Weekend on the mountain

So, I am a very bad blogger. It´s been two weeks since I´ve updated. I´m a bad blogger. So for the next three days (the deadline I´ve given myself) I´m going to try very hard to catch you all up.

(Scene of Mike at Uncle Tony´s laptop computer rapidly pounding the keyboard with his index, middle, ring and sometimes pinky fingers fades into obscurity, and suddenly it´s the afternoon, and we see Mike in a taxi cab curving along an old road up a mountain somewhere in Costa Rica. The day is June 23.)

I´ve made a lot of interesting friends in Costa Rica, from a variety of places and generations. One of them, we´ll just call him Turbo, invited me to his bed and breakfast for a weekend to stay and meet some of his friends and family. An older hippie who´s seen the world a few times over and can´t get enough of it, we seemed to know we stood eye to eye on a lot of things before I´d even got halfway done with my interview with him a few weeks back. He´s a radio host and journalist, and I admired him because I basically saw him living the dream I wanted for myself: to just travel, meet important people, do what you love and keep going with it. I wanted to know more about his life, and maybe learn a thing or two.

The bed and breakfast had a 14th century look to it at the front, with a black painted steel door that stood maybe 7 or 8 feet high and a peephole at the 5-foot mark. Aside from a few tiny houses and closed up shops, there wasn´t much else to be found on this mountain road where the taxi driver left me, and it actually brought me a sense of peace as I rang the doorbell. San José is so crowded, so loud and so filthy that it makes you never want to take the boring but innocent countryside for granted ever again. Turbo invited me in, where it was much more like a modern villa, with a wall garden, a long patio for dining under the shelter of the second story walkway, and showed me to my room, which came with a view of a sprawling green mountainside full of coffee plants and clouds in the distance covered up the summit of Poas Volcano. That afternoon me, Turbo and his wife listened to music, and I heard him talk about living on the West coast in the 60s and I told him about living in Alabama now and how I got to Costa Rica. He´s had radio shows in Turkey, Europe, Seattle, and Central America. He´s worked in Hawaii and in Cuba. He´s friends with Woody Harrelson. As we talked and I basically sat back and unexpectedly let him give me some much needed advice on life, the clouds rolled over the mountain top and the patio filled with fog. He talked about how life´s an adventure, and you should try to expand your mind, not blow it, then the rain began, and it rained.

Turbo´s friend Steve from Toronto, who along with his Phillipino wife Sarah will be running the restaurant at the bed and breakfast, showed up as it was getting darker. They´d been at the market all day looking for the best vendors to buy their groceries from. I was lucky enough to come when they still hadn´t decided what would be on the menu, and Sarah was cooking experimental gourmet dishes to find out what might work. She´s a good cook. That weekend I would eat steaks, pastas, salads, an omelette and fresh breads for free, and all they asked in return was ¨D´ya like it?¨ The restaurant is towards the front of the bed and breakfast, and it has this romantic, European accent to it. Along the walls is a line of wine bottles from all over the world, except for in one spot there´s wedged a canister holding the ashes of Turbo´s father. His father, who spent his life being contracted to ship cargo by plane all over the world, has a story of his own worthy of an epic novel.

Steve, who admittedly looks like a character from the Sopranos with grey, slicked back hair and darker skin from his Spanish ancestry, is also a freelance journalist. As a young man out of college he came down to Central America on his own to report on what was happening with the Contra scandal (thanks to Ronald Reagan, the greatest American, cough cough, puke puke) and also spent seven years living in Cuba. All of his journalistic travels and writing he did on his own, and supported himself without the assistance of any one particular media outlet. Steve, who wears copper bracelets around his wrists because he says it helps the blood flow, has never been to the deep South, but said a number of years ago he developed this obsession with Civil War history. After dinner on my one night stay, the three of us guys sat around with Cuban cigars and a bottle of Jim Beam on the patio with candles flickering and a few rain drops still pouring, and I felt like some hot shot telling stories about my homeland and family with Steve hanging on every word.

As I walked up the stairs by myself that night, and looked out into the distant valley where the lights of the nearest pueblo could be seen, and the hard beat of Reggaeton could be heard faintly emanating from the local discoteca, something happened to me. I knew there wasn´t a single thing around me that reminded me of the world I´d always known, and I counted up every day of the 21 and a half years I´ve already managed to put behind me, all the way up to that night when I found myself on a balcony in the mountains of Costa Rica thinking about the past, and what I could or should or might have done. And I let it go, and slept easy.