Roots

On Monday, as my new landlord Juanca and I sat on a bench outside the O.I.J. (Pronounced O E Jota, Quepos´version of a sheriff´s office) waiting our turn to talk to a detective about my stolen bag, he asked me if I plan to stay in Costa Rica despite all the recent bad luck. ¨Of course I do,¨ I told him, ¨Plus, having buried Caindog at the beach, I sort of feel like I´ve got roots here.¨ He said, ¨Well, yes, but not for that,¨ and started telling me about his life. He told about living in Switzerland when he was younger, among all the blonde-haired, blue-eyed, fair-skinned people, being Latino with dark skin, hair, and eyes. He tried hard to fit in, he said, but felt that his roots were obviously elsewhere, in a place with other dark people like him. Then he told of his move back to Costa Rica, expecting reconnection with his heritage, but finding instead that these people who looked like him treated him like a foreigner as soon as he spoke and revealed the accent he´d acquired speaking another language for so long. ¨I realized,¨ he said, ¨that I was trying to find belonging through other people when the truth is that I was a part of everyplace I´d been all along. I didn´t need to look to another place. My roots are everywhere.¨ I listened in silence, having felt my way through a similar sequence of changes, not really sure if I agreed with him.

Wednesday morning, over a breakfast of scrambled eggs, toast, and tea, I commented to Karen that I was looking forward to the intercambio I had planned for the day. I worried aloud that we´d been spending too much time with Americans lately, sort of stunting our experience here. An intercambio (Spanglish for interchange) is when two people get together and spend time swapping language lessons in the context of some planned activity. They´re pretty common here. I was going on my first with Jenifer, a Tica who works at a tienda near the beach.

Jeni came to meet me at home around 8am so we could travel together to her home in Damas, a little town just about 20 minutes outside of Quepos. The plan was to have some lunch and coffee at her house and then go kayaking.

The bus dropped us off across the street from a tiny roadside market which marked the entrance to a quaint little Tico town. As we crossed the road, I took in the organized lanes of short, squat tin-roofed homes, all painted in vivid colors, separated by gravel paths and interspersed with palms and tropical foliage. The whole town was framed by distant mountains, lush and green for the rainy season now upon us. ¨¿Muy fea, verdad?¨Jeni asked. I looked at her, thinking she was joking, but then saw her crinkled nose. ¨No way! Just the opposite,¨ I said, and told her about all the buildings and concrete and echoed noise that is Philadelphia. A different kind of beautiful for sure, I said, but I prefer this. She smiled and seemed to relax a bit.

We went into the market to gather some things to prepare for lunch, and I was taken again by the differences between this place and my home. A friendly smile from the man behind the counter of this corner store and familiar conversation as if he and Jeni had known each other every day of their lives, which I´m sure is exactly the case. So very different from the bored or angry scowls from the cashiers back in Fishtown whose only conversation was to tell you how much money you owed. Then, a loaf of bread, a can of sweet corn, a ripe tomato, a bundle of fresh cilantro, a can of tuna, and some mayonnaise, all for 2.500 colones (that´s less than $5!). Even in Quepos, for all the passing tourists, prices are not so much cheaper than the states unless you know where and when to go. Here I was, not just passing through, but feet on the ground in true Costa Rica.

Groceries in arms, we turned down a gravel road outside the store and walked a little ways until we reached a tiny blue concrete house with a porch comprised of bamboo posts and a propped tin roof. The front door was wide open, typical for Costa Rica, and Jeni called in, ¨¡Hola Lily!¨ She turned to me and asked if I´d like to meet her friend. I smiled, nodded, and mentally turned my Spanish up a notch.

Lily stepped out her kitchen door, an oversized and smiling Tica with bright eyes. She was wearing an apron and holding a spoon in one hand. ¨¡Hola!¨she said and kissed Jeni, and even before Jeni finished introductions, she was pressing her plump cheek against mine for a kiss. She squeezed me so hard a laugh escaped as she said, ¨Mucho gusto, Nicole,¨the Tico equivalent for ¨pleasure to meet you¨. Igualmente, I told her as we were invited inside.

A tablecloth of doily lace decorated with cartoon cows, obviously meant for entertaining guests for it´s bright whiteness, was unfurled on the dining room table to encourage us to sit. I immediately took in all the plastic flowers adorning the room, hanging in strands from the ceiling, in vases on tables, in windows, and over the TV (these are also typical decor). As I made my way toward a chair, I noticed and greeted the 14-year-old girl slung sideways, head and legs propped across bulky chair arms, in the living room (delineated only by the back of the sofa in front of the dining room table). Lily introduced her as her daughter Katie. I smiled. She just looked at me, but in a way that let me see what she saw: a blonde-haired gringa with skin darker than hers, blue eyes, and a disaster of an accent, standing in her house smiling stupidly. She got up from her chair, only because her mother insisted, and sat down beside where I´d found my seat. I turned my Spanish up one more notch even as Lily boasted that Katie knows some English, then left the room with Jeni to go get the coffee.

