The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Killing Tarantulas with a Machete

Things go bump in the night. Iguanas are scrabbling on the roof and geckos scream intermittently all night long. The howlers don’t wait for daylight to announce dawn and a lot of birds and insects apparently never sleep. I guess they don’t expect us to sleep either. There’s no shutting the windows — we use screens to cool down at night so the nocturnal cacophony is ours to share.

Last night a rhinoceros beetle the size of a VW hit our bamboo shade in the dark wings beating the slats like a drummer OD’ing. Trust me, you come out of your dreamy slumbers ready for combat. Only to turn on the light to find a 3 inch bug catatonic on the shade. I found him next morning where I tossed him, dead, I thought, but no, just resting up.

I would hate to wander the trails here in the dark. Odds are good you’d run into something poisonous, toxic, dangerous or malevolent. Trust me, nettles seem rather benign from my vantage here, compared to a fer-de-lance or a scorpion or a crocodile or a tarantula. Let’s don’t even mention ocelots, jaguars, snapping turtles or coral snakes, poison toads, boa constrictors, boar peccaries or the well named vampire bat. Back home I don’t fear much of anything unless it’s on two legs — down here I feel like food, no doubt why we clear jungle, drain swamp, clearcut the wilderness. The denizens give us the creeps.

I think we’ll emerge fairly unscathed, maybe even make a truce with our unseen predators. I’m told the ‘Ticos’, the Costa Rican natives, kill any snake on sight. When I asked why, I was told they were deathly afraid of them. A gringo here at Costa Rica Larry’s was helping clear trail by machete when a tarantula fell down his shirt front. In his terror he took the machete to the armpit the spider had crawled into, carving himself up like a Turkey dinner. Fear is primal. Nature, to most of us, is terrifying. I suggest we all put down the machetes before we hurt ourselves needlessly. Course, I don’t want my armpit to be the home of a tarantula family either. The chiggers there already are bad enough.

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Costa Rica is a Hot Spot. The Word is out: cheap real estate, great climate, stable government, low taxes, tropical paradise. Half the surfers, the Nuevo hippies, adventurous snowbirders, disaffected Republicans who fled the Obama era, gold hunters and real estate hucksters, eco-tourists, bird watchers and yuppies in search of the Next New Place — they’re all here or coming soon.

After all, we’re here too. I have to say, I’m really glad we aren’t going to the main tourist sites — we’re hauling around Costa Rica Larry’s backroads, bayou bars and backwash villages. Se Vende signs are everywhere. For Sale. They’ll carve this country up from beach to mountain vista, Americanize it, sanitize it and monetize it. The first ones here, bottom of the pyramid scheme. Later … not so lucky, amigo. Time to move on to the Next Big Thing.

Call me cynical and step on my rose colored glasses. Yah shure, the grass is greener here, perfect greens on the 18 hole golf courses I see behind the concrete fences of the gated communities. Fairways lined with palms. Palms lined with money. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Here, the middle class gringo is rich.

The poor? I guess the jobs working for the gringo offer some greenery too. We bought America with beads and trinkets, then … well, it’s the story of the world, I guess. Ask nice, see if that works, if not … Ask the Hawaiians. Ask the Seminoles. The Cherokee. The Mandan.

Maybe you shouldn’t want to live in a place that’s paradise. They’ll pave it and put in a parking lot next to the casino/resort. The South End was undiscovered when I came, maybe the first wave of immigration. Now the wealthy have found the bluffs with views and the beaches. At first the natives built their homes — now they mow their lawns. We bought the house next door and rent it to the tourists. Who think they’ve discovered paradise. We’re paving the way….

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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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It’s been chilly here in Paradise the past few weeks. Burning wood the way a train fireman shovels coal, trying to keep warm. Back east the Bomb Cyclone has descended and friends and relatives send desperate missives concerning frostbite and frozen pipes. I’d like to help, but as you know, the Lord helps those who help themselves. I guess we have to assume the Lord is a Republican.

No, we’re going to venture out of our comfortable little cocoon here on the South End and head down to Central America. We got a buddy who works with the turtles there and he plans to rub our noses in how slow we’ve been to come on down where he has a hacienda on the Pacific slope of a mountain overlooking Tambor, then he’s going to vacation with us around his Costa Rica.

We’ve never been very south of the U.S./Mexican border. Oh, a couple of times we slipped across. Once we had a carload of empty cerveza bottles lying around the floor of a ’62 Chevy Impala we’d driven across the desert before accidentally, in our inebriation, found ourselves in four lanes of traffic, apparently crossing back into the Yew Ess Aye, not a ‘welcome back’ for four gringos trying to explain those empty beer bottles to the nice Mr. Customs Man. Once we’d ascertained the immediacy of our Situation, we acted swiftly and jettisoned that evidence. Sadly, we probably created flat tires and heartache for our fellow returnees. C’est la vie, as we say in Tijuana.

Another time I ventured down Baja when the State Department had issued warnings for us Americanos to leave, much less arrive, while the getting was good. That time I had a ’64 Chevy Belair, bald tires, pretty much on its last legs, and I had planned to donate it to the Mexican Department of Transportation when the machine gave up its ghost. It didn’t, I returned stateside, only to have it die in front of my ghetto estate in Seattle. I haven’t been back to Mexico since. Or anyplace further on….

So it’s off to the jungles for a couple of weeks. If I come across a howler monkey with a laptop, I’ll post a blog or two. But I don’t really expect the little primates to loan theirs out to a chimp like myself. Which means, once again, you get a reprieve from these trenchant malcontented observations intruding on your pastoral computer surfings. Now you’ll find out what you’ve been missing. No need to thank me. Thank the howlers instead.

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