Monkey Head

     Go to Costa Rica for the wildlife, or maybe the beaches.  Don't go for the food, or the culture, or the shopping. Go so that you can stand in one place and within the span of about thirty minutes see three species of monkey, scarlet macaws, parrots, lizards, and a woolly opossum. I can't promise that you will have that experience, but we did.

Photo by Martha O'Brien

     A little over a year ago my family started planning a spring break trip. We don't usually make a big deal out of it but this time we considered Mexico - we hadn't traveled there before, it was likely our last spring break with our daughter Lily, and both our kids were studying Spanish.  We then realized that Martha's sister Liz and her husband Rich were thinking about traveling to that part of the planet in the same time frame and we started collaborating.  We ended up enthusiastically bound for the Osa peninsula of Costa Rica.

Monkey scat on the Montero.  Photo by Rich Kerber

     I'm going to leave out the parts about how our flight plans were compromised, how I learned to make tortillas (another post), and how great the first VRBO was. The heart of this story begins when we pulled out of a Payless car rental in a seven-passenger diesel Mitsubishi Montero (sans Liz and Rich) into the nightmare that is San Jose traffic. We could have crawled out of that town faster. And during this time our car began making noises that said, "You should really turn back."  Low, guttural rumblings were coming from somewhere below.  Was it the transmission? The rear end?  I contemplated turning around into the motionless lanes pointing the opposite direction, returning to a car lot that I knew had no acceptable replacement, and killing the first of our precious days here. I gripped the steering wheel a little tighter and visualized doing the sign of the cross. A couple hours later, having suffered through developing nation road signage and our beginner smartphone skills, we were driving south on the right road under mostly sunny skies along the coast, and not horribly behind schedule.  The car sounded fine.

     We made it to our destination and had four full days in paradise, most of it shared with Liz and Rich who were able to catch up. We stayed in a small, artfully designed, wide-open house a stone's throw from Golfo Dulce and not far from the famous Corcovado National Park. When I say "wide-open" I'm not talking about floor plan. This dwelling barely had an exterior, let alone windows. It was a roof over low concrete walls and we slept under netting. This was not hardship - I think people call it "glamping."  It was lovely, and one result of this design was that we not only saw wildlife on the property, we saw it in the house: land crabs in the shower, a tiny gecko in Owen's toilet kit, large beetles on the kitchen counter, hummingbirds darting through the bedrooms. We also needed to keep our food in a monkey safe. The first of two regrets I carry from this trip is that I didn't record the 2:00 AM howler monkey concert - beginner smartphone skills.  The second came later.

     We had arrived with a list of "gosh, I hope we see that" wildlife, checked off a bunch of them on the first day and nearly all of them before we headed home.  And there was that one beach... I had given up on the idea of ever being alone on a huge, gorgeous, tropical beach in my lifetime, but there we were. Costa Rica is one of the last places you can witness the rain forest meeting the ocean in an uncompromised way and it is an amazing border.  There are other stories - beautiful, concerning, wild, complicated, and funny - from those four days and I would happily share them with you.  Some of them include the local food that we embraced, cooking for ourselves with stuff from the grocery. But this story continues on what was to be our last day.
     The drive back to San Jose and its airport was supposed to be fun compared to the drive down. We left Liz and Rich behind to make up for lost time.  We had all day and knew where we were going, conditions we thought would lend themselves to some interesting sightseeing along the way.  All we had to do was make it to our hotel for some sleep before an early morning return flight. What's more, four days of driving back and forth from the house to the town of Puerto Jimenez over several miles of washboard gravel road had seemingly shaken all the parts of our car back into their correct relationships. We hadn't heard a noteworthy sound from under the car in days. About an hour into the drive we pulled over to take some pictures from the hills looking back toward Golfo Dulce beyond a canopy of flowering trees.  Goodbye paradise. We climbed back in the car and continued North.

