You Can't Save Everyone
We were finally heading home, our volunteers feeling regretful and emotional about leaving while I couldn't wait to get the hell out of Dodge! Tobie had heard about the train that puttered its way between Siquirres and San Jose so a few of us decided we'd like to have the experience of slicing through the jungle in open-air cars. The bright blue coaches with red and white stripes had crimson vinyl seats that were punctuated on the aisle-side with wooden armrests. On the window-side, cornflower-colored ledges were the perfect height for resting the elbow so I leaned there, soaking in every second of the scenery as we trundled through what seemed to be an unending swath of green.
There was so much to see, both downtrodden and picturesque, that I didn't quite know where to focus my attention. Men with machetes worked diligently to keep the jungle from taking over the tracks, their floppy hats soaked with sweat and grime. A few yards away a bum in a grease-covered yellow slicker slumped on the rail of the opposite track as if he'd given up on his last hope. Trees dripped moss, and frothy rivers crashed over boulders the size of automobiles. Cicadas throbbed, drowned out only by an occasional piercing yowl of steel on steel as the train ambled along. I couldn't believe how high the tufts of bamboo shot into the cloudy sky, spraying like fluffy fountains reaching for heaven.
We pulled into El Rocio where the train station looked as if it would topple, its warped boards straining to stay in place. We gave begging children chewing gum. One cheeky boy sniffed the scent of the piece I gave him before unwrapping it and stuffing it into his mouth. His smile immediately bloomed to reveal intermittent teeth—about half of them gone from a lack of dental care and I was guessing too much sugar. The crop and the processed form were plentiful in the country. Fields of it spread out in all directions, the plants gracefully bobbing pointed, limp-wristed fronds as they intersected with patches of burly coffee bushes—the interweaving of the two creating an organic collage.
The higher we climbed, the more prominent the coffee bush became with its red and green marbles ornamenting its fingering limbs. Banks of daisies crowded the tracks, their friendly white scalloped disks with yellow button centers interrupted by clumps of impatiens in pink, fuchsia and red. Confetti-like petals peppered the ground as the train's passing jostled the fading ones from their stems. Children in ragged, colorful clothes crowded the doors of shacks outside of Turrialba, and a woman, the heavy skin of her upper arm flapping as she worked, scrubbed a porch floor with coconut shells. On one particularly steep slope, men dug blue-black mud from beneath the mountain's skin, the yellow John Deere front-loader looking so out of place in the dense jungle.
As we began a more pronounced ascent, the scream of the wheels echoed through deep valleys, and the town of Turrialba—clinging to the mountainside—came into view. The multi-hued rusted roofs of its buildings favored a tile mosaic in bad need of a cleaning. Once past the town, the landscape grew verdant again. The train waddled through tight grooves and sliced through blasted-out mountain passes, the wheels becoming impromptu flutes that spurted brash concertos. Men scoured the slopes like mountain goats, one standing with his knees flexed as he sorted through the raw coffee beans in a round plastic container the size of a clothes hamper, which was belted to his waist.
Unpainted wooden shacks dotted the rolling peaks and hollows, and from time to time, a primitively made bell tower topped with a cross would appear amongst a cluster of houses. Out of nowhere in an isolated stretch of railroad, an elderly Indian woman ducked out of the jungle and walked along the tracks, flipping bits of brambles from her long, thick ponytail well peppered with flecks of gray. She was framed by ferns so large their spiky tongues licked the air around her hips as she paused to wait for the train to pass.
A river churned far below as we tripped over a bridge so high it took my breath away. It was such an intense experience that my lower back muscles tightened as if trying to clench the seat. Two men in a field of coffee raised their faces to our noisy crossing, and rocks stitched a haphazard flame pattern on the mud-stained water that crashed nearby. Viewed from above, a field of banana trees spilling down the slope looked like a cascade of green stars huddled together.
At times, the train arced into a half circle as it skirted steep indentions in the mountains. Houses were strung along the train tracks like square beads of pink, blue and tan. The air cooled with every inch we climbed, and at Santiago, fields of corn took over, and grapes strung on chicken wire were molded along bumpy inclines, making slopes of their own. Here lichen-covered rocky banks were so close to the window they breathed a musty dampness into the train car.
In El Yas, squash blooms with giant yellow throats extended skyward, and a lake rested peacefully in a wide, flat valley like a piece of gray-blue water glass. The greenery was emanating a pungent odor like moist liquorish as a dark, rain-colored sky loomed above a giant moss-covered bolder favoring a scab on a knee-shaped slope. When the rain came, it obliterated everything, as opaque as liquid solder pouring from above.
The shower passed quickly and just as I was wondering what I was missing, the sky cleared, the first thing coming into view a goat shaking the rain off its back as we drew close to Cartago. The train stopped square in the middle of the marketplace and we were surrounded by bins filled with jewel-colored vegetables. A dark-skinned woman with pronounced cheekbones was yelling at a vendor, haggling as if her life depended upon it. Her black-on-red fern-print dress, white belt, bright red sweater, and ancient claret-colored hat with a tangle of satin ribbon carved a dark profile from the backdrop of shiny red and green peppers she argued over. The onions beside her glowed like tiny moons and the cabbages shone like larger planets in the light.
Fat, stumpy carrots oranged the hazy sunlight, and in the midst of all the lusciousness, sad, hungry dogs scavenged the curb for a bit of garbage to fill their stomachs, their ribs visible beneath their sagging skin. As we waited for passengers to board, Allen, one of our volunteers, was belting out the words to "Rhinestone Cowboy," channeling his inner Glen Campbell as he listened to the singer's version of the song on his Walkman. He didn't have a clue that he was as loud as he was given the headphones he wore. I was watching him, laughing at his enthusiasm, as the train inched forward, readying to leave. In a nanosecond, a man lunged from the compartment behind him, grabbing his cassette player and jumping off the train—his movement so fast and fluid I questioned whether it had really happened until Allen, who was silenced in mid sentence, shouted, "What the…?"—the chord of his earphones dangling from his upheld hand.
I had been wondering if I'd overreacted by sticking my legs through the handles of my bags when we'd left Siquirres, but I was glad I had. Everyone felt a little shaken after that and we were quieter for the rest of the trip. I returned to the scenery as we took off from Cartago. Just outside of town, a poor soccer field had goals made of small saplings forked at the top and driven into the red dirt. A stick resting in the Y-shaped sockets formed the top bar, which held no net.
A quarter of a mile further along the track, several large villas hugged the mountainside—marble white against the lush green backdrop. Orange barrel-tile roofs topped smooth stucco structures like bright sun hats. The trucks and cars, like the windows, were locked behind wrought-iron gates painted the same color as the trim—always in an intricate, geometric pattern. Lacey curtains daintily shaded the windows—the message being that the home's inhabitants didn't want to acknowledge the poverty lurking beyond the boundaries of the property. As we drew closer to San Jose, the foliage died away and an urban dirtiness took over, clapboard façades segueing to brick and stucco buildings.
The experience, which had exhilarated and unsettled me, stayed with me for the entire trip home. As I sat on the uncomfortable, black Naugahyde and stainless steel chairs at the Lacsa gate in the San Jose airport, my tennis shoes anxiously flexing on the orange indoor-outdoor carpet, I celebrated the fact that I was going home even while I felt a resignation building in me. It was a flat, stale deadness that had begun to grow when Jim said to me that morning, "You can't save everyone, so why do you even worry about it." I didn't answer, truly at a loss as to how to explain my feelings, which ran along the lines of How could I not?
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