The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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I can’t remember the last time I woke up to howler monkeys howling. After one red-eye to Atlanta, a long layover, another long flight to San Jose, a 3 hour immigration queue that looked like an NFL bathroom line with only one bathroom (this one had none), then a ride in a single propeller puddle jumper, followed by a 4 wheel drive straight up a one lane rutted mountain road with vertical drops of hundreds of feet both sides, we made it to Costa Rica Larry’s hacienda, an aerie overlooking the Bay of Tambor and the Pacific Ocean. With only a couple of airline hours of sleep, we slept the sleep of the muerto. Until dawn and the howlers ….

If you thought, from my exaggerated and hyperbolic descriptions of the South End, that we lived on the edge of some wild frontier, trust me when I say we’re not in Kansas here. Two miles up this mountain and civilization drops away like an Alzheimer memory. There are a couple of houses up here and one that is actually inhabited more than a couple of weeks of the year. At night we can see the lights from the fishing marina ten miles away and a few from Tambor Tropicale, a small resort with an outdoor bar that is Larry’s second home. Probably will be ours too. But up here on the aerie’s nest, isolation is the operative word.

Except, of course, for our fellow denizens, boa constrictors, vultures, wild pigs, birds beyond counting, insects and alien plant life. We’re anything but alone. The place is what you’d call fecund with a bio-diversity that is astounding. And we’ve been here all of one day. Plenty of folks come down to Costa Rica to visit, but not too many escape completely the way Larry has. We’ll go home too in a week. But I bet we’ll be sorry to leave. And that wild South End, it will look about two years from its first strip mall.

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