The Wild-Life of Costa Rica, in Beaches, Bars, and Rainforests

Tha names of characters in this story were changed since I am writing about them without their knowledge or permission.  

 

Dominica, Costa Rica

Ficus Tree, Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve, Costa Rica

          

          After almost dying during a multi-day ski trek across Norway's Hardangervidda Plateau, explorer Roald Amundsen said, "Adventure is just bad planning."  
           By this wisdom, I was beginning a hell of an avenutre.  I had arrived in Central America without any plans except to rendevouz at the start with my high-school friend, John, who lived in San Jose, Costa Rica.  He had to work during the week so we agreed to regroup on Friday night in a bar in a small beach town called Dominical.

        The first thing I noticed when I arrived in the hotel room was the toilet didn’t work.  But I had noticed it too late.  I held the flusher down until the brown water rose to the top and then I stopped, afraid of the consequences of holding it longer. I retreated to the bar.  

            I spent the night talking to Americans that moved here (click here to read my post about American surfers in Costa Rica) to surf and watching the waves crash amidst flashes of lightning.  The Tortilla Flats bar was open-air, a long bamboo and tin roof covering a concrete spread without walls.  The bar wrapped around the interior several televisions showed American sports each night.  It was also full of wildlife, as crabs, cats, monkeys, and dogs came in and out and around during the storm.

          The next day John and I surfed.  I drank saltwater for several hours and scraped my side on the fins of the board.  Years ago I once caught a real wave, and I never forgot it, and each time I go out hopeful it will happen again, and each time I fail.  I decided to spend less time surfing, and more time reading in hammocks.  It wasn’t what I imagined my Costa Rican adventure would look like, a book, mosquitos and a hammock but it was too comfortable to complain about.  

            That night the comfort continued.  We went to a Tica’s house for her 30^th birthday celebration, and we ate chicken and steak off a small grill aside the house.  We drank whiskey and beers and ate cake.  We were surrounded by verdant tropical beach greens, but all we could see were dark woods and hear the song of night birds and cicadas, backdropping the cries from a soccer game on the television in the living room of the green pastel-colored home.

            When we returned I went straight back to the hammock with my book and a bottle of Knob Creek whiskey that I had brought for John as a gift only to discover he had stopped drinking.  John went to the bathroom.

            “Hey, man, you just sitting there drinking and reading in a hammock, eh?”  A group of four young Americans were walking by and two of them stopped to notice me.  The young man, Jeff, had a sort of scraggly soul patch beard and mustache and the girl, Tess, had blonde dreads down to her shoulder blades. When they opened their mouths, it was like an explosion of enthusiasm, they were effortlessly, intensely friendly.

            “That’s it,” I said. 

            “You’re cradling it like a baby,” the girl said.

            I offered them a drink.  Jeff took a swig.

            “Do you want to go look for caymans in the river?!” the girl asked, almost shouting.

            “Of course.”

            I left my book and brought my whiskey and a headlamp.

            The four Americans were friends from Seattle and Vancouver.  Their social leader, Jeff, had lived in Dominical for a couple months and traveled all over Costa Rica.  Tess, his girlfriend, and their more-relaxed friends, Nick and Ali, followed him along the beach.  At the mouth of the river, where it joins the beach in a stream, we spotted one cayman swimming, and we found several frogs that Tess and Jeff chased.  They squealed when they caught them, holding them to their faces and feigning kisses as if the frogs were puppies. It seemed so fun and child-like, and it reminded me of when I was a kid, and I’d capture a toad by the creek after rainfall, when it wasn’t enough to observe nature, but necessary to touch it too. 

            “Dude, you should come to Corcovado with us!”  Tess said.

            “What’s Corcovado?”

            “The most bad-ass jungle in the world,” Jeff answered.  “I’ve been to the heart of the Amazon jungle and it’s nothing like this.  It’s got more biodiversity than I don’t know what.  I’m talking monkeys, jaguars, snakes, frogs, it’s crazy.  You turn on your headlamp at night and you got eyes staring back at you.  But it’s a serious hike, not for the weak.”

            We walked back along the beach picking up frogs and hermit crabs while Jeff explained the plan to me. They would go the next day to get gear.  Then drive down and maybe hire a guide.  They would hike for three days, but it was hard to say for sure how long they would be in the jungle.  Jeff was their adventure-planner, and leader of all things fun, and his charismatic enthusiasm was infectious.  I, too, was soon trying to scoop up wildlife from the dark sand of the beach, while thinking about the Costa Rican jungle.

            After, we decided to attend a Reggae party in a bar on the one main road of Dominical, and I left my whiskey in the room.  Our friend, David was in the bathroom. 

