Stone spheres of mystery (Drive Day 102 minus 14 years)
After enduring a night at Marino Bellena I wouldn’t be surprised if the giant stone balls of San Vito are fossilized mosquito eggs. The only absolute is that they’re made of a substance quarried in the mountain range that produced Cerro de la Muerte, which leaves plenty of room for speculation. But the real mystery is how they’ve escaped the modern information era, avoiding codified, collective memory. That they’re still the cause of speculation is, in a way, cause for celebration. Not everything is knowable. Or controllable. So we leave the stone spheres and roll on ourselves, toward Panama.
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Planning a road trip? Buy the audiobook here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa.
Primeval Paradise (Drive day 101 minus 14 years)
There are places so beautiful you are punished for intruding. The Costa Rican state park of Marino Bellena, named after the humpback whales that pass by every year in migration, looks unoccupied. I wouldn’t be surprised to see dinosaurs amble out of its wooded shoreline. But instead we are attacked by swarms, hordes, battalions of mosquitoes. And a heat so wet and blanketing that your lungs feel unequal to the task of breathing it all in. All of which is the way it should be. Or developers would surely decimate this slice of coastal wilderness as they have in Costa Rica’s north. I’m willing to lose one night’s sleep to bear witness to Marino Bellena’s grandeur but we will peel out of here at first light tomorrow. Before the circling vultures overhead drop down to devour whatever vestiges of us the mosquitoes don’t eat first.
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Planning a road trip? Buy the audiobook here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa.
How to say goodbye
Lately I’ve been having to compose one particular kind of prose that shreds my heart – obituaries and eulogies for the people I’ve loved and admired most. And now I’ve hit send, to the Oregonian, on the obituary I’ve been dreading longest. My grandmother Nellie Fox Edwards died late Friday night.
It starts with the words “Oregon lost a working woman’s hero this week” because its true and that’s how she’d want it to read. But obits are mechanical, the cataloging of dates and names, and overwhelming, just trying to list her accomplishments, causes, husbands, boards, wins and losses. Not to mention uncomfortably judgmental, picking which parts to leave out. This time I actually had to rely on a funeral home checklist just to avoid forgetting the ordinary details among the publically significant.
The thing is there’s no box to check for why she made the choices she did. The part where her rich uncle refused to pay her college tuition because women just have babies. Or the part when she was a teenage widow and mother of an infant girl also taking care of her own aging mother. That slogan — if you like weekends, thank a union – doesn’t take it far enough. Without women like my grandmother fighting from inside the union movement, women who choose or have to work would face the same stigmas she did.
So it haunted her when women didn’t see their own strength, when they made choices out of fear and circumstances she couldn’t fix. In one of her speeches she spoke of “until” workers – women who couldn’t imagine careers but only working “until” the furniture was paid off, “until” the hospital bills got paid, “until” their husbands found work.
She dragged her three children to union rallies, not piano recitals. She wore heels with her pantsuits and had her hair set every week by two men who will sob when they open the paper and see she’s gone. When husbands got jealous of her career success she left them, not her causes. When her son developed mental illness, she didn’t ask him if he wanted her to take up the cause but took charge anyway, fighting for public awareness, funding and legal changes.
When her first granddaughter came along she didn’t come to my gymnastics meets, she brought me with her to the state capitol to meet a woman senator she admired. When I went away to college and flirted with becoming a Republican she sent me “care packages” of newspaper clippings proving Reagan was no friend to workers or women. She flew to China to expose slave labor conditions at Oregon’s NIKE plant there, but she also flew to South Carolina to watch me anchor the TV news. When she thought I’d outgrown that job, she bought me a plane ticket to DC to “drop in” on the Creative Director at Ogilvy. She tried setting me up with a few of her political “sons” over the years but treasured the choice I made on my own. Still, she handed Gary her business card when I introduced my future husband.
Until him, I had no champion as utterly confident in me as my Granny. No matter what decision I made I knew that she would understand and, if needed, back me up. She never judged my choice to not have children. She knew that I will always celebrate Labor Day in her honor and never take progress for granted. If I ever vote for a Republican she will haunt me until I join her and beg forgiveness.
I had another, softer, cookie-baking kind of granny in South Africa and loved her dearly too. She never wanted a career beyond her family, but was bitterly unhappy in her final years when she realized she had no financial autonomy. “Modern” granny got to make her own choices, knowing full well the consequences, and regretted none of them. Her brain deserted before her body, leaving me these last three years to learn what she must have been like as a child.
My tough, inspirational feminist granny was also a hand-holding, sweet tooth whose face lit up with every knock at the door. She was flirtatious and friendly, bossy and grateful. Under her name the words beloved and admired will be carved into her headstone, and my heart, forever.
