360 Degrees Longitude (37 page)

Feeling refreshed, I really didn't want to put on the same underwear that had accompanied me since the morning of the previous day, so I did what any semireasonable person would do—I washed them in the sink. Hey, there's a hair dryer, I thought to myself. September sometimes dries the laundry with her hair dryer!

Imagine my surprise when the hair dryer just didn't work. What does one do with wet underwear when there isn't anything else to wear?

September was in the ladies' shower across the hall. It seemed logical that there would be a hair dryer over there, and that she could dry my underwear for me. I slipped on my trousers, damp underwear in hand, and walked over to the doorway and called out to her.

“September… ?”

No one echoed back, “October!” so I figured she was alone. I called again, this time with a wee bit more volume.

“I'm just getting started!” she replied. I told her want I wanted, and she replied back, “Just come in and use the hair dryer yourself. There's no one else in here.”

I timidly slipped one word the ladies' shower room, glancing over my shoulder every other second, expecting a giant hand to suddenly appear and point an accusing finger at me. The giant hand never appeared and after a few moments I started to get somewhat comfortable in my surroundings. I started to blow-dry my underwear, always wary of any movement in case the Restroom Gender Enforcement SWAT team came swooping in.

Even though I had my guard up, the next thing I knew someone of the female persuasion was standing next to me giving me an incredulous look.

Pretending not to notice, I went about my business as though I dried my underwear there every day. As the seconds ticked by, I could feel holes being bored into my skull as this woman was staring at me in disbelief.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

I couldn't stand the tension any longer, so I turned to her and smiled. With that gesture, she looked a tad panic stricken and vanished as suddenly as she had materialized.

I decided that my underwear was dry enough, went back to the men's room, changed, and returned to where the kids were reading their books.

The Restroom Lady was nowhere in sight, nor was the Restroom Gender Enforcement SWAT team. Mission accomplished.

Turning to the kids, I said, “There's a lovely shower in there. The water is warm, most likely void of elephant poop. You don't have to keep putting coins in it to keep it going. Don't you want to take a shower?”

“Grmmph. Can't you see we're reading?”

I forgot to advertise it as a mud waterfall, warning them not to get dirty.

As I sat in the transit lounge, people kept giving me these awful stares like they knew I had a dark secret. Did the Restroom Lady come out into the transit lounge screaming that there was a man in the ladies' room drying his underwear, and now everyone was trying to get a look at this demented pervert?

I looked around for the giant accusing finger pointing at me, but it wasn't to be found. I felt uneasy, burdened with my dark secret.

After what seemed like an eternity, September emerged from her shower and came out to join us.

“Ick!” she said. “What's all over your face?”

“Huh?”

“You have this grayish fuzz all over your face. What have you been doing? Eating lint from the dryer?”

It turns out that I had paper towel lint all over my face. The kids have always said that my beard stubble was like sandpaper and the paper towels were no match for it. September spent the next few minutes grooming me, monkey style, picking tiny bits of towel fuzz off my face.

• • •

Hours later, we were boarding our flight from Taipei to L.A. It was already after midnight in Taipei and we had been on the move for more than 30 hours. I felt as though someone had harvested my eyeballs. September looked about how I felt. The kids were as perky as ever.

Jordan had the in-flight magazine out before the cabin door closed.

“Hey, Mom! Guess what! That same movie is playing on this airplane, too! You promised you'd watch it with me. Remember Mom? Remember? You want to watch it? Remember what it was about?” Jordan proceeded to rehash the plot. I gave September an I-told-you-so look.

“The in-flight entertainment won't start for at least an hour,” September whispered to me. “Surely he'll be asleep by then.”

As soon as the flight was airborne, I donned earplugs and was off to a blissful chemically induced sleep. It isn't as though I pack around 20 pounds of clueless with me just for conversational purposes, but hours later when I regained consciousness somehow I was in a fair amount of trouble.

“Hey, I didn't promise him I would watch it. Don't make promises you can't keep.” This comment did not boost my approval rating.

September proceeded to enlighten me as to how Jordan would pause the movie and rewind it so that he could explain the implications of what was happening in the plot. I did my best to furrow my eyebrows in a concerned fashion and occasionally make an empathetic groan at a critical juncture. It seemed to help, but sometimes I wish there were a guidebook on women I could refer to.

• • •

Two hundred thirty-two days. It had been way too long since I had had a decent burrito. Even though we were only passing through LAX with a two-hour layover, I had been counting down the days for a very long time. LAX had to have a Chevy's or at least a Taco Bell.

You can imagine my disappointment when all I could find was a measly burger joint that also sold burritos. Worse, I swear the cook had trained in England.

• • •

After our second red-eye in a row, we arrived in Costa Rica, checked into a hotel by the airport, and turned in for the night. It was 8:00 a.m. When we woke up it was dusk outside. We went to the mall up the street hoping to find breakfast. To my delight, we were greeted by a Taco Bell in the mall's food court. And there was free Wi-Fi!

So, I had been reduced to getting excited by a Taco Bell. Maybe I was just excited about the Wi-Fi. I pulled out my e.brain and looked at the empty browser window and wondered where to go. It finally struck me as pathetically ironic. I didn't need to “go” anywhere.

During our travels, September and the kids loved to tease me for my obsessive searching for open Wi-Fi networks so I could scan the headlines. It had been my way to keep my finger on the pulse of the world. Over the last dozen or so weeks, however, it was becoming increasingly clear that the world as viewed through the lens of the media was a different one from the world I was experiencing through our travels.

It isn't as though I completely gave up going online for an information fix, but my compulsive behavior of searching for open Wi-Fi networks to satiate my morbid fascination with the post-9/11 news died in a food court in San Jose, Costa Rica.

I stuffed my e.brain back into my pocket, and turning to my family, said, “I love being in a new place and discovering what makes it tick!”

January 19–February 9
Costa Rica

A
nyone who has dealt with real estate in California knows that every “Planned Unit Development” has a cutesy made-up name with an alternative spelling, like “Chardonnay Parque.” This is to make it sound exotic even though it is just some place next to the BART Park-N-Ride. So it was with a healthy amount of skepticism that I went to a Costa Rican “Cloud Forest.” I was blown away. Really. The wind
really
blows.

Costa Rica sits between the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, the two coasts being only a few hours' drive apart. Between the two coasts is an impressive mountain range sporting no fewer than seven active volcanoes. One of the volcanoes, Volcan Arenal, has been active almost daily since 1968, when it wiped out an entire village.

The two coasts and the high mountain range in between create a veritable cloud factory. In the Cloud Forest you watch clouds whiz by, propelled by the impressive velocity of the wind. I have watched clouds from a 747 that don't go by nearly as fast. And the clouds are so low it seems that you can reach up and touch them, creating a kind of Timothy Leary effect.

When we left Thailand we had said good-bye to September's mother, Marie. When we arrived in Costa Rica, we said hello to September's brother, Perin, his wife Ashley, and their three children.

We had come to Monteverde because of its much-hyped cloud forests and rain forest tours that were conducted along walkways suspended a hundred feet and more in the air, or by whizzing above the forest canopy on a series of zip lines. The hype was well deserved, although Katrina and Jordan feigned polite interest. After having no other kids their age to play with for more than 30 straight weeks, what they really wanted to do was to spend time with their cousins building a fort behind our cabin.

 

Katrina's Journal, January 21

When I woke up this morning, I found a big black scorpion in the shower. It was pretty cool. It saved me from taking a shower! After breakfast we worked on the fort with our cousins. But after a few hours, Mom and Dad made us stop so that we could do a tour over the rain forest on zip lines. Fortunately, there was still enough daylight left after riding on the zip lines for us to work on our fort again. It is almost finished
.

When the fort was completed it was time to move on, and we descended to the beaches of Montezuma. Within the space of about 40 miles, the scenery and environment changed from pleasant temperatures in the mountainous forest to hot sun, sand, and surf.

You don't just “pass through” Montezuma. After a two-hour ferry crossing, then a couple of more hours to the end of a long and bumpy dirt road, Montezuma has that magical quality that makes you forget there was ever life at the beginning of the road.

That magical quality also has the tendency to create a population that comes and forgets to leave; it became immediately clear where all the Deadheads went after Jerry Garcia died. All those college-age kids spend their days not wearing enough clothes and lining the only street selling handmade necklaces, T-shirts, earrings, navel rings, and other rings that I don't even want to know where they are intended to go.

• • •

September came running down the worn trail from town. Trying to catch her breath, she said, “The EMT is on the way.”

The waves at the beaches of Montezuma were a bit on the wild side. When I predicted someone would get hurt, September chided me, “You're such an Eeyore!” Little did I know that the “someone” was going to be one of the adults. September's brother Perin had been body surfing when a wave had used him to demonstrate a perfect pile driver.

We had already learned that health care varies dramatically throughout the world—not the quality, but the administration. For example, we couldn't even get doctors in Denmark, Turkey, and Japan to take our money. When the EMT showed up at the beach in Montezuma, Costa Rica, bearing a credit card reader that was connected to the world via satellite phone, I knew that accounts receivable wouldn't be an issue.

The EMT spoke excellent English, and surprise of surprises, he wasn't an EMT at all, but a physician. What happened next was a bit of a blur, and I'm not even the one who went into shock. There were a lot of needles and dire talk of worst-case scenarios. When it was settled that Perin's credit card was valid and that his insurance would reimburse all the expenses, a four wheel drive ambulance took him and his wife to an airstrip 50 minutes and 15 rough-and-tumble miles away. From there a private chartered plane, complete with an EMT, flew them another 50 minutes to the capital.

Poof. They were gone. And we had no way of communicating to see if Perin's injuries would require anything like amputation. The following day was dedicated to reuniting anxious children with parents. The trip to San Jose took Perin and Ashley two hours; it was 16 by car and ferry.

When we finally reunited Perin and Ashley with their three children, Perin was wearing a sling. “I see all the important bits are still attached,” I observed.

“Not quite. I was administered a massive wallet-ectomy.” Perin explained that the hospital staff seemed captivated by this concept of private medical insurance, and how, regardless of the procedure, insurance would “cover it.” Even when it was clear that his injury was limited to a separated shoulder, the hospital insisted on an overnight stay and whipped up a potpourri of drugs and tests to keep themselves amused.

“Clearly, they've done this before,” I said.

“Yeah, it seems that it has become a cottage industry for the doctor. He has his own private ambulances cruising the country looking for adventurous souls who push their adventure too far. When the hospital finally let me go, the doctor was nice enough to offer me a cash discount for services rendered. One thousand dollars.”

Over the previous months we had seen evidence of multitiered health services: a public tier where services are free or low cost, and another private tier that presumably offers better and more upscale service. It would seem that the darling of the medical system in Costa Rica is yet a third tier—foreign tourists with insurance.