Two Friends and a Snap Decision

My best friends Jeff and Karissa were in San Jose leading a group of youth from their church on a service trip and so I came down from Monteverde to meet them.

I went up the stairs of the mission house where they were staying I heard Jeff's booming laugh and I hesitated.  It had been six months since I had seen a familiar face, or been touched by someone who knew me.  What if I wasn't the same?  What if I was?

I took a deep breath and came up the stairs and before I knew it they were both leaping over chairs and wrapping me up in a huge hug and I felt joyful and frightened and relived and ready to run away all at the same time.  After a few seconds we realized that a room full of people was staring at us– the youth group that Jeff and Karrissa had brought down and a pastor who had been in the middle of a speech.  "Sorry," I mumbled, and took a seat.  He resumed talking but I didn't hear what he said because I was thinking about how the whole time I'd thought my journey was a line taking me farther and farther from where I had started but it felt more like a circle now that I was among familiar faces and feeling similar feelings.

I spent the week with Jeff and Karissa and their group– most of the time we were building a house for a single mom who didn't have a place.  I wasn't so good at it. It took me about five minutes to hammer in one roof nail and when I finally did the tin around the nail had a hole in it.  I got my hammer privilege suspended for a while.  Right afterward I stepped on the neighboring roof without stepping on a beam and almost made a surprise visit via the ceiling.  Later I had a nail in my mouth because I had been holding it there to do some hammering and was working along when suddenly I realized the nail was no longer in my mouth.  I had swallowed it.

"Karissa," I hissed.  "I just swallowed a nail!  What do I do."

She busted out laughing. "Oh my gosh..." she could hardly talk through her clashing hilarity and concern.  "Can you feel it?"

"No."

Uhhh...  we could tell..."

"No, don't tell anyone, that's embarassing!"

"Yeah, well we have to tell someone.  Steve's wife is a nurse.  She'll know what to do."  She called Steve's wife who said, "Rush him to the hospital!" and pretty soon the whole construction crew was crowded around exclaiming and thinking up extraction schemes involving electromagnets.  The Costa Rican foreman came up.

"No problem," he said. "I've probably swallowed a half a dozen of those things by accident.  It all turns out O.K."

For the rest of the week I endured comments like, "We just got a new bag of 2 inch nails, but keep them away from Collin" or "I hope you ate breakfast because today we're putting screws into drywall." But Karissa kept checking in to make sure I was OK and though it felt weird to have someone around who cared, I can't say I didn't like it.

San Jose.

In between construction time we sometimes sat up on the terrace and I spun yarns about my travels to Jeff and the youth.  Their awe made me feel at the same time like a conquering hero returning from battle and a fool cloaking his true strengths and weaknesses.  Jeff found a guitar and I pulled out my harmonica and we started playing a slow blues.  We improvised ridiculous lyrics.  We played some faster jams and he laid down some new riffs he had been working on and I bent note like you only learn how to do when your hungry and broke in some Mexican town and we lost ourselves in ecstatic improv.  We also visited parts of the city.  I watched Jeff and Karissa see this new country as they walked down the street, Jeff lapping it in with his boundless enthusiasm, practicing his Spanish.  I realized that my experience of new things had become dulled, like the person who no longer smells a pungent odor that is always present.

One night I had to escape from the group; I had come to treasure my solitude. I walked out to the plaza.  It was night. Strangers chatted on benches.  Young men shot hoops in the basketball court.  Everything in me was at ease in this place.  I was unknown there, unclaimed, an endless fountain of possibilities.

I thought of the Dane I had met in Mexico City, 6'6" with red dreadlocks and the utter composure of having faced and conquered fears.  He had left his country at age 18 to teach English in Central America but ended up cutting his credit cards and heading south completely without money.  He worked the worst kind of jobs until one day in Colombia he traded a rusty bike he owned for some juggling clubs.  Now, five years later, he lives by juggling in the streets and has a singular passion for his art. He has friends in every city in Latin America and just shows up with the clothes on his back and his juggling pins and begins to live where he lands.  I spent quite a bit of time with him and saw him as a sort of sage.  He shared everything he had with me.  He was broke in a city of 22 million people with absolutely no fear.  He had utter self composure and an acute sense for what was passing in the lives of anyone around him.  He had hurled himself into the unknown and was utterly liberated.

But when I thought about continuing my journey, instead of endless possibilities I saw nothing.  The map in my mind of everything between Costa Rica and Bolivia appeared blank to me.

Jeff, demonstrating the hazards of mixing water and
electricity in the same shower head. Thanks Caleb
Brown for these photos.

The week flew by and we were suddenly putting the finishing touches on the house and it was the last day for the group in Costa Rica.  I had no idea what I was going to do when they left.  It seemed as though the massive swell pushing me southward, the rush of energy always pulling me on, had dwindled away. I had forgotten how good it feels to be among people that know me. That night I began to talk to Karissa, who always seems to know how I am feeling better than I do.  How could I leave off my journey now? I asked.  I never again wanted to believe the easy lies of permanence and obligation.  Would I forget that huge horizon and put on blinders again to make the dazzling choices more bearable? I felt as if I had been constructing a great arcing bridge from Carbondale to Cochabamba, and, at the highest point of its span I was stopping, leaving a half-arc, a bridge to nowhere.  But as I continued to talk to Karissa it became more and more apparent that I was deeply exhausted from my journey.

Two days later I was on a plane to Bolivia.