It is hard to see clearly or to think straight in the company of other people. Not only do I feel self-conscious, but the perceptions that are necessary to writing are difficult to manage when someone close by is thinking out loud. I am diverted, but it is discovery not diversion that I seek. What is required is the lucidity of loneliness to capture that vision which, however banal, seems in my private mood to be special and worthy of interest. There is something in feeling abject that quickens my mind and makes it intensely receptive to fugitive impressions. Later, these impressions might be refuted or deleted, but they might also be verified and refined; and in any case I had the satisfaction of finishing the business alone. Travel is not a vacation, and it is often the opposite of a rest. Have a nice time, people said to me at my send-off at South Station. It was not precisely what I had hoped for. I craved a little risk, some danger, an untoward event, a vivid discomfort, an experience of my own company, and in a modest way the romance of solitude. This I thought might be mine on that train to Limón.
I found a corner seat by a window and watched the houses get smaller as we approached the outskirts of San José. They got smaller but, unlike the houses in the rest of the suburbs in Central America, they did not get dingier and more tumbledown on the periphery of the city. The campaign flags were still flying, and election slogans and posters were stuck to the walls of some of them. They were ranch houses, bungalows, square tin-roofed houses; houses of clapboard and concrete. They were pink and green and lemon-yellow in the small settlements, and in the smart outer suburbs they were red-brick and white and had rolling lawns. And then, without passing a dump or a slum, or the dirty river with its grey froth of soapsuds that was the boundary of every other town I had seen so far, we sped into the countryside, past banana groves and fields of coffee. These were shady plantations, with wooded green hills surrounding them. It was sunny and cool on this day in late February, and there by the tracks was a Costa Rican beekeeper, like Sherlock Holmes in retirement, just as hawk-nosed and skinny; he looked up from his swarming hives and grinned at the train.
Even the poorest, the smallest house was neatly painted, the stairs swept, and starched curtains flapped through windows. In the yards were the piles of firewood, the vegetable garden, the borders of flowers. They were proud little houses, and the pride gave them dignity. There was a completeness to this, a certain formality, and it was reflected in the way the train passengers were dressed, the girls in sun-hats, the ladies in shawls, the men in fedoras.
More than half the passengers on the train were black. I found this odd: I could not remember having seen any blacks in San José. Their baskets and shopping bags marked them out as Costa Ricans, not tourists, and for the early part of the trip they chatted with the whites on the train. They spoke in Spanish, getting acquainted, laughing and joking. I hope I've got enough food, said a black lady in a sunbonnet. My children are always eating.
Then I heard, 'Take yo haid out de winda!'
It was the same woman, now yelling in English. One of her small sons, in a blue jersey, was hanging out of the window. But his head was so far out he could not hear her.
'Tree gonna lop it off!'
Now he heard. He turned his head to her, but did not withdraw it.
'You kyant do dat!' She punched his shoulder. The boy sat back in his seat and giggled at his sister.
'I have to watch them all the time,' said the black woman in Spanish. Her English was sing-song, her Spanish a stutter.
We passed through blobs of sunlight in a pretty, shady wood. It was unusual to travel in the shade, through woods which overhung the track. Normally there was heat on either side of the track and sun beating through the windows. But here the sunlight speckled the glass and flashed in the train, and the trees were so dense it was impossible to see beyond the pickets of slender trunks and the cracks of light. We were among mountains. A space between the trees opened like a gate and, far-off, pine groves grew darkly on the hills and below them in a ditch of shade there was a dairy and a saw-mill and a village of timber houses and a wood-lot. A river ran through it, sparkling just before it tumbled into the shady valley, and the place looked to me like a town in Vermont I had seen as a child, perhaps Bellows Falls or White River Junction. The illusion of Vermontness persisted even though in this village I saw a row of royal palms.
We came to Cartago. This was a market town. Here, in 1886, the railway line was begun by an American speculator, Minor Keith. The silver commemorative shovel, with an appropriate inscription, is on display in the National Museum in San José, along with pre-Columbian pottery and masks and gold jewellery and portraits of moustached Costa Rican patriots and presidents (their walking sticks, each one as individual as their moustaches, are also on display). In that museum is a painting of Cartago depicting the result of the great earthquake of 1910. It is an interesting picture, for right through the middle of town, in the foreground of the painting, are the railway tracks, a whole section of them covered by masonry which had fallen from a convent wall. That earthquake flattened Cartago, but the line was repaired; nothing else of old Cartago remains.
The seat next to me had been empty. Just as we left Cartago a young man took it and asked me how far I was going. He said he was going to Siquirres. Limón, he said, was interesting, but I might find it crowded. It would be hours before we'd reach Siquirres; he hoped I would teach him some English. He had tried to learn it, but found it very difficult. His name was Luis Alvarado, he said. I asked him if we could skip the English lesson.
'It is just that you look like a teacher. I think you could help me,' he said in Spanish. 'How do you like Costa Rica?'
I told him that I thought it was a beautiful country.
'Why do you think so?'
The mountains, I said.
'They are not so beautiful as those in Oregon. Or so high.'
The river, I said. That was a lovely river in the valley.
'The rivers in Oregon are much more beautiful.'
I told him I thought the people in Costa Rica were extremely pleasant.
'The people in Oregon always smile. They are more friendly than Costa Ricans.'
It was a green country, I said.
'Have you been to Oregon?'
'No,' I said. 'Have you?'
He had. It was his single visit outside Costa Rica, a summer in Oregon, trying to learn English. It was a wonderful visit, but the English lessons were a failure. He had not been to Nicaragua or Panama: they were loathsome places. He said that instead of my going on to Panama I should return to the States and visit Oregon.
The river was beneath us; the landscape had opened and become simple and terrifying, two parallel mountain ranges and between them, so deep it made me anxious, a gorge. There were fountains of mist in the gorge, the flung spray of the foaming river. This was the Rio Reventazón. It is a swift river and its strength has pulled down the sides of these mountains and made a canyon, filled with the rubble of its destruction, and this - the fallen walls of boulders, the river heaving over rocks, the turbulent suds of rapids - lay four hundred feet below the train. The low coffee bushes could not obscure the view. I saw how the gorge had been levelled by the rushing whiteness on the valley floor. The valley of the Reventazón is forty miles long. The mountains are in places so precipitous the train has to descend through tunnels (screams, exalted yells in the car, and the odour of damp walls) to a cliffside that brings it so near the river the spray hits the windows. Then up again, along a cut to switchbacks and bridges.