     My mind wanders a lot when I drive.  This can be a problem if it happens when there's something like an exit I'm supposed to be looking for.  But at that time it was "no problemo" - we wouldn't be getting off this particular road for a few hours.  So my mind wandered freely until coming to rest on the observation that we hadn't seen any road kill. If you've done the background reading, or know me well, you will understand why my mind would have taken this detour. Here we were driving through a zoo without cages and nothing ever seemed to get hit by a car.  I typically see more decomposing carcasses on five miles of Wisconsin road than I had in two hundred miles here. Maybe the vultures we had been seeing were super efficient.  Do you believe in karma?  I don't, but it can help me describe the next 45 minutes.
     No sooner had the roadkill thoughts been chewed on a bit than I saw a group of smallish animals run across the road ahead.  It appeared to me that at least one was hit by the car in front of us.  A survivor returned to the middle of the road, touched a body, and ran off. As we drove up a heartbreaking scene unfolded - two squirrel monkeys on the road. We had just read about their endangered status and to witness their numbers reduced was shocking. I pulled over and walked back to find a juvenile, squashed flat, and an adult seemingly untouched except for a broken forearm.  I grabbed it's tail and returned to the car for my family to get a closer look.
     It was a beautiful animal and we mourned over it.  There was deep orange fur on its back with other orange highlights over grey, green and bronze undertones. We had observed this very species a couple times over the past four days and this one was dead.  We were all pretty quiet. So... I'm not sure exactly how to handle this transition, but I...   um...  I've been collecting animal skulls since I was about ten.  I don't have a primate skull.  How many more times in my life will I have this opportunity?
     Martha could see where this was headed.  I don't remember what my next words were, but her response was, "If you get stopped at the airport we're going home without you." I looked down at the lifeless body.  Get in the car and keep driving now, or collect the head and risk abandonment by my family.  That's a tough call.  If I leave it behind the decision will have been made and there's no rewind button.  On the other hand our flight isn't until tomorrow morning.  If I take it with me I'll have the next 18 hours to think about it.  I could chicken out at the last minute and leave it in the hotel room, tucked in the bottom of the wastebasket.
     I went to the car, got my folding knife out of my fanny pack, detached the monkey's head and that amazing tail, placed them in a zip-lock sandwich bag, and threw the rest of the body into the brush.  I put the package into my luggage and we were back on the road. I could use the next few hours of driving to mull over things like the penalty for transporting endangered species parts, what luggage compartment are they least likely to search, and what would the head look like when the scan of my bag popped up on the screen?  My toilet kit seemed like a good hiding place.
     I had little time for that.  We had gone no more than 50 yards when the car sounds returned, louder and angrier this time.  We were fine when going about 40 miles an hour, but as soon as I let off the gas the car bucked and growled. "That didn't sound good," was heard from the back seat.  I momentarily pictured driving non-stop to our hotel at 40 miles an hour, traffic signals and pedestrians be damned, then I remembered the San Jose traffic. We were coming out of a forested area into a small town. Martha shouted, "There's a policeman! Pull over!" I tried to.  I steered toward a gravel shoulder area but this time when I let off the gas the rear wheels locked up.  The back of the car screamed and fishtailed and we jolted to a halt, tipped backwards with the rear end of the car hanging over a ravine. That sounds scary doesn't it?  It was, but it's also true that the ravine was only about ten feet deep.  Had we gone over, it would have been bad but we would have survived.  Now everything was quiet and motionless.  We got out carefully.  The two-lane road was narrow enough that the front of our car blocked one lane.  Traffic started backing up. Curious bystanders were gathering.
     If you had the option of choosing where to break down in a foreign country we nailed it.  In addition to the cop that I've already mentioned, two more angels descended: a truck driver with a chain to haul the car out to the shoulder, and a teenager, Javier Villalta, equipped with good English and his recent experience as an exchange student in Edgerton, Wisconsin.  (A Packer fan no less.)  Now that all four wheels of the car were touching the ground we pulled out our luggage. Traffic was moving again. Javier and Lily helped communicate with the policeman and then Javier talked to the rental car company.  We were able to give him the keys and just walk away.
     Where we walked to was his house right across the street.  We were served fruit drinks on the veranda while his relatives researched our new travel options.  Martha leaned over and whispered in my ear that I should ask Javier about the risk of traveling with a squirrel monkey head. So I managed to summarize for him the events right before our wreck and my motive for getting the head back home. He excused himself to talk to his uncle - a retired government employee. The upshot was that unless I was a biologist with a permit I could get in a lot of trouble.  Well, that wasn't really anything I didn't already know, but it tipped the scales toward leaving it behind.  I turned over the sandwich bag and it's contents to Javier.  He said he'd bury it. A little while later they drove us a few miles down the road to a station from which a bus would be leaving for San Jose in an hour.  We thanked them profusely, exchanged contact info, Lily and Owen friended Javier on Facebook, and we said goodbye.

Photo by Martha O'Brien

     So the karma story would go something like this: in the process of thinking about it I made it happen, then I unleashed the curse of the endangered monkey head, destroying our car, threatening the safety of my family, and sabotaging our travel schedule, but the overall reserve of positive energy that Martha, Lily, Owen and I brought to that moment was a counter, so forces aligned to make everything work out.  We won't miss our flight!  In forfeiting the monkey head I was acknowledging the state of karma in that moment - don't push it.

I was stopped by a customs agent in Houston.

They searched my bag.

They didn't look in my toilet kit.