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Mists over the Pacuare |
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Osa Conservation |
“Right forward, Left back!”
Here I am sitting nestled into a triad of boulders, my back fused into a stone bowl hollowed out with Michelangelo’s precision to the exact contour of my body, the mighty river rushing by in front of me, favors guiding the artillery of neurons in my brain, Goldie’s echoed shouts sending our raft into remembered whorls punctuated with pummels of water and towering bluffs spinning round and round, whoops of glee and tight-knuckled grimaces from one or the other of my companions.
“Baby, look, the moon.” Gitanna, lying next to me on the largest flattest rock on the bank, breaks my reverie, taking my hand in hers. And there it is, rising over the ceibos on the ridge across from us, pearly white and heavy with child through the diaphanous haze of the descending mists. “What does the fish say when he hits a concrete wall?” Trevor says to us and the river.  “Dam!” Scary words on the Pacuare River in the wake of the commissioning of the adjacent Reventazón River’s first artificial impoundment. Here in the heart of the jungle, a stone’s throw from the Cabecar Indian reservation, everything that exists rules its own domain, but the whitewater lords over all.We were up at the crack of noon yesterday, and as I wiped the ghosts of Friday night in crumbs from my eyes, I yawned, a little challenged by the day’s mission. You can’t bemoan the loss of the dawn for long, however. Gitanna had rounded up a couple of unsuspecting tourists—American engineering students—to round out our one-raft complement of seven. We had jointly seduced Amy, the crossword puzzle queen of Old Jiménez Town, and my buds Dan and Cliff from theStates had been on the list from the start. The latter were to meet us in Turrialba the next morning and were somewhere up around Nicaragua, reminiscing about the bad old revolutionary and contra days of the Central American Eighties. My mission for today was ostensibly easy, simply to get the five of us from the Osa Peninsula to Turrialba. Easy enough, except for one enormous challenge: to get out of Old Jiménez Town. Against all odds, however, our little band of misfits, miscreants, and reprobates were soon firmly ensconced in our ride, two cases of beer on ice, party favors tucked away, the purest azure beaming down on us like a personal gift from God, The Tape blaring“Tangled up in Blue.” The obligatory stop at Bar El Puente in Rincón meant piangua and pescado ceviche for a nice afternoon breakfast. We rode the Snake through to Chacarita in two shakes of a toucan’s tail, and with an irreverent whoop by Gitanna, we blew through the police checkpoint at Palmar Norte—our favors uncovered—and hung a hard left on the immortal Costanera highway. “Damn, it’s good to be a gangster.”
At four in Dominical, there was only one thing to do since our favorite little Italian restaurant didn’t open till five: beach it. Trevor surfed, Adam drifted inside the soul of the setting, Amy smoked fags and watched the sunset, and Gitanna and I cavorted like colts in the surf this side of the breakers. “Wave therapy,” smiled I.
When the chef concluded her accented litany of appetizers and entrees, we sat in a moment of dazed torpor, the echoes of her incantations of culinary concupiscence racing in my mind with each other, all dead even at the finish line. “Let’s go Chinese,” was Adam’s conclusion, his eyes grazing each of ours in turn. Chinese it was. Six appetizers and six entrees on the menu; six of us: you do the math.
If Rincon-Chacarita is the Snake, then Dominical-San Isidro is the Vertical Octopus, and the wall of fog punctuating the climbing switchbacks teased me with what I had to look forward to on the San Isidro-Cartago leg of the odyssey. My heavy-lidded, full-bellied companions relived the carpaccio, tetrazzini, calamari, and scaloppini in shallow dreams with gentle angels, and all Paco could fondly recall as the fog became the biggest tentacle of all were the pitchers of Chilean cabernet. “Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death. . .”. Gentle snores blew around the aroma of garlic in the cold air above San Isidro, but by the time we cleared Cartago and hit the next fogbank on the way to Turrialba, all eyes were glued to the illusion of a hint of highway before us.
