Costa Rica: Americana Blowing in the Wind
By Michael Ames

When the tour boat pulled off to the side of the river, the difficulty of the impending exit wasn’t yet clear to all aboard. Among us were passengers, avid and passive wildlife tourists: old, young, firm and otherwise consolidated into a skinny boat cruising the Rio Frio through the Cano Negro Wildlife Preserve in the northern Costa Rican lowlands.

Parking the boat meant grounding it on the river’s muddy shores and keeping an eye on the brown water for fins. The infamous freshwater sharks of Lago de Nicaragua live less than 50 miles upstream and, in our drunken thirst to see all and every animal in the Central American isthmus, we believed that, since relations between the nations had warmed, the sharks might make the day trip into Costa Rica.

Once beached, having seen zero sharks, we birders and strangers single-filed towards the bow and a crude wooden dock jutting into the water above it. To facilitate passage, the river boat company had lashed an old, balding tire to a sun-bleached post, giving us an intermediate platform between the boat’s slick deck and the wooden dock high above. Still, the step to the top of the crudely roped tire was high—three and a half feet at least—for many of our older or shorter limbed passengers.

Not paying attention as I waited to step off, my eyes were still displaced in the jungle canopy above, hoping to spot some more Capuchin monkeys or a sloth. So when the sizable Midwesterner of advancing years found herself stuck, suspended between stepping fully up onto the tire or falling disastrously back onto the deck, I was ill-prepared to help. She hovered there, shaking with muscular strain and failure manifested in a strangely kinetic stasis. Her internal CD drive began skipping right there, halfway between the boat and the safety of a dock on the muddy bank of a Costa Rican river.

“Give me a shove, wouldya!” she half-shrieked to who ever stood behind her. Perhaps she assumed her husband. But he, ruddy-faced from the tropical heat and his voice softened by what sounded like years of emphysematic coughing, was helpless as he watched her struggle, standing three places behind her in the line of exiting passengers.

“Eh - that’s not me, dear,” he said, sotto voce, wondering, along with everyone else, what I, the actual man in position behind his wife, would do.

So here I was, final day of an eventful eight, my first Latin American foray. Some people had told me that Costa Rica lacked culture, that it was an American vassal state. While it was true that the country boasts little in the way of pre-Columbian culture, or even Colonial vestiges compared to many Latin American countries, I nevertheless found the typical Costa Rican lifestyle appealing, romantic in its simplicity and yet creature-comforted by streaks of modernity. As for the people, they were, at least outside the choked capital of San Jose, nearly all friendly, generous, hospitable. In a week of travel, we had not had a single altercation, or even bizarre interlude worth retelling. The greatest cultural barrier I encountered was when a storeowner poured a just-purchased glass bottle of Coke into a plastic bag for me, with a straw, because he had to keep the bottle for reimbursement.

This moment, on the boat deck, with the large Nebraskan hovering above me, and the howler monkeys in the trees surrounding, throwing their warning dung bombs across the bow of our tiny ship, had the distinct possibility of becoming a defining moment.

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