There’s a big difference between a vacation and an adventure. A vacation—for the most part, is pre-planned. You know what’s going to happen before it happens---where you’ll eat, what you’ll do, where you’ll stay. An adventure is different. It’s like being in a fairytale, wandering around lost in the forest, not knowing what’s going to happen next—good or bad.
Halfway through my Costa Rica “adventure”, I’m tempted to give up. But if you want a real adventure, you can’t simply give up halfway through. I’ve been on the Pacific side for two weeks now, and I’m thinking of going to the Caribbean side. Everyone tells me not to go there:
“The people are wild, the animals are wild, and the weather is wild,” they tell me.
Perfect, I think.
So, I grab a bus and head to the south Caribbean. It’s gorgeous and lush and green. I stay in a treehouse in the jungle with a dipping pool. On the Pacific side, there’s the dry season and the rainy season.
Here in the Caribbean, there’s no such segregation. It’s the rainforest, so it rains at least a little most days. The Pacific side is super touristy— like Santa Barbara on steroids. But the Caribbean is less developed and more laid back—more like a real jungle ought to be.
The best part of the Caribbean is I finally meet the drug connection I’ve been looking for. All along, I thought my drug connection would be a big, burly, tattooed, taxi driver guy. As it turns out, it’s a diminutive grandmother—a pretty, brunette lady in her late 60’s from Idaho. I meet her early one morning when I am uncharacteristically awake and out on the beach.
She’s walking her big, brown dog, and I, of course, have to stop and pet him. We start chatting and I admit I’m too afraid of the waves to swim.
“All you need is a boogie board. You tie it to your foot and if you get dragged out, you can get back,” she says.
L. lives nearby and offers to lend me her boogie board. We walk to her house, and we sit on her front porch and search the trees for sloths. “They’re most likely here. You just can’t see them.”
Her dog stretches out in front of me, and I rub him with my feet. She’s selling her house, and I tell her I’m thinking of moving to Costa Rica.
“If you buy my house, you can keep the dog,” she says.
“Not a bad offer,” I say.
We arrange to meet for dinner the next day, and afterward, we go back to her house where she produces half an ounce of marijuana.
“I can help you get more,” she says.
“Well, all right!” I say.
She rolls a joint and we slowly get stoned and drink Jameson out of iced glasses.
L. tells me she’s had seven husbands.
“Goddamn, really?” I say
“What can I say?” she says, laughing mischievously. “I like men.”
“I like being married,” she continues on. “People ask me all the time, after so many marriages, why don’t you give up, and I say I don’t look at my marriages as failures. I learned so much from each one of them.”
I think of Babe Ruth, the famous baseball player who got the most home runs—and the most strikeouts. He was married and divorced several times. People used to ask him why he kept getting married, and he’d say, “Just because I keep striking out doesn’t mean I don’t get up to bat.”
I tell L. of my recent marriage and divorce and how I found the whole marriage thing oppressive and overwhelming. In fact, the day we went to the courthouse and got married, I went home with a queasy stomach, as if I’d eaten a bad shellfish and had to lie down for three weeks.
L. tells me about her two children who died—one just two years ago, and how she laid in bed and howled for weeks—maybe months. She doesn’t remember exactly.
I tell her about my rape in Turkey, and how after I stood on the balcony outside my apartment, overlooking the crumbling streets of Istanbul and howled with grief—not so much because of the rape itself, but because of the shattering of my childish illusions that life was good and terrible things don’t happen.
It took me many years to realize that two things can be true at once: Life is good and terrible things do happen.
Life is salty and sweet. Us Jews know this better than most. We don’t believe in an all-knowing, powerful, benevolent God in the sky (or else how does one explain the Holocaust?). Nor do we believe in a fiery hell.
We believe in nuance and shades of grey. That’s why, during Passover, we eat Matza crackers topped with bitter horseradish and sweet apples and wine, symbolizing the bitterness of slavery under the Egyptians and the sweetness of freedom when Moses led the Jews to the "Promised Land". The bitter and the sweet, together.
But for me, right now, life is sweet. I swing on my hammock in my treehouse late night and eat gummies and listen to the animal sounds in the jungle. In the misty, early mornings, I wake to the sounds of howler monkeys high in the trees.
When it comes time next to test my courage, I’m in the ocean with my boogie board. I’m all alone on this desolate beach. There’s no one there to save me if I get in trouble. The waves are big, but I’ve got my boogie board strapped to my ankle.
My instinct is to brace myself against the roaring waves, but I dive deep into them instead and swim further out into the ocean. I think back to when I played fast-pitch girls’ softball when I was 14. I was the pitcher.
All eyes were on me every inning of the game, as I stood on the mound, trying to throw strikes. It should have been the easiest thing in the world—just one simple motion over and over, but just letting go and letting my body do the work without my mind interfering was one of the hardest things ever.
Out here in the ocean, I imagine I’m on the pitcher’s mound again, my teammates around me screaming encouragement to me. With no one around, I shout to myself, “You can do it, you can do it!”
I try to ride the waves with my boogie board, but the first few waves smash my face to the ocean floor, seawater and sand streaming up my nose. No one will know if I give up now and go home, but I tell myself, “Just one more time. One more time.”
I catch the next wave, and the next and the next, and gleefully ride the waves to shore.
‘I’m doing it! I’m doing it! I’m doing it!” I shout to myself.