¨Do you speak English?¨ I asked Katie. She stared down at a bowl of soggy corn flakes. ¨Do you understand English?¨ I tried again. I waited a second, feeling out her silence. Mean kid or shy kid? I couldn´t tell. ¨¿Se habla in Espanol?¨ I asked, trying to be funny. She looked up this time, but her eyes weren´t laughing. Como se dice, Yikes? Thank God for Lily, Jeni and the coffee!

As Jeni sat down and sipped her coffee, she told Lily that I´m a yoga teacher. ¨¡Que linda trabaja!¨ Lily exclaimed, rosy cheeked, and Jeni went on to tell her all I´d taught her in my limited Spanish about the benifits of practicing yoga. Katie just stared at me. I told them all about my classes and answered some of their questions, but was secretly grateful when Jeni changed the subject to talk about her boyfriend´s birthday gift. I listened, silently, absorbing the Spanish even for the rapid fire between the two friends. Then, Jeni started telling Lily about seeing one of the neighborhood girls going discreetly into the house of one of the neighborhood boys. ¨Gossip!¨I said, grinning. ¨¿Que?¨ Jeni asked as they both looked to me. ¨Gossip,¨ I repeated. Blank stares made it clear I´d have to explain further. I cranked the Spanish up, yet again, and began describing. ¨When you see a neighbor doing something, or you know a secret about somebody, and you tell another friend about what you know, that´s gossip.¨ ¨¡Chisme!¨ Jeni exclaimed, and then blushed as everyone, including Katie, burst into laughter. ¨Chisme,¨I repeated. ¨Gossit,¨ they all said. The laughter eventually died down with an ¨Ayyyy, Niiiiicollle!¨from Lily. We spent the next few minutes practicing the ¨p¨sound in gossip. Our first word of the day.

Ice broken, our Spanglish lesson continued, informal and entertaining and peppered with giggles (and more Ayyy Niiiicoles). Before Jeni and I gathered ourselves up to go, Katie got her camera and insisted we all pose for pictures together. She kissed me on the cheek and hugged hard just like her mom as we made to leave. She even asked when I´d be coming back again. Apparently, the laughter (whether with or at me I´m still not really sure) blended away our differences.

Jeni´s house was just across the gravel road. A bright green concrete structure with a silver tin roof and a hedge of tropical foliage that edged in a large yard. Three barking dogs, small, smaller, and smallest, were tied alongside their own little houses. The inside of her house was equally green. There was a black and white cat on a kitchen chair and two colored finches in a cage above the couch. The floor was polished concrete, and a baby was staggering around holding on to whatever she could. Jeni picked up her neice and smothered her with kisses saying sweet things in Spanish that I couldn´t understand. She introduced me to her sister who was doing dishes in the kitchen, then invited me to sit down. I sat on the sofa and started watching the telenovela playing on the fuzzy TV while Jeni fluttered nervously around the house. When she finally sat down, she said, ¨My house is very poor,¨ and looked embarrassed. I shook my head no, feeling her anxiety, and said, ¨No, no es pobre. Es sencilla.¨ (No, it´s not poor. It´s simple.) Everything in here is clean and bright,¨ I told her. ¨There isn´t a lot, but what is here seems cared for.¨ Still, she looked ashamed. To ease her anxiety, I suggested that we go make lunch. We shared rice and beans, plus the groceries from the market mixed together in a salad, typical Costa Rican fare, while discussing in both our languages the sorts of food typical where I come from.

After lunch, we changed into bathing suits and headed down the gravel road, palm oil farms on either side of us, to find our kayaks. I had no idea what to expect as far as where we were going to PUT our kayaks, and still didn´t know what to expect even when I saw the mangroves. Soggy banks of dark mud lined a slow flowing chocolate milk colored river. Rio Estero. Mangrove trees descended in jumbled root clusters into the depths of murky water. I walked down to where a small boat was pulled up on shore and noticed the entire surface of a giant mound of dark, wet riverbank shifting and moving. Giant ants, was my first thought, and then I hunkered down closer. Crabs! A colony of hundreds of tiny crabs, the largest no bigger than a bumble bee, the smallest the size of a large ant. Each had one giant white claw rotating in rhythmic circles while snapping open and closed, open and closed, and a normal sized claw, the same dark brown color as the rest of its body, that retrieved whatever the larger claw had captured and either ate or discarded it, dead. Each crab moved independently, giving space to the others around it, but the whole population of the mound seemed to be dancing, robo arms extended, grasping, and rotating overhead as if trying to lasso whatever it could get. It creeped me out a little, their scavenging nature, but as I looked down river at the tangling trees and floating logs, I sort of wished I had a giant-sized robo arm of my own to protect me from whatever might be lurking downstream.

