My given name is Matthew, but for better than 20 years I have also been known as Mateo, the Spanish equivalent of Matthew. In my early years here, like many wishing to reinvent themselves in one way or another, I sought to be called only by my new Spanish name. I became Mateo—to my wife, kids, friends and acquaintances of all nationalities. Over time, I have introduced myself as ‘Mateo’ to countless people. Most remember my name, but for some unexplainable reason, there are a number of Costa Ricans who upon seeing me a second time, call me ‘Tomás’. It is not as if this has happened one or two times—indeed, it occurs with such startling frequency, that it makes me wonder why I am never misremembered as ‘Marco’ or ‘Miguel’, or another name that begins at least with the same letter as mine.

Admittedly, there are similarities: Both names have 5 letters, 4 of which are the same. But that does not explain why so many people become temporarily dyslexic when they see me coming. Every time I am called ‘Tomás’, I wonder if there are others out there who have similar experiences. Are there any David’s out there who hear themselves always misremembered as ‘Vidal’? Any Anita’s  who have to deal with often being called ‘Tania’?

Just last week, a Costa Rican man stopped me while I was walking with my daughter on the calle central of Quepos. He was vaguely familiar, but greeted me warmly and I chatted with him for a minute. When we parted, my daughter had two questions: 

1. Did you know that guy?
2. Why did he call you Tomás? 

And its not as if it is people I have met but once or twice. Recently a good Tico friend I have known for years referred to me as Tomás before quickly correcting himself. I shook my head, laughed out loud, and explained to him that this was an occurance so frequent that it was a bit spooky. I asked him if there was any logical explanation as to why so many Costa Ricans, after meeting me and learning I am Mateo, will later call me “Tomás”.

“Obviously,” my friend said, “You look like Tomás.”

It was as good an explanation as any, and it got me thinking, why not use this altar ego to my advantage? For some time I have harbored this fantasy of carrying a high-powered airhorn around town while driving the narrow broken streets. It would be used judiciously, against fools who impeded traffic with thoughtless actions. Forced to slow down for a group of seemingly brain-dead pedestrians walking four abreast, I always imagine easing past them and leaning out to give a nerve-shattering blast. Forced to stop at an intersection for a cab driver who has decided that the best place to discharge his fare is where the painted crosswalk would be if painted crosswalks existed in Quepos, I dream of pulling up next to him and BWWWAAAAHHHHing him into next week as an impromptu lesson. Of course, the fear of being easily recognized has always tempered any such fantasies. Mateo could never actually do this. As for Tomás–maybe Tomás could.

I recently purchased two new pairs of eyeglasses, one pair lightweight and fashionable, the other pair protective glasses for bike riding, etc. Far from fashionable, the protective glasses look like I told the optician to please give me the ugliest pair in stock, a prosthetic device for the eyes. They are clunky enough to slightly change my appearance, and I like the idea of a sort of reverse Clark Kent effect—putting on the eyeglasses to change one’s self—voila!—no longer Mateo, but Tomás.

The more I consider it, the more I embrace the possibility of running with this. Like a child who blames mishaps on an imaginary friend, I could pin any regrettable public behavior on Tomás—so, if on some hot, bright Quepos summer day,  you happen to see a guy who resembles me, and he is wearing a weird and homely pair of glasses, engaged in actions that might be considered embarrassing or unacceptable—don’t consider it a hallucination brought on by the power of the sun. Just blame it on Tomás.

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.

A few years ago, I was on the receiving end of the only “road rage” incident I have experienced in over 20 years in Costa Rica. It was near the airport, at night, at a stoplight on the multi-lane highway from Alajuela. I had unknowingly moved in front of another car while coming to a stop at the red light,  concerned with positioning myself for the upcoming airport exit. While awaiting the green light, the driver began flashing his high beams and blowing his horn. When the light turned green, he blew around me, cut dangerously in front of me and braked. When I attempted to pass he sped up and when I returned behind him he slowed down again. Obviously whatever I had done while approaching the previous stoplight had angered him enough to risk an accident while he worked out his anger toward my benign driving error. (He was actually very lucky, as I was driving a sleek, compact rental car, on the way to pick up my teenage son and daughter at the airport. Had I been driving my Trooper or Pathfinder—whichever aged and battered model I owned at that time—I might have just rammed into him when he cut in front of me and slowed abruptly).

