Finding My Footing

Albany, NY - Costa Rica

A fresh start.

The ground iced over the other day, and there I went, yet again, sliding away in my Toms, a new pair this time (with a backup still in the box upstairs — once you find a shoe, once you find your footing, you have to invest in it, in your foot future), but ice-compatible they are not, sending me down our new driveway in Albany just as they had down the side of a sandstone ledge at one of the many arches in Moab only some months back.

There were jokes made at our expense at a recent holiday party down in Jersey, a crew of lifelong Jerseyites warning us about the weather up here, everyone suddenly appearing to be Albany aficionados, Capital Region connoisseurs, weather sages, snow-and-hail scholars.

“They got the lake effect up there,” one said with assurance. Thankfully, as it turns out, there’s no lake up here to have this effect.

“You’re gonna freeze your ass off,” another said, and another, variations of the same thing, balking at the news of our move as though we had told them we were heading up to Siberia to live out our days in some remote tundra, a kind of self-inflicted solitary confinement to endless winter.

And then, “What is it, about six hours to get up there?”

“No,” another corrected. “More like four I think.”

“Was a hike getting up there the one time I went,” another added.

To this, I had to step in. “Hour fifty three, guys,” I said with a hand up in the air to make it clear I meant business.

“That’s it?” they all said.

“From right here, from where we sit,” I said, “under two hours.”

“It’s still colder up there,” one said after a lull. “I don’t care what you say.”

And on this day, gliding precariously towards the street, I thought about this, about these weathermen who I thought were mere businessmen, shop owners, retirees, wondering if they all were in fact right, more attuned to forecasts and climatology than my dumb ass.

Ultimately, of course, they weren’t — at least to the degree in which they warned us with such meteorological certainty. We’re looking at a 3-5 degree difference on average probably, sometimes a wider berth than that (though New Jersey can be colder than Albany too), with none of this lake effect stuff that has blanketed western New York already this winter seemingly every week — the Syracuses and Rochesters and Buffalos. It’s a different world out there.

But, the bottom line is: it’s winter, and it’s cold.

As I slid down in that kind of purgatorial in-between of a possible instant back injury or regained footing, I thought of the hottest I had ever been in my life in a kind of wishful thinking, like the heat from my mind would travel down to my toes and magically warm up the driveway in some kind of electrical current. Perhaps it did, for no injury came.

But what to do about the ice? As a homeowner, which I am just warming back into, you must think of these things. Problems don’t just disappear anymore; they linger. A house is a thief, was my grandmother’s famous line.

Buying a new home comes with a range of mysteries. Where will the first leak reveal itself? When will an appliance cry for help? (the gutter guard, I just noticed, has been blown off the roof already in one spot, and the dishwasher’s officially deceased after three impressive bouts, like a final cry, one last push, a dying wail). Everything works when the inspectors are around of course. When they poke and prod, everything runs full-steam, like young cadets in training. But nothing lasts; and something will crash on you the first few weeks you’re in there. You can count on it.

But you’ll also find little trinkets, items stashed away, and sometimes friendly leave-behinds for, perhaps, an icy day.

“There’s a bag of icemelt in the garage!” I shouted, just when I thought we’d never get down the driveway that day, a day in which we had the epic six-hour sub-two hour drive down to Jersey, where, it turned out, it was also brutally cold, because it was winter there too.

I sprinkled the stuff around like magic dust, and it worked in just that way, which is to say magically, eliminating the ice at once as though from the wand of a winter wizard.

Inside, hugging a warm mug of coffee, I continued recalling the hottest I had ever been in my life as a sort of life-saving measure (and there were some doozies to choose from), and it acted like an added blanket around my shoulders, warming the soul — dreaming of the equatorial heat of Costa Rica from dead-of-winter Albany, my new, ever-so-slightly colder home.

