Valentine's Day, Costa Rica!

(On our way to a recent Valentine's Day celebration.  Sometimes it just doesn't pay to dress for dinner.)

It was about as romantic a day as you could ever expect.  Yesterday was Valentine's Day, 2010, and my wife and I are in Costa Rica.  This is the only place I have ever been, other than my home in Ithaca, where I feel true homesickness when I am not here.  There is something special about the country that stays with you long after you leave, especially if you have experienced the richness that the place and the people have to offer.  Maybe there are dozens of other countries about which I could say the same if I knew them, but this is the place where I have a professional and a social history going back nearly 25 years.  I have memories of friends and family and habitats and organisms here that run wide and deep, and that is not easily duplicated in another place in a short lifetime.

In the morning, Robin and I met the guide from Southern Expeditions at Playa Pinuelas (pretend there is a squiggly accent over the "n", and pronounce accordingly) near Uvita.  We received our nautical instructions, along with four other couples, and we boarded the smallish skiff for our tour of Ballena Marine Park.  I awoke the night before almost regretting that I had agreed to this trip.  I am one of those who suffer from motion sickness; I don't have a pretty history of being on boats in the ocean.  Twice I went salmon fishing off the coast of Oregon years ago and I was the only one who got sick out of 20 passengers--both times.  I must be in the tail of the statistical distribution with respect to this particular affliction.  It is simply no fun vomiting for four hours in front of perfect strangers, and it is embarrassing.  I wanted to see this park, I needed to do it, I dreaded doing it, and I felt like a coward all at the same time.  It is like seeing a bare section of electrical cord leading from a wall outlet to your table lamp.  You just want to touch it to see if you get shocked.  And when you feel that ZAP!, you have your answer and you are good to go for another 20 years.

The skiff sped away from the beach and we headed for the open ocean to look for whales and dolphins.  I had tried medications before, and they never helped, so I didn't even bother this time.  I couldn't remember what the sailors advise to avoid sea sickness---watch the horizon, don't watch the horizon, focus on something in the boat rather than on the water.  I decided I would keep my eyes closed as much as I could.  With sunglasses on, no one would notice.  Even my wife, who was holding my hand, must have assumed that she and I were enjoying the same view of the ocean, and the sun, and the islands.  Wrong!  I wasn't seeing a thing.  From past experience, I would know soon enough if this was going to work, or if I was going to spoil the trip for that German couple who was sitting downwind of me.  Gott in Himmel, let this "eyes closed strategy" work.

I don't believe in the American god, but I guess the German god really exists, because an hour passed on the boat and I still felt fine.  I decided to open my eyes and look around.  Pretty nice.  We saw no marine mammals, but we did some snorkeling, looked at some sea caves, and learned something about coastal topography.  At the end, my wife was happy, I was happy, and the German couple sitting behind me was happier than they could have possibly realized.

But the creme de la creme was later that evening at the Villa Leonor, where I had made reservations for a Valentine's dinner.  The place is nothing fancy and, frankly, I wasn't expecting the evening to flip my wig.   The place is run by Cliff, an ex-pat from Colorado, and his tico wife Anna.  The original plan was for the guests to come at 5pm for drinks on the beach, and to watch the sunset.  Then, we would all retire to the open-air restaurant of theirs about 200 meters back from the beach for live music and dinner.  We had preordered our dinners the day before.  The formula was as romantic as one could construct on paper for this day of days for sweethearts.

But about an hour before we were to leave the house to go to the Villa, it started to rain, really, really hard.  It rained so hard that a large tree fell down near our house, knocking out the electricity for the next 12 hours.  But we had ordered our dinners already, and we thought we owed it to Cliff to show up for the food he had probably gotten in specially for this night.  We drove in a pounding rain to the place.  When we got to the parking lot, Cliff greeted us with an umbrella and escorted us into the bar area.  He obviously had to cancel the beach soiree (pretend there is an accent aigu over the first "e", and pronounce accordingly, but this is French, not Spanish, like the last word I provided instructions for).  Cliff brought us a complimentary cocktail, and we then realized that his electricity was also off.  About ten couples are coming for a rather elegant dinner on a special day and the guy has no electricity just as he is about to prepare a 3-course meal.

