January 31, 2009:  Crow's Nest, Jimmy

Russ was up at four thirty just before his alarm went off and out the door and off to the bus.  Thirteen hours later, there is a melancholia in the Crow's Nest air.  In the whittling away of the visitors, each attrition is like a sudden punch in the stomach, unexpectedly knocking the wind out of me.  I did not see it coming.  I expected the post-partum blues upon delivering Aladdin and his crew, but between the hurly burly or returning the rental car and flying back down to the Crow's Nest to find Orpheus, Russ, and Dad still here, their departure was not as sudden and bracing.  And in all fairness, the energy level of the film crew on 24 7 was intense and their sudden absence, almost like a breath of air stirring on a hot still day.  Having to miss Orpheus's departure to renew my visa was a bummer, and I missed that farewell and had to get the most that I could out of a goodbye at the pier on my departure.  But now as the party has dwindled, Russ's exodus leaves only the old regulars, me and Dad, to regulate the energy of paradise and muse on the mutability of matter and the transience of all things.

Andrei Grecu dropped back into my life on Facebook today after thirty years, and Mighty Mo dropped into the nest for a visit today, all good looking and vivacious.  She introduced me to her brother, and I worked steadily and hard all day long today, nearly all on reservations, pushing steadily against the impending wall of melancholia, only to find it crumbling all around me the moment I look up in the falling light of the afternoon to find a silence among the ruins of the day.  What a hell of a month January has been!  Unquestionably this has been one of my finest months on record, not just in recent memory but perhaps in all memory.

I have been too busy with everything to pony up much in the way of journal entries, and in the course of the month I wonder if some things along those lines have not changed.  Sometimes I stare into the abyss and find little smiling faces winking back at me and in wondering at the meaning of it all come moments of deceptive clarity, like in the near surface dream in which the blueprint of the universe is unveiled in all its extreme detail and for a fleeting instant I suddenly and miraculously know and understand everything in a flash of inspired lucidity that as suddenly as it arrives, is dispersed like mist before the rising sun.

We close out this month with nothing but the highest of expectations and the fullest of hopes for the days, weeks, months, and years to come . . . !

January 24, 2009:  Hotel Bequeret, Boquete, Panama

January 22, 2009:  Crow's Nest, Jimmy

January 21, 2009:  Cabinas Los Laureles, Uvita

With each passing day, the cumulative weight of the preceding unreported days grows and disproportionately so.  Tonight I learned that my visa expires not on the 28th but on the 22nd, and it propels a wholly different set of variables in play, all sliding into gear about the time I wake up in the morning.  The job is a beautiful thing, everything in place and progressing.  The trench is within two days of completion, everything is falling in place.  The miracle of existence is thick in the air, and at this hour it has cooled off.  Final shout out goes to my new Toshiba laptop and its six hour battery life.  We are humbled.

Meanwhile, in Matapalo, Roscoe and his never still camera madly at work:

January 18, 2010

January 16, 2010 Dominical

Dominical beach:  Max and Aladdin	Max	River shot	Orpheus and Sonnya
Riding thez wave	looking northwest	of zen and footage	looking southeast

January 15, 2009:  Villas Manu, Hatillo

January 14, 2009:  Villas Manu, Hatillo

January 13, 2010 Puerto Viejo

January 12, 2010 Puerto Viejo

January 11, 2010 Turrialba-->Pto Viejo

January 10, 2010 Turrialba

January 9, 2010 Cerro de la Muerte

	/

January 8, 2010, Carate,

January 7, 2010, Playa Lapa, Carate

January 6, 2010 Jimmy

January 5, 2010 Road Tripping / Crow's Nest

January 2, 2009:  Adventure Inn, San Jose

Last night the uncomfortable mattress of a fleabag hotel was no real impediment to a light but restful sleep.  I set my appointment for the relatively late hour of 8:15, and even though the directions I had were sketchy, I planned to sleep till seven and stop for a cup of joe on the way and probably beat the client to his finca.  I awakened many times during the night and looked at the time and pulled the covers up again and marveled at the crispness in the air, at the preternatural chill so unfamiliar in the Cradle.  My room, number six, was an internal room with no outward facing windows.  The bathroom had a window that opened to an internal courtyard, however, and at 4:30 I left the bathroom door open so light would filter in.  And so it did, breaking up the murky ink shortly after five.  By six-thirty the tiny window was channeling enough light that the second coming of Christ might have been going on in my very room, and I broke off any further delay at getting with it and packed my gear.

