Questioned by the Hound

About a week and a half into our artists’ retreat in Costa Rica, Laura and I decided to leave our casita and head into the town of Ciudad Colon for a decadent lunch of roast chicken, tortillas and Diet Coke. We went to the roast-chicken shack that Laura remembered from two years before, bumblingly ordered our food (neither of us speak Spanish), and sat at a little metal outdoor table. The food came in plastic baskets, and we began eating it with our fingers. After a week and a half of healthy, home-cooked, largely vegetarian meals, the succulent chicken was a great pleasure.

As we ate, a dog trotted over and began watching us. He was a medium sized, short-haired, tan dog, possibly a stray, but clean and well behaved. He stared intently and expectantly as we ate. This didn’t, at first, bother me. The dog’s expectancy was not the least bit unreasonable, considering our shared history. And he said so. “Four thousands of years, you toss me bits and scraps. In return, I hang around your settlement, even in the dead of night, when I stand ready to bark and howl to ward off potential threats.” As he finished, he continued looking, as if this reminder were all I needed to get with the program and throw him a morsel.

Dumbly, I reached an empty hand over to pet him, but he backed away. “Not so fast, bub,” he said. “Where’s the grub? Food scraps for my services as a canine! For millenia, that’s been the deal. What’s the problem now?”

I didn’t have a credible answer ready. Many things have changed in those millenia. Not to mention that giving the dog food would be disrespectful to the establishment. But Laura and I were too focused on our chicken and soda to tackle expressing all this in words. So I copped out: I pretended not to hear him. Fortunately, just as the whole situation was starting to feel uncomfortable, the lady from the chicken stand stepped out, made a couple of sharp hand claps and whisked the dog away.

Creatures of Ciudad Colon

It is now our third day in the artists' colony in Ciudad Colon, Costa Rica. The colony is a small clump of houses and cabins on a steep hillside outside of the town. The colony is surrounded by lush forest with a wider variety of inhabitants than I've ever seen since my childhood weekends in the Catskill Mountains.

A partial list:

Bushes with purple flowers sticking up like ice-cream cones, bushes with red thorn-like flowers that hang and expose downward-facing sex organs.

Bamboo trees, tall and lanky, that lean gracefully and creak in the wind. Coniferous trees that drop pine cones like ours. Squat palms with great oval leaves that could shelter us both in a rainstorm. Palm trees with green coconuts nestled at the top. Colossal mango trees that drop their softball-sized fruits by the dozens on the path, where they're quickly devoured by ants and beetles.

One banana tree, with a single broad hand of bananas, too high up for me to reach. Plaintain trees: Yesterday I took a plantain, cut it, eased the flesh out of its skin (it can’t be peeled like a banana), diced it and fried it in hot oil – the pieces came out delightfully crisp but mushy on the inside. Stalks of corn, neatly and tightly planted, just over a barbed-wire fence in the neighboring property.

Last night, an enormous toad (not a frog, I was told) with a body the size of a bread bowl. It didn’t hop, but climbed a ledge and slid under a gate with slow lumbering movements like a forest primate.

Humming birds, and blue-grey birds with reddish breasts.

The butterflies. Orange butterflies; yellow butterflies; pale-green butterflies. Red and black butterflies; red, white and black butterflies; and black and yellow butterflies flying around each other in pairs (mating?).

Moths disquised as bark, moths disguised as leaves, a moth on my girlfriend’s shirt, disguised as her shirt.

An ant, over an inch long, that I spotted outside through the window. It was black with soft yellow waves on its gaster.

A line, over forty feet long, of leaf-cutter ants, transporting materials along the path in front of our cabins. We spotted this parade in the evening. By morning, they were gone without a trace.

In our cabin, miniature ants (about two milimeters long) scouting alone over the tiles. When one finds a crumb, they snap into action. A clump of ants descends on the crumb like a rugby scrum, while hundreds of others run in both directions along the straight invisible line from the crumb to the crack in the wall that leads to their colony.

A milipede sat high on our bedroom wall, near the join with the ceiling. When I flicked it onto a dustpan, it curled tightly into a disk, and held that position as I carried it outside and flung it into the grass.

Spiders – all black, and ranging in size from half an inch to an inch and a half, and malevolent seeming in their stillness. When I miss them as I swat them with a shoe, boy do they dart fast. When I get them, they lie prone on their back with legs curled in the air. One night I got one just before bedtime, and left it on the floor to clean up the next day. In the morning it was gone – come back to life, or taken away by something for a meal?

Thankfully, gnats and mosquitoes are scarcer than I feared, and pester me only around sunset, and only when I’m outside.

They can’t get in through the screens, and don’t seem to try, even when the lights are on. And then there are the insects we just hear, especially at night – crickets and cicadas, and a creature that whines endlessly at night like a policeman’s whistle, and almost as loud.

The dogs – all are friendly, all are greasy to the touch. A slender dog with jackal-like ears that prances about playfully. A big brown labrador, aging and arthritic, with a body like a barrel and sad round eyes that hope for company and attention. After petting his head for five minutes one evening, he thanked me with a single wet and heavy lick.

One cat, the owner’s. It sits loaf-like, and its cream-white face stares blankly as you approach the house.

And the people. Two painters from Tallahassee, a busy woman and a relaxed and mellow younger man, in neighboring cabins, “travelling together,” they say, though their relationship status seems uncertain. A memoirist from L.A., not writing but “doing revisions.” A retired businessman from Dallas, nursing his sciatica. A columnist from California who, we’re told, is a manipulator. A woman studying peace at La Paz University. My girlfriend and I, writing.