How We Almost Saw the Mouth of Hell Volcano
More adventures from trying to live the good life abroad
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How We Almost Saw the Mouth of Hell Volcano
In the Clouds, Volcano
BY CATHY SONG
Earth-touching clouds hush the forest.
A terrarium of stillness
shrouds the bird realm.
Speaking as if from another source,
‘Apapane the ventriloquist
knits its calls, releasing
like a ball of string
notes that flutter to the floor as leaves,
typing trills that glitter the branches.
The cloud dome diverts the wind
the way a boulder divides a river,
rerouting the occasional car
from turning down the gravel road.
There are many ways to pass through.
There are many ways to exit.
Solitude expands the sense of time,
on this side of the hourglass,
the sand in short supply.
I frittered it away in such
a hurry, the arguments, the hostility,
grabbing at what
I thought would make me happy,
so many missed opportunities
to make, in the end, amends.
I take heed from the old sages.
I do not miss
the fickleness of the fleeting world.
With my books and papers,
I scratch insects out of stone,
patch and reclaim torn threads.
The stitches are far from perfect.
Tobacco-drunk and countless tea cups,
I retreat, content beside the twig-fed fire.
All that I need is to want
nothing more. Rising into clouds,
the wisps of smoke impersonal as my signature.
Source: Poetry (October 2020)
Could there be anything more poetic than staring at a volcano?
I don’t know what it is about volcanos, but they fascinate me. Being the Mary-Oliver-loving nature poet that I am, they seem spiritual, supernatural. A way to see into the Earth, and look under its surface, a rupture beneath the green. A furnace that heats pools, creates ash, feeds the soil.
Also, a great place where you can throw virgins.
Most of my life I’ve wanted to see one. Yet, somehow, I’m thirty seven years old, gone to Hawaii, lived in Costa Rica for two years, but have never seen a volcano up close. Looking at something as dangerous as a volcano requires planning, savings, in short, capital. You need a vehicle to get to the top. You need a park pass and a guide to make sure you don’t fall in.
In Costa Rica, Seeing a Volcano is Expensive.
In Costa Rica seeing a volcano can run you half a month’s worth of rent. Costa Rica has six active volcanoes and 61 that have gone dormant. During the pandemic, you couldn’t see the inside of any of them, but by the end of our stay, tours have resumed. Most of these volcanoes are closer to the interior of the country, several hours from the beach town of Playa del Coco where we live.
In the neighboring country of Nicaragua, there are 19 active volcanoes, and the cost of a tour is about half the price you pay in Costa Rica. If you want to see into the beating heart of the universe at a great price, the thing to do is hop over the border to Managua when you do your border run. Early Spanish conquistadors called it “The Gates of Hell.”
Our First Border Run
Once COVID restrictions lifted enough to head to do our mandated expat sojourn outside the Costa Rican border, I got my hopes up. A man in a cab would come up and say, “I’ll take you to the volcano for $20” and then we could talk him down to $10. We’d pop over, have a quick life-changing experience, and make it back in time to catch the bus.
But it was wishful thinking. What happened instead is that once we got to the other side of the border, I stepped out of the immigration building for five minutes and saw hovering over the horizon, a volcano. I can’t say for sure, but looking at the map, I believe it was the Masaya volcano, very faint in the distance. A mountain, pale with tranquility, a giant green tower on the face of the earth, one emblem of mystery and longing. It was a clear day in the tropics, but clouds flew around the volcano’s tip. In front of me were busses and concrete and fencing, people in bureaucratic uniforms filling out paperwork. Tourists and expats came back from San Juan del Sur with their surfboards, and bags of inexpensive rum and tequila.
I realized that the volcano was not at all the kind of thing you could see on a whim while pressed for time. I stood there and did what tourists do. I tried to get a good picture of something miles away.
(Look close, behind the center lamp posts, you’ll see the faint outline of the volcano.)
Standing there, staring at the entrance to Nicaragua, I had to ask, what is a border anyway? What is a country? Between Costa Rica and Nicaragua, the scenery looks the same. Dragonfruit vines wind up the same tamarind trees. The mot-mot birds fly from one country to the other without any kind of passport. But on the ground there are whole systems. Three government buildings: one for submitting paperwork. One for exiting one country, one for entering another, and a booth for showing your Covid Passports and test results. All of them charge seperate fees. In between, men weilding rickshaws offered to ferry the easily sunburned tourists across the stretch of pavement that separated them. It seemed truly absurd to come all this way just to see what we were missing on the other side, just to get a stamp on a passport and return home immediately.
After getting the covid test, then the covid insurance, then bording the bus to Liberia and the bus to Los Penas, and dragging our tired flip-flop adorned feet down the hill to the first building and up the hill to the Costa Rican exit and down the sidewalk to the Nicaraguan border offices, and the Covid checkpoint, and waiting in line to get our passports stamped, and saying at least one hundred times in our terrible Spanish, “Buenas Diaz, como estas?” surely, we should at least be able to do something fun. Something to make all the trouble worth it.
But by the time we got over the border and through the eighteen million beurocratic hoops they made us jump through, we were tired, hot, turned around and utterly demoralized. It had been so humid that day, and we had felt so lost and confused jumping between offices, that we had paid a man in a white-collar shirt $20 to load us into his cart and carry us the final few feet from one country into the next. The distance between the building where you get your passport stamped to leave Costa Rica and the building where you get your passport stamped to enter Nicragua is about five city blocks. Not a bad walk on a normal day when you know where you are and you’ve thought to bring a frozen water bottle, but this was only our first border run. We didn’t know where we were going. We didn’t have a bottle of cold water. Our feet hurt and we would have paid any price for someone to point us in the right direction and take us where we were meant to go.
We were just tired and wanted to go home.
On the other side of the bornder my husband noticed me looking wistfully into the distance. He’s seen me doing this so often in our marriage. He put his hands on my shoulders and said, “Next time we’ll go see the volcano.” Then he steered me back towards the official proceedings of the day. We got our passport stamped, and within five minutes of leaving Costa Rica we were back, eating at a soda, and waiting for the bus to Coco.
We arrived at our condo about six p.m., just as the sun was going down. We survived our first excursion across the border and it had “only” taken twelve hours. Twleve hours to go a four hour distance, navigate a bureaucracy, spend a fair chunk of our money, and not see a volcano.
There’s a joke from The honeymooners my husband likes to quote, “What do you mean we never go anywhere? We’ve gone to hell and back together.”
No offense to those sturdy souls who work at the border between Nicragua and Costa Rica, but I like to think that even though we didn’t get to see into the volcano at Masay up close, we definitely saw “The Mouth of Hell.”
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