Shining with Every Movement

The rehearsal dinner had the haphazard quality of an event organized in the tropics, where both cell phones and responsibilities have spotty service. A three-walled restaurant with insufficient waiters hosted us and dinner took almost three hours to serve and sort and share the English-language menus.

In the midst of the ordering and waiting, an after-dinner dance party was deemed necessary, as only these sorts of things can be. It was hasty and half-hearted in the planning stages, but once implemented went on as most dance parties do. Nineteen friends, found in different stages of drunk and sweaty and committed, dancing in a large pagoda in the backyard of a rental house to “Seven Nation Army”.  I most feel comfortable as DJ in those situations. I can’t live outside my head when dancing is involved; I need a task.

The dance party wound down at 12:30. Everything was sticky; the temperature was still a humid 90 degrees. A moonless sky served to accentuate the overwhelming stars.

 Someone suggested we go to the beach. A narrow path cut from the rental house through the jungle and out onto a wide and white private beach. I was one of the last to arrive, and the beach was littered with piles of my friends’ clothing, as if they had disappeared out of their outfits as soon as they touched the sand. Skinny-dipping sounds emanated from the ocean—laughter, chatter, splashing and reckless abandon—but as I stepped closer I realized I could see from where the sounds came. The ocean was teeming with bioluminescent phytoplankton. My friends shone with every movement.

Not our beach, but very similar to what I saw. 

I was hesitant to join them. I was feeling much older on this trip, and thought that maybe I’d passed the age of group skinny dipping. But my friends were glowing in the sea and I was jealous. I wanted to shine. I stripped down and ran in.

It was as if I were swimming in sparklers. Every movement lit up my whole body, each kick left a trail of light. I couldn’t stop laughing. The bride floated by me, doing the backstroke through the teeming sea, her face glowing from the moment, her eyes reflecting the endless galaxy above and below.

It was much too much.
And I’m grateful.

(I was in Costa Rica in September/October 2011; I'm just getting around to writing about it)

Climbing Out of the Panoply

The humidity of Costa Rica isn’t subtle; it doesn’t creep upon you, doesn’t belly up to the bar beside you as you sit. It hits; it has fists that punch the moment one steps outside. It is as subtle as a stripper.  I walked out of the San Jose airport towing my bright orange backpack and was forced to stop a moment to collect my breath, the air thick with city and heat and sweat and noise. My prearranged taxi driver mumbled to me in broken English how to get to his beat-up Mitsubishi and I blindly followed.

20 minutes later my driver dropped me at the inner-city bus station, where I was to meet my charter out to the coast. He told me that the brightly-painted castle next to the station used to be a prison. It’s now a children’s museum. He said this like this shift was symbolic of the whole country. 

I ordered a lunch at the bus station mostly through pointing and nodding; it was carne and rice but I’ve no details apart from that. My Spanish was slow to come back to me after sitting dusty since high school. I felt dumb; I’m no good at staying mute. To use the restroom at the bus station cost 50 coloń, or about ten cents. The bored looking woman at the table took my coin and handed me a few small squares of single-ply. I was traveling alone and the floor of the bathroom was slick, and so I found myself squatting over a dirty toilet, wearing my 30lb backpack and trying not to laugh out loud while my thighs shook.

The bus wasn’t air conditioned. It was half-full and I took my pre-assigned seat by an open window, my sweaty back made hotter by the rough fabric of the seat. We climbed out of the panoply of the city without a word passing between any of us. The roads narrowed and traffic shifted without signs or signals. Buses blindly passed each other. Banana farms and endless jungle lined the two-lane road and everything was verdant and hummed of wings and lust and sweat and arrogant fertility. I didn’t know where I was and my heartbeat thumped loudly in my head.

I caught my first glimpse of a road sign three hours later, after I’d resigned myself to the possibility that I’d missed my stop and my future included being murdered in the jungle near Panama, and after my fellow travelers had departed and been replaced by new strangers, one carrying a live chicken. The lone road sign was bent and dirty and hard to see but provided the modicum of comfort that I needed. It was such a relief to know I wasn’t lost, I just wasn’t there yet.