I sometimes think of that driver when I am driving the roads of Costa Rica. Every day, I encounter numerous situations that could push me over the edge— were it not for the fact that I practice what I like to call “road tranquility” while behind the wheel. An endless soundtrack of soothing harp music plays in my head, the smiling face of Maharishi Whoever appears in my mind’s eye, and I calmly adjust to whatever highway idiocies are thrown in my path. That pirate taxi driver coming around the curve at high speed well over the faded double yellow line? No problem, I will just move quickly to the right while also slowing enough to avoid the family of four walking side by side, backs to the passing cars. That guy in front of me driving 5 miles per hour through town while he waves to his friends and neighbors as if to say “Look at me! I’m driving a car!”? Tranquilo, mae, we’re in no hurry here.

I long ago accepted that a higher than average percentage of adults in this country suffer from some form of attention deficit disorder, so that when a driver slows from 80 kph to 20 kph for no visible reason, I do my best to slow down with him, and pass him if it is safe to do so, without blowing the horn or flipping him the bird. Those pedestrians who step in front of me even when I have the right of way are greeted with a friendly wave of the hand and a smile. That Maharishi in my mind’s eye smiles too, as I resist the urge to stop my car and lecture the pedestrians (“See this car? It’s made of Steel. Steel is a very hard object. A ton of steel moving at thirty miles an hour would easily crumple and crush your flesh and bones.”).

Most of my driving is done far from the Valle Central Metro Area, so my practice of “road tranquility” is not tested as thoroughly as it would be if I lived around San Jose. Driving there presents its own set of patience destroying challenges. It is as if the city planners of San Jose (if there is such a thing here) want to create an atmosphere of total driving confusion. Lanes that merge abruptly, center lanes that suddenly become left turn only lanes, unmarked and unnamed streets, faded street signs, important road signs with letters the size of the bottom line of an eye chart, are all part of the mix of driving in San Jose. Recently, while driving there, I made the mistake of attempting what I thought was a shortcut to get from San Pedro (east of San Jose center) to Escazu to the west. I got on a road with a sign for Escazu; over the next couple kilometers I came to three different forks or rotundas, none of which featured a sign indicating the direction for Escazu. My shortcut cost me an extra half hour. All of which reminds of something that happened recently while I was at home, watching a movie with my wife and 11 year old daughter. The movie featured a few uses of the “f-word”. My daughter and I had the following exchange:

Me: You know that’s a bad word in English, right?

Her: Yep.

Me: You don’t hear me use it do you?

Her: Only when you’re driving in San Jose.

What I could not possibly explain to her was that those f-bombs help me maintain a state of road tranquility under the most trying of circumstances; after all, there are occasions when all the imaginary harp music and smiling beatific visions of holy men just aren’t enough.

Every April 11th, Costa Rica celebrates Juan Santamaría day. On that date in 1855, young Juan helped defend Costa Rica’s northern border against the forces led by the American mercenary William Walker, whose goal was to annex Central America for the ignoble purpose of the slave trade. The image of the humble young campesino, torch in hand, giving his life to ensure that Costa Rica was not tarnished by any kind of occupying force is in the heart and mind of every kid who grows up here; so great is the remembrance of his deed that the country’s largest airport is named for him, and a large statue of him greets every arriving visitor.

Flash forward 156 years to a little piece of land called Isla Calero. Part of Costa Rica, the isla has been technically occupied by Nicaragua for the past few months, while they allegedly work to improve the navegability of the San Juan River, which flows between Costa Rica and Nicaragua, but is considered part of Nicaragua.

Isla Calero is part of Costa Rica, but you would not know it from looking at recent photos of members of the Nica army working, living, and going so far as to plant a Nicaraguan flag for the world to see.

I recently received a long email from my cousin Junior Casseday, a retired career US Marine officer who came to Costa Rica to live in retirement. For a while he haunted me in the Quepos area but a few years ago he tired of the hot coastal climate and moved to a town in the mountains somewhere between Perez Zeledon and San Jose. We seldom see each other these days, but keep in touch regularly via email.

He was, and is, an irascible opinionated guy and  his email summed up his feelings toward Costa Rica’s tepid response to Nicaragua’s outrageous action. My cousin has given me permission to quote freely from his rant.

