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El Gringo Feo Travel Bob

What happened to my howler wakeup call?

(To read El Gringo Feo’s Costa Rica Diary from the beginning, start here.)

Tuesday, August 21

A coatimundi makes his way past the Treehouse while foraging for food.
A coatimundi makes his way past the Treehouse while foraging for food.

For the second morning in a row, there was no howler monkey party outside my window as day broke. Yesterday, I was sleep-deprived and thankful for the relative silence. But today I miss the little buggers. I’m not even hearing them in the distance. They must have moved on in search of food. I suspect they cycle through a wide territory …

I thought I caught a quick glimpse of a white-faced capuchin monkey, but upon further review I’m pretty sure it was actually a coatimundi. Later, as I was reading Poilu on the deck of the Treehouse, a band of them showed up, leading me to believe my earlier capuchin sighting was more wishful thinking that actual fact. The coatimundi does have a vaguely monkey tail, and one of them ventured close enough to me for a photo opportunity (see above). He was casually foraging for tasty fruits, much of which gets tossed down from birds who take a single bite and move on. Sydney, our umbrella cockatoo, behaves in this manner. It’s a very efficient way for nature to scatter seeds …

As I write, a rain of fruit is falling around me, some of it clanging off the metal roof, as the jungle birds eat breakfast with little regard for the mess they’re making.

Remember that smack I was talking about the dearth of mosquitos here?

Not so fast. One of Jeff’s friends warned me there are biting bugs on the beach, and they’re very stealth. You don’t realize you’ve been assaulted until it’s too late.

There are some here at PurUvita, too, though it’s still not as bad as my front porch in Ohio. Regardless, I’ve reconciled with Deet, at least in some circumstances.

I spent yesterday morning watching boats full of tourists head out toward the Whale’s Tail at high tide, presumably on their way to watch the whales. From my perch atop PurUvita, they looked like tiny waterbugs, discernible primarily through their wakes. Is that a rogue wave? No. It’s attached to that little dot, er boat, pushing out into the Pacific. Another item for my to-do list.

Strange, delicate little wasp-type insects were ducking in and out of a tubular hive in one of the logs that forms a supporting timber for the shack. They chose a knot in the wood to insert their nest. I assume they’ve burrowed into the wood. They don’t appear to be aggressive and were unperturbed when I came close to shoot a short video. I haven’t had time to ID them yet. There’s so much here that I don’t know. It’s humbling and invigorating.

I received a text yesterday from Lara telling me her father is going into hospice. I think she has mixed emotions. It’s obviously distressing to know your father is about to die. But there’s also a sense of relief. He was a difficult guy before dementia twisted his brain. It got worse from there, muddling him and prompting him to see schemes and conspiracies everywhere. But Lara said Daddy has taken a turn toward sweetness with the news. Perhaps he’s ready. Or perhaps it’s like that Flannery O’Connor Story, A Good Man is Hard to Find, one of my favorite O’Connor stories. After an escaped convict, the Misfit, encounters and then kills a sinful Christian grandmother, he says, “she would have been a good woman, if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” I always took that to be O’Connor saying some people need that immediate threat of extermination every day to truly see the light and find grace. Or as Ray Wylie Hubbard sang in Conversation with the Devil:

Some get spiritual, ’cause they see the light

And some, ’cause they feel the heat

Though my favorite stanza from that song is:

Now I said, “I’ve made some mistakes, but I’m not as bad as those guys

How can God do this to me or can’t He sympathize

He said, “You’re wrong about God being cruel and mean

Oh, God is the most loving thing that’s never been seen”

I said, “Hotshot tell me this which religion is the truest”

He said, “There all about the same

Buddha was not a Christian, but Jesus woulda made a good Buddhist”

The day closed, again, atop the hill, watching a delicious grenadine sunset sprawl across the sea, capped by banks of clouds. The humidity was palpable, and then a light rain fell as the light faded. No photo. Impossible to capture … so I’ll leave you with Ray Wylie.

https://youtu.be/pNOl6mMcwvM

Categories
El Gringo Feo Travel Bob

Portrait of the artist as a pasty middle-aged gringo

(To read El Gringo Feo’s Costa Rica Diary from the beginning, start here.)

Monday, August 20

Random flowers. BIrd of paradise, perhaps?
Random flowers. Birds of paradise, perhaps?

Last night was my first sleepless night here, but it was more due to sudden inspiration than anxious tossing and turning. I was up until almost 3 a.m. uploading all of my entries thus far to the site. And I still awoke at about 5 a.m. so there will be a bonk at some point today.