But Cliff is laughing and seems totally calm, and says something about making do when in Costa Rica, and my wife is trying to make him feel relaxed during a probable tense time like she usually does, which makes me feel less relaxed because her ruse is so obvious to me, because I have known her for so long and I have seen her do this a thousand times before.  Basically, Cliff's message was, "we have no electricity, so let's party".  Guests kept arriving, and we all sat around while it poured like the devil only a few feet away, and I could hear frogs calling in the rain under the eaves of the open structure with the thatched roof.  Candles were lit everywhere, and it was wonderful!  Cliff went around to each guest and asked them how they wanted their food cooked, not one person complained about anything, and the orders were sent to the kitchen.  Turns out they cook with gas, so the kitchen was lit up with flashlights and candles and they proceeded.

At about this point, a young man from San Isidro picked up his guitar and began to sing.  He continued for about two hours with a fantastic collection of old and new ballads, some in Spanish and some in English.  He was surprisingly good.  Our dinners came, the music continued, and about this time, the electricity came back on.  I realized that my first impulse was one of disappointment.  We were eating my candlelight before the power came back, not because we chose to attempt to strike a romantic mood, but because we had to eat by candlelight to see our food.  To me, that REALLY was romantic.  Cliff caught the change of mood immediately and turned off the incandescent lights that had just flickered on, and we continued almost seamlessly.

I don't consider myself a romantic, mushy kind of guy.  My wife says she would like me to be, but I doubt that really.  Last night's dinner was as romantic, in the fullest sense of the word, as it gets.  My wife did look fantastic, but it was so much more than that.  It was romantic because it could have turned completely sour if the attitudes in the room had been different, but they were not.  The ambiance was perfect, but not so much out of purposeful design, but because the guests and the restaurant staff went with the flow, improvised, laughed at the inconveniences, and were dissuaded from the idea that weather or power outages would keep us from enjoying the moment.  It was also romantic because Robin and I fully recognized the experience as yet another memorable Costa Rican evening that enfolded in a way not quite expected.  And OK, it was also romantic because we held hands for most of the night.  Some mush is allowed.

Fender-bender in Costa Rica

(Driving in San Jose can be hectic, but the dangers of driving in rural areas in Costa Rica are just as real.)


I stayed remarkably calm throughout the entire event; my wife was a bit less so.  When I saw that motorcyclist fly off his cycle onto the trunk of a parked car, my heart stopped for a minute.  I was turning right into a parking space without my turn signal on, he was passing me on the right, so there was plenty of blame to go around.  Fortunately, he was physically all right.  The damage was minimal, mostly lights on all vehicles concerned, but the official reporting took half a day.  We waited in the center of Uvita, a coastal Costa Rican town, until the police and an insurance guy from a town 90 minutes away arrived to fill out all the reports.  I was instructed by the transito that I could show up in court in Ciudad Cortez within eight days, but my car rental company told me that they will do that; that is why I signed all those papers when I got the Nissan 4x4 on day 1.

After all these years of driving in my favorite country, it finally happened.  Nice that it didn't occur during one of those times when I was driving over the Cerro de la Muerte in the dark, in the fog, with trucks passing on blind curves, with a thousand feet of drop off the side.  That would have ruined my year.  I guess this is why I have never been a fan of cars or of driving.  I learned at an early age how these machines can change your life forever.

When a fender-bender happens in the states, it is inconvenient, but it is really not that big of a deal.  If your vehicle is undrivable, we take it to the shop and we get around some other way for a while.  We take a cab or a bus or our neighbor who has a car delivers us where we need to go.  Heck, most of us have a second car anyway, so we use that one until the first one is repaired.  But in places like Costa Rica, it is a big deal to have your only mode of transportation down.  Bus transport in the capital is great, but not out here in the boonies.  Most ticos do not own a car or truck, some have a motocycle or a bike, and most walk nearly everywhere.  So this guy who richoched off my rental car will not be able to drive his moto until he gets the money to fix it properly.  Life gets instantly more difficult---to get to work, to get to market, to conduct business at the bank. (He will apparently receive insurance money, but it will take months.  I will have to pay for damages to the rental car up to the deductible amount.)

