Ticos Come Looking for Work, hmm?

It was interesting, almost amusing, that once the land was nearly cleared of brush, los Ticos started to ask if they could work for me. One night un macho walked right into the restaurant where I was having dinner, sat down at my table, and asked for a job driving the tractor. This was the very same dude who turned me down the first couple of times I asked him to work for me. While I admired his style, his machismo was not to my liking. I’d bet he’s a wife beater.

I couldn’t  blame macho man for wanting the tractor driving gig. It paid better and was also relatively safer, as it was farther from the snakes. It was better than swinging a machete, but at that point I was happy bush hogging the land myself while the boys continued their business with machetes. I might have considered hiring another tractor driver later, but right then I didn’t need one. And it wouldn’t be him. Besides, he probably wouldn’t have dared to take the tractor onto some of those slopes that I shouldn’t have been on either. I once tried to teach the oldest boy, Rosita’s dad, how to drive the tractor, and we both almost died that day.

On a side note, working in the middle of nowhere forced me to use my noggin. My crazy expat friend and kayaking partner, Tim, started calling me MacGyver after he saw how I used some vines to replace a bolt that sheared off the bush hog. Well, that and some incredibly well-placed 9mm rounds that I had squeezed off from his Glock.

Before I bought and started driving the tractor, mis Nicas taught me a technique they used to wade into the jungle that was supposed to scare away the snakes on the ground. The problem was that sometimes juvenile vipers hide aboveground in tree limbs. I might barely catch something move out of the corner of my eye, and it’d be a small snake. Swatting evil adolescent vipers out of a tree with a machete before chopping their heads off is high-adrenalin stuff. 

Please don’t anybody tell PETA about this, but our intent was to kill every snake that we came into contact with. The bushmasters could be fairly predictable, but fer-de-lance were absolutely schizo—one day acting like the  cowardly lion, the next day in kamikaze mode. I hated them for being so amazingly quick, faster yet when coming directly at a person. Old timers around there said that on sand, the fer-de-lance is faster than a horse. 

The deadliest snakes are generally nocturnal. For those who’ve never been in a jungle, it’s true what they say—the jungle positively comes alive at night. When it’s not raining, you can sometimes hear and at other times sense large animals moving about. It is loud, pitch black, and sometimes the underbrush itself SCREAMS at you, but when it suddenly goes completely silent, it is hair-on-the-back-of-your-neck scary.

I couldn’t  imagine the challenges mis Nicas faced on their journey to Costa Rica. Without their incredible field craft on that trek, they never would have made it. They must have crossed several rivers and slept on the jungle floor alongside pumas, some of the most deadly snakes in the world, poisonous dart frogs, and caimans. The rivers they crossed were not dried-out Rio Grande river beds, but tropical rain-swollen rivers with treacherous currents. The five boys, three teenage girls (one visibly pregnant), and a toddler walked to Costa Rica from Nicaragua bringing almost nothing with them except machetes.

With no work and no money in their country, they’d been doing pick-up jobs for table scraps since they’d been in Costa Rica. Ticos called Nicaraguans—perros (dogs) and it was not meant as a compliment. But just spend a couple of days or weeks working up close and personal with these people to see that they are brave, honest, and generous. I would rather spend a day in the jungle with these guys than have dinner at the White House. Some of the Ticos  also suggested that I fire my Nicas and replace them with local boys. It wasn’t an option in my book, as my boys were the only ones loco and hungry enough to walk into that jungle with me. I would go down swinging with and for them. Somos pocos pero locos.

I once asked myself if I was contributing to the delinquency of minors when we would stop somewhere for cold beers. They were happy drunks, and I laughed my (expletive) off when they started teasing each other after a couple of beers. At other times, they’d seem mature beyond their years and discuss things that I had never seen nor could imagine. They let me see into their world and it was a harsh and unforgiving place. They were good boys, and I loved them.