“You’re off the road again,” came Amy’s gently correct admonition for the third time. Then like a vision, Big T yawned in the valley below, a Mecca for our humble band of marauding pilgrims.
It was grim at first light with the steely rain pounding the strange skylight of our hotel room. The thick blanket was mother’s milk, and I hugged the warmth beneath a nascent black portent of a day filled with rain on the river, cold and miserable, camping out in the wet, no escape, everyone mad at their Old Buddy Paco for setting it all up. Then, at the designated meeting time, the clouds parted, the old sun laughing from the blue serenity above with its warm hilarity.
A flock of six king vultures tripping on thermals above the mountain we descended on the final leg of our journey was a definite omen, and suddenly we were on the bank of the mighty Río Pacuare, Goldie, Felipe, and Juan securing the amenities onto the transom raft and prepping our travel raft as Loco Lee outfitted us with our helmets, life jackets, paddles, and drilled us with the safety overview.
In minutes we were wet, standing water crashing over the gunwales all around, “ALL FORWARD HARD!!!” a sonic blast from Goldie’s lungs, Gitanna digging deep beside me into the rabid roiling turbulence, the boat rising and falling right through the V of the train of cascading standing waves—the fastest part of the river—the bank and rocks and trees rushing past in a peripheral kaleidoscopic hallucination. Goldie took us close to the big rock in the center, and as we toppled over the edge and slid downward to the eddy below a torrent of water rushed us, pile-driving me in the chest, Gitanna a rag doll to the current from her remaining knee up, her ass in the river, one silken leg holding onto our ride. I lunged in sudden desperation for her, holding my T-grip faithfully, but she popped back up just as sudden, her place held by the muscles of her ankle working in concert with the universe through that one lovely foot securely pinioned into the foot holder. “You ain’t getting rid of me that easy, baby,” she laughed, letting out a whoop for good measure as she shook the water from her hair and we reached the first spot that we could actually relax for a moment.
 “High Five, team!” Goldie raised his paddle, and we all clacked it. “That was Bienvenido, a Class III; we’re looking good today, boys and girls; you guys got what it takes. Whatever you do, don’t leave me high and dry when we really need it.”
Juan frolicked in the kayak in boat cartwheels and surfed above eddies where it was favorable, no one to rescue through any of the ensuing rapids. We ate them one at a time, some forward, some backward, some whirling like an inspired dervish: Piedra de la Bruja, Pele el Ojo, and Limonas, Class IIIs all, and all the Is and IIs in between, and we chomped them, chump-change in our nascent whitewater expertise. We took out in the early afternoon, secured the boats and humped our provisions and clothes inland a 100 meters to a manicured camp hollowed from the forest into a meadow draping like an apron from the precipitous mountain forest rising behind.
After beer, chips and salsa, grilled chicken, quiche, fresh fruit, and smokes, we dispersed according to our whim, some to one of the two nearby waterfalls, some to play with the nearby hand-operated cable car the Cabecars use to cross the river, some to naps. I rigged up a couple of rods and went fishing. I caught nothing but the singular notion that this was Siddartha’s river. Night fell, and we drifted back to the kitchen rancho, where grilled pork chops were the order, balanced with a steamed veggie medley, salad, garlic bread, and two bottles of nice white Cabernet to punctuate our bites. Gitanna dispersed the favors, and I found myself throwing the tarot with one of her decks. At the end she gave the deck to Felipe, and we all drifted into whatever next thing came along.
And the next thing I knew, I was here, lying next to Gitanna on the river rocks, looking at the moon and the river, somewhere beyond speech, somewhere this side of comprehension, but well within the realm of hope. We lay and gawked at the sky for hours, the moon rising, the mists falling, the river the perfect metaphor for the flow of life with its gurgling giggles and muffled murmurs. When an animal screeched in the jungle, Gitanna and I turned to each other, did our chupacabra imitation, and giggled like schoolgirls.. Adam was abducted by aliens, Trevor climbed the mountain in search of hairy white dwarves, Dan went swimming at the waterfall, Cliff rode the cable-car, the guides disappeared into the moonlight, and Gitanna and I tippled lightly and became one with the rocks.