            I walked with Jeff and his friends down a dirt alley past a row of small pastel-colored houses.  Jeff pointed to one of them.
            "The lady that lives there is crazy," Jeff said.  "She is always high on Benzo.  I was smoking weed with her in her house once and there was dogpoop all over the floor and she was just downing Benzos and screaming.  I got the hell out of there."   I thought that was sound judgment from a guy I might follow into the jungle.  He was in a house with an old lady high on cough medicine living amongst dog poop, and he left.  I would do the same, I thought, excellent judgment.  
          Everybody in Dominical gathered at the same reggae bar that night where a DJ wearing a backwards hat and ski goggles played electronic music in an air-conditioned VIP room. Tica women and American men started to pair off quickly.  I was drunk and missing my girlfriend.  Anytime a Latina girl danced against me, I would do my "possum-move," and stand competely still in the middle of the dance floor, until they thought I was disinterested or awkward or both, and then they would move away quickly and I could resume doing drunk robotic hippie white boy moves, thereby reaffirming my awkwardness in the VIP room.  Jeff and Tess danced wildly in the middle of the room. To the side was a stripper's pole that Tica women tried out while laughing.   It was fun and unexpected, and I slipped out quietly to go slink off to bed, wondering if I would ever know what Costa Rican culture really was.  
         The next day I was hungover.  I did some research about Corcovado at an internet cafe.  There were several species of poisonous snakes, a 25 km beach hike in the middle of the trek, and a river that had to be forded at low tide only because bull sharks arrived at high tide to feed.  It sounded like an adventure.  
         It seemed like this was why I came to Costa Rica.  To take risks. To go with the flow, and meet the opportunities that travel offered me as a reward for being at a certain place at a certain moment--to go on adventures.  I agreed to join.  But I was nervous too.  
       I told John about my plan and he told me he was jealous, but I knew he was lying.  He would go back to his apartment and read books and his hammock and be happy about it. 
      Before he left he used the bathroom one last time.  I tried to flush it down all afternoon but each time the water rose to the top I got scared and let go.  I put the lid down, but I knew I was only covering the problem up, not disposing of it.  
       I spent the day sleeping, reading in a hammock, and watching the sun set.  I waited for Jeff, Tess, Nick, and Ali.  They told me they would be leaving at dark to get gear in San Isidro, but they returned late and changed their plans. 
      "We can't go tonight," Jeff explained.  "We were too ambitious today and we're exhausted."  We sat at the bar drinking beers and they explained they had driven out to a point on the coast called the "Whale's Tail" which was known for snorkeling.  They decided to save on money and didn't hire a boat to take them out but swam more than a mile out from shore to get past the murky water toward the corral reef.  They could not see or hear each other but swam with poisonous fish for several hours.  They swam back at high tide, which took them even longer. 
     Ali had stayed behind.  She was quiet and clearly not as adventurous.  "After about 5 hours I thought you might be dead," she said.   "I couldn't see you all or anything."  
       "Yeah, that shit was scary," said Tess, who then squealed and jumped up to capture a blue crab on the bar floor with her beer cup.  On the television the Heat played the Spurs in Game 5.  A thunderstorm rolled in again and coconunts began to hammer the roof.  I found out everyone in the group was around 22 years old, and as they told stories more stories about how they almost died in other misadventures. 
      When Jeff went to the bathroom, I asked Nick about the plan.  "Yeah, we don't really know what we're doing. We're just kind of following Jeff.  But I got to tell you, he's kind of crazy.  Don't be surprised if he leads us into some sketchy shit in the jungle.  I mean, like today, that was fucked up, but fun."  I talked to Jeff about the plan when he got back and the more he explained, the more I realized that he wasn't just missing a plan, but he had the wrong information, and it might be another two days before they entered the jungle.
       Outside the bar a stray cat leaped five feet into the air and hissed.  It was fighting a baby boa constrictor, which was curled up in the rocky entrance to the parking lot with its head in striking position.  It struck at the cat twice which jumped away then crept closer to counterattack.  Tess grabbed the cat in her ams, which probably would have won the fight, and then leand in to cake a closer look at the snake.  I could tell she wanted to touch it. 
     A Tico bartender stepped forward and went to pick it up.  Just then the power went out.  When the lights returned seconds later, the bartender was laughing.  Then he grabbed the snake by both its ends and put in a tree in the back of the lot. 
       That night I went to sleep early.   I was worried but it seemed natural to worry about entering a jungle.  There were jaguars there.  Of course I worried, but I also was tired of second-guessing myself.  I wanted to go on an adventure.  But there was something nagging me about my decision.  Was I forcing it?  What had I come to Costa Rica for if not this kind of opportunity? As I dozed off I heard Jake and Nate talking about handling snakes and how to identify the Fer-de-Lance, Bothrops asper, which accounted for 50% of snakebites in Costa Rica.  
       "But it's not as dangerous as the Bushmaster," Jeff said, "that shit will kill you.  It'll stop your heart." Then they went back to recounting how scared they were during their swim that day and laughing about it.  
       I woke up less than an hour later to the smell of shit and urine stewing in the open-air bathroom.  It was too powerful to return to sleep.  I turned in bed and stuck my nose by the window but nothing worked.  Its odor was furious, persistent, out to get me.  I went to the bathroom and stared at the contents of the bowl, a whole weekend of wet waste.  I held the flusher down.   I waited until the water got the top.  I held the it another three seconds, also holding my breath.  I took the risk.  Then a sucking noise.  The whoosh of water, and like that, the poop moved on. 
      I went back to bed.  Nick and Jeff were back to discussing snakes.  
     "If we're lucky we'll see the jumping pit viper...."
     "You mean if we're unlucky, if you see that shit, then you've been gotten!"
      The fresh air afforded me some clean thinking.  It wasn't the snakes I was worried about.  It was the people.  They were young and without a plan, and that was ok, but could I follow along and be happy about it. I thought of Amundsen, what would he say?  And then I realized I didn't have a plan either, but I wasn't an adventurer--I was a traveler, and I was backpacking to Mexico City.  Wasn't that exciting enough without following a careless group of kids into the jungle in search of fer-de-langs?  Or would we even make it to the jungle? Three years ago I would have done it, but now at 27, and more important than any sense of safety, I had no interest in being an inconvenient victim to the impulsive whims of people I didn't know or trust.  And it didn't matter if I was making a wrong choice.  I made the decision, that was all that mattered.  I wasn't going.  I knocked on the wood of my headboard, opened my guidebook and read about Monteverde, a tourist hotspot because of its cloud rainforests and wildlife.
     The next morning I told them the news but they already knew.  Ali made the same decision. 
     "They're just more adventurous than me."  She was reading her book in the hammock.  
      Two days later I was in the mountains.  I climbed a wet TV tower on top of a summit.  I drank a liter of beer and then hopped into a van full of white people to go take a night tour of the rainforest during a thunderstorm. Our guide rushed us through the dark trails and we saw monkeys, poisonous snakes, tarantulas, toucans, and a two-toed sloth.  The next day I saw four quetzales, the bird that put Monteverde on the international travel map.  
     The next day I went to the Serpantario, which displayed a collection of reptiles.  I saw all the snakes of Corcovado behind glass, the Eyelash Palm Pit Viper, the Boa Constrictor, the Central Amerian Jumping Pit Viper...
     A guide followed me to explain each snake.  "This is the Fer-de-Lance," he said.   "She just had 50 babies, some of which will grow as long as eight feet.  She is poisonous, but not the most."
      "Which is?"
      We moved on to the bushmaster.  It was curled in the corner, but its beaded eye seemed fixed on us.
       "I have a lot of respect for the power of the bushmaster."  
       "Have you ever been to Corcovado?" I asked. 
       "No," he said, and nothing more, and like that, we moved on the turtles.   

Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve, Costa Rica

Howler monkey sleeping after rainfall, Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve

 

The TV tower on top of Cerros Amigos

Fer-de-Lang in a jar at the Serpantario, Santa Elana, Costa Rica

Orange-kneed Tarantula

Toucan

Side-striped Palm Pit Viper, Costa Rica

           

The American (surfer's) Dream: Dominical, Costa Rica

Dominical, Costa Rica

        
           When my girlfriend suggested I go to Iceland with her I scoffed, "I don't want to go to a cold island full of white people."  It was a stupid and narrow answer, and I was punished with the discovery that I was among the throngs of white tourists in Costa Rica.  I left Manuel Antonio National Park hoping to escape some of them and to meet my friend John in a small beach town called Dominical. 

            The bus was full of local Ticos (a term for Costa Ricans) when I arrived in Dominical, but nobody else got off.  The town consisted of two dirt roads full of restaurants, bar and surf shops.   Muddy water filled rutted ditches in the middle of the dirt roads.  The beach featured signs prohibiting swimming because of rip tides. I was halfway hopeful that this was the real Costa Rican culture I was looking for.

Tortilla Flats was the only bar in town with its lights on.  It was open-air with a long roof made of lacquered bamboo covered by tin.  A line of palm trees separated it from the beach, where a gray curtain limited the depths of the Pacific horizon and issued a coming storm. The waves emerged from the curtain and grew to more than ten feet tall and then broke hard.   When the storm began the only thing louder than the thunder were the coconuts that the wind punched from their perch in the palm trees then fell against the tin roof like gunshots.  Blue crabs and stray dogs scrambled for cover in the bar when the rain began.   A howler monkey watched between dry rails of a wooden staircase.  Five televisions showed the Braves and Giants baseball game.  The bar was full of white people with American accents.

I sat at the bar watching the game and taking notes.  Bumbarner was hitless through five innings.  I talked to the Americans at the bar thinking they were tourists, but they were residents. And they had all moved here to surf.  Steve had lived here for four years and worked at the bar; James had lived here nine years and worked at the surf shop; Rich moved here seven years ago and now ran the only dive shop in town.   I sat between Rich and Johnny, an older man in glasses who wore a fisherman's hat that he said made him look like a “wanker.”  He believed that people were ruining the world and their own miserable lives unless we allowed a philosopher king to rise up to lead us. And that Google, too, needed to hire philosophers. When I asked him where he was from he stared off  into the storm.  Intermittent lightning illuminated the ocean and its monstrous waves appeared as if frozen in their breaks, large watery monsters foaming at the lips with whitewash, before the ocean went black and the dark was followed by the crash of those waves and the flickering of power in the bar.

