This is my third post of the day. Scroll down to see more photos and a request for advice I could not resist answering.

WHAT I DID ON MY SUMMER VACATION, PART SEVEN
Costa Rica: Transit II

In his short story “Janitor on Mars,” Martin Amis posits an interesting theory. In it, dignitaries from Earth go to Mars to meet a robot that has been observing mankind since it evolved millions of years ago. The robot, puzzled by the human tendency to create art, says: “Now I know I’m halfway there on religion. Surely this has to be how it is. It’s like a tapestry sopping with blood, right? You had to do it that way: for the art. But tell me. Tell me. Does it go further? Like Guernica happened so Picasso could paint it. No Beethoven without Bonaparte. The First World War was to some extent staged for Wilfred Owen, among others. The events in Germany and Poland in the early 1940s were sent in motion for Primo Levi and Paul Celan. Etcetera.”

In other words, the robot janitor is suggesting that things happen (especially terrible things, it seems) merely as a genesis for art. I am beginning to suspect (although I would not in a million years put myself in a category with Picasso, Beethoven, et al) that the events I endured on 27 July 2003 occurred mainly so I could write about them. I shall proceed to do so, although I do not pretend I can do them justice.

Our Sansa flight was scheduled for one-thirty, and our ride picked us up at the cabinas at noon. So it was back down the muddy track by pickup truck, back across the swampy estuary by boat, and back through Golfito to the airport by taxi.

Shaken by the flight in, I had not noticed many details about the Golfito airport except that its landing strip was a gravel-paved gash cut into the jungle. There is no terminal associated with this facility. They unload the planes directly on the runway, taxis come up to the planes to get you, and off you go, all very efficiently. Waiting for your plane to arrive is a different story. One small office (with one desk only) serves as the airport maintenance office and as the local ambulance dispatch, both duties handled by an immense one-armed man named William (so to speak: his only task at the airport seemed to be placing an orange cone out in front of the planes’ spinning propellers once they pulled up, which might explain what happened to his other arm). Outside of this office is a small, tin-roofed area where the passengers could wait on benches that had rusted through in the salt air. Those who braved the benches’ support were quickly covered in the biting ants that apparently thrived on the rust; those who stood up were instantly surrounded by clouds of mosquitoes.

One-thirty came and went without a plane in sight. No one seemed to know or care why this was the case, or when it would come, or if it would come. William told one of our fellow passengers that it might come at two-fifteen, which it did not. Neither was it there by three-fifteen, which gave Rob and I quite some time to get acquainted with local color.

First we met Bill and Doreen, Americans who had bought a home on Playa Zancudo years before but were now in the process of selling it. Rob and I loved Bill and Doreen; we chatted for hours as we waited, and they regaled us with stories about the area and the trials and travails of being white foreigners in Costa Rica. Luckily, they had dealt with Sansa and the Golfito airport dozens of times and were there to show us the ropes. We told them about our trip, and about living in New York City. As we talked, a strange man strolled into the airport/ambulance office, where a television blasted some sort of sporting event. Suddenly, the strange man started jumping and hooting like a monkey, and by this we were to understand that the team he championed had just scored a goal or made a touchdown or some such thing. When he emerged from his fit, he turned to us, and we realized that his face had been scraped, lacerated, and cut in many places . . . a mess of healing wounds. “My heart is in Alaska,” he told us (in English). “I live there, but I have been here for a vacation. It’s turned into three months of difficult business deals.” He then went to make a phone call, and Doreen said that, from his appearance and demeanor, his business was clearly drug-related. A car full of yelling men pulled up, all so drunk that they could barely stand up—some of them actually fell out of the car—and they went into an adjacent bar. The strange man who had been talking to us went up to join them. He jumped around with them for a while and then started opening the hoods of nearby parked cars to look at the motors (“Drugs,” said Doreen again).

Meanwhile, some monstrous little boys were playing around the area. One of them, having been given the task of emptying the trash barrels, took all of the garbage and dumped it, loose, in the culvert next to the road. Bill, incensed at this, told William, who yelled at the boy and told him to clean it up. “He’s saying, ‘You know you shouldn’t do that in front of the Americans’,” Bill joked with us. “’Wait until they’re not looking!’” The nasty boy, upon putting the garbage back in the cans, went into the office and came out with an enormous machete, which he used to poke at the ground and slash at the air rather near one of the stray dogs that was wandering around.