He begins with a suggestion: “If this country was really on the ball, they would round up all the street addicts, dress them in tshirts reading JUAN SANTAMARÍA BRIGADE, give them a few square meals, and bus them all to unload at that little hot spot where the Nica flag flies on CR turf. Send them at night, they are more active then anyway. Imagine what those underfed ragtag Nica army boys would think when a few thousand of CR’s finest street people descended on their positions like the Night of the Living Dead…”

He is not a big fan of Nica leader Daniel Ortega: “ Lock me in a room with that gutless little pedophile and keep the door locked until only one man comes out alive. I would pay good money for the opportunity to snap the neck of that little chickenshit…”

Nor is he a fan of many Costa Rican males: “Really, where are all the tough macho men? Maybe if the Nica force was made up only of women we would have plenty of volunteers ready to go beat them up…”

And needless to say, my cousin has no use for the leadership of Costa Rica: “The lamest response to another country’s disrespect I have ever seen. Oh world court help us. We are a poor and defenseless country and that big bully to the north is hanging out in our yard and cutting down trees and digging big ditches and he won’t stop and he won’t go away………..what a bunch of maricones…..they should replace the statue at the airport with one of a politician pissing his pants in fear….”

I’ll be the first to admit that my cousin can go overboard with his rhetoric. I am not in agreement with much of what he says. However, I think it fitting to conclude my article with the same passage that concluded my cousin’s jeremiad, because I have to admit that it is spot on:

“Nicaragua is crapping on CR and CR lacks the cojones to do anything about it. But why should I be surprised? When has the leadership of this country ever stood for self-reliance? Look at the facts. This is all just par for the course: Need a new stadium? The Chinese will build it. Need a new highway? The Spanish will build it. Need some high tech infrastructure? The Americans or the French or the Japanese will provide it. Need help defending your border against the sorryass Nicas? Sorry Costa Rica, you are on your own, and your lame, spineless, mariconista response speaks volumes.

Juan Santamaría must be rolling over in his grave.”

Someone recently asked me to describe the strangest thing that had ever happened to me during my 20 plus years of living in Costa Rica. My first memory was of an incident that occurred in downtown San Jose in the early 1990s. I had spent the night in a pension in Barrio Mexico. The following morning I walked the kilometer or so toward the small, congested center of downtown San Jose. The most direct route took me through a bedraggled district of cheap all-night bars populated by loud and broken-down street people, but as I was walking among a multitude of pedestrians all en route to downtown, the scene—which was right out of Hogarth’s Gin Lane—seemed harmless. At 6 feet 1 inch, I had no problem seeing over the heads of the people walking in front of me, and ahead I saw a small, boisterous woman, standing in the street and clutching a sort of bedroll. The first thing I noticed was that she was missing an arm. The second thing I noticed was that she was staring right at me. Her wild eyes locked onto me as I approached and did not waver. I glanced away and glanced back and the look in her eyes suggested that I might have been a walking composite of every man who had ever wronged her on her life’s tortured path, As I passed where she stood, I saw a sudden motion from the corner of my eye, then was struck hard on the side of my head by the thing she had been clutching. If it was a bedroll it must have been of the cement lined variety. I reeled and grabbed the shoulder of the person in front of me to keep from falling as she continued whacking me with all the force her one arm would allow. She was saying something as she swung, but I did not understand. Within a couple seconds I was out of her reach, absorbed by the flow of the pedestrians. I heard laughter coming from across the street as I regained my senses and continued toward the city.

I am not sure if that incident qualifies as “strange”. The streets are full of crazed and defeated people often ready to react violently, and my brief experience was more a result of walking down the wrong street. Strange—to me—is when one or more events occur randomly and senselessly, like an odd dream one awakens from laughing or crying or shivering. Had the woman struck me on the head, and then jumped into the back seat of a waiting limousine and sped off, the event may have truly been considered “strange”.

Of course, what is truly strange varies from person to person, dependent upon one’s collected experiences. My incident in the street was a great story that I repeated numerous times over the years, but in terms of strangeness, pales compared to what I am about to reveal for the first time here: Back in the late 1990s I made the acquaintance of a well-traveled English-speaking Chilean woman who claimed to be a psychic. With her flowing prematurely gray hair, steady shining eyes and intense demeanor, she certainly looked the part. I was skeptical of her claimed powers—whenever she greeted me with an innocent “How are you doing today, Matt?”, my first instinct was to say, “Don’t you already know?” I spoke with her frequently, but never about her alleged psychic powers. Then one day in 1999, she told me that she had a job offer in Los Angeles and would soon be leaving. We made some small talk and before departing she kissed me on the cheek and told me to be prepared for big changes in the near future. She locked her eyes on mine, took my hands in hers, and made the only psychic prediction I had ever heard her make. Here is the last thing she said to me:

“A loony is soon to come out of his bin, laden with terrible surprises.”