You could gauge how important this incident was in the daily life of a tico because of all the locals who stopped by to get the story.  The cyclist must have described his version of what happened a dozen times to friends and relatives while we waited for the authorities.  When gringos passed by, they barely noticed.  I didn't get to explain to anyone what happened.  There was an American eyewitness, however, who was drinking coffee only a few feet in front of where the accident occurred.  Terri Peterson gladly came to my rescue and volunteered to be a witness, if necessary.  Turns out she runs eco-tours from the southern part of the country, so this is my chance to give her a plug.  But from the crowd of ticos, you would have thought there were 2-3 bodies lying on the pavement instead of some pieces of broken glass and plastic.  Fortunately, the owner of the parked car was a guy named Eddie that I had just met 15 minutes before at the nearby gas station.  He had lived in the states for 16 years, so he served as my interpreter with authorities.  My Spanish is perfectly fine in a bar or restaurant, but explaining a car accident to the police is another matter.  All in all, I guess it made for an interesting morning for Uvitans.

In the mid-80s, we lived in a mountaintop village in Costa Rica with our three children for a year.  We had no car, so we walked everywhere.  It was really work to get food and to do errands.  And then, whatever you bought, you had to carry home. After a while, we bought a horse, and life got immensely easier.  I lost 25 pounds that year, and I was not overweight in the least when I got there.  Can you say emaciated?

So I feel badly that I caused, or was involved, in a disruption of the normal flow of events in this man's life.  The accident gave me something to write about; it only gave him a problem.  I wonder how often this is the case.  We tend to weigh our economic setbacks against our own standard of living, not against those for whom the event is much worse.  It even seems there are parallels here with the effects that U.S. international policies have on millions of less fortunate people in other countries.  But that is another blog.

Is your life's path determined at 17?

(The choices that young people need to make are daunting, and possibly made too early.)

When we were kids, I distinctly remember asking my younger brother what he wanted to be when he grew up.  We were sitting on the basement stairs at the time, so he looked around the basement, and answered: "A clothes dryer".  I laughed at him, and attempted to explain that was impossible.  He was a young human being and when he grew up he would just be an older human being, but what would he do for a job as an adult?  I'm sure he didn't understand my logic at the time.  But I have often wondered at the perspective that allowed this young boy to think that he could become a mechanical, inanimate object later in life.

Last night, I had a drink with four of my former undergrad students, all of whom will be graduating in May.  The conversation focused mostly on what they would be doing after graduation.  They are all very bright students and they had been applying to various grad schools around the country.  Should I work on population ecology modeling with Professor X at Penn State or on a topic somewhat less mathematical with Professor Y at University of Georgia?  Should I study fish management at Oregon State or do a study on white-tailed deer at Ohio State?  Should I work on obtaining a M.S. degree now, or go straight for the Ph.D.?  Should I become a clothes dryer or an upright vacuum sweeper?  The conversation with my brother from more than 50 years ago came streaming back into my head.  Was the topic of last night really all that different?

Perhaps the reason I feel somewhat apprehensive about the topic of our beer banter was because I am not at all sure that I would follow the same path again in my professional life, knowing what I know now.  I would likely not go into academia, would not get a Ph.D., and would not have focused so intently on wild animals and ecology as I did.  The details of my thinking will eventually end up in another blog; those details are not germane to my point here.  I have the benefit of hindsight, and these young people do not.  They are pursuing what they THINK will make them happy, but they can not possibly know for sure until after they have spent many more years working on degrees, getting a position, and working at that job for some time.  By then, they will be in their 40s, and it will be tough to turn back.  "You rolls the dice, and you takes your chances", as that old saying goes.

The problem is that these students haven't lived enough yet.  The world has so much to offer, and there are so many interesting challenges and opportunities.  They are bright enough and ambitious enough that they could choose any path they wanted, but they can't possibly know now about more than 1-2% of those potential paths.  They are following the logical direction based on what they chose as an undergraduate major at university.  Think about that.  A 17-year old high school senior picks a major for college based on what they think their interests are at that time, and it generally predicts their life's path for the next 40 years.  Astounding!

I'm even willing to wager my next Social Security check that if these four students did something else in the world for the next two years, that at least two of them would not proceed down the route they are now planning to take.  They might still decide to attend grad school, but the thesis topic they chose, or the major prof they selected, or the degree they pursued would be different than it will now be.  And then, their professional life would become different than it will now become.