While I’m getting a solid 3G connection here, it bogs down massively during prime time when everyone has a straw in the bandwidth and is sucking voraciously. In the middle of the night, my 3G becomes relatively fast and smooth, prompting me to take advantage of my computer’s tethered connection to my iPhone.

A drenching rain fell for much of yesterday, which helped break the heat that had been mounting toward noon. It was incredibly soothing, and as much as I hate to use this cliché, it was Zen. I found it difficult to not just sit there drifting off into the raindrops.

I spent most of the day reading and writing. I’m deep into Poilu: The World War I Notebooks of Corporal Louis Barthas, Barrelmaker, 1914-1918, and have no idea how the human mind can survive the things Barthas describes in his amazing account of the Great War. Many don’t survive it, crumbling mentally as the shells explode and gore flows out of the trenches. But many find a way to persevere. As a counterweight, I started reading Jack Ewing’s Where Tapirs and Jaguars Once Roamed: Ever Evolving Costa Rica, which was recommended by Jeff, who noted that his wife, Laurie, loved it. She’s a fantastic writer and journalist, so that was good enough for me. Jeff and I drove over to Domincal so I could pick up both of Ewing’s books about Costa Rica (the other is Monkeys are Made of Chocolate: Exotic and Unseen Costa Rica). Ewing first came here in 1970 when he was just out of school with a degree in animal husbandry and intention of working in the cattle business. He gets hired to assist in bringing cattle to Costa Rica for sale. Ultimately, he ends up settling in Domincal and founding Hacienda Baru , a national wildlife refuge and lodge. Jeff and I poked around a bit there after buying the books, and I definitely intend to return before leaving.

To say the two books are polar opposites would be an understatement. Or perhaps not. When Ewing arrived in Costa Rica, it was being pillaged for its natural resources and the jungle was under siege. Thanks in part to his visionary efforts, that was thwarted. Or at least slowed. So there is a sense of impending apocalypse in both books. But the Barthas book is just mind-numbing. He managed to survive the major slaughters of the war, which he refers to accurately as charnel houses. I’m about to enter the section where he details the horrors of Verdun. Wish me luck.

Another random flower, this time to purge thoughts of Verdun.
Another random flower, this time to purge thoughts of Verdun.

My writing thus far has largely been self-obsessed blogging about this trip, but I’m starting to think about form and structure for a novel I’ve been plotting for decades. It’s Pittsburgh based and focused on the rise and fall of steel. The Homestead Strike is in there. And Tall Tale hero Joe Magarac. And maybe a few ghosts. But the world keeps shifting. The plot line was focused around an unemployed Geek who was spit out in the first great Internet meltdown in 2000, or Dot.Bomb, as it came to be known. The Geek returns home from the Bay Area to Pittsburgh, where he retreats to an hold house in Homestead that his grandparents left him in their will. As he’s tearing out the lathe board to install Cat 5 cable for Internet (this was before wireless changed everything), he finds a trove of letters that date bak to the 1892 Homestead Steel Strike, which triggers the rest of the action. But as time has passed and the nation has been Trumped by populist hysteria, it seems major reworking is in order. I really hope I can get myself to do that during the next few months. On the plus side, there’s not a whole lot else to do most days. My usual vices and distractions are far away, and I’m feeling something that I can only describe as clarity emerging. But there’s still a lot of static and frequent cranial power outages, so we’ll see how that goes.

On the plus side, I’d vowed to write at least 1,000 words a day, which I’ve had no problem hitting. A letter to Mom and Dad alone clocked in at 1,600. If I can keep this pace, I should produce about about 80,000 or 100,000 words. while here. That’s a hell of a lot more than I was doing before I jumped on that Delta jet and headed south.

One more gratuitous flower picture.
One more gratuitous flower picture.

I spent this morning talking to a helpful American Airlines agent to undo a business-related trip back to the States that I have to take in October. They moved the agenda back a day, negating the itinerary I’d purchased before leaving the States. I don’t want to charge the company I work with for my travel back to the States, but they kindly agreed to pay the change fees on both that trip and the next leg that will take me to my destination.

Last night, I sat here atop the hill, watching a cloud-strangled sunset recede into blackness over the Pacific. Suddenly, I noticed a firefly. Then others. So there are fireflies here, which I enjoyed immensely as I pecked away at my keyboard. White puffs of cloud clung to the trees as the day’s rain instantly evaporated, ready to start the cycle again.

I still haven’t gone off the property. I’m thinking I’ll do that tomorrow, when I’m better rested and will be needing a few minor supplies. I’m also hoping to find a spot where I can poach a wifi connection to do more bandwidth-intensive tasks. But there’s no hurry. I have food. And I’m in paradise.