The Tree Top House. Monteverde, Costa Rica.
Wednesday, July 27, 2023
It is late. The teens (Lucy, 18 and Edie 17) are in town, probably at Bar Amigos.
Monteverde is more cloud rainforest and coati (think Costa Rica’s racoon) than party town. But local teens like to gather at Bar Amigos. David and I are nodding off. The little kids are sleeping hard. The girls are probably drinking with the townies, dancing cumbia, and shooting pool. They’re feeling liberated by the 18-year-old drinking age and the relaxed, safe, exuberant, environment that translates into the country’s motto: Pura Vida! The girls tell me that other local teens have told them it is very safe to walk home, even late at night, and so they scrap the Uber and walk.
The next morning, Lucy is frying eggs and bacon for herself and Raffi. She’s catching me up. Someone started a dance line and everyone joined in and they made a long swerving snake together dancing to the Macarena.
I love witnessing the full-on of youth, the newness of everything, the taking in of life in big exciting gulps. New people is their currency. They are not interested in backpackers and tourists, they go where the Tico teens go. They want new people, new things, new experiences.
Even as I go to bed at a respectable 11, they are up for anything, at any time, and it’s pretty fucking fun to watch.
Lucy, the hippy child, who loves the treehouse and the jungle the most, the quiet days on a yoga mat, trampling alone through the rainforests, in her ripped jean shorts and Doc Martens, around our tree house, reading Emily Dickinson or Kafka, or some book about psychosis or lobotomies, and who feels her day is not complete without a properly homemade breakfast. Edie, the beach lover, the Formula One lover, the Mustang, classic, muscle car lover, the French fry lover who eats rice and beans for every breakfast here because she despises eggs and all breakfast foods, the girl who is moving into her 17th year on this trip.
Remember when you turned 10 on a train from Edinburgh to Cardiff, Edie? It’s your summer birth right to turn the next new number on an adventure.
When I see the way Tico boys watch Edie, it reminds me of being a teen myself, too long ago. Me: geeky, flat chested, skinny, pimply, no hips, from a blue collar upstate New York town, transformed by time in Spain as an exchange student. I remember the boys in Gordoncillo, in the North, the town so small as to only have a few bars and churches, and the best crusty bread at the bakery every morning that my Spanish mother layered with warm soft farm cheese and that we ate with strong cafe con leche, the boys there, screamed “Rubia! Rubia!” (blondie!) when I walked down the street. They hung out the windows. Like Madonna had arrived. This did something for my pimply lack of self-confidence. I was - quite shockingly - attractive to someone in the world. There was tangible evidence that I would not die a virgin. It was stirring and powerful that first time. It was only later it became an unwanted burden, a toxic interaction, a misogyny, a thing that drags you down and impacts your humanity, a defect of the world. Edie will learn this too. But not on this trip.
The teens meet Tico girls who teach them to salsa. Edie tells me how sweet and kind they are, how they fold Lucy and Edie into their friend groups, and how the more serious conversations are left to a back and forth game of Google Translate.
On this trip, Lucy talks about college, her aversion to formal education starting to soften, and also that she is not interested in making her life about work, but wants to find enjoyable and decent-paying enough work in hospitality to be able to enjoy her life. She is a product of a post-pandemic world. She wants a life, not just a work life. I am proud of that. I never had those choices at her age. There was a track, you got on the track, if you were able, if you were upwardly mobile, and if you weren't you’d get lost, get left behind, get trampled, get stuck, get blamed, and then like a factory conveyor, you move and just keep on moving toward some elusive idea of success that may or may not be attainable or even feel like success, but people tell you it is, so you keep going, over and over, work a little harder, sacrifice a little more, more school, more debt, for the rest of your life until your choices, your ability to maneuver is small, closeted, cramped.
Until you figure out it’s bullshit and you go for a kind of economic self-preservation that includes heavy doses of sanity and pleasure and love and generosity and service to the community. Because this is where shit gets meaningful.
The girls come in one night and can’t get the front door unlocked. I rustle David out of a sound sleep and make him go. I stay under toasty covers with Desi because if I go, I’m quite sure, I will be blown off the steep spiral stairs into the canopy below. I have notoriously terrible balance, the result of brain surgery years ago, and I can topple over easily enough, particularly in the dark, particularly in the wind, like a drunk girl walking like a baby giraffe in stilettos, toppling off the side of a cruise ship.
I could easily be eaten by coati. We all know it.