“I guess I’m a South Pacific Scot,” he said. “I could say I’m from Planet Earth but that answer is too far out there for some people.”

I asked him why he moved here.  Again he stared off, a drunk philosopher, into the Pacific storm for another ten seconds.  He gave me a complicated answer but the truth came out eventually: to surf.  Johnny and Rich both told me their histories.  They were  long, multi-chapter stories, like those of traveling beach-dwelling hermits, living on the shores, captainin boats across foreign seas, avoiding their familes, farming, working, but mostly chilling.  Each destination was described as a whimsical stepping stone that led them to here, Dominical, Costa Rica, the fantastical reward for their go-with-the-flow lives. They never talked about the idea of a next destination.  They had arrived at their dream. 

"The key to good health, to life," Johnny said, "is to shoot away five times a week." 

 "Shoot off?" I asked.

 "He means to get off, you know, ejaculate," interjected Rich, now eating a second dinner after a long work day.

"All my friends with prostate cancer, didn't shoot away enough," Johnny said. I told him I never had a privacy in Costa Rica since I was traveling.  

 "Then sneak off to the bushes. That's what I do when my girlfriend doesn't satisfy me enough."

An hour later I watched Johnny pretend to slink off towards the bushes. From under the trees, he winked at me, a beer in one hand a box of food in the others. Then he shuffled the items into one hand and got into his truck.  He attempted to back up five times between the palms before successfully driving away into the rain. The game flickered on and off.  Bumbarner lost his no-hitter but the Giants won 6-0.   Then the power went out with a clap of thunder and a few seconds later the lightning lit up the waves, and this time they seemed bigger, as if high tide might soon swallow all the bar. I could not imagine surfing them.

The next day John and I went surfing.

My first-time surfing, in Ecuador, I caught two waves.  It was a feeling unlike others, riding water, participating in nature by joining its current, being weightless, and no word could describe it except…cool, but not cool as a descriptor but as a feeling.   I understood, in that fraction of an experience, why surfers like Rich and Steve and Johnny pursued the life.  But I never caught another wave again.  I only ever rode the whitewash.  After three hours of being battered around and sucking in saltwater I quit for the day and went to read my book in the hammock.

At sunset I returned for the view. I sat on a log of driftwood and watched the sun go down in a myriad of warm colors. Iguanas and crabs scampered along the beach and a couple monkeys hung around the palm trees. The large waves bounced clouds of mist against the sand and sent them upward, suspended in the air then disappearing into the remaining stretch of blue sky.  All the best surfers were out with their boards, as they had likely went twice every day, at dawn and dusk.  I saw Steve and James and even several Ticos.  They carved and cut and stalled. They trimmed their way through barrels and turned against the lips of the breaks and then out again.  They jumped and spun and switched positions with ease.  They were very very good.  And as the sun set a few came in, but the best stayed out, until it was dark and they appeared like dimming shadows against the waves, refusing to get off their boards and come ashore.

The next day I tried again. But the waves were bigger. It was high tide and instead of sand I was surfing over rock so I decided to quit for the sake of my health.  On my way back I saw a local Tico running toward the water with his board.  He had dark skin and long dark hair that blew behind him in the wind, an iconic profile of a native surfer, headed for the waves.  His face was plain until he got into the water and splashed against the first small wave.  Then, still standing, he threw back his head, whipped his hair, and laughed at the sun.  This is what he lived for.  The next wave. To get his legs off the land and ride the water.   To me, the life seemed like it could be dull, the same thing everyday, but for the surfer, the life is as different as each wave, each moment renewed by the next set of breaks, as they lay in wait on their boards for the perfect wave to join. This was the dream, like Johhny and Rich’s dream, attainable here on nature’s rich coast of Costa Rica. But it was a specific dream; it was a surfer’s dream.

When the Tico saw me watching him, he stopped whipping his hair and his face went plain again,  Then he tucked his board against his chest, duck-dived under the oncoming break, and paddled out where the other surfers waited on their boards.

Dominical, Costa  Rica

Relax... It's Costa Rica

Punta Cateral, or the tobolo, in Manuel Antonio National Park, Costa Rica

     The day before I left for Costa Rica I realized I didn't know where I was going the first night.  I was victim of my oblivion again, my inability to forecast anything whatsoever in my life that required choice.  I had gotten my vaccinations and read the State Department warnings, (Nicaragua has been land-mine free for 3 years now!) but forgot to plan a damn thing.  I had 44 days to get to Mexico City.  That is all I knew.

     I messaged my friend, John, who lived in San Jose, three times to ask for his address.  I was worried.  Americans worry.  But Costa Ricans don't.  John replied he would "send somebody for me."  And if that person didn't come, I should take a taxi to San Pedro Mall and wait in the food court.  For who?  I felt like he was batman, and I could never find him, but somehow, maybe, he would find me.

