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Tim Campbell

    Sanchez and I perched on the steep Costa Rican hillside taking in the magnificent view of the valley floor a thousand feet below. There, my little house sat like a miniature in the small hamlet of Platanillo, my home as a Peace Corps volunteer. Such a short hop from here as the crow flies, I thought. Not far from my house, sat the unfinished village church, the one Sanchez had campaigned so long to build.
    Sanchez, the village elder, was in his late fifties, paunchy, with a placid face. He had asked me to trek up the hillside with him to see the progress on the road being cleared by a bulldozer. He had used his political pull and maybe his church connections to persuade the municipality to send its only Cat 22 for the job. Peasants needed to get their crops out. A storm had passed the previous week, and more rain threatened to make the roads impassable. Patches of dark, soggy wetness pockmarked the steep mountain road.
    It took us more than an hour to make our way up the serpentine road on foot. As Sanchez and I stood admiring the view, a loud shout reached our ears. The operator stood atop the bulldozer, waving his arms. We could see his problem immediately. The driver had come to a sharp turn in the road and, cutting corners, the Cat’s tracks went into soft ground. The three-ton machine had sunk halfway up one of its tracks and couldn’t move. Much of the surface around us was dry, but that dip in the road had gathered runoff, creating a small, soggy swamp.
    Five of us stood around mulling over the situation like men do around stuck cars, flat tires, and sports bars.
    “Should’na cut across,” Sanchez moaned.
    “It’ll take a couple weeks to get another Cat out here,” one of them said.
    “But what about the road in the meantime? How are we going to get our harvests out?” others asked.
    Hats came off, men walked around the Cat scratching heads, examining more carefully the degree of stuck-ness.
    “Well. I guess it’ll have to be the oxen,” Sanchez said.
    “Oxen?” said another, echoing my silent doubts. “You really think the oxen can pull this thing out?”
    “If we get those four good ones from Dominguez, and if it doesn’t rain tomorrow,” said Sanchez, in his quiet deliberate way. Dominguez ran a half dozen oxen on his small plot at the edge of the village.
    “We’ll have to get to him right way,” said Sanchez.
    The others started talking about heading back down the road to arrange for the oxen. I stood by the wash—a deep crevice in the hillside fifteen yards wide, thick with vegetation. The crevice ran down in a straight line towards the little church next to my house. A thought sprang to my mind. I could get down to Dominguez’s house in a quarter of the time it would take to walk the serpentine route back down the way we came.
    “Look, guys, I’ll take a shortcut.”
    The group halted abruptly and looked at me, slack jawed. “What?” Sanchez exclaimed.
    “No, really, I think if I just take the straight shot, I’ll bet I can get down to Dominguez before you guys.”
    They looked at the gringo with mild incredulity. “We’ll see, Timoteo, we’ll see... a beer for the winner,” Sanchez said confidently. The others laughed.
    “De acuerdo,” I said, accepting the bet. The group turned and marched on down the road shaking heads. I took my first tentative steps down into the wash, confident I would be back down the hill in twenty minutes, half an hour, max.
    But the wash turned out to be wildly complicated, deeper than I had imagined and full of low limbs and twisting branches, rocks large and small, layers of wet, dead leaves, steep drop-offs, and limited visibility. The tree thicket formed a heavy blanket overhead, sometimes blocking out the sky. Underneath, it was almost eerie, quiet, prehistoric. The wash felt more like a cave than a mountainside drain path.
    The setting shifted like a twisting kaleidoscope with each passing minute. The elements were the same—branches, rocks, wet creek bed, dead leaves, thickets—but the configuration spun into new arrangements with every step.
    That’s when a spear of fear shot up my spine. I remembered that the wash would be a nesting-ground for snakes. Costa Rican mountains were full of pit vipers, like terciopelo muda, one of the deadliest snakes in the Americas.
    I had attended a pit viper seminar at the University of Costa Rica months earlier. The herpetologists demonstrated the milking of vipers to make anti-venom. “About eight to ten minutes, that’s all you have if you’re hit by a terciopelo muda.” The professor had spoken calmly, like a grandmother stirring cake batter, as he milked the fangs of a six-foot snake into a jar.
    I reproached myself for making this foolish decision. I stopped every ten yards to rest and reconnoiter. My senses went on high alert. Every twisted branch got a second look. I stopped and picked up a long, straight stick as a tool of defense as well as to help me navigate the uneven terrain. I peered intently at every pixel of the scene, studying acutely for any slow, steady slithering trailing behind a diamond-shaped head. The snakes would blend perfectly into the thick carpet of large, brownish leaves lying about.
    My wristwatch told me it was only a half-hour since I had taken the plunge down the hillside, but I couldn’t tell how far I had traveled. The thick vegetation limited visibility. I couldn’t see my target, my little house. I couldn’t see the horizon. I couldn’t see the sky. I forgot about my race to see Dominguez. Sweat rolled off my brow in sheets. My soaked shirt stuck to my skin. Then I realized that my watch had stopped. I felt an empty pit in my stomach. I was being swallowed by a monster hillside. I had trapped myself and felt alone and foolish.
    I felt a double vertigo—the kind you feel when you can’t see the horizon and the kind you feel when you lose track of time. With each step, my scrutiny had to be renewed. The intensity of my senses—of peering, studying the tapestry of shapes and colors—made time stretch out and drained my energy.
    Already far down the path, I deeply second-guessed myself. I sat to clear my head. A conversation from a week earlier with a Peace Corps colleague floated into mind. We had bumped into each other at the post office and spoke about our Peace Corps adventure. We had struck a common theme about independence from dominating fathers.
    “It’s a liberation for me,” Biff had said, “but my dad thinks Peace Corps is out there in pinko-land.”
    I nodded.
    “My dad was hard, career, buttoned-down military,” he added. “Step out of place, you get smacked down.” Biff had hinted earlier that the smacking down part was more real than metaphor in his family.
    “At least I didn’t have that problem. But I had others,” I said, and told him about the time my dad, attempting to start a stalled car, had ordered me to pour gasoline into the carburetor and it had almost exploded.
    “Here we are, wriggling away from double binds engendered by our fathers long ago,” Biff had said.
    Was I taking this shortcut as an unconscious gesture of defiance, a way to be someone different from my father, different from authorities like Sanchez?
    My progress was slow, but at last, the steepness began to flatten out. The wash fanned out into a drainage pan. I came to pasture grass high up on the slope behind my house. In another ten minutes, I was entering the backyard. The late afternoon sun touched the far mountaintops. I took some water and went out on the front porch to catch my breath before heading over to Dominguez’s place.
    “You made it,” I heard Sanchez’s voice from next door.
    “Yeah, I finally got down,” I said sheepishly.
    “We’ve been waiting for you for over an hour,” Sanchez said with a wry smile.
    “Yeah, I guess I owe you a beer.” I paused. “Did you see Dominguez?”
    “Yep. He’ll get up there tomorrow.” Sanchez smiled. “No snakes?”
    “Just in my mind.”
    The next day, we retraced our steps back up to the stuck Cat. Four of Dominguez’s oxen were hitched up the front end. The driver played out the cable on the winch that was mounted on the nose of the Cat and secured it to a giant tree. He cranked the winch. The Cat roared. Prodded, the oxen strained forward. Slowly, the giant yellow machine crept out of