A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving. ~Lao Tzu

The dolphin leaves on a ship to Ecuador Monday, we fly out on Saturday….Next comes South America…Over halfway there…

April 8
Eliada Orosco Madrigal

Our first stop along the southern coast of Costa Rica was in Jacó, a surfer town set on a long Pacific beach surrounded by dense jungle. We were sitting outside the Dolphin at an ungodly hour, in Camping Madrigal, the morning we met Eliada Orosco Madrigal. To say we had awoken early that morning would be an understatement. At 5:30 the cocks began their yodeling and I jumped out of bed to unplug the Dolphin’s electrical cord from the outlet in the campsite in order to avoid the extra electricity fee and the morning caretaker. The air on this beach refused to move – it held stubbornly still in its humid bed and denied us even a breath of wind during the night. We had secretly plugged in the vehicle at night in order to use the tiny fans near our heads, which created more an illusion of a draft than anything tangible. But at times, when our small loft bed in the Dolphin takes on the dimensions of a coffin and we seek sleep on sweaty, sandy sheets, the idea of a cool ocean breeze is all our minds need to believe. After the early morning cover up of the contraband plug-in, we had been unable to fall back into our dreams, which were not particularly pleasant anyway, so we made coffee and sat outside the car, watching through the mango trees as the sun rose over the ocean.

As we sat watching the most dedicated early bird surfers arrive down the dirt road, an old woman came around the car, smiling. The bottom edge of her burnt sienna house dress was speckled with black volcanic sand and saltwater from the sea. Her soft ankles, swollen around the joints, were tanned and freckled above the blue plastic flip flops on her feet. Her face held the wrinkles of a woman who has smiled often over the years; her loosely held hair still shone with the silver black swirls of someone half her age. She greeted us Buenos Dias and asked about our stay. We responded politely and Jonas asked in Spanish if she was the proprietor of the campground.

“Oh, yes, I own most of this land. I was, you see, the first Tica (Costa Rican) to come to this part of the isthmus. That was 65 years ago and I was 19. I am 83 now. There were only a few Panamanian fishermen here at the time. All this land was ours - mine and my husband’s. He’s dead now though, eleven years ago. But I’m still here.” She smiled down at us and arranged her sea swept bun with her hand.
So we asked and she recounted a small slice of Latin America.

Eliada originally lived in Puntarena, inland from the coast, with her husband and two little children. Her husband was a cattle rancher and was gone for days at a time, buying and selling cattle. She was alone too much, 19 years old and depressed. The burden of raising their two babies alone finally became too much, and she told her husband she could no longer live the life of a rancher’s widow. Her husband understood and moved his young wife and their toddlers to an area of Costa Rica were there were no roads, no stores, no other ranch families – to the densely forested southern coast, near the border of Panama. There they were isolated, but together - homesteaders of the old world of Central America.

Eliada and her family arrived in Jacó by boat, the only mode of transport to such a remote jungle area. I imagined her trepidation upon first seeing the black coastline, the powerful crashing surf, the mountains of green vines, dangling, twisted trees and impenetrable growth, writhing and yelling and seething toward the sea. She pointed out where the family made their first house, now an empty plot on the beach, surrounded by small apartment complexes and upscale tourist rental cabins. Maybe she holds onto this plot, refusing to sell, for it is the only empty beach-front land on the two mile stretch of sand.

When they arrived in the tiny fishing village, Jacó was still part of the living jungle around it. Eliada remembered wild animals of all types wandering out of the forest, into their homes. One morning, they found a half eaten goat near their house. The next night, with a net, the villagers hid and waited, and the Jaguar returned to finish the second half of his kill. When he arrived, silently padding out of the forest, risking the scent of human habitation for the addictive taste of goat flesh, they caught him. We did not ask the fate of the great cat – we could only imagine the terror such a creature would inspire in a tiny village in the wilderness.

Eliada bore fifteen children with her husband in the jungle of Jacó. Only nine survived. The nearest doctor was hours away by boat, across the immense waves of the Pacific, up the coast. I looked into her soft eyes, trying to locate the gaping holes that are carved away in the soul by the death of children. Yet this woman was so at ease, so full of genuine warmth, proceeding through life at 83 with a sharp and confident mind. I cannot fathom the abyss of darkness that must close over one’s spirit after the death of the fourth child, and the fifth and finally, tragically the sixth. I did not ask how or when the deaths occurred or why they continued to have children…it was irrelevant. The stories would have been so far into an age-old world of survival and tragedy that I never could have comprehended anyway, with my small well of experience.

Eliada learned to read at age 40 by watching her children do homework. While she pretended to understand and supervise, she was silently memorizing the sounds of the letters, the meaning of words. She wanted very much to read the Bible, but was too ashamed to admit, even to her children, that she had never learned to read or write. So she quietly taught herself through osmosis. As she grew older she watched her home change from a small Panamanian fishing village to a real Costa Rican town with roads and schools to a tourist Mecca for blond guys named Ned who get temporary tattoos of disfigured Japanese characters representing “wave” and drink Corona in the afternoon near the internet café, awaiting the evening surf. She watched her children grow older and saw her son’s hair become whiter than her own. She gave them jobs to keep them busy, complaining that they cannot support their own children. Eliada has been without her husband for eleven years; she sits in a rocking chair in her front yard every afternoon, facing the plot where they first lived, watching the waves. She says in order to sleep, you must work, you must have a purpose during the day; you must exercise your mind and your body. Insomnia, she says, comes from a lack of the peace that accompanies purpose and hard work. So she awakens every morning before dawn and walks the length of the quiet beach, allowing her feet to flirt with the waves and the small wind to play at her hair, unconcerned with the thick black sand dotting her calves and the hem of her dress. It takes her an hour and a half to walk the coastline of Jacó; she chooses the break of day when it is cooler and the tourists and surfers have not yet arrived on her beach.

Eliada finally chuckled and put her hand to her mouth. “Oh dear, I talk too much. I’m sorry – I will leave you in peace now. It was very pleasant to meet both of you. I guess I just like to talk…” With a small sigh, the Mother of Jacó and one of the pioneers of Central America gave us a last smile, wiped at her dress, and walked slowly back through the mango trees. Her grace was untouched by the growing pierce of morning heat and her passage went unnoticed by the morning traffic on the sandy road.

We took a greatly needed four-day TV-kitchen-couch-drink-beer break in a friend’s studio apartment in a swanky ex-pat suburb of San Jose. Although our friend’s studio was a modest, brightly lit spot set back from the street, his neighbors were the ... [Continue reading this entry]