Sometime in late 2001 or early 2002, I awoke one morning with that sentence pounding through my head. I got up and wrote it down on a piece of paper and saw the name of the recent perpetrator of the worst attack against the US in recent memory, along with a word derived from the word “terror”. I fell back into bed and shivered for the next half hour.

Strange?  You be the judge.

This current situation with Nicaragua makes me feel like I am witnessing some mean, underfed yet frightening school bully stealing lunch money from the timid, studious kid the next barrio over. The powerless one—Costa Rica– offers no resistance, hands over his change, and looks about pleadingly for help, for some authority figure or big brother/mentor to step in and make things right but no help is forthcoming. Meanwhile, the dull bully –Nicaragua– flexes his angry anemic muscle as Costa Rica waits and waits patiently for someone to come and put the meanie in his place. I love this country, but I don’t love the wimpiness, the “turn the other cheek for we are a trembling but proud people of peace” image we seem to be cultivating. Our answer to this illegal occupation of a small piece of Costa Rica has been to….wave flags. We lack toughness. It’s a brutal world out there and too often the Costa Rican response to turmoil is to seek immediate refuge. And while I have no solution to aggressive neighbors, I do have an idea how Costa Rica can assert itself and show some huevos on the international stage.

Tourism is our number one moneymaker. Not only do we have more to offer the benignly adventurous vacationer, but we can wrap it in a package that simultaneously shows the drawbacks inherent in visiting any of the nearby countries competing for the tourist dollar—and that includes you, Nicaragua. They can punk us all they want in militaristic matters, if we’re halfway smart we would compose some kind of open letter to all people intersted in visiting this region of the world and it would go something like this:

Dear Tourist,

So you are thinking of taking a vacation to a new and exotic place, and on your last trip to Hawaii some 500-pound guy playing a ukelele fell on you when you went to tip him, causing a trauma so great that even the thought of the word “aloha” leads to a terrifying sensation of being crushed. The rest of the South Pacific you only know from magazine articles about pink-cheeked missionaries gone forever missing in remote areas populated by some of the earth’s last cannibals.  You hear about this funky place in the Mediterranean called Ibiza, but too many web searches reveal too many photos of too many pasty Euros of both sexes prancing about in thongs, and Bali sounds great until the moment that unemployed grade school dropout Abdullah al-Quilamal decides to blow himself up while seated on the barstool next to you in return for eternal bliss with 72 broken bleeding hymens and 1000 dollars in Indonesian coin for his impoverished family of 10 living on stilts in the distant rice paddies.

So now you have trained your eyes toward the tropical Americas. You’ve heard a lot about this part of the world, but have yet to discern between the countries, besides the fact that they all speak Spanish, and if you speak English slowly and loudly they might understand part of what you are saying. Your first thought might be to visit Mexico, your immediate neighbor because it is closer and there are many good deals to be had, which is to be expected, as you have a 10,000 times greater chance of being kidnapped, tortured and decapitated by drug cartel gangsters if you choose to vacation in Mexico. Ahhh, Mexico Lindo. ¿¿¿Mexico Lindo??? Is that an all-time oxymoron or what? The real national symbol of “Mexico Lindo”should be the smoldering garbage heap at the edge of every village. “Mexico Lindo”, a corrupt country of fixers, bribe-takers and bagmen at every economic strata. Yes dear tourist, Come to Mexico, where every highway roadblock is a life or death adventure!  Is it a federale soliciting a bribe, or is it a member of the Zetas killing random tourists for kicks?

Or you could come to Costa Rica and enjoy the beaches….enjoy the mountains….enjoy the rain forest….and most of all, enjoy the fact that there is virtually no chance that you will be gunned down in a murderous crossfire!

Thinking instead of a vacation to Guatemala? You’ve likely heard about the still prevalent influence of the indigenous cultures. But you likely have not heard that their murder rate is three times that of Mexico! Would you believe 25 murders a week in Guatemala City alone? How do you say “Yikes!” in Spanish?