          Worry was something that was new to me at 27.  And I don't deal with it well.  And this makes me worry more.  I worry about choices: should I move to New Orleans; should I change jobs; and which tomato sauce should I buy at the store, should I buy organic, or save a buck, or does it really matter?  Every decision represents an alternative choice, and I can never know which one is better because I can't experience both simultaneously, time won't let me go backward and choose again, and again, and again.  Time is the dirtiest of bastards.  But three years ago I didn't worry.  I was traveling in Ecuador.  I was jumping off things even though my mother told me I'd break my neck. I jumped off bridges, boats, into waterfalls.  I hopped onto buses unsure where I wanted to go or where I'd spend the night. I ate guinea pig and chicken feet and cow heart from dirty street grills.  I never thought twice about it.  What happened?  What is this feeling....is this what my parents always encouraged...is this...dear god...is this maturity?!  

         I hated the idea and so I before I left the airport I bought a bottle of rum at the duty-store free.  When I left security a man stood with a sign, "Sam Nelson."  His name was James Brown, and he was an older, black man who grew up on the Carribean coast.  He spoke Spanish nice and slowly, and everything he did was relaxed except his driving.  He threaded his taxi between trucks and cars at fast speeds on the highway.   He treated several red stoplights as if they were suggestions.  And he taught me pedestrians have no right of way.  He almost hit three of them.  I loved James Brown, and was tempted to hug him instead of pay him, but I knew he would not have wanted it that way.  

           I also learned there were no postal addresses in Costa Rica. There were street numbers nobody knew of because only recently did the capital city start to post signs.   

          "When I get mail, which is almost never, it says I'm two blocks from here and 1 block from over there," John told me. 

       I relaxed.   I had arrived safely.  I was in Costa Rica, the beginning of a two month dream vacation.  But I quickly found other things to worry about. Why hadn't I planned  anything?  Did I pack too many sets of pants? Why wasn't I traveling with my girlfriend in Iceland or Spain or, hell, why not Fiji?! Had I robbed myself of novelty by returning to Latin America?  Why had I quit a good job?  Did I have enough money? What about socks...god, I hate wet socks, did I have enough socks? And why were there so many prostitutes here? Everywhere, a prostitute.  Every question represented a choice, every choice a right and eight wrong answers. Was I on the right track here?  I thought I was...but there were just too many hourly hotels to confirm it.  

         I thought about these things and many more, all the way to the Pacific coast.  Even in my first walk in Manuel Antonio National Park I worried. I was distracted briefly by a green vine snake eating a poisonous milk frog ten times its diameter.  It suffocated the frog by swallowing its face.  I wondered if it would be able to swallow it whole, and decided it would.  Snakes don't second-guess.  Then the frog stopped moving and I resumed my walk and started worrying again.  And why was I so worried?  This, especially, worried me.  I worried I would be full of worry all the way back home and have nothing to say for it.  

        Then the beach confronted me.  Natural beauty has a way of challenging you, but each natural beauty is unique in its confrontation, its arrest of your vision and perspective requiring immediate attention to the details that make it so magnificent and different than all other places on Earth.  Manuel Antonio is special because of its wildlife, but also because it contains a geographical rarity, a tobolo--where the ocean waves deposit enough sand from two directions to thinly connect the mainland with a nearby island, creating a formation that, from above, looks a like a spoon with beaches on both sides of the handle. 

       I stared at the Pacific Ocean.  It went on forever.  If there was an end to it, I saw no evidence.   It is so vast and blank and permanent, it feels as if it has never changed and never will, only the land that meets it will change, and because of this, it feels as if it has no past.  Staring into it, I felt the same quality reflected in myself; I forgot my own past, the mirage of myriad missed choices, all the other places I could have been right now.  

      I swam.  The undercurrent was strong but the water was shallow, and I felt all my worry wash away in it.  I sat down in the waves and looked at the tropical beach bowl surrounding me, small cliffs delineated with palm and manzanillo trees, a bright sun, warm moving water.  I got out of the waves and hiked to the tip of the spoon.  I saw howler monkeys, dozens of chicken of the tree lizards scattering under my bare feet, and a two-foot black iguana sun-bathing at low tide, and then I swam again, on the other side of the tobolo.  

      I found shade on the shore under the toxic manzanillo tree, reading Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano but really just listening to the cicadas and a pair of Laughing Falcons squawking at each other, and the waves washing up, not even caring to think about how far the water traveled to get here, as I often like to do.  I was on a tropical beach in Costa Rica. I hadn't forgotten all my worries, but they had lost their weight.  It was beautiful and bright and full of life, and I felt like the vine snake, its fangs in the milk frog; there could be no second-guessing here.

Manuel Antonio National Park, Costa Rica

Green Vine Snake eating a Milk Frog in Manuel Antonio National Park, Costa Rica

Black Iguana, Manuel Antonio National Park, Costa Rica

Part of the hiking trail in Manuel Antonio National Park, Costa Rica

Chicken of the Tree Lizards (I think) in Manuel Antonio National Park, Costa Rica

If you think this is a trip for young people, please note that Steve is not young, but traveled
from Belize to Costa Rica on his own in 5 months time.  We found ourselves in the same place, going in
opposite directions. 