Outside, I found Ruby parked on an empty and quiet urban street of a second tier suburban city of this nation's capital.  The sky was bluely crystalline, infinitely clearer than air ever gets on the Osa, and the chill and the grace of the light reminded me of Cochabamba in June.  The streets were all but abandoned on this Saturday following New Year's Day, and as I turned up the road to Barva, I struggled with the dimness of my recollections from 1984 to summon the requisite nostalgia.  After all, this road was the one I took back and forth on buses as a college exchange student between my host family's home in Barva and my classes at the National University in Heredia.  But it was to little avail.  The ensuing twenty-five years have shellacked the roadway with an attendant myriad of mom and pop shops as well as outlets of corporate entities perhaps in their infancy or not even around all those years ago.  It is unrecognizable from the bucolic brushstrokes of my memory.

I returned to this street once, December 1993, with my father, so I cannot claim a full 25 years of uninterrupted distance between today and those coming-of-age moments of a quarter century ago that surely lay the paving stones of my highway through life.  Once I got to Barva proper, the changes were less, the appearance more in synch with my memories, and the square of Barva blossomed with its old-world stateliness and fresh simplicity in much the same way that it did all those years ago, its white-washed cathedral facade, its perimeter of medium cedars and concrete benches for lovers and people-gazers to gather on fresh clean days like today.  And there was Iris and Alfonso's house, and I drove around the block and passed it again, more slowly this time, and nothing about it stood in contrast with any element of my memory.  The same creek was there, the same walls, the same street intersections, the same gritty sidewalks, the same brilliant light streaming down through a limpid brisk wind coming off the mountain.  One block beyond the house that I lived on my summer exchange program two and a half decades ago, the memorized directions had me turn right.

It was a climb of nine kilometers up the flank of Barva Volcano, and I made out with the place names and the name of my client directly to my destination, stopping to ask along the way five walking people along the way.  How many Paso Llanas are there and once within reach of that little hamlet, how many don Jorge Steinvorths could there possibly be?  The red gate turned out to be rusty and red only through the prism of perhaps memory of better days or wishful thinking.  Still, that was the place, and as I waited for my client to arrive, having no long pants in my bag, I put my pajama bottoms on under my shorts to cut through the piercing chill, and bemoaned the wet cold on my unsocked toesy woesies.  Mr. Steinvorth turned out to be one of those refined old-world gentry that is legitimately civilized, refined enough to treat those of lower rank with genuine respect and common courtesy and forbearance.  He addressed his dairy foreman, 20 years don Jorge's Junior and a few years older than me, as don Hernan, and he was solicitous of me but not fawning.  I was to ride in the passenger seat as Fernan drove and he rode in the back seat.  His family had owned the land, it emerged during the course of our travels about his 400 hectare farm on the upper flank of a dormant volcano, for nearly two hundred years, since shortly after the nation's independence from Spain.  He was engaged as a septuagenarian in his relationship with the land begun nearly 200 years ago, pointing out trees that he had planted, later trees that his father had planted, and then finally to a grove planted by his grandfather. 

I asked him the name of flowers that we passed, and he said that they were hortensias.  I confided that I mistook them for chrysanthemums.  "No," he replied, "chrysanthemums are altogether different, which reminds me of a joke," and he switched to a gently accented but fully mastered English language to tell.  "A man was walking through his village with an armload of flowers and was stopped by a neighbor.  My, what beautiful roses, his neighbor said.  They're not roses, the man replied, they are chrysanthemums.  No, said the neighbor, those are most certainly beautiful roses.  No replied the man, they are chrysanthemums.  Chrystanthemums, the neighbor frowns.  Spell it.  Okay, says the man, you're right, they are roses."  And then, he translated the joke for the foreman lumbering along on the rocks that seemed nearly like paving stones from a former age. 

At the top, at the rough wood house where some of his farm hands lived, where he wished to provide light and hot water, the fine mist that boiled over the top of the mountain coursed across gently sloping pasture unbroken by more than lines of cedars along fencerows.  Beyond the swampy pasture uphill, whence came the water, the forest was dark and low, menacing through the biting chill of the wet cold.  I could tell when I acted like we had to go see it that he considered this to be unnecessary, which it was not, and we trekked off up the mountain to see the water.  He led the way, and I kept up with him gamely while the foreman fell behind and presently began to realize that no matter how much my lungs worked, the air was not going to satisfy them easily, and I had the strange sensation that this was one of the ways that people die.  So I allowed him to get on ahead of me, and we eventually came to the water, which was immaculate and large and captured and 65 meters vertically above the house rather than the 40 meters estimated.  I took pictures, answered my cell phone twice (they have never seen a phone that gets a signal there and were quite impressed when my phone rang, and I was able to carry on normal conversations), and puttered around to look at it all and to catch my breath.

There's not a lot of oxygen up here, I commented to don Jorge.

Imagine what it must be to reach your age, he zinged me, his eyes twinkling.

January 1, 2009:  Hotel Heredia, Heredia

I am back to a beginning of sorts, transported back 25 years when I first rolled into this town as an exchange student.  Today, all these years later, I am receiving some signals from Jimenez that have me unable to focus on the here and now and will truncate this entry.  Suffice it that the first day of the decade has stood and been counted in the ikhanosphere.