Come instead to Costa Rica, where our murder rate is miniscule compared to the human carnage that is a way of life in Guatemala.

Or maybe you’ve heard that Nicaragua offers much of what Costa Rica has, only cheaper. This may be true, but it will be cheaper because half the workers in the country make less than three dollars a day. The country is led by a despicable little Castro wannabe, and the only monkeys you will likely see will be roasting over an open fire, the main course for any large campesino family unsure where tomorrow’s meal will come from.

Panama’s main attraction is a canal built by indentured servants who perished by the thousands from yellow fever, influenza, and overwork, thanks to the subhuman labor conditions. The most interesting fact I can think of offhand concerning Panama is that they still refer to their currency as the Balboa, even though the only place you will find a 20 Balboa bill is in a museum.

Colombia has recently entered the tourism market and I’ll admit, its a country whose national beauty may even trump that of Costa Rica, but try driving between cities through remote mountain and jungle regions that rife with ragtag paramiltary groups all to ready to kidnap you and hold you hostage for YEARS if necessary to prove some esoteric ideological point.

Thinking about visiting Venezuela? Two words: Hugo Chavez. Unless you’re some sort of collectivist sop you won’t be interested.

So dear tourist, when you are looking toward warmer climes for your next adventure, please come to Costa Rica, a country not run by commies or drug cartels and where the murder rate is the lowest in the region.

Costa Rica: Clearly the lesser of all evils.

Costa Rica has long been a haven for people on the run; for every legitimate tourist, there is a philanderer, a bail-jumper, a credit card scammer, an embezzler arriving to pass some time in paradise. The smart ones lay low. The others make themselves visible, integrating themselves into the community and completing their metamorphosis from worm to butterfly with the mandatory ‘cover story’. While most cover stories are subtle, a shifting of mere degrees from reality, others use the change in latitudes to transform as completely as an informant in the witness protection program.

However, even the best crafted cover story can be a double-edged sword. With the advent of the internet, anybody can be a detective, and it is in the best interest of one in the throes of life reinvention to concoct a story that is both interesting and investigation-proof.. You want to claim to be 23^rd in line to be the next Prince of Liechtenstein? Or a one-time Olympic alternate in the 20km Walk? Or Tom Hanks´illegitimate kid? Careful what you claim—it can and probably will be looked up.

Twenty years ago, when I first arrived in Costa Rica, veracity of a person´s cover story was not so easy. Generally, you took what someone told you at face value and trusted your built-in bullshit detector to ding when the whopper got to the unbelievable stage. Over the years, I have listened to enough partial biographies to realize that the safest cover story is one that is general and without provable specifics. Not long ago I met a guy who claimed to be a professor of romance languages at a major southwestern US university. Within 30 minutes of being told this, I listened to the same guy mangle the Spanish language while trying to order dinner from a Tica waitress who finally switched the conversation to English in order to clarify what exactly it was that he wanted to eat. I laughed while my bs detector went off like a car alarm in the Costa Rican night. Had this guy simply told me he was a college professor—and left it at that—he may have been on his way to constructing an acceptable cover story.

And then there are those who are so far gone in their role-playing that it seems they really don’t care about the possibility of being found out. Easily the most notorious of these was a fellow I ran into several times over the years in the decade of the 1990s. When I first met him, he intoduced himself as Stig Olavson. He was tall, wiry, blond, with ice blue eyes and a madman’s stare. He claimed to be a native of Norway, and an expert skiier and ice skater—which of course is damn near unprovable here. He spoke English with an undefinable Scando-Euro accent that got more indecipherable with each beer he downed. He was fond of citing some annual quality of life survey that year after year ranked Norway first in the world using some arcane collection of data. “Veee are noomber voon ageeen,” was how he once greeted me, newspaper headline (“Norway Once Again First in Quality of Life”) in hand. In a later conversation, he showed me a worn blue ribbon that he carried in his wallet that he claimed was for winning the annual Norwegian Herring Cannery Workers yodeling competition. While I was never able to produce a yodeler who could verify Stig’s claim, I did one day meet two Norwegian tourists who I immediately took to meet Stig, excitedly explaining en route all of his claimed accomplishments. After the initial introductions, it became clear that Stig could not understand what was being said. He became angry at me. “Why do you bring me these people?” he asked. I explained I thought he would be interested in meeting some of his fellow countrymen. He said I had misunderstood him. “I am not from Norway,” he said. “I am from…….Iceland.”