Neither Jeni nor I had ever kayaked before. Even more of a reason why we should have had our own kayaks. But for some reason, we were give one to share. Jeni´s friend Alan, who knows the river very well, came along and paddled behind or alongside us to keep us from getting lost (Mom and Dad, who I´m sure are worrying about now.). We had agreed that I should be in the back since I´m stronger and could probably steer better, but once in the kayak, Jeni couldn´t seem to get the gist of paddling in unison or pausing in her paddling so that I could direct the kayak. It only took me about 5 minutes to figure out that if I used my paddle as a brake by paddling in reverse, I could turn the kayak to navigate the bends in the river, but only if Jeni stopped paddling. Alan pointed out monkeys and lizards that I couldn´t have been bothered to look at (I can see them in my back yard), preferring instead to watch for what might be in the water!

Paddling is hard work, especially when trying to sync up with someone else. In the midst of the exertion, the frustration, and the complete aversion I felt to being tossed into the swampy water, my Spanish failed me completely. The result was two women, one dark and one light, speaking in two different languages, sharing one single vessel, paddling around in confusion and getting tangled up in thick roots.

We turned around and headed back to where we started after about an hour of mismatched paddling, and arrived somewhat dry and only slightly exhausted. I was thinking how I couldn´t wait to get out of that contraption when Jeni stood up and hopped ashore without even looking behind her. I was still sitting, paddle in hands, on the back. I screamed and flailed my arms a few times (apparently quite comically I found out later) before going face first into the muck. It was deeper than it looked I found out as I gurgled under. Next time, I want my own kayak.

I got home, soggy and cold, just as it started to rain in Manuel Antonio. It didn´t matter. I was already wet, and the rain was surely cleaner than what I was covered in. I recapped the day with Karen and then took a hot shower in preparation for the second half of my day.

It was raining hard when we left to go to TEFL. Karen, planning to use the wireless connection there, had her computer in a backpack strapped to her belly and covered with her zipped up raincoat. It wasn´t until we were climbing the hill to the main road that I caught a good hard look at her and burst out laughing. She looked 9 months pregnant and was even waddling to distribute the weight. She looked back at me, smirking, and said, ¨What?! I´m just trying to have the true Tico experience, ¨making me laugh even harder. We´d only gone a few more steps when we saw a man on a motorcycle getting drenched in the pouring rain. ¨That sucks,¨ Karen commented. I agreed. We watched as he cruised by us and then heard him stop suddenly a few feet behind us. We turned to see him looking back at a completely flat rear tire. ¨THAT sucks even more,¨ she said, and I cracked up. Partly because she was right and the way she said it made me laugh, but partly, too, for the ease and understanding between two women from the same country who speak the same language and don´t have to pause to explain what ¨even more¨ means.

Later, after yoga, hanging out in the kitchen waiting for tea water to boil, we had the front door wide open, Tico style. Karen cracked some funny jokes about the tin snowcapped christmas trees mounted on the wall outside our front door. ¨¿En serio?¨ she laughed, ¨¿Neve?¨ I giggled. I´d thought they were odd too, but then stopped noticing them. We´d turned them into the onion hanger when we´d brought our first big bunch home from the feria. They´re onion hangers is all.

Christmas trees in Costa Rica. And snow. Onion hangers. Brown skin. White skin. English. Spanish. Here and there. The stillness between forward and back. Neutral. Turning energy between extremes into something useful. Finding beauty in the starkness of contrast. And laughter, for sure. These, I think, are the keys to navigating culture, to navigating life. To synching up to paddle the same kayak, so to speak. The lesson I´m feeling following these past days is this: Honor your original roots for sure. No shame. Trace ´em back to see how you became who you are. Be proud of every step of the journey to here. Even the dark mucky places. Swim in them, even, willingly or otherwise. Better to know them, I think.

Then, be daring enough to put down new ones wherever you are. Juanca is right. Your roots are wherever you are. Who says you can´t be so big? Whoever it is, I bet they´re pretty small. Put down your seeds anyway, and wait. Give them something to climb.

I´m sure I´ll have more to say on this following my visit back home...