Rainforest of the Face

I’ve written about my struggle to drive cars overseas. Forget about the opposite side of the road (the intro alone in this blog will clue you in), but even on the right side of the road something’s off. The roads dip differently; you need to dodge things with a different rhythm, and dodge different things: stray dogs, chickens, mini-bikes, ditches so deep you think you’re falling into middle earth where you’d die in a ball of hellish fire.

We regretfully witnessed a small dog get squashed by our safari-style tour bus once, on the way to zip-lining in the Dominican Republic, where the Western Women collapsed in a sudden fit of inner commotion, as I grabbed Kristen and, as in a movie, said, “Don’t look back,” but, of course, I looked back, only to see what used to be a small dog now flattened flush to the road by a tour-bus tire.

In the US, you have other things to dodge (bikers dressed to the nines like they’re participating in the Tour de France for instance). You get used to your domain, wherever you are.

In hindsight, I now know that things are a bit dated out there in Costa Rica too, our Toyota Rush (some RAV4 knockoff or reject) hiccupped up hills like a granny with COPD. There I went, smoke curling out from the exhaust, around steep winding curves, foot nearly kicking a hole through the bottom of the car, causing the engine to snarl and cough defeatedly, barely making it to our first stop of the trip, outside of bustling San Jose (where I blindly got us out of in a blur of honks and shouts), to Hacienda Alsacia, Starbucks’ coffee farm.

“Boy could I use a cup,” I said as we arrived and I never meant it more.

We got our caffeine fix and a tour of the farm and then hit the road for two-and-a-half hours (with a highway and a real car, what would have taken about eighteen minutes stateside) to our resort in La Fortuna, at the base of Arenal Volcano.

It was here that the heat first really hit me. See, there were these natural thermal pools, these hot springs, on the property, and — to my surprise — you were supposed to go in them. There was even a swim-up bar.

After dipping my big toe into it, I said, “Wait now, Kristen — are you sure about this?”

She dipped into the thing like a rock in a pond and swam casually toward the bar.

“What the —,” I said and let out a kind of high-pitched whine getting a calf into the water and forget about the middle part of my body. I was on fire.

“I don’t understand,” I squealed, nearing Kristen at the bar, wincing. “In Iceland this felt good because it was cold outside. But it’s hot here.”

Once all the way in, you only somewhat get used to it — at least if you’re built like me. Others seemed comfortable enough, drinking at the bar. You could count on your skin being sun-burned red when you came out too. But evidently there were healing properties working wonders on you, though it didn’t feel that way.

Now, you’d think this would have been the hottest I was on this trip, or when we trekked through the rainforest to spot monkeys, snakes, and sloths — successful on all fronts.

Or the night we ate outside at a restaurant for dinner and sweat dripped down my face like Patrick Ewing at the foul line, trying to see the rim before taking a shot — a kind of rainforest of the face, sweat dripping onto my mahi mahi the entire time. But no, there’d be warmer, hotter, scorching moments, particularly along the beach in Tamarindo.

A Frenchman’s Jalopy

And not when the power in town went out either (what proved to be a normal occurrence in these parts), and we were left with no A/C in the room. The sweet Frenchwoman at the front desk of our small inn, the Boho Tamarindo, a very much Bohemian kind of come-as-you-are place, smiled and stated plainly that there was no power throughout the town with no further explanation, and you knew not to ask anything more so as not to reveal your uniquely weak American need for the perfect temperature at all times when indoors.

No — it wasn’t then either. Nor when we hiked in water shoes to Rio Celeste, where clear waters converge with turquoise. If I were to give a travel tip and treat this like an actual travel blog, I would tell you to wear sneakers or hiking boots when going there, for it is a hike, though we did make it.

The hottest I have ever been in my life was rather right along the shoreline of Tamarindo, where the heat got us oppressively so — and “oppressive” is the word from my notes, and there is no improving on it; it is the word for all of this.