“You mean to tell me you are not Stig Olavson, proud native of Norway,” I asked.

“I was joking about Norway! My name is Stig Olavson…Olavsonson, Icelandic adventurer,” he shouted. Then he was out the door and I guessed I would never see him again.

I was wrong. A few years later, in a different part of Costa Rica, I encountered a man in a bar, loudly bragging about his exploits playing buzkashi on the plains of Afghanistan. (Buzkashi is the national sport of Afghanistan. In Buzkashi, a headless goat carcass is placed in the center of a circle and surrounded by the players of two opposing teams. The players are all on horseback. The object of the game, is to get control of the carcass and bring it to the scoring area.)

Although the man’s hair appeared to have been died shoe-polish black, and he spoke English with a Boston accent, the ice blue eyes and manic visage were too familiar. I started to call his name, but decided to leave him alone. He had honed his cover story to perfection; after all how astronomical were the odds of a Pashto-speaking horsemen showing up and saying to Stig, “Hey, I play buzkashi, too! I’ve got the carcass, the horses, and a playing field. Come join us!”

I don’t know what ever became of Stig, but until I hear of buzkashi being played on weekends at La Sabana park, I will assume that his cover story is intact.

It was my first month in Costa Rica. I was living in Dulce Nombre de Coronado, a suburb in the hills northeast of San Jose. It was October, the rain fell daily, and the temperature early in the morning hovered around 50 degrees when the sun was obscured by clouds. I was living in a standard Costa Rican 2 bedroom, 1 bath, cold water cement block bunker. The rent was 11 thousand colons a month, which at that time was around 110 dollars. The neighborhood was Tico working class. From my front door I had a view of the narrow street running in front of the house and a sudden drop beyond that widened into a 100-foot deep chasm. The locals used this depression as an impromptu landfill.

I went to San Jose Monday through Thursday to teach English. I paid 18 colons to ride a bus the ten kilometers downhill into the capital. The final point destination point for the Dulce Nombre bus was Calle 5, a narrow city street that seemed to serve as the terminus for half the buses in the metropolitan area. All down the street were lines of people inhaling the monoxide choked air, patiently awaiting their rides.

Early on, I learned to orient myself in the city by looking toward the point in the sky where the darkest, most ominous clouds had gathered. That point was invariably to the northeast, directly above Dulce Nombre de Coronado. Using that as my reference point, reading the city map I carried became much easier.

This wasn´t the tropical Costa Rica I had expected, but circumstances had sent me to live and work in the congested Valle Central for my first six months. San Jose was still a new and exciting city to me then, a place where I went because I wanted to, unlike what it has become to me now, a place I go only when it is absolutely necessary.

On weekends I spent time in the two local cantinas, drinking beers and practicing my Spanish with Tica barmaids and Tico customers. I was still in the early stages of picking up the language; every statement and response was first filtered through English in my head. If someone greeted my by asking, “Como esta?” my brain told me: “Como esta” means ¨How are you”. I was usually good for about an hour of attempted conversation before experiencing cognitive exhaustion. Compounding my problem was that I had not yet learned to appreciate the game of soccer, which is all that was ever on the bar tv on weekends. On a typical Saturday or Sunday afternoon I would be good for a couple beers and an hour or so of attempts at conversation with the locals (as the only non-Latino walking the streets of Dulce Nombre, I had no trouble finding curious people to engage in conversation) before catching a bus into the city and heading to an American sports bar for football or basketball from the US and conversations in the English language.

In time, I made friends with a neighbor named Luis. He was in his early thirties, had four children, no steady job and lived with his mother and various younger siblings in a small concrete block house. Luis was a hard drinking, chain-smoking barfly who listened intently to my attempts to converse in Spanish and answered me in rapid-fire bursts that I understood barely a word of. It didn´t help matters that he was missing his two upper front teeth. Body language, hand gestures, and a lot of verbal repetition marked our daily get togethers.