Students who read this essay may be disturbed by these ideas, but I think they know there is some wisdom here somewhere.  And by reading this, it will probably only increase some doubts they already have.  I make no apology, because my role in life is largely to make people question.  I guess that is the teenage decision I made all those years ago.  My only advice is to realize that what you currently know or think is only a tiny fraction of all you could know or think, and you don't need to be a prisoner of those limited thoughts.  Perhaps, becoming a ball pene hammer would not be nearly as rewarding as becoming a 5/8 inch socket wrench, but you can't know the answer to that until you have tried them both.  My advice: take the time to explore, investigate, and experiment broadly before you Super Glue your life's map on your chest.

Senescence sucks: My wife now sleeps with Darth Vader (Part 7)

(This man has just been told that he will have to wear this device for the rest of his life.)

As we pick up the exciting action after my last night in the Sleep Clinic, we find DrTom with a new device prescribed by the doctor to wear while sleeping.  It is called a CPAP unit, and it looks like the apparatus one would use to breathe hostile air on a foreign planet (see photo).  The electrical unit pumps air at a predetermined pressure into the mask, which keeps your airway from collapsing during sleep.  DrTom suffers from a common ailment known as Obstructive Sleep Apnea Syndrome.  It involves a closure of the airway due to relaxed muscles that causes you to snore and to wake up gasping for air (although you seldom remember this), which prevents you from hitting the REM stage of sleep.  It is during REM that the body obtains the restorative benefits of sleep.  Prolonged periods of REM deprivation may be associated with hypertension and heart problems, and a lowered sexual drive, according to a major Harvard study.  And, when you awake in the morning, you do not feel rested.

I've now worn the darn thing for three nights, and some changes are already apparent.  My wife won't look at me when I'm sleeping now, and she won't kiss me on the cheek when she comes to bed for fear of getting her lips caught in the clips that hold the mask on my head.  The dog no longer sleeps on the bed, but he stares at me a lot, even in the dark.  I think he is afraid to come near me when I have it on.  I was always fascinated with Star Wars and Star Trek and the idea of visiting other planets with strange creatures, like Pandora in Avatar.  Already, my dreams are now focusing on that kind of adventure.  I am sure this is because of the mind-set I have after donning my space mask as I climb into bed.  When I breathe, I sound a bit like Darth Vader, so the ambiance in the dark bedroom is perfect for fantastical hallucination.  Last night I dreamed I was Luke Skywalker's father.

When I travel with the CPAP unit, which fits in a case about the size of a shoe box, it has to be carried on an airplane.  It is too sensitive to be checked.  I have a letter from the sleep doctor that I show TSA when checking in that this is a medical device, and that it should not count as one of my carry-ons. 

I can see it all now, because I had a similar situation years ago when traveling with my daughter and my infant granddaughter to California.  Amy needed to take one of those mechanical breast pumps with her so that she could bottle milk for me to feed her daughter when I babysat on the trip.  The device was about the size of a small sewing machine and it was fairly heavy; Amy carried her baby and I carried the thing.  We were traveling soon after 9/11.  When I tried to go through security, they called me aside, opened the machine and examined it with special swabs for evidence of explosives.  After all, it did resemble a small atomic device that you see in the movies.  When the test came back negative, I whispered to the young girl what the device was.  She immediately turned to her colleague who was many yards away and yelled while laughing hysterically, "Mabel, it's a breast pump."  At that instant, about 40 passengers about to board my flight turned and looked at the white-haired guy, standing there alone, holding what was obviously the object of everyone's attention.  I don't embarrass easily, but that one made my ears glow.  My daughter was one of those smiling broadly from across the hallway, but her mouth did not utter a word of explanation.

My wife, the former ER nurse, insists that I take care of myself and that I have all medical issues checked out by a physician.  I am trying to be a good patient.  So I will continue to wear the Vader mask, to dream of faraway places and adventures, to frighten the dog, and to deal with security issues at the airport.  What worries me most is that I know from listening to them sleep at night that both my wife and my black lab also suffer from sleep apnea.  It is just that when they are both fitted with their CPAP masks, there will not be enough electrical outlets near the bed to go around.