And the wind is a volatile mind-fuck in the jungle, petulant, fierce, unrelenting, every night. You really feel it in a treehouse, the sensation that if you got the right gust, you might simply blow away in the night. It feels precarious and safe all at once.
David is sure-footed and rescues the girls without incident. Edie goes to bed, but Lucy stays in the night kitchen, right by our bedroom, and rumbles through the fridge, a lot like the wind itself, and takes out a tray of little flat bread toasts I made for them earlier, Airbnb kitchen-style, tinned white beans, with sautéed lettuce, mushrooms and onions, olive oil, limon, any herbs I can scrape up, some salt. She heats them in the tiny toaster oven until the goat cheese goes soft and bubbly and puts slices of avocado on top, hot sauce, some crushed up sweet potato chips for crunch, more salt and limon.
Humble, nourishing food, as high art in the night kitchen.
This morning, we prepare for another travel day. Slow dirt roads off the rainforest mountain, winding in curves and bumps down to the ocean. There are not a lot of highways here, so driving the country you see a lot of Costa Rican life. (I’m supposed to find it grueling, I guess, but I secretly love car travel days. There is so much to see.)
The younger kids (Raffi 12, Desi 8) had a rough day yesterday, bickering, driving each other bananas, Desi melting down on trails and needing extra love, Raffi learning lessons about how to be with his siblings in healthy ways, and then doing it! And later not doing it. But sometimes just doing it again! We know the pool and the beach is ahead of us again and it will soothe them. Raffi will ride the waves and he will find his flow. And Desi will swim and her anxiety will ebb and they will love each other again.
Maybe there will be some peace.
The beach is calling us back. We needed to do dumb shit like zip lining across the jungle canopy (well, not me, the others), ATVing around a volcano (again, not me, I was having girl time with Lucy), hiking down a mountain to submerge into waterfalls (ask me about the 500 step staircase down and up, 500 steps??? Calves on fire for days) and walking over volcanoes and through ground springs.
The best was lying in a hot-spring-fed river with Tico families and gringo backpackers, a part of the vacation that really felt so good. The hot springs felt a lot (only hotter) like when the girls were young and we had that broken down summer/weekend house in New Paltz, New York and we’d all go swim at Deep Hole, a rocky swimming hole in the woods. We brought our picnic foods in coolers, like the Costa Rican families who do the same, we set up our smoker, smoked salmon on the rocks and drank Coronas with our friends.
The experience was new, but it also woke up all the old memories. A reminder that we are kinda all the same, connected by similar experiences and desire for comfort, safety, pleasure and connection with family and good friends.
And really, this vacation was mostly about people, amigos. Like our new friends from Israel, who we met seeing monkeys and tapirs in the jungle, who had recently broken up after having three adult kids and 35 years together, one of them wanted to leave, the other was heartbroken, this was their goodbye trip. We stood on a beach and told each other our stories. It took my breath away. And the boy named Ony from Denver, whose mom is Costa Rican and the boys body surfed together day after day in Manuel Antonio, and still play Roblox every night, even though we are no longer in the same province. Friends for life. (I know the girls made friends, but they aren’t talking. :))
We all made amigos, exchanged numbers, promised to stay in contact.
I don’t think it gets better than that.
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END NOTES: We’ve been eating at sodas a bunch. Sodas are these relaxed, low-cost gathering places where people make and serve typical Costa Rican foods. We’ve had some of our best meals at sodas. One dish I am enamored with is the Chifrijo. It’s kind of Central America’s answer to the poke rice bowl. This one has rice, red beans, little crunchy pieces of chicharron, pico de gallo, tortilla chips, avocado and mango slices. Kinda the perfect meal in a bowl. Definitely serving this at home.
I’ll try to post a bit on IG, if you want to follow along, you can find me at @KimintheWest.
Thank you, as always, for reading. xo
I think you’re right it doesn’t get better.
“She is a product of a post-pandemic world. She wants a life, not just a work life. I am proud of that.”
This! This is the gift of The Great Pause of 2020. Cheers to you for encouraging your daughter to take a different path. Thank you for sharing this adventure, and all the beauty within it.
This makes my heart, so happy for you and your family and the wonderful things you were showing them
It took me way longer to realize what your daughter recognizes. In 2021. I retired at age 55 on the corporate world to pursue helping people heal. Now my days are filled with Hipnosis and Reiki, and helping people open their hearts and learn to love themselves.
I’m so glad your daughter doesn’t have to go through 40+ years of work to find this life