We live in a sort of throwback time here. Things taken for granted in the “developed” world–uninterrupted electricity, watching your favorite team play online, well-lit thoroughfares, mandatory high school education—are still considered a luxury—at least to those living in rural Costa Rica. Recently I was driving from Dominical to Quepos, on the “new “ road, the paved road, remembering how absolutely giddy I felt the first time I drove the new 40 kmstretch, grinning nonstop now that the bone-jarring 2 hour travail had been transformed into a 25 minute breeze. As was my custom when the road was bad,  I stopped for a break at the Savegre River bridge. There is a space with a ledge, right as you turn in toward the mountains, and it is a good place to sit, maybe have a long drink and a short smoke, and watch the river. At that spot, the Rio Savegre is bottoming out from its long savage run down the mountain. In the late afternoon grayness that followed the day’s rains I saw that the river, even here, was swollen and rushing and mud brown, carrying branches and small pieces of zinc and wood. Something had been destroyed upriver, possibly somebody’s rancho, another lean-to built too close to the riverbank.

A convoy of tractor trailers roared over the bridge above. The rutted, broken excuse for a road that had tormented drivers for years was now a part of the interamericana, the Pan-American Highway. That was civilization rumbling past me up there…and at that moment I saw a campesino hacking his way through the clump of jungled hillside that separated me from the highway. Why he was patiently slicing a path with his machete at this spot was a mystery. I observed him in my side mirror, the churning river a blurred backdrop. When he got within a few meters of my car he stopped and walked over. He stared out at the river with me. We exchanged greetings. He had been up by the underside of the bridge, scavenging. He lived nearby, on the old unpaved road that had been left untouched when the new highway went in. It was raining regularly in the mountains and during the last rain he had salvaged 5000 colones– 10 dollars –worth of flotsam. I commented that it was probably much nicer for him that the new road was in and he did not have to breathe dust in summer and slog through mud in the rainy season. He shrugged and said he had problems where he lived. Problems with the suegra—the mother-in-law. He was married to a 24 year old woman and lived with her and her mother and father. Campesinos live hard, physical lives and it is often difficult to tell their age, but this guy’s gaunt body, lined face, and flickering eyes told of years of hard and poorly compensated labor. I guessed him to be around fifty. I smiled and congratulated him on having a much younger bride. He shrugged. She’s epileptic, he said. She is very sick, always—siempre enferma. She has seizures. He went through an entire reportoire of pantomimes– an open mouthed, twisted face, followed by a shaking upper body, followed by rolling his eyes up into his head– to illustrate what she looked like during a seizure. La pobrecita, he said. There had been numerous stays in the hospital, much suffering. These tales of woe are not uncommon among the working rural poor here; it sometimes seems every other campesino family has a story to tell of a crazed homebound aunt or a crippled mother or some vago family member’s brood of underfed kids to care for.

He pulled a crumpled cigarette pack from his pocket, fished one out, and lit it up. He offered me one as well, the last in the pack. “No gracias,” I said. “No fumo cigarros.” He took a long drag and continued talking. He had come to this area ten years earlier to work on the palm plantations that line miles and miles of the central Pacific Costa Rican highway. He moved into what he described as little more than a zinc shed on the property of his future wife’s family. She was 15 when he met her, and suffering from seizures even then.Her mother and father, he casually informed me, tied her to the kitchen table when they had to leave the house. I let this sink in. His tone was resigned, emotionless.I repeated what he had said back to him in the form of a question. “Le amarró a la mesa de la cocina?” He nodded. His mother-in-law still wanted to tie her to the table when no one else was home and it was the source of much tension and disagreement.

I stared out at the muddy Rio Savegre, a river that in my 21 years here has carved new terrain and rerouted itself on more than one occasion: a wild, free-flowing river that dumps immeasurable volumes of water into the Pacific. He stared out as well, smoking, brooding.

I started my car and said luego. There was nothing else to talk about. He started back up the hill toward home, to the throwback life he shared with the in-laws and his poor tortured wife, La Pobrecita. I turned onto the highway. Her face—or his imitation of her distorted face in the throes of a seizure– was in my head as I shifted gears and gunned the engine and headed north, toward Quepos.

Back in the 90s I lived in the southern Costa Rican city of San Isidro del General. I owned a car, but my preferred mode of transportation was the bicycle. I rode almost every day and one of my favorite training runs was to the top of El Alto, the highest peak between San Isidro and Playa Dominical. The climb was over a thousand feet in a distance of less than ten miles. I did it as much for the exhilarating high-speed ride back down the mountain as for the exercise. The last couple of kilometers before beginning the ascent wound through a neighborhood called El Hoyon. I would psych myself while passing through, preparing for the torturous climb. It was here, in a spot along the road that overlooked a warehouse of some kind, that I began encountering a man who hid himself in the high grass on the embankment above the warehouse. When I passed he would often be there, lurking, visible only from the waist up. He would shout something to get me to look, and when I glanced over while passing he would make odd, slurping sounds, sometimes saying, “ooo, que rico”, always those words. Though I couldn’t tell for sure in the couple seconds of view, he often appeared to be playing with himself.

One morning, I must have been riding a bit slower than usual, and he emerged from the brush and crossed the street in front of me, grinning at me as I approached. He plainly grabbed at his crotch as I passed, made the slurping sounds and said “ooo que rico.” I rode on without responding. In my teens and early twenties I had hitchhiked over thousands of miles of highways and had certainly had my share of weird experiences and strange advances, so there was nothing startling or scary about his actions. Besides, I was twice his size physically; he was a bedraggled looking guy in his 30s, dressed in jeans, dank work shirt and cheap black rubber boots. I felt sorry for him. He was clearly poor and likely simple in the head.

I kept an eye out for him any time I rode by. Sometimes he was there, more often not, but any time he saw me as I rode by, he would shout to get my attention and I would glance over as I sped by, catching a glimpse of his leering face. He would usually be a few feet down the embankment, so that his head was only a couple feet above the edge of the road, framed by the wild uncut grass. I sometimes wondered where he lived, if he had family in the area, but as time passed, I noticed him less and less.

One morning as I pedaled through El Hoyon, I watched from the distance as he emerged from the bush and said something to a passing group of school aged children. The children quickly crossed the street to get away from him. As I passed he was stepping back down into his area and did not see me. I rode a hundred yards past, filled my left hand and pocket with several small rocks that I scooped up from the broken road side, and rode back slowly toward him. When he saw me he began his routine, but I stopped, dismounted from my bike and began firing rocks in his direction. I was only about ten feet away from him and though obscured, he was still an easy target. When he realized what was happening, he shouted something, a command, and suddenly three dogs tore from the bush and ran at me, barking. I fired a few more of the rocks in their direction, jumped on my bike and sprinted back toward San Isidro, growling dogs nipping at my heels.

Shortly thereafter, I moved to Quepos, and I never saw the guy again. I return to San Isidro from time to time, but El Hoyon has undergone a lot of development in the past ten years and the place where he once lurked is now the entrance to a large, open depository of some kind. Alas, the pervert is no more—but the memory of him lingers, like the residue of a bad dream.