Brookline, Mass., March 2000

(Continued.)

It is as if the stark disconnected images of my nightmare were the bones of an incomplete skeleton - increasingly two-dimensional with the passage of time - which have now grown flesh: muscle, sinew, voice, rhythm, balance - have gained a soul!
The difference between the perceptions of a 6-year-old and a 44-year-old answers for some of this. My young self could not have recognized that the muddy mountain road was in fact a norm - and part of a vast web of throughways, for footpath to highway, adapted to the needs of the people, the demands of the tropics, and the limits of public funds (and priorities). That so much travel even now in Costa Rica is intensively local. That work and social interaction is cast in an unurgent mold, so that a visit or chore, if not done today (because of a washout, say) can always be done mañana. This much-maligned (by northerners) Latin sensibility is a relief valve that allows life to keep going. One bows to the inevitable and takes a siesta.
Somehow this adult awareness of the continuum of existence - at least in the context of roads - erases my terror. Something like the same effect occurs in with the other dream ingredients of weather, the cliffside shrine, the precipice.
These threatening pictures which jarred the 6-year-old me awake in my cozy bed have realigned themselves like the faces of an origami transformation - originally at odds with any reality, they now mesh and soften....

Let me be more specific about the roads.
We drove 917 km in 8 days.
Of these roughly half were on major "red-line" roads other than Highway 1 (the Pan-American Highway), and the surface and condition of these varied quite widely - sometimes within the space of 100 meters - from well-paved, to patched, to pot-holed, to unabashed gravel. Even a gravel section could be preferable to paved, if it was well-graded - but this usually didn't last more than 1/2 km at a time.
Some 100 km was on Highway 1, which was generally good and even widened to two lanes each way at major intersections.
The balance was on lesser roads - significant legs of our trip. Our surprise and doubt magnified, for instance, as we followed signs to the Arenal Observatory lodge, and found ourselves on an increasingly improbable surface (to our unaccustomed sense) of crater-like potholes, large, protruding rocks, hairpin turns and single-lane bridges of dubious provenance. The only signage was that provided by enterprise - usually a makeshift cluster of half-rusted posts uneasily congregated near a fork in the road - and of course there were no lane markings, cat's-eyes, street lamps, railings, or any other aid.
(Back to Farewells.)