I awakened inside our tent with the brilliantsunlight caressing the vegetation outside, gentle titters of morning birds all around. At the kitchen, the guides had coffee made and were working on breakfast. I took a cup of joe back down to Gitanna, and we smoked and laughed at last night’s antics. Tamales, muffins, fresh fruit, juices, regular coffee, fancy coffee; it was the right breakfast. By ten we had the rafts securely packed, and Goldie shoved off the bank while we were all standing around like momos. I got the picture and got wet only to my waist, but everyone else had to swim for it, and Goldie and I hauled everybody over the sides by their life jackets. Terciopelo, a Class III was upon us immediately, and when the boat went to the right, Dan and Cliff went to the left. I pulled Dan back in, and Gitanna hoisted the lumbering Cliff like a beached whale into the boat. Adam moved over to the transom raft and operated the oars under Felipe’s guidance, and we were all straight up for Doble Piso (IV), shrieking through without further losses. At Río Frío, we beached the boats and hiked up the stream several hundred meters. Everybody but me jumped from the rock to the pool. It was my third time on this river, and for the third time I was the only one of the party to refrain from the jump. What’s up with that, I wonder. . . Upper (IV) and Lower (IV/V) Huacas were next, the biggest water on the Lower Pacuare, appropriately enough named Graveyard in the Cabecar language (as a colorful side-note, the Cabecar word for white man is the same word they use for excrement).
Goldie stopped us ahead of the Huacas and explained how we had to do it. “There’s only one line through this set of rapids, and if we get off that line, you guys are on your own, because I’ll be bailing.” Everybody dug hard, and Goldie slipped us between the blood-hungry rocks over the frothing bareback of the whitest water like it was child’s play, and we high-fived. We stopped to marvel at a tributary waterfall, swilled some beers, told each other some lies, and got back on board. This time I took on the transom challenge and dug into the water with the powerful oars. It took me only a few rapids to build an enormous respect for Felipe’s upper body strength; it was big work. Gitanna jumped across into the transom raft and broke out some beers and played the bowsprit, whooping and hanging on through Pinball (IV). We moved around again, and I dug hard from the left rear of the raft as we barreled down the river, gobbling Guatemala (IIII), Cimarrones (IV), Roller Coaster (III), The Brain Rock (III), El Indio (IV), and finally Rock & Roll (III) like cotton candy. We ate fruit and muffins and swilled beer on a big river-side outcrop decorated with embedded bivalve fossils.
Magnetic rock (III/IV), Dos Montañas (IV), Landslide (III), and The Wall (III) came and went, and I drifted with the current through the gorge looking up at the vertical walls lining both sides of the river. Finally, the bridge below Siquirres appeared around the next bend, and we took out. We stowed and loaded the gear and took showers while the guides and Loco Lee lay out the final spread of the trip, and we ate the ceviche, quiche, grilled chicken and avocado sandwiches, chips and salsa, and brownies with ravenous interest.
“Baby, we’re taking these guys to the Del Rey tonight for cheeseburgers,” Gitanna announced. I took my cue and called the Dunn Inn, securing rooms for all of us for half-price on my VIP card, and after an hour and a half of The Tape on the road to the Hose, an hour swilling martinis at the Dunn Inn, and a few minutes showering and shaving and stuff, we walked over the few blocks and sat down to burgies and cabernet, while the professional girls in the bar worked the sad-sack gringos.
With Trevor and Adam headed for Puerto Viejo the next day, Dan and Cliff returning to the States, that left Amy, Gitanna, and I to finalize the odyssey, and we decided to do that via Jacó and the Costanera highway instead of over Cerro de la Muerte. “I know this great restaurant in Quepos,” winked Gitanna. My treat tomorrow night...
Article courtesy of Paco & Gitanna, Courtesy of El Sol de Osa The Osa Peninsula’s Newspaper |
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