One evening I asked Luis: “Sabe donde…?” and then I put my index finger and thumb together, held them to my lips, and made a loud inhaling noise, which to me, at least, was a universal pantomime for someone looking to score something more to smoke than the single cigarettes for sale by the bar. Luis smiled his jack-o-lantern smile, nodded, said “Ya!” as in right now, and a few minutes later I was being led through a dairy farm, down a remote hillside and across a shallow river, which Luis passed in seconds, bouncing from small rock to small rock. My attempt to emulate Luis was brief; I waded through the shin deep water to get to the other side. We continued walking until we reached a settlement of a few houses perched along a hillside near the same river we had just crossed. Only 10 miles or so from San Jose, this hidden area was without electricity. It was late afternoon and from inside each house candles and lanterns burned and the rich smell of wood smoke made it seem somehow inviting. Luis went to a house, knocked, and within a couple minutes a barefoot young man emerged, carrying a loosely rolled newspaper. He smiled, laid it at my feet and unrolled it. A connoisseur of finer smoke might well have laughed and gone on his way—this stuff was the ganja equivalent of Boone´s Farm—but I was appreciative of the effort of my friend Luis as well as the calm demeanor of this dealer. He ripped off a piece of the newspaper and measured out and packaged two handfuls. I paid him with one of the now non-existent purple 500 colon notes, which was about 5 US dollars at the time. I thanked him and made my way back to the barrio with Luis.

I got back to my house at nightfall and rolled and smoked an industrial-sized spliff and imagined I was a bit high as I tramped through the house in my soggy sneakers and listened to the BBC news on the shortwave radio.

I recently received an afternoon visit from a squat, unsmiling man who arrived at my house on a small motorcycle and without a word of warning cut off my electricity. His bright yellow shirt easily identified him as one of the seemingly tens of thousands of people employed by ICE (which for the uninitiated, is our national electric and telecommunications company). A visitor to my house saw him removing the cap to the meter and came inside to alert me. By an amazing coincidence, I was at that moment attempting to pay my electric bill via internet. It was not easy, as I only have one option for internet where I live (controlled by ICE) and the speed with which I receive the service puts me in mind of those old time room-sized univacs that probably took a couple days to warm up once they were turned on.

I hurried from the computer in time to see the lights go out and hear the fridge shut down. I ran outside and confronted the man because the local ICE office had told me that morning that I had until the following day to pay the bill. Not that it mattered to him. He insisted I was 10 days late (it was actually six) and waved me off before hopping on his moto and heading back toward town.

I grabbed my 6-days overdue bill, jumped in my car and headed in the same direction. I wanted to catch up with him and wave my bill in his face. Flurries of delicious insults ran through my head as I drove down the road. Just before the Naranjito school I saw him, cutting off the power of another irate customer (who may also have been advised that she had another day to pay). I braked to a halt and waved my electric bill at him. “Solo seis dias tarde,” I shouted. I told him he was wrong and challenged him to come see for himself. He turned and laughed out loud, and it wasn´t an “I´m just doing my job” laugh. It was more like the laugh of a movie villain who has just finished tying his victim to the railroad track as the distant whistle of the train sounds in the background. Then this insult came to my lips: “Cuanto se pagan para hacer eso? Digame cuanto gana usted. Es mi turno a reir.” (How much do they pay you to do this? Tell me how much you make. It’s my turn to laugh.)

I held my tongue though, primarily because I would have been delivering this put down from behind the wheel of my battered and rattling 1991 Pathfinder, the irony of which may have made him laugh even harder (had he an appreciation for irony). What I did yell was a benign, “Coño! Idiota!”, before heading into town to pay my bill and have my service restored.

The above incident is what I refer to as “An ICE Moment”. If one went around Costa Rica collecting such anecdotes of injustices suffered at the aggressively indifferent hands of ICE, one could likely fill a book as long and frightening as anything Stephen King has ever written. ICE can best be thought of as a cross between a corporation and the mafia, with a dash of left-wing street gang thrown in. They make the rules, change them at a whim, and if you don´t like it, you can always live as everyone lived a hundred years ago, reading by the light of the wood fire that dinner was cooked on. Unhappy with the phone service? Do not ever do as a friend of mine once did at the local ICE office. After tearing into the rep about various problems with her telephone line, she concluded by saying she anticipated the day that competition would be allowed in so she could leave ICE and their stinking service behind.

She left the office and went home to find that her telephone service had been cut off.

