This morning I left at six. A sloth curled tightly in a dormant ball was all the company I came across on my walk to school. The garbage bags sat by the roadside awaiting their fate, while the birds called elusively, mournfully, from deep within their cover of leaves. I tiptoed respectfully past and enjoyed the windswept solitude that enshrouded the rest of the journey up into the clouds. There were no taxis out. No buses passed. Nothing. The dust, which has found elaborate invasive pathways to my precious alveoli these past few days, settled around me without a fight and slept, following the lead of the gentle rain. The restaurant construction projects along the main road lay strangely inactive for the first time in months. I checked my inner calendar to make sure it is indeed a Thursday and not a major national holiday. Should be business as usual, but yet a ghost town splayed out before me, abandoned even by the ghosts. Perhaps the workers didn´t get paid yesterday, as is often the case, and simply didn´t show up, as is also often the case. I allowed myself the brief vision of all of them off with the taxi and bus drivers, dancing around campfires in wild abandon, beating drums, but somehow I think not... Yep, it was probably about money... For all the "Pura Vidas" and "don´t worry about being late, we´re on Tico time" lines I´ve heard, there sure is an incredible efficiency in cutting off services rendered here when a payment or a paycheck is even minutes late... Telephones, internet, and electricity get cut off, kids get sent home from school, and workers simply leave, even if they are in the middle of a shift.
Nonetheless, I found peace in the half built walls of the pizzaria, alive only with the flitting of tiny birds and a morpho butterfly, and was smiling fully and genuinely by the time I unlocked my classroom. I was just stopping in, though. This was to be my first personal day of the school year. San Jose has yet again beckoned (gotta pick up my renewed passport before my trip to the states next week), but I needed to arrange a few things for the sub first.
It never ceases to amaze me how isolated and idyllic my little town is, and I´m never more aware of it than when I come down to the city. The horns blaze, the traffic crawls, and the people on the street seem to suffer from a collective loss of facial muscle function. Yet the six year old girl in front of me hears none of it. She peeks around the seat and tells me about the horse she dreamed of last night - the pure white horse with the rainbow wings that carried her above all the cars right up to the clouds. We spent the rest of the five hour bus ride in one game after another, from crabs that rob eyes and teeth, hiding them in the depths of rivers, to inventing gum flavors for wild animals, to imagining what faces those same wild animals make when they sleep. We laughed and caused a ruckus, while the adults around us zoned out and tried their best not to make eye contact with anyone. Thank goodness for her. How amazing the world would be if we all could learn to listen to her.
As soon as I left the mechanical heat and human coldness of the bus behind me, I passed a raggedy woman crouched in the middle of the sidewalk smoking crack. She was the first to smile at me since leaving Monteverde. Crack smoking was happening everywhere, blowing in and out of my vision like so much filthy discarded newspaper and fast food detritus. I found myself wondering if this was the holiday that I´d forgotten about - San Jose crack fest. Next came the prostitutes, hanging onto street corners and offering unconvincing waves to the tinted windows that rolled slowly past. to me they looked quite sad, young, and cold in their tiny skirts and zip-up leather vests. I shudder as I try to imagine what games they played when they were young. What color were the wings of the horses that carried them off to distant clouds? I walked on, far more tempted to bring the young women a hot cocoa and some extra clothes than anything else, feeling my face ease into the blankness of my contemporaries. A man soon passed me on the street and yelled a string of homophobic epithets past my face that could not have been less offensive, considering he was saying far more about himself than me. I took it all in and yearned for home.
I found myself wondering again and again this evening "Is it already too late for humanity?" "Should I just stay on the mountain forever?" As I stand at the computer console in my hostile, listening to 50 cent and Snoop Dogg call these same cold girls all kinds of demeaning names, I find myself caught once again between frustration and inspiration. I shake my head, filling my mindscape with a vision of the horse with the rainbow wings and let myself drift away. There. It´s all good again. Pura Vida. Stay young, stay young...
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