This is the start of a piece I wrote for the Landscape class.
Travelling, for a teenager, into unfamiliar territory is like shaking the contents of the frying pan into the fire and then pouring on petrol. Teenagers are already struggling in an alien environment: the borderland between childhood and the adult world: parents and teachers are like another species, friendships are fragile and unpredictable, even the teenager’s own body is rebelling and mutating. When an unfamiliar language, a strange culture and a foreign landscape are thrown into the mix, the results are all the more excruciating.
I was seventeen when I left for Costa Rica. I was bright and popular at school, and involved in a wide range of cultural and political activities – the perfect candidate for an exchange programme. Under the surface I was struggling to deal with the effects of several incidents of sexual abuse, and I was experiencing the first symptoms of a psychotic illness. I’d spent so long dancing from the frying pan to the fire that I’d developed a thick skin of scar tissue, but the layers were beginning to crack.
Fire is not a bad analogy for the Costa Rican landscape: the burn of snakebites and poisonous plants, the hiss of jungle cats, and the constant sputtering of the volcanoes… it has a savage beauty, but you wouldn’t want to jump into it.
I was placed in San Carlos (population 40,000), a bustling agricultural town to which my guidebook devoted two sentences. It obviously wasn’t a tourist area. There were three other exchange students going to San Carlos, and we travelled together in a van. The town was only 60km away, but it was about a three-hour drive due to the winding potholed roads. As we meandered through the mountains north of San Jose, we passed through endless coffee plantations, the rows of dark plants heavy with berries. When the bushes are in flower, my guidebook told me, the locals call it Costa Rican snow.
My host father was a farmer, and my host mother was a Catholic. Her name, Marielos, was an abbreviation of Maria de los Angeles. Her house was filled with pictures of bleeding hearts, glowing virgins, and doves emitting rays of light. In fact, the whole town looked towards the Catholic Church looming above the Plaza Central. But I wasn’t interested in an inner journey – I wanted to explore outwards.
To the south, San Carlos climbs upwards towards the central mountains. To the north-west Arenal volcano rises above the hazy plains. Between the houses in our neighbourhood I could catch tantalising glimpses of the volcano – one of the most active in the world.
It was weeks before I was able to escape from the city, but even though I was trapped, the wildlife was free to come and go at leisure. Costa Rica is home to between 500 000 and a million different species of flora and fauna, so it’s not surprising that a few of them ventured into the urban landscape. Toucans could be heard croaking in the trees near the colegio, iguanas and armadillos could be seen basking in the park, and huge spiders crept through the house.
I was thrilled to discover a banana palm leaning over our back fence. I soon found out that bananas are not trees at all. They’re perennial herbs that sprout from rhizomes. What looks like a trunk is in fact made up of tightly packed leaf stems, and, botanically at least, the fruits are berries. Most cultivated bananas are seedless, but the memories of seeds remain as brown specks within the flesh. Each plant produces one flower cluster and then dies, but a new shoot will sprout up. I watched the flower in our backyard, day after day, as the huge purple petals unfolded. Bananas are incredibly fussy, demanding shelter from wind, direct sun but not too bright, consistent warm temperatures, and even then it can take months for the fruit to ripen. There are hundreds of different varieties, and in Costa Rica I tried dozens: tiny green bananas thrown into soups and stews, huge plantains sliced and fried with any meal, and small, sweet eating bananas, creamier and spicier than anything I’d tasted back home.
Every week I would walk to the market and buy something that I’d never tried before. One week it was guaba, huge bean-like pods. My host-mother showed me how to split open the pods, and suck off the fluffy white pulp from around the seeds. Another week we brought home cashew apples. We broke off the nuts to roast, and then stewed the fruit with sugar.
I think my favourite fruits of all were the ones I picked at my friend Minor’s house. I remember the day we climbed up the jocote tree and feasted on the sweet and sour and spicy fruit. One morning Minor took me outside to show me the cacao tree. I laughed out loud, it looked so odd. There were pods like small lumpy rugby balls sprouting straight from the trunk. I thought the flowers might smell like chocolate, but they didn’t smell of anything at all. The cacao tree has to produce tens of thousands of flowers to compensate for the fact that there’s no scent to attract insects. The fruit doesn’t taste anything like chocolate either; it’s sweet and quite mild, but the purplish seeds, when accidentally chewed, are incredibly bitter.
Posted by Fionnaigh at August 7, 2003 11:35 PM