My grand Costa Rica adventure starts out like this: I buy a $309 ticket going from LAX. to New Orleans to Costa Rica. I wave my ticket in front of my friends, like I just won the golden ticket to Willie Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. “I’m going to Costa Rica for $309!” I shout.
I hop on the plane to Louisiana, see my family first, and the night before my Costa Rica trip, I notice the ticket says San Jose, California, not San Jose, Costa Rica. Goddamn, I think. But I’m in full-on travel mode. Nothing’s stopping me now. Cost be damned. I buy a new ticket to San Jose, Costa Rica, close my eyes at the price, and hit “purchase.”
I arrive in San Jose, grab a bus going way down south, where I book a small cabin next to the beach. In the morning, I rush out the door and the heat and humidity knock me off my feet. It’s the hottest, wettest heat I’ve ever felt—a combination of Louisiana heat in the swamps in August and what I imagine hell must be like. I’m on my way to the beach, just 500 feet away--the longest 500 feet I’ve ever walked. I stop every 10 feet. But of course, I’m walking in the wrong direction.
I spot a man on the road selling coconuts. He greets me like he’s been expecting me all day. “What you want--coconut oil, milk, meat?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say. “All of it.”
He begins cracking coconuts, offering me the water in a glass.
“I can open 150 coconuts and they all taste different, like wine,” he says, gleefully, like a child showing off magic tricks.
I don’t mind if he does. The man, whose name is Elvis, offers me a chair in the shade. A cool breeze picks up, as sweet and refreshing as the coconut juice. I think I’ll stay here in the shade with him until he asks me to marry me or to leave. He does neither, but sends me off with a bag of coconut meat and a bottle of milk—all for $5.
“Be careful,” he says. “The milk is strong. It gets rid of parasites.”
I drink half the bottle and turn around to find the beach. I try to swim in the ocean, but the rip tide is too strong. I lay out on a blanket in the sand, but within minutes my towel is covered with ants. A prehistoric-looking iguana scuttles out from the brush and stares at me. I stare back. Neither of us blinks.
My stomach is killing me. I head back to my cabin, which is basically a glorified toolshed with very little ventilation. I woozily climb the steps to the loft. I drop down to the mattress on the floor. The heat and humidity and food poisoning overtake me. I lie on my side and moan.
I feel like I’m in a P.O.W camp, waiting to be interrogated. I interrogate myself, questioning every decision I ever made as I linger between wanting to throw up and being too afraid to.
The next day, I think fuck it. I leave the tool shed three days early and book a sweet Airbnb with air conditioning, a real bed, and its own private swimming pool. I strip off naked and swim laps and float on my back, the lush palm trees swaying overhead.
My body unclenches. It feels like I’m swimming through silk. I look up at and see one the workers watching me from the balcony. Aw, shit. I don’t care. I’m 57, not 27, and the chances of getting raped and murdered are so much less. Predators steal the innocence of the young, and I lost my innocence a long time ago. Still, that night, out of habit, I search the Airbnb for a potential weapon. All I find is a very large fork, which I stick under my pillow.
The next day, I am squished in a jeep, next to Duncan, a handsome-sandy-haired velvet-rainbow-pants wearing guy on my way to go paragliding. “How old do you think I am ?” he asks. I stare deeply into his eyes. Not 20’s, not 40’s. I draw out the words. “Thirty-seven-and-a-half,” I say.
“How did you know?!” he asks. “That’s it exactly.”
I shrug my shoulders. “Sometimes I just know things without knowing how I know.”
We talk about global warming, kids, philosophy. “If I ever have a child, I want to have a ‘super kid’ with a super-hot girl who’s a genius,” Duncan says.
I’m guessing the woman he’s fucking, Kate, who’s sitting on the other side of him, whose hand he’s holding and just turned 50, isn’t going to be the mother of his children. She laughs nervously.
“Well, I’m Buddhist at heart,” I say, trying to change the subject for Kate’s sake. “and the first tenet of Buddhism is suffering. Everyone and everything around you dies, until eventually it’s you. Once you get used to that, it’s not so bad,” I say.
In a few more minutes, we are standing on the edge of a cliff, overlooking the green, green jungle and the ocean, about to jump. I’m strapped in with my tandem-pilot, Beth. “Are you scared?” she asks.
“What’s there to be scared of?” I say with a laugh.
We all die. I know now for sure that’s true, since my beloved aunt—my father’s 88-year old sister, who helped raise me, is back in Los Angeles on her death bed. In five days, she’ll be gone.
Beth and I step off the mountain, as if we’re flying in a dream. The cool air, after the stifling humidity, is orgasmic. We soar high above the trees and the ocean alongside the birds. It feels surreal and almost cartoonish, as if we could fly through the trees and nothing bad can happen to us.
We follow the updrafts. We head in for a landing way too soon. Back in the car, Kate and Duncan tell me about their spiritual journey work and all the mushrooms and ayahuasca they’ve been taking.
“Duncan’s been taking it very seriously,” Kate says. “He gets up every morning at 7:30 a.m., trips out for five hours and sobers up just in time for his work zoom meeting at noon.”
I laugh “That’s great!” I say.
I examine Kate’s dewy skin and perfectly smooth black hair. “You don’t look 50 at all. I thought maybe you were 40.”
Kate smiles. I used to get these comments all the time myself—until I turned about 55, then they stopped. I think of a butterfly's life span- two weeks to a month. Do they know how short-lived it all is? Do they care?
I think about my aunt who won beauty contests in her youth, and how out of everyone in the family, I resemble here the most. I think what’s the point of trying to hold on to youth and beauty—or even life itself—when every single one of us ends up as a box of ashes or in a box that goes into the ground.
This isn’t a morbid thought. It’s freeing —this knowing that at some point we have no choice but to let go—like stepping off a cliff and flying.
Kate, Duncan and I arrive back in town with our guides, the humidity already soaking our shirts to our bodies.
“We did it!” Kate says. “We were flying!”
“You’re damned right we were!” I say.
We high-five each other and head off into the heat of the day.