“If I don’t jump, will you push me?”
The three Costa Ricans laughed. The young man squatting on his haunches, double-checking the connection at my ankles, smiled and said, “No, Señora. Here we do bungee jumping, not bungee pushing.”
I stood on the crane’s tiny platform. Below me, the town of La Fortuna de San Carlos spread across the lush green landscape in a scattering of colorful buildings and small roads. In the distance, clouds wreathed the peak of the Volcán Arenal.
Not even the prospect of one of the ten most active volcanoes in the world could distract my attention from the teenager who had just dived off the platform and was hurtling toward the tiny blue pool at the crane’s base. A small giggle had escaped his lips as he sailed off the edge. He plummeted head-first, his dark hair a spiky halo preceding him. I held my breath; the teen met the pool — first his fingertips, then hands, wrists, arms. Just as it seemed his head would be plunged beneath the surface, the cord snapped him free, propelling him toward the sky and the metal platform. Up he came, then down he went. And again, in decreasing arcs. After the last bounce, my son spun suspended by his ankles above the pool. My stomach churned watching the sickening spirals until the ground crew grabbed him and lowered him safely to a mat on the grass. I was next.
The inspiration for this trip had struck suddenly, like a maternal panic attack. It was spring break 2009 — my son’s last break in high school. Soon he’d be leaving for college, plunging full speed into his own life. I might never again have the opportunity to travel alone with my oldest child.
All I knew when we boarded our flight to San Jose, the capital of Costa Rica, was that we would begin and end our week there. In between we would spend four nights in the Arenal Volcano National Park area and three on the coast. I’d prepaid for our rooms in all three locales but otherwise had made no arrangements.
We arrived in San Jose on Thursday evening. The owner of our B’n’B shook her head sorrowfully when she learned that we had no plan for getting to Arenal the next day. The public buses wouldn’t be running on Good Friday, she said, and it was too late to arrange a shuttle.
I had known that the entire week before Easter, Semana Santa, was a religious celebration. What I didn’t realize was that Good Friday was the main event, the most holy of the holy week, when public, and most private, enterprises were closed – including the ticketing agencies for the van and bus lines that crisscrossed Costa Rica.
I spent the first night of our vacation futilely attempting to arrange transportation. My son read as I bent over my phone, texting, sending emails and leaving voice messages. I didn’t tell him that I had messed up. I was the parent; it was my job to take care of my child. While he slept peacefully in the bed beside mine, I lay awake most of the night wondering what we would do the next day, and how I had ever believed I could pull off a trip like this alone.
On Friday morning, the inn’s owner informed us she had located a taxi driver willing to make the drive to Arenal. She had spent hours arranging it, either because it was the right thing to do for a guest or because I’d made the effort to converse with her in my rusty Spanish. Or, perhaps she had
I sat next to the taxi driver, trying to parse his carefully enunciated Spanish as he told me about the Vulcán Arenal. “For many years, Arenal was thought to be extinct,” he said. “Then in 1968 it woke up. The eruption killed many people. It spewed lava and poisonous gasses and giant boulders. Three towns were destroyed.”
I turned to the backseat to translate for my son. He had fallen asleep with his head bowed forward, his chin on his chest, headphones clamped over his ears. He didn’t stir when I removed the earphones or gently adjusted his head so he wouldn’t wake up with a stiff neck. He roused only once on the three hour drive — when we stopped for gas at a station next to a river where enormous crocodiles lazed on the bank, basking in the late morning sun.
We were welcomed to our hotel in La Fortuna de San Carlos with the news that for the first time in weeks, the cloud cover around Arenal’s cone was lifting. It would be possible to see the lava flow that night. There was no telling when this opportunity might come again. And the van for the lava viewing was leaving in ten minutes.
It all happened so fast — one minute we were in the lobby checking in and the next, we were dropping our bags in our room, cramming bathing suits and binoculars into a backpack, and running downstairs to meet the tour van.
Good Friday had started amid the high-rise towers of San Jose. It ended in pools heated by Arenal’s underground geothermal activity, the last stop on the Arenal tour. Two days of travel, which had culminated in a humid, four-hour hike through the rain forest on the volcano’s slope, had exhausted my body. Worry and stress and sleepless nights had depleted my spirit.
I lowered myself slowly into the hot springs, luxuriating in the transitioning from the warmth of the tropical air into the heat of the mineral water. I had just immersed myself up to my neck and begun to float, when my splashed up to me. “Guess what, Mom. They have water-slides!”
I sighed and, reminding myself this trip was about spending time with my son before he left for college, I relinquished the embrace of the water and followed him to the water-slides. Teenagers jostled from behind and laughter spilled from above as I climbed the unlit ladder. I made it to the top of the slide before I balked. Before me was a tube, snaking into the darkness. I couldn’t force myself into it. I backed down, one humiliating rung at a time.
