also created the brilliant greens of the surrounding hills. Briefly tempted to test the alien ground, topography nebulous and inviting as the sky. Desire tempered by gravity slides and dire signage. We back away to rejoin other animals and plants boldly staking claim on the volcano. Scraggly tufts of grass thicken enough to host picnicking Ticos not far from the crater edge. Low shrubs make a daring comeback, then fierce little Myrtle trees post up. Man makes like a monkey in one, swinging from a limb and howling ew-ew-ew-oh-oh-oh while kid laughs and wife takes pictures on her phone.

Towers on the densely forested ridgelines above Irazu's principal crater are vital telecommunications sites for all of Costa Rica. Steel scarecrows painted up red and white. The volcano has erupted seven times since 1900, causing more than USD $150 million in damage. The latest major eruption began in 1963, the same day JFK came to San Jose.  In a brief speech to university students he said the word "free" a lot:  11 times. Said  "people" 10 times, "right" 8, "great" and "nation" 7 each. "We," "us" and "our" counted together = 30. No mention of "volcano" or the 20 inches of ash blanketing the city, choking rivers and flooding nearby valleys. The  eruption outlasted JFK by two years. When an American President returned to Costa Rica in 1968 the most used non grammatical word in his airport address was "share."

Of course this has nothing to do with anything. Not like "Nature of Magma Plumbing System," a recent and comprehensive assessment on Irazu's petrography, geochemistry and geobarometry, which concludes that two distinct magma chambers are "co-existing, evolving and  mixing" under the crater. The "eruptive style of Irazu" it concludes, is mainly controlled by magmatic gases and water, working through their differences with increasingly frequent catastrophic results for human property and life.

All this is beyond our expertise, which is general. But still a pride in our hubris begins to swell, pride that people compare this national park on top of an active volcano to the moon because people have been to the moon, pride in the pictures we take with our cell phones, in the over-worked metaphors and contrived conclusions we use to describe them, pride most of all in our ability to remain optimistic, to picnic on the edge of certain doom and to mimic monkeys so hilariously.

North of Irazu's principal crater, the rain forest literally draws a line in the sand, beyond which we must once again go under rather than over that which impedes us.

Pura vida

Nearly there, wherever that is. On the cusp of seasons in a room that gleams like a freshly scrubbed toilet bowl. Scoured in electric blue bedspread, single serving soap. Nothing so generous as a fan that works, so cruel as one that doesn't. Today is a generous one. No semi automatic weapons sighted since crossing the border into Costa Rica. Mere pistols. Cantaloupes for the people. Sipping mescal and reveling in that familiar feeling of almost having made it. 
Cheers!