         

2nd Lining after Mother's Day Shooting; Celebrating Life and Culture in New Orleans

The rescheduled Original Big 7's Mother Day Second-line at Frenchmen and Villere, sight of the shooting.
Photo courtesy of Alex Turvy.  

The streets leading to Villere and Frenchmen are like many in the 7^th ward of New Orleans.  Well-kept creole cottages mix with vacant lots and houses, boarded up since Katrina and swallowed by swaths of cat’s claw vine that overtake the roofs and kill native plant life.  On the 1200 block of Frenchmen, though, a resident, Julius, who lives in a cream-yellow double-shotgun home had put 7 flags up on telephone poles, each adorned with a white and red star and the word, “Welcome.”

            A block away, on May 12^th, 2013, 19 men and women were shot at Villere and Frenchmen by a teenager during The Original Big 7’s Mother Day second-line  that started only a half hour earlier on Elysian Fields Avenue.

            Two days later The New York Times ran the article, “Celebrating, In Spite of Risk,” and politely asked if second-lines invited violence, a question that’s been asked before.

            A few hundred people gathered at the place of the shooting to hold vigil for the victims and to answer the question together—No.   Mayor Landrieu led the vigil and told the Times, “The layers of this thing are really important, and that’s to understand what the origin of the violence is, what it’s connected to and what it’s not connected to.” 

            Second-lines are like parades and have not been affected by gun violence for a few years now, but they have long expressed a traditionally thin line between life and death in New Orleans, a line that every resident and native walks in their lives and understands, more so because of guns and hurricanes.   A second-line is mobile, a people’s parade, a party.  The first line is the band and the people that follow—drinking, smoking, dancing—are the second-line.  The band, in essence, “rings the (cow)bells” through the narrow streets of poor neighborhoods and people come out of their homes and off their porches to join until the party swells the sidewalks, gaining momentum block by block. 

            The second-line evolved from the jazz funeral, where the band leads the funeral party and deceased to the graveyard.  They play dirges, but also upbeat spirituals, and the family dances, shaking white cloths in the air, some say to keep the spirit of the dead from attaching itself to the living.  More simply, New Orleanians respect the dead by celebrating life.  2^nd lines are celebrations of life without funereal ceremony.  They happen every Sunday from September to June, put on by Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs operating in primarily African-American neighborhoods.  They are funky and fast and open to everyone, an expression of community in the Crescent City, but even they too respect the dead and slow the parade to play a dirge somewhere along the 4-hour route.  

             

             Many people wondered if there would be a second-line the week after the shooting.  There were four. The morning began with a less traditional bicycle second-line that I followed, with another near-thousand bikers, to the Backstreet Cultural Museum in the Treme then abandoned to find the start of the Divine Ladies in Uptown. 

            A mass of people gathered on St. Charles and Washington and barbecue smoke pilfered the corridor of live oak branches shading us.  A truck played bounce music and the streetcar rang its bell to let people off.  A sousaphone player tuned his instrument on the corner.

            A local reporter, Meg Gatto, interviewed me, asking me in a few different ways if I felt safe, and digging at the same question that went national after the shooting, trying to figure out what defines New Orleans culture, and is the violence inextricable from the way we celebrate life.  

            “The culture here we’re celebrating is one of peace and community and life,” I told her, “and the culture of violence is one we’re trying to discourage.  They’re two separate things.  I second-line a lot, and I always feel safe doing it.”

The Divine Ladies Social Aid and Pleasure Club

            A double-decker City Sight-Seeing bus pulled up.  On top the Stooges Brass Band hung their horns over the rails and showered notes at the shifting crowd, as if their trumpets were magnets gathering the people in, and the Divine Ladies, behind them, waved their fans and danced.  They all filed off the bus.  The tuba player left the corner and the barbecue trucks got ready to move.  The first line marched on, and the second-line, us, followed, everyone dancing.  We might never predict the next storm or gunshot, but the second-line, like a sunrise, we could count on.  It was Sunday and it was going to happen, and like another lady interviewed said, "We ain't never going to stop!" 

            The next week Money Wasters began their annual 2^nd line in the parking lot of Charbonnet-Labat-Glapion Funeral Home, where the jazz funeral for famous musician Uncle Lionel Baptiste began almost a year ago, his brown oak coffin being led out slowly to “Take a Close Walk with Thee.”  This time, the honored party emerged from the home wearing salmon-orange suits and waving ostrich-feather fans, unaccompanied by the dead, and To Be Continued Brass Band (TBC) lead the rest of us.  We rounded the corner where three black men on horseback waited in Tuba Fats Square, a gun-free peace-zone on a vacant lot and house weathered by neglect, but celebrating the home of another famous and passed musician.  We went by the Candlelight and a mural of Uncle Lionel with his bass drum looked out at us.  The horses followed.  Under the Claiborne Overpass, TBC, slowed down and played the first few notes of “Take a Closer Walk with Thee,” but it was a fake start, and they immediately switched tempos in music and pace, bringing the funk back and marching quickly under the highway and up Orleans. An older man in a white tee and army hat followed holding a beer bottle and a white sign, "Thou Shalt Not Kill," -God.

