Traveler's Mind
On a trip to Costa Rica, a self-described homebody
reflects on what it means to be married to a traveler.by
Adina Sara
The silent lake does
not so much as ripple, though the winds are loud around it. A chorus of
trees fills the air — fern fronds flapping the high notes while coco
palms play a soft percussive swish. In the background, somewhere behind
a bed of clouds, a roar from a source too big to see. Covered in clouds,
unseen for days now, the always active volcano is the reason travelers
drive arduous hours on pocked and twisted roads, hoping to get a glimpse
of its treacherous steam.
I dash for the camera,
snap click the fuzzy edge just before another cloud comes by. And now I
see that the lake has begun to waken, silver ripples are moving to the
shape of wind, and a flock of white birds just exploded from a distant
tree. In mid-air they stop, turn sharp right, and disappear. The clouds
still cannot settle on any direction, they tease and taunt the
mountain’s edges, and yes, finally there’s the top — clear and cloudless
— volcanic steam spewing wide white trails into the sky. I point and
shoot, but there is no more film.
- - -
We have been in Costa
Rica for three days, and already I have learned to recognize the
Montezuma Oropendula — a medium-sized bird with flat broad yellow tail,
a splat of brilliant red across its front. Before this trip I barely
knew a robin from a sparrow, but yesterday I saw a boat-billed heron
peering out from a bank of bushes, and then three toucans flew past,
landing in unison on a single leafless branch. The birds are everywhere,
singing, darting, hiding, surprising. Iridescent iguanas slither out of
nowhere and back again. Cayman crocodiles lie in wait on slimy logs, as
time continues to pass. It is said they live for 80-some years.
Motionless.
I didn’t really want to
go to Costa Rica. It sounded like a good place, sure, but in truth I
was just as happy not going anywhere. I am a homebody, easily diverted
by the miles of regional park hiking trails that lie minutes from my
doorstep. I never understood why people stand in endless lines, clinging
to luggage, shuffling for tickets, sleeping crook-necked for impossible
hours to see what they can see anywhere if they would only open their
eyes. Traveling is a state of mind after all, and I subscribe to the
belief that one can travel just as well going nowhere. Traveling is an
interesting but unnecessary luxury. If it were left up to me, I’d never
stray too far from home.
But my husband is a
traveler at his core. The more exotic, unfamiliar and distant the place,
the more he relaxes into a unique paradox of a comfort zone. His species
is quite different from mine, characterized not by the roots he puts
down but by the brilliant antennae he holds up to absorb the vast
differences and dimensions surrounding him. Traveling wakes him up,
injects him with more energy and bravado than he has when caged in the
routine of home. When he finally convinces me to join him, I attach
myself like a parasitic limb, kicking and writhing at first, but
eventually allowing myself to enter the safety of his certainty.
- - -
Distant and not so
distant shrieks, rat-a-tats and whistles syncopate the landscape. Just
now, the tiniest of birds darts past, singing out a most pretentious
screech. Always the possibility of a monkey overhead, or else the poison
red dart frog. A single drop of its blood will kill a healthy man. Such
an impossible feat, hiking hour after hour in the muggy sludge of
rainforest. Why do we do this?
Because we are
traveling, and traveling causes people to board rickety single engine
planes (driven by pilots who wear dirty Bermuda shorts and fiddle with
headphones instead of looking at the sky), planes that have to swoop to
dodge a flock of birds, that rattle their way through the mountainous
clouds, and then set down on a gravel strip of beach bump bump bump, to
a rickety stop. I would never ever fly in a plane so small but here I
am, flying in a plane so small. My hands are blue with fear and I close
my eyes to let the time pass but the time doesn’t pass, only minute
after minute and the flight takes one whole hour, sixty slow minutes
over oceans and treacherous mountains and green twisting roads.
- - -
Silenced by our
smallness. Vines wrap themselves around trees, trees stretch and reach
beyond the sky. We crane our necks to spot birds through the web of
leaves that shields us from the sun, not the heat. For some blessed
reason there are no mosquitoes. Only grasshopper-type things the size of
small helicopters that dart in blue and yellow lines and then vanish.
There is a flurry, a
slight shifting, then silence. Now a shrill blast of unrecognizable
timbre. What living thing could make that music?
Trees cling to each
other; gnarled in deadly tree hugs. Rope limbs hang loose, fall from the
sky, connecting themselves to earth with giant claws that grope their
way downward. The forest is a clench of knots of trunks of roots so huge
they can be walked on. Leaves so big they cover the sky.
My hair curls in the
heat and skin sticks to skin. I unhook my arm from his and it makes a
sucking sound. He takes my hand again but we slip loose, we stumble. The
heat is not so much on us as in us. We sparkle with sweat. We are
floating in it.
Suddenly there is a
din, a blinding sound, like the rush of distant waters. A thousand
cicadas screech their mating call. They will mate and then they will
die.
