The Waterfall

There are some things you dread. With just the thought of them your entire body convulses, and your mind, for a brief moment, is overcome with fear. At the same time, these are the things you are drawn to. Although you’re afraid of them, it is the emotion of fear that compels you to them. These are often the risks we take – or do not take – in life, when we step outside our comfort zone, when we seek a thrill or danger. One of these things, for me, was jumping off the infamous waterfalls in Montezuma.

“About half a dozen people have died attempting to jump off the Montezuma Waterfalls.”

These were the words I read in the Costa Rica Lonely Planet. Although I read this three months ago, having no plans to travel to the difficult-to-get-to Hippie beach town on the Pacific Coast, I still felt an acute anxiety rise inside my stomach as these words leapt out from the page at me. I’ve bungee jumped without hesitation; I climbed Mount Fuji in the middle of a typhoon. So what was it about these waterfalls? One thing that didn’t help was when a friend told me how she hurt her back from not jumping correctly, and how she still felt water inside her ear two months after she took the plunge. No problem, I thought, I just wouldn’t go to Montezuma. Or so I told myself.

With the school year coming to a close, and vacation approaching, my roommate, Jacob, and I planned out our final trip together, before he headed back to the US: party in the international town of Samara, chill on the beach in Jaco, and…visit Montezuma. In the days leading up to the trip, my inner-Woody Allen began to rise to the surface. As we took the beautiful ride down the Pacific Coast from Samara to Montezuma, I found that inner feeling of anxiety bubbling in my stomach.

The hike to the falls was one of the more difficult I had ever done – or at least, one of the most dangerous. We ended up veering off the path and hiking up some pretty intense steeps. A rocky river roared below us as we scaled a cliff, trying not to think about what would happen if we slipped. Man was my heart pounding when I made it to the top.

Then we got to the waterfall. I’m perfectly satisfied swimming in the cool water, I thought. I wasn’t going to do any sort of jumping. Definitely not.

Then Jacob did it. Without hesitation, he scaled the rocks like a monkey, and leaped. And I found myself, somehow, at the water’s edge.

I wasn’t as high as Jacob. But still, it took me a few minutes, sitting on that ledge, to summon up all the courage I had. And eventually, I jumped.

When I teach creative writing, I often open with a short story I wrote where the main character overcomes his fear. This sort of thing makes for great storytelling, I tell my students. But no matter how hard a fiction writer may try to escape into his imagination, he will always have to reenter the real world, stop living vicariously through his characters (or as a teacher, through his students), and confront himself, overcome doubts, and take on challenges. As I climbed higher, and leaped again, my anxiety and sense of adventure met, and I faced my fear – the same emotion I felt as I got onto the airplane to come here, knowing I’d be living in an unknown land. Fears are there to be conquered. By overcoming ours fears, we can become as strong as a mighty waterfall.

The Dog Who Looks Both Ways

There are no street names in Costa Rica. There are no house numbers. There are no mailboxes.

Ok…so how do you get around? How do you receive mail?

Directions are geared toward the locals. A block is referred to as “100 metros”. I live 75 meters north of the Musmanni Bakery, in front of the Catholic Church. The school I work at is 400 meters south of the Panasonic Factory. These are the simple addresses.

In the city of Alajuela, a movie theater is used as a landmark. The only problem is that the movie theater has been torn down and a bank currently stands in its spot. The “Cine Alajuela” no longer exists, yet it’s used in addresses all the same. In the San Pedro section of San Jose, there was a big tree, called “higueron”, which people used for directions, and although it too has long since been gone (for a good twenty years), all Ticos know it as a landmark, even the people who deliver mail.

There are no “mailmen” per say. To receive bills, for example, a representative from the company slips them through your door (or through the bars that surround it, which are there to keep out intruders). Unless you use FedEx, which can be up to $150 a package, sending mail outside the country can take weeks, even months to be sent, if it’s delivered at all.

The driving here is more aggressive than in the States (even in New York). One of the major differences is that in Costa Rica, pedestrians do not have the right of way. Cars zoom down streets and motorcycles weave in and out of traffic as people search for an opening to cross the intersection. Not only are people accustomed to this way of life, even the stray dogs that roam the streets know to look both ways when they cross.

Foreigners often seem perplexed by the directions, mail, and traffic patterns in this country. It’s the same way in Nicaragua as well, though not in Panama, a country created by the United States for transportation of goods. When I first came to this region, I found these differences particularly striking when compared to the US. Yet the more I thought about them, the more I made sense of it all. With directions like “seventy five meters south of the bakery”, sure people need to know where the bakery is, but they also need to know where south is. It’s harder to forget the four points of the compass when that’s what’s used to get around. This can only help develop an innate sense of direction.

One thing every expat learns is that there are many ways of looking at the world. Living abroad forces you to see things from a different perspective. This cultivates open-mindedness but it also creates challenges. It’s easy to see things as black and white, good and evil; it is harder to accept a world filled with murky complexities. Being pushed out of your comfort zone is certainly part of the experience of living abroad. but maybe this is something we all have to face. We are always changing, learning, adapting to our surroundings. Even the dogs learn to look both ways.