Foco de Dios

  

  “Where’s this bus going?”The young man asked me.

  Startled, and unsure if I heard him correctly with the heavy rain on the roof, I responded: “Excuse me?”

  “Where are we going in this bus?” He repeated.

  “This bus goes to Zapatón.”  I informed him, a little wary and certainly surprised to be asked a question with such an obvious answer.

  “So we already passed Salitrales?”

  “Ooooo – yes, my friend, almost an hour ago.  Remember when the driver got out to drink coffee, the bathroom stop…?”  He gave me a blank stare, as if his eyes wouldn’t focus.

  “So where are we now?” He asked, realizing he was far from his target.

  “Thirty minutes from Zapatón.”

  “I fell asleep,” he said, “and when I woke up I looked out and all I could see was thick forest, and I knew…I had a feeling.  So we’re really far from Salitrales.”

  “Yeah, man.” I insisted.  “And this bus stays in Zapatón until 5am tomorrow morning.  Maybe you could find a place in town, you’ll have to talk to the driver.”

  Just as I was realizing that this guy was on the tail end of a drunken slumber, a familiar thing happened.  The bus stopped, moved forward and back a few times, and as the October rains continued to fall heavily, the tires slid sideways as much as they did forward, and we sunk down just enough to be noticeable.

  “Hasta allí llegamos.”  That’s as far as we’re gettin’, said a grandma from my town.

   I shushed her in an instinctive response to negativity and a few people chuckled.  Then people got to their feet: to help gauge the situation, to give optimistic commentary, or just to watch as we got stuck even more.  Sticking their heads out the window, people realized we were sunk.

  I quickly forgot about the young man lost in the outskirts of our mountain town and grabbed an old man’s flashlight, foco in Spanish, to light up the ground where the back tires were stuck so the driver could see.  Another guy shined a foco on the hole on the left edge of the curve we had to get around.  The rain intensified, and lighting cracked down on the top of the bus.  The seven of us jumped a the sound, some shrieked, and then we giggled.

  “Don’t move the bus any more or we’ll fall in that gulch!”  Said the grandma.

  “Sit down ma’am.”  The driver said curtly.  We all laughed, except for the driver, because he was the only one who knew for sure that we weren’t getting to town that night.

   The next familiar step began after a collective sigh, not a blaming or overly negative sigh, but just a sigh of calm acceptance, a sigh that lets out the last hopes of a normal trip home and that readies the mind for the wetness, the puddles, the mud, the thunder, and the hour-long walk with a group of oddly assembled community members.

  If I were a regular gringo in rural Costa Rica I would have been startled by the rapidity with which people plunged noiselessly out the bus door and into the heavy rain, with and without umbrellas.  But this time I was out just as quickly as the rest.  It’s an activity one comes to expect in October.  I had my backpack on my chest (with computer, camera, and signed documents from the Japanese Embassy inside), my dufflebag strapped on my back, a reusable shopping bag full of six or seven kilos of fruit, veggies, and boxed wine in my left hand, and an umbrella in my right.

  “Ayyyy!”  An older gentleman ahead of me yelped as we assumed our mission with positive spirits.

  “Ahora si…” I said, now we’re getting after it.

  Gamboling about in the rain, the tone of our troop was hilariously jovial and with no flashlight among us we reveled in the brief assurance given by every lightning bolt, and the brief impulse given by every thundering blast.

  CRACK!  Another couple tenths of a second of fleeting light guided us momentarily.

  “And nobody has a foco,” I said, “que tirada…”

  CRACK!  The brightness lasted longer this time.

  “But muchacho…” the old man said, trucking along fearlessly, “we’ve got the foco de Dios.”  God’s flashlight.