Eventually, the Sansa representative showed up in a pickup truck. “We call him Mr. Personality,” Doreen told us. We dubbed him “Mumbles” because nobody could understand him. Mr. Mumbles Personality at our service. They weighed our bags on a portable scale. Mine came up to thirty-eight pounds and Rob’s forty-three. Bill and Doreen told us that they charged extra for going over the weight limit, but that they changed that limit every time based upon how much they thought they could get out of you. Also, they only charged white people, not Ticos (presumably, Costa Ricans were too intelligent to fall for such nonsense). Sure enough, the guy came oozing up to Rob later and informed him that his luggage was eighteen pounds over the limit. Having spent several days in an area with no banks or teller machines, we were down to our last dimes. We scraped up enough to pay for Rob’s fee, but we lived in fear that they would shake me down, too. After all, his bags were only five pounds more than mine. And yet, I escaped that fate, for which I was thanking god when the strange man came back and announced to the world at large that he was not, in fact, waiting for a plane. So I thanked god, as well, that we would not have to be on a flight with him. He went back to the phone and was soon up to his eyeballs in mysterious business transactions.

The plane arrived at long last. It was not a six-seater, as before, but a twelve-seater. We all squeezed aboard and claimed our territory. The seatbelts were the ancient kind you find in racing cars, with a lap buckle and a shoulder harness you attach separately. A little sign said, in English, “Keep Belt Fastened While Seated,” which was ironic considering the ceiling was only an inch above our heads while sitting down, and there was no place to go, anyway . . . when would we not be seated? As on the way in, the pilots were in the cabin with us. We could see them and all of their instruments, which were quite a bit more elaborate than on the smaller plane, perhaps as sophisticated as the OnStar system in my father’s car. We took off immediately and smoothly, and I was able to relax for a little while. The in-flight magazine, which seemed to have been stuffed in the seat-back pocket for years, featured stories on Carlos Santana and how to take care of your newborn baby (in both English and Spanish). Then the pilots started pulling out their lunch and eating it in front of us, and I thought, that’s probably not a good thing to do while you’re flying a plane. But the flight was smooth, and the clouds were pretty, and although the smell of their chicken was making me salivate, I was able to relax again.

And then, a few minutes later, all hell broke loose.

Out of nowhere, we flew into a heavy storm. Rain smashed against the windshield like bullets, obscuring all visibility. Lightning flashed. Alarms whooped at random and were silenced. The pilots gritted their teeth and fought to control the plane, which shuddered and bucked like an evil amusement park ride. Rob and I clenched hands, and I braced myself on the back of the seat in front of me, certain we were about to plunge out of the sky like a brick, or get struck by lightning. Things smoothed out for a short while, and suddenly we were in the storm again, worse than before, and this time, it seemed, losing altitude. I was at once absolutely convinced we were going to die and absolutely convinced we were going to land safely, a confounding clash of paradigms that left me simultaneously praying to god and attempting to notice every detail to record later. Finally, once again, things smoothed out. We passed through the clouds, and I noticed some buildings below had, painted on their roofs, “Come back to Costa Rica, Loveable.” Clearly this message was not meant for passengers on Sansa flights.

Then we were coming in for a landing. The airport was obscured by low-lying clouds, but the pilots, it seemed, could do it by their instruments. Thank god for that. Except . . . they could not. We slowed to a crawl and dipped toward the ground; there was a whump, as if we had had something, and then another alarm. Instantly, the pilot punched down on the throttle and aimed the little plane in a hair-raising ascent at an inclination of what seemed like sixty degrees, enough to throw us back in our seats and keep us there. San Jose spread out below us as we climbed back toward cruising altitude. None of the passengers seemed to know what was going on. Bill and Doreen looked pale as ghosts, and when I said to them, through a jaw clenched with anxiety, “Hey, you must have done this before,” they said, “Never like this!” We were heading back toward the mountains, the pilots looking down out the windows, as if they were lost and trying to find a landmark. Minutes passed, and we turned left and right uncertainly. Finally, we seemed to circle around and head back the way we had come. More time passed before the pilot came on the intercom, saying in Spanish that we were going to land at a different airport instead. Great, I thought, just get us on the ground. Just when I thought we were going to hit the rain again, we circled another time, and I suddenly recognized the ground below. We had passed over it the first time we tried to land. And we were going back to the same airport after all. And . . . well, we landed, of course . . . and rather smoothly given the circumstances. It was a short taxi, and then all of the passengers bounded out as quickly as possible. I directed a pulse of gratitude to the universe, and we went to get our luggage.

Later that night, after we checked in to our new hotel in Escazu, Rob and I found a swanky restaurant and had a delicious gourmet meal that cost a hundred dollars, but that was fine because it was a celebration of life. We drank too much wine and argued fiercely about politics, but I suppose that is part of life, too.