A Glass-Free Society

It took me a while to realize, but it's true; I haven't been in a fully enclosed room for ten days, and the last glass I peered through was the window of a bus. My bedroom features two windows, both of a screen over wood-latticework variety. The patio doubles as a kitchenette, and triples as a hallway, with a door leading to my bathroom, which offers some of the same latticework only without the screen and set up about head high so that I might gaze out while I shower or pee. I might, except there's no jungle view; just a walkway commonly used by the lodging's proprietors, housekeeping staff and construction crew, which is building new cabinas a few feet from mine. To their credit, they never ruin the moment by saying hello when they walk past.

Anyway, some of the privacy issues aside, the lack of glass is not isolated to this rental property. Most of this town's establishments, from restaurants and nightclubs to coffeeshops and liquor stores (I might need healthier habits), have at least one wall open to the air, to the humidity, to the ocean breezes, to the sounds of nature, to a view of ripe foliage that thrives everywhere. Can you install glass windows? Of course. The bank has them. The grocery store does... in its frozen foods section. A few of the modest homes seem to have at least one actual window, as I grew up knowing them. But it's clearly an indulgence; probably an impress-the-neighbors type thing.

I can't accurately depict this place without describing the walk I've taken, multiple times daily, from where I stay into town. Situated along a hill a few blocks in from the ocean, the property covers a fiar bit of ground, most of which is tropical rainforest. A road of sorts descends from the main gate, but it's quite steep and rocky, so when I'm on foot I opt for the jungle path, which is more accurately 200 yards of cinderblock staircase staggered between the trees. It is here I've done the bulk of my nature walking, and have spotted many lizards, tree frogs, butterlfies and one snake dangling from the branch of a tree.

When I reach the bottom I pass through a gate, rejoining the craggy road in time to cross a mostly-loose wood plank bridge that spans about 15 feet over a creek. At this point I am only about three city blocks from the main street (not Main Street--most of these roads don't have names); however, given the scale of the place it's given to radical compression of geographic regions. So, as i cross the creek I enter rural Puerto Viejo, as evidenced by the domesticated animal life I encounter. Dogs lying in the middle of the road, roasting their bellies in the sun. A rooster that likes to race my bicycle when i ride by. Horses that look embarassed that I might have happened upoin them rifling through some trash bins. Pigs that founder happily in the muddy creek banks. Well, most of the pigs. The little one seems to have a thing for me, and whenever I pass gets incredibly aggitated, snorfling and hobbling at my foot, which I think it means to bite, or maybe drool upon. Regardless, I am apparently not the first victim of this mottled porcine obsessor, as it's the only animal in ther bunch that's tied up by a length of rope.

Now past the livestock (actually, quicker than it took you to read that last paragraph), I enter the suburbs, beginning on one side with a tiny elementary school, on the other with a heavily-used soccer field. This gives way into several square blocks' worth of small homes, built on a grid, some elevated on stubby stilts, most with corregated metal rooftops. most times of day there are people entering or leaving doorways, sitting on corners talking to their neighbor, who sits in his livingroom twenty feet away, across the street. Oh, and there are children, lots of children, toddling, running and biking around, shouting, chasing, and dleightfully unaware how blissful their exixtence is.

I might take different routes through this grid, depending where I'm going or whether I need to steer around the potholes and softball-size rocks that pitt some roads more than others. One way or another, I am bound to enter the urban center, which is eerily quiet on wednesday nights, but in all other waking hours bustles it's way right onto the Caribbean sand. Here I find an unfathomable mix of nationalities and personal styles, always somebody trying to sell ganja, and usually happy faces. granted, some of the faces are preternaturally happy, given that marijuana's not the only thing these hustlers are peddling, and this inevitably leads to the same faces unhappy later or earlier in the day, when the missing teeth elicit sympathy again, rather than add charm to the smiling localisms tossed out in bouncing island patter.

And that's how I know it, ten days' worth. That people I've met here have asked after seeing me here this long if I'm moving, or in fact have moved here, I credit to their friendliness and the source of it: when a place is so small that everybody knows everybody and all their business, the intrusion of tourism keeps things lively, but the adding of new characters keeps it fresh. Which is important when everybody's sharing the same open air. Off to Jaco tomorrow. Pictures maybe someday.