The air smells, of all
things, garlicky, from feathery yellow flowers that drift along the
path. In the distance, chicaw chicaw, thweet a tat a tat thweet a tat,
wio wio, shhhhhhhhhh.
Clown-faced monkeys
spot us first, make threatening noises, shake tree limbs over our heads.
My husband attempts a monkey-like cackle but they are on to him and
swing past us, convinced of our utter uselessness in the scheme of
things.
We are soggy with
excitement and trudge on, trails steeper and deeper than anywhere I
would ordinarily go. We are tingling with travel.
I step tenderly, root
by root, one tree is spiked with spines, and there is the red poison
dart frog to watch for. Careful to touch, not to touch, each footstep
ends the life of one bug or other. I hear the squish of sweat inside my
clothes, or is that another insect calling its last call.
Nothing is familiar,
not the trees, not the dirt, not the iridescent lizard who slithers
past. I do not recognize the muscles that guide me down and up steep
inclines, that keep my heart pumping pumping through the heat, through
the overwhelming sense of wonder.
I sit down, slowly,
there are ants that carry large tree parts and I do not want to squash
them. I sit so that no part of me touches and allow the hot breezes to
fan my skin. There is no sound and then at once, every single living
thing lets out a crude announcement: I am alive! I put my hands over my
head and still the shrill cry of life echoes in my ears. The rock
beneath me quivers, as if to speak. Or maybe it is a bird. Or maybe it
is me.
- - -
We have been walking
longer than we ever walk. And we are lost. Lost. The map given to us at
the lodge says there will be a fork, then a tree marked with a yellow
string and we are to veer left, then down, then on past some sort of
meadow (the map is unclear, marked in faint lines and sloppy). The trail
is supposed to take one hour max, circling eight hectares of virgin
forest and we should spot howler monkeys if we are lucky. We have been
gone several hours or more. We do not know because we are lost.
There is no fork and
then there are 3 forks intertwined, a virtual place setting of confusing
directions pointing us nowhere and everywhere at once. There is no tree
with yellow string but there are strings of tree limbs and the air is
suffocating and we have gone too far in and can’t turn back.
At first there is a puddle. Then a trickle. There is no mention of water
on this crude and fitful map but instinct tells us to follow the flow —
water is life after all, and we are hungry for direction.
Foot by foot the
trickle turns to stream and round a narrow ledge the opening surprises
us with more stream — full fledged with pebbles, babbling luscious
pebbles licked by the steady clear stream of cold mountain water. Shoes
come off, socks, toes swell in the cold rush of water. Yes — I sink down
on all fours, dissolve my body’s heat into the shallow cold surface.
He walks ahead, just as
lost as I but less afraid. Not surprisingly, the stream is connected to
more stream, deeper yet and colder still. I cannot see him but hear him
splashing. His clothes and pack are strewn on a rock, just his happy
head appears, bobbing like a buoy, in the shimmering pool.
We are not only lost,
but also exuberant and scared and hot and hungry and scared a little
more, and laughing too. The map floats past us, wet beyond recognition.
No matter we say,
because we are cool now and the place has become us. The stream will
surely lead us back. It always does.
- - -
I am home now. He is
still away. He wanted to stay on and I wanted to come home, my dog waits
for me, and my garden. We are old enough to know what we need and wise
enough to respect each other’s knowing.
He sends me email every
day and his voice is not the voice of the man I live with year after
year but the voice of a young man 30 years ago, who traveled with backpack and wet bandana around his head, who saw India and Nepal and Africa
and Indonesia with the fresh open eyes of youth.
I have unpacked and
watered the plants and answered a reasonable number of messages. I am
fully hooked back in. I wake up with traveler’s mind but my heart has
gone slack with the comfort of ordinariness. Try as I may, I cannot
picture myself boarding a single engine plane the size of a VW bug, nor
walking in sandals where snakes are said to reside.
He, on the other hand,
writes to me of rafting trips, fishing trips with Roberto (who lives on
the beach), a house along a dusty road where he sleeps quite
comfortably, languages he does not recognize, still more exquisite
stories of travel. I want The Traveler to come home but that is the
paradox. He will leave his traveling self back in the salty beach shack,
and someone else will come home again, to help me organize the taxes,
clean out the disgusting refrigerator, deal with the roof.
I can hear birds
outside — there are birds here too of course — but I don’t run outside
with my binoculars to see if I can identify some wondrous thing about
them. I have put my bird book away, reshelved the Costa Rica Guide next
to all the other travel books of places seen or still to see.
I did refill the
bird feeder. And took a few minutes to watch a family of ants crawl up
the lemon tree. My cat has been tracking me ever since I got back. He
purrs and slinks against my ankles, as if he senses wildness on me,
something under my skin.
- - - - -
ADINA SARA lives
in Oakland, California, where she writes a gardening column, The
Imperfect Gardener, for a local newspaper. Her essays and poetry
have been published in a number of publications. She can be contacted at
adinasara@comcast.net. |