There was another slide, open to the tropical air. My son said it was for children and refused to join me and the little kids who whooped and hollered as they flew into the warm water. After one quick descent, I waited on a poolside chair until my teenager had had his fill of the tunnel slide.
“Diez, nueve, ocho…”
The countdown reverberated off the walls of every building, infiltrated every corner of La Fortuna. It preceded each jump from the top of the crane.
“That’s so cool, Mom. Can we do it?” We walked along La Fortuna’s main street, away from the bungee jump, aimed in the general direction of the volcano. The town was stretched between the majesty of Arenal and the commerciality of the metal tower.
“Siete, seis...”
“Mom?”
“No.”
Over fresh watermelon juice at an outdoor stand, my son brought forth a flurry of brochures. “If we can’t bungee jump, can we at least try the ziplines?”
I examined the colorful pamphlets. “Let’s go to the waterfall. It says here it’s seventy-five meters tall. No visit to the Arenal area is complete without seeing the waterfall.”
He laughed. “This one says no visit is complete without a quad bike tour. Please, Mom. That’d be so awesome. It goes by the river and there’s a lunch and swimming.”
I hesitated. “That sounds dangerous.”
“They go with you and guide you and stuff. Not like Baja.” He laughed again. “That was dangerous. I thought I was dead for sure when Arthur flipped us into the dry river bed.”
Despite the tropical air, a cold chill ran down my spine. Gus had been in Baja two years earlier. I was supposed to have gone on that trip. Just my friend and her son, Gus and me. “You never told me that.”
My son fiddled with his sunglasses, not meeting my eyes. “Yeah, well, you know.”
I did know. We had not talked about Mexico because I had met him at the airport to tell him that his stepfather, the love of my life, had died during spring break. It was a routine hospital procedure. At the last minute I had decided to stay. Had I sensed unseen danger in the common procedure? I didn’t know. I knew only that my partner's death was cataclysmic. Grief fractured me from the inside and extended fissures deep into my soul. Like those who once dwelt on the slopes of the sleeping volcano, I now understood that what lay dormant could erupt at any time, that what appeared benign could shatter a life.
By the time we reached the river, the face-plate of my helmet was so encrusted with dust, I couldn’t see. When my son asked if he could drive our ATV after the lunch break, I sucked in my breath and climbed on the back. “Be careful.”
He was a smart young man. He had learned his lesson in Baja. He put the quad bike in gear and cautiously moved forward, across an open field. Thus, we weren’t going fast when he hit the rock. The bike went over in slow-motion, and I with it.
I survived the scrapes and bruises without an “I told you so.”
On Easter Sunday we took a taxi to La Fortuna Waterfall, which, as advertised, was a two-hundred-fifty-foot cascade of white water. Not advertised were the hordes of tourists. The crowds thinned as we descended the five hundred steep, damp steps to the base of the falls. Gus joined the intrepid souls cavorting in the pool swirling around the thundering cascade. “Come in, the water’s fine,” he called with a wicked grin. I jumped from a low rock, shrieking when my bare legs met the chilly water.
We warmed up quickly on the walk back to town. We knew we were close when we spotted a fresh fruit stand and heard the countdown, “Seis…cinco…”
The shade under the stand’s palm-frond roof offered respite from the tropical sun. “Why do you think no one passed us on the road?” my son asked as he brought our drinks to the table. I’d flopped into the closest chair, grateful for the teenager’s resilience and willingness to play waiter.
“If there’s a way to take a wrong turn, I’ll always find it,” I laughed. “I thought about trying one of those trails we saw but then I remembered the crocodillos.”
A man at the next table leaned over. “Excuse me, Señora. It is not the crocodiles you must be on guard for. It is the snakes. Poisonous snakes.” He shook a finger at us. “Very bad.”
I’d worried about transportation, reservations and money, been scared of ATV accidents, the steepness of wet steps and the height of a metal tower, all the while, oblivious to the true dangers —the toxic gasses from the volcano, the crocodiles in the rivers, poisonous snakes in the trees.
My seventeen-year-old thanked the gentleman for his concern and assured him that we would be careful.
On Monday we ascended to platforms wrapped around the trunks of massive trees and traversed bridges suspended above the rainforest. I marveled at the green world below the slender, wobbling bridges and did not once doubt the strength of the steel cables that anchored them to the trees. Those same thick cables were the lines we zipped down, from the highest platform to the one below and another below that until, at last, my feet were touching the solid earth.
After the ziplining, there was only one thing left to do in La Fortuna.
“What happens if I’m too afraid to jump?” I asked the young man who unhooked the cord that had been attached to my son. The sight of my child on the ground waiting for me filled me with love. When he gave me a thumbs up, I returned it.
This trip wasn’t about getting close. We had that. It wasn’t about letting him go. He was already diving headfirst into his future. All that was left was for me to do the same.
“You are not too afraid, Señora.”
The young man was right. I was afraid, but not too afraid.
“Dos, uno. Go!”
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