Personally, I have discarded the idea of going to the local ICE office for just about any reason. I don´t know about the rest of Costa Rica, but the office here in Quepos is so slow that instead of taking a number to be waited on, one should take a date, or a day of the week. There should be a sign hanging over the office entrance that reads “Abandon the rest of your day, all ye who enter here”. True story: The last time that I had no other choice but to go to the local office (to get my new cell phone activated) I took a number, left the office, did some errands, did my banking, went to the gym for a workout, showered, bought some groceries, returned to the office and still waited almost an hour. I half expect to someday walk in their office and, like in some cartoon drawing, see a cobweb draped skeleton seated in the corner, still clutching the “take-a-tab” between its finger bones, waiting its number to be called. If I could, I would put a statue in front of the ICE headquarters. It would be, say, four ICE employees—one working at something, the other three observing. There would be an inscription at the base, inspired by the words one sees when visiting the Statue of Liberty (“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.), but tailored for prospective ICE employees. It would read: Give me your slow, your tired, your unmotivated yearning to wield power and abuse their clientele, The wretched mediocrity of your public schools.

The Spanish word for this is “prepotentente” or all powerful.

So there I was, strapped to a gurney in the Quepos hospital. My bata was askew, private parts exposed, and a self-assured man in a green surgical suit was fitting a breathing apparatus over my nose and mouth. “Respire profundo”, he ordered, and I took one, two, three deep breaths. As consciousness slipped away, brutally and rapidly, my last thought was: `This must be what its like to die.´

An hour or so later I was conscious, still alive, in the recovery ward. My gut felt like someone had taken a running start and poked me with the tip of an umbrella. To my left was a kid recovering from an appendectomy; to my right a guy whose recent siring of twins had shocked him into a vasectomy. I was there following an operation to repair an umbilical hernia. We shared a common bond of midsection pain. The three of us communicated by rotating our heads slowly to the left or right and wincing.

Several hours earlier I had lain in the same room, on the same gurney, waiting my turn to be sliced open. There was no reading material, nor television, but one of the attendants had brought in a boombox, which was tuned to a religious station. The songs were actually catchy, almost danceable, but suddenly the programming switched to a manic Tico preacher who ranted on and on and on. Time passed slowly. The preacher continued his out of control raving. I stared at the ceiling, which seemed to be in motion. Weird eye dirt danced like floating amoebas in my line of vision. An unconscious post-op patient was wheeled in and hooked up to a machine that registered his heartbeats with a loud and annoying beeping sound. After a time I noticed it was just me and the unconscious patient, accompanied by the steady beeps and the mad preacher. One comes to a hospital to either get better or die and it occurred to me that maybe I had died, and this was to be my eternal purgatory. Fortunately, an attendant entered the room moments later and wheeled me to surgery.

I had given myself the hernia several months earlier in the Mucho Musculo gym. I was doing a series of kneeling stomach crunches—one kneels facing the weight machine, reaches up and grasps a bar, and then doubles slowly forward as if bowing toward Mecca, making the muscles of the midsection do the work. This is an exercise one should do with caution and lighter weights, but I was stacking 150 pounds or more for my repetitions, because I wanted to prove to my wife that I could drink all the beer I wanted and not develop a gut. That I felt an occasional sharp spasm while doing these did not deter me—no pain, no gain after all. Then one day I was showering and I noticed that my navel, a cavernous “innie”, had now become an “outie”. I didn´t think any more about it—there was no pain or discomfort, but when I showed it to my wife she immediately identified it as a hernia. One of her sisters had gotten a similar hernia in childbirth years earlier and her “innie” too had become an “outie”.

It is possible I could have gone on indefinitely without surgery; I had grown fond of my “outie”. Indeed I found it more attractive than my true belly button, which is large enough inside to house a hummingbird. But there were risks involved with letting it go, and besides, it had become my “enabler”: I couldn´t exercise vigorously, so I indulged in my vices vigorously instead.

Prior to my surgery, I was given a battery of other tests because I am now of the age that requires these preliminaries. My blood pressure, cholesterol levels, EKG, lung x- rays all were deemed excellent. If someone was to ask me to what I owe this good health, my honest answer would be, “Get enough exercise to break a sweat each day, don´t be afraid to laugh out loud , if you´re going to drink, stick mainly to beer, eat pizza at least once a week, and if you must smoke, smoke only the finest greenbud.”

Its now been two days since the surgery and the bloodstained gauze has been removed and replaced and I have accustomed myself to the sight of my cave like navel. If ever I tire of it, I´ll just have to return to the gym and start doing the “Mecca crunches” again.