The hard part will be toughening up and carrying on the fight when I feel so adrift and suddenly alone. I am the writer. She will expect me, more than anyone, to remember her victories and tell her story far and wide. She will expect me to take as much credit in my own successes as a man would; they’re a reflection of hers. Of all women’s. She will also nudge my conscience when I give myself too much credit, reminding me of the women before me who made such accomplishments possible.
Mountain of Death (Drive day 100 minus 14 years)
Sometimes reading the guidebooks is a bad idea, especially when the drive south from San Jose is over a mountain pass called “Cerro de la Muerte.” Ascending its 11,000 plus feet in our newly lockable Ford F350 I have a birds-eye view of the plunging drop-offs and landslide-prone slopes that make it famous. Luckily I have another source of information that doesn’t even mention the Mountain of Death: my mother’s journal. In it she not only uses an adjective (rare) but the same one three times in a row: beautiful.
And she’s right. Though Gary has to stay white-knuckle focused on the road ahead as he drives, I am riveted by the dozens of waterfalls and lush, subtropical ferns along the route. Memories are rushing back from the first road trip along the Pan-American. Mom and Jenny washing clothes in a stream. A hitchhiker we befriended snapping a photo of Dad and me taking a bath in another. Back then I was mortified by my near nakedness. Now this picture captures the Costa Rica that hasn’t changed in thirty years.
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Planning a road trip? Buy the audiobook here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa.
Football – San Jose style (Drive Day 99 minus 14 years)
Arnoldo insists on treating us to a Central American soccer match while we count down the days to the truck’s repair. I’ve never been to a professional game and this is a head-first immersion into Latin culture. You don’t even have to know the slang to understand that mothers are being insulted, mascots maligned, referees berated and scores contested. It’s like a three hour battle of the bands, only the musicians sit in the cheap seats playing homemade drums and horns. Gooooooooooooooooooooal!
This day’s souvenir stub? One for Gary’s journal.
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Planning a road trip? Buy the audiobook here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa.
Trailer park conspiracy theories (Drive Day 98 minus 14 years)
Our neighbors at the Belen trailer park are American expats of an unusual age. Christian is a twenty-something, one-time vet student and his girlfriend Killian (like the beer) dropped out of a graduate program in astronomy. All to escape big brother. These two have conspiracy theories about everything from 9/11 to cell phones and after a few shots of guaro — the local moonshine — it all seems plausible. And that’s before we stumble on a giant green head near the Ford dealership in San Jose memorializing JFK. If this isn’t alien art I don’t know what is….
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Planning a road trip? Buy the audiobook here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa.
Artsy capitol (Drive day 97 minus 14 years)
San Jose is way too congested to use our truck and camper as local transportation, especially without a functioning door lock. So we catch city buses into the capitol from a bus stop right outside the Belen trailer park. It’s a crapshoot where we’ll end up on any given trip, but that’s the beauty of unplugged travel. You just go as far as you want in one direction, take it all in, and reverse course.
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Planning a road trip? Buy the audiobook here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa.
Remembering how to make grocery store lists again (Drive day 96 minus 14 years)
When I was seven, San Jose was a big city delight because of all the activities it offered a camper-bound child. I still remember the zoo and all its caged, exotic Central American animals. This time around, the city’s charms are more practical. Like a chance to go to a real grocery store. With a wish list. And find the things on it that make us feel not quite so far from home.
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Planning a road trip? Buy the audiobook here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa.
Saying Yes! (Drive Day 95 minus 14 years)
Before this road trip, I would’ve balked at the thought of “looking up” someone my best friend’s parents asked me to contact once we arrived Costa Rica. But we’re in San Jose for a week or so while the Ford Dealership orders a new door lock to replace the one damaged in the coastal robbery. So I tell Nancy’s parents yes, I’ll try. And at an Internet cafe in a mall, I email the one-time exchange student who braved a year at Glencoe High School. His name is Arnoldo and I quickly find out he has morphed into a Latin American recording star with a silky voice cooed over by all the women in Costa Rica. And he’s married to the local Kelly Rippa TV star, MariaMalia. They’re humble celebrities and she’s way pregnant with twins. Yet they take the time to show us another Costa Rica — one with upscale malls and coffee shops. And I vow to always say YES to looking up friends of friends, even three times removed.
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Planning a road trip? Buy the audiobook here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa.
Expats going native (Drive Day 94 minus 14 years)
Even in the city limits of its capitol, you can’t escape wildlife in Costa Rica. Especially the human kind. The trailer park’s owner is an American woman who wandered into the Pura Vida in the 70s, a year before my parents drove us into this city. They didn’t know her refuge existed, so we camped on city streets. In Laurie though, they would have found a fellow traveler. They left, but she stayed and thirty years later we’re the oddities passing through. After 9/11, she says, not many Americans venture this far from their color-coded security comfort zones.
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Planning a road trip? Buy the audiobook here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa.
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