At our inn, we were picked up by a Frenchman (there was some kind of French Connection at Boho Tamarindo) in a beat-up jalopy (or are all jalopies beat up?). This rust-blue heap of paper-thin metal clacked and gurgled even when turned off, like a body disposing of gas after dying. The rail-thin, thickly-tanned Frenchman came around the ancient structure on wheels to greet us and, we regretfully assumed, to urge us to get into the thing for a ride to the beach. He would be our surf instructor that day.

Dry-heaving through town, the mega-jalopy muscled forward and then would kick back as though it was a blind dog thinking it was about to walk into a wall. We chatted the guy up, I think, to deflect our fear of crashing, though we were only going about ten miles an hour. He seemed to be around fifty, though could just as easily have been twenty-eight, the sun perhaps adding decades to him, giving him one of those burnt pancake faces surfers seem to all have, making his blue eyes shine out of his skull like diamonds.

There was the heat in the car, of course, but that would be nothing compared to what was to come. Because, as it turned out, surfing is the hardest thing you can do in life.

The Frenchman couldn’t have been a better instructor, having spent his whole life chasing waves (“Thailand eez best”), and Costa Rica the best place to learn how to fail hard, with its calm waves and powdery soft sand bottom. But failing hard is what would teach me, for the first time in life, that you can sweat like Ewing in water.

Of course, fiery hot, belly-of-the-earth thermal hot springs will make you sweat, but did you know you can have sweat fall down your face at a consistent clip while in a regular body of water? I started sweating along the shoreline during the first lessons on land, getting the footing right, jumping up, leveling out, standing in an athletic position with arms like sails. When you’re on your stomach to start, doing this is nothing short of a burpee, and anyone who has done a few of those knows it can be quite the workout.

And so out we went to do about five-hundred of them in unbalanced ocean water, where I thought the water would cool me off. At first, we’d both stand on the board and immediately go flying into the void, disappearing beneath the salty water, not knowing if we were right-side up or down. Absurdly, I’d pop out of the water and immediately feel the sweat reappear on my forehead in full Ewing Mode.

After failing so often and so hard, I had the thought that I have had before when facing seemingly insurmountable tasks. That is: I will not be able to do this.

But, of course, to my bafflement, we ended up riding actual waves after what felt like nine hours of failing, somehow getting our bare feet to find purchase on a slick board, gliding in frictionless pursuit toward the shore. Granted, the Frenchman was the one giving us a push — paddling with your hands to get on a wave is a whole other strenuous piece of the sport that we did not have to do that day. But we did our burpees atop a board atop moving water and floated effortlessly, even reaching the shoreline a couple of times and bailing only out of necessity.

After riding a wave, we’d have to push ourselves back out to the Frenchman, which was arguably the hardest part, pushing out to a tiny dot of a man out deep in the water, waving us over to him, shouting, it seemed, to push the board in the correct way to optimize our approach. When my heart finally felt like it might give out, I said to Kristen, also struggling beside me, “How much more do you think we have to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“I think we’ve gotten our money’s worth. What do you think?”

“I think so.”

In an act of survival, I got to the Frenchman and said, breathing heavily, “Has it been an hour and a half yet?”

He laughed, said, “Yees.”

“Oh… ah… How much more do we do?”

“It eez up to you.”

“Okay,” I said. “It’s been great. But yeah. I think we’re done.”

A couple of beers (and several waters) at Volcano Brewing Company later, we rebalanced our souls, took in the best sunset we had ever seen in our lives — worth the trip to Tamarindo alone — and then succumbed to a long, dark night of sleep as we watched giant-wave surfing wipeout videos on YouTube. One of those blank sleeps, deep as the core of the Earth, with A/C or not.

Mental

Mug refilled, I brought the warm coffee to my lips, blanketed in warm memories. I surfed, impossibly. We’re resilient, us humans, and all mental. We have a way of finding our footing.

I took off a layer, warm now, and remote-started the car, watching the cold quiet world out the window, icicles like daggers overhead, letting the car heat up before our straight shot down the Thruway.