The Money Wasters Social Aid and Pleasure Club

            The next Saturday I was scheduled to fly out of New Orleans for the summer to travel, but the Original Big 7 had rescheduled their Mother’s Day second-line to run the same route before the shooting disbanded it three weeks earlier.  They changed nothing about the route sheet, except the date, and even excluding the common request, "Keep your guns at home." 

           But nobody worried.  A swarm of people gathered on Elysian Fields Avenue, and food and drink vendors set up on the neutral ground between pink crate myrtles and an Oleander Bush, a beautiful but toxic shrub. Q93.3 gave out hand-fans with a printed message, “stop the violence.”   The Big 7 came out of a green cottage home with orange and gold-trimmed shutters.  An old, weathered live oak tree shaded the yard, its branches extending across three lanes and into the neutral round, where Bittles Wit’ the Vittles BBQ truck sent meaty plumes of smoke skyward. 

            We marched around the block to “I Got That Fire,” and soon turned on Villere Street towards the intersection of the shooting. 

            The setting was again familiar, colorful cottages offset by vacant lots, abandoned since Katrina or another storm.  In a lot next to the intersection, a set of wet clothes dried in the weeds.  A backyard lined with sunflowers fenced in a trampoline and a plastic kiddie-pool, next to a rotting yellow shotgun-home being strangled from the top-down by vines.

            At Frenchmen and Villere, One Mind Brass Band stopped and began to play the popular spiritual, “I’ll Fly Away,” then moved quickly to make room for TBC Brass Band.  I expected a dirge, something slow to remember the victims, but no one had died in the shooting—they remained with the living—and this is a city that celebrates its living and dead the same, by celebrating life itself, by dancing to keep bad juju from attaching to us, to feel alive and show off just alive we really are, no matter how many hurricanes and bullets strike out.

            TBC did not play a dirge; they did not even fake its start, but instead stopped at the intersection to play “We’re Everyday People” by Sly and the Family Stone adapted for brass funk.  They played for a hard minute, singing the chorus between blasts of trumpets and cowbells, then as quickly as they came, they marched on. 

            Behind us was a third line—a chorus of red and blue police lights from six patrol cars.  More cops walked with us, and at the next corner an officer lifted his orange vest to show the pools of sweat collecting in his uniform.

            At Henriette Delille Street the 2^nd line turned.  I let it go.  I had to fly out soon.  After the red-and-blue tails of the parade passed me, I walked back along Frenchmen Street.  Again, I noted the “Welcome” flags, the beautiful yellow house of Julius, and the vacant lots and homes of his neighbors who never came back, the unturned property sitting like visible ghosts of Katrina, and I knew the violence of man would never stop the 2^nd-lines, but the only thing that would return this city to nature would be nature itself, but even then…. even then, it is easy to imagine that if only a 100 people in a 100 homes remained, somewhere on a Sunday afternoon would be men and children with horns, and behind them an audience, a 2^nd line, dancing, celebrating every living moment, all the way down the line.   

            

The Bayou Boogaloo Bicycle 2nd-Line

TBC Brass Band at Charbonnet-Laban-Glapion Funeral Home for the Money Wasters
Social Aid and Pleasure Club 2nd-line

Money Wasters

New York Times Article: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/15/us/new-orleans-parades-celebrating-in-spite-of-the-risk.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 

Local News Report and interview: http://www.fox8live.com/story/22293935/group-holds-second-line-to-honor-mothers-day-shooting-victims

Jazzfest in Hell

          For seculars, hell is a fantasy, and everyone has a different idea, a different gallery of images that collects across the mind when asked to imagine it.  Some of them are brutal.  The Dutch painter Heironymus Bosch depicted hell as being full of frog-headed demons eating and excreting sinners into its fiery bowels.  In one painting a musician and his lady audience ride a haywagon being pulled by these demons toward the underworld.  The lute-player is having such a good time serenading his woman that he doesn't realize where he's headed, that his love for music is about to score him an eternity of pain and fire.  But the imaginative process is made easier when you’re released from the notion that you’ll burn forever.  Still, I sometimes like to imagine if I do go to hell, what would I want it to be like without cheating its integral features of being hot and uncomfortable.  I would want it be fun, full of people who are there because they enjoyed living too much, people who drink and play music and dance and had a healthy appetite of earthly delights, even if they knew it would cost them in the afterlife.

            I would want my hell to look and be like Jazzfest.
 

            I live in the quiet neighborhood of Bayou Saint John, which began as a worker's camp that predates New Orleans.  It is residential and quiet.  In the spring the air is fragrant from the confederate jasmine that lines fences of blue and yellow French Colonial homes. Down the street is a park where you can play chess or read under the shade of palm trees.  Live oaks encircle our streets and avenues and turn them into shaded corridors all the way to City Park and its 1,600 acres of Louisiana natural beauty.  It all screams of peace and quiet resplendence.  People come here to see the quieter, greener part of the city.

            And then for two weeks in the year people come here to see Jazzfest.  A lot of people.  A healthy Saturday will bring more than 100,000 people into the fair grounds and community.  Half a million visitors will make the pilgrimage during the festival. And for good reason.  There are more than 70 bands daily, including both rock stars and local favorites.  My first year I went three days and when I could not find a ticket the last day I hung outside the fence on Gentilly Boulevard and watched The Preservation Hall Jazz Band from inside a set of hedges.

            This year I decided to leave the first weekend.  I found a ride with friends to the town of Lafayette, another proud city of Louisiana that works hard to preserve its Cajun and Creole culture and French tongue. On the way we stopped at a gas station in Gross Tete, which is French for “big head.”  The station was called “Truck Tiger Stop,” and next to the lot was a large cage with a tiger sleeping inside of it.  His name was Tony and he was 12 years old, a Bengal Tiger, bred, born and raised next to interstate 10.  

            I ate homemade jerky from the truck stop and watched him wag his tail in the heat.  Inside his spacious cage was a tin pool, some balls, a rubber tire strung up by rope, and a pair of concrete structures he could hide inside.

            A man stood next to me wearing a Bluetooth with a microphone extension.  He was bald and his head was sun-burned.  He kept hissing, and I thought he was talking into his bluetooth until I realized he was hissing at the tiger.  He wanted Tony to move; to play the part of the powerful jungle cat.

            “Let’s throw something at him,” he said to me.  Inside the fence in front of us was a sign that read, “This animal is federally protected.  Do not throw objects into its cage.”

            I took another bite of the jerky.  It was smoky and delicious. 

            “Throw that jerky in there.  That’ll get him up.”

            “No,” I said.  The man shrugged then walked away.    Parts of Tony's home were painted purple and gold to support the LSU Tigers, only a few miles away in Baton Rouge.  Tony rested on top of his home and continued to swat his tail at the air.  I went back inside to buy more jerky.  By the salad and fried chicken there was a stuffed white tiger named Salene that used to live there, too.

            International Festival was not Jazzfest.   It was free.  It was easy to get up to the front of the stage.  It was downtown and we danced on concrete instead of dirt.  The beer and food was affordable.  I ate a fried chicken caprese sandwich tucked between waffles.  We watched an all-female 12-piece Mariachi band, Acadian rockers in kilts and dreads play Celtic music, and a Jamaican reggae musician pluck a guitar with only one string, the bottom E.  But the music was not as good and there was some sense of excess missing.  Nobody except the black creole cowboys danced and most people appeared sober and rested.  It lacked the struggle and hearty endurance of Jazzfest.

            I slept in a tent in a friend’s backyard and when the first ride available got ready to leave I packed up and left too.

            The next weekend I was back at Jazz Festival.  It was hot, crowded, expensive, and the rain had turned everything into mud.  Because it was on a horse track the mud contained manure and everything stunk.  Run-off created deep, wet trenches that separated crowds and caused festival-goers to cross it as if fording a river.  At the Fleetwood Mac show a man in a straw hat got stuck in the mud.  Three people helped pull him out.  I looked around and saw thousands of festival-goers stretching back to the end of the track, all exposed to the sun and without shade.   The ritual of it began to dawn on me.  Everyone gathered, as if religiously, around the large stage and faced the musicians.  A group prayer. There were flags hoisted in the air.  Drunk people jumped and waved their hands back and forth and screamed.  Others sat and knelt in the mud.  A man danced with a fly swatter.  Stevie Nix changed her outfit three times and came out wearing a top hat for “Go Your Own Way."  Lindsay Buckingham played a 5 minute guitar solo and never closed his mouth.  A shirtless man in front me shed a layer of dry skin; the second layer was already red and peeling too, and it felt like we were all burning; we were all sinking into the mud and didn't know it.  This was Jazzfest.  This was hell.  The place we all go because we like to have a good time just a little too much, because we like to drink and dance and play and do things to excess.  This is our pilgrimage to pay tribute to those things that make us a little less wholesome, and a lot more fun.  We worship a good time. We worship the music.  And if you stop and look around you, you'll wonder when it was that you arrived, when did you start riding the haywagon and stopped reading books under the shade of palm trees, stopped being quiet and restrained on earth; when did you arrive in this hell, and why is it so crowded?
               But when I found dry ground and fell into the music of the Little Willies at the Fais Do-Do Stage I forgot all this.  I was drunk and hot and I had stumbled into that ecstatic tired state of worship where the ritual of live music seems to enter you intravenously and flood your nerves, and you forget about your discomforts.  Norah Jones sang and her band played soft country music and my girlfriend and I held each other and swayed back in forth in the mud and we didn’t care if we were burned or dehydrated; if this was hell, it was a good hell, even in spite of the smell of horseshit. 

            The next day I conducted surveys to earn free admission.  I went to the back of the track where groups of friends, young and old, sunk their lawn chairs into the mud, several hundred feet away from the main stage.  Everyone complained about the mud.  I asked them how long they have been going.  They said 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, 42 years.   They all said they would be back next year, ritually, and every year after that, immersed in lakes of hut mud.  But they also asked me to record a complaint: that next year if it rains and makes the same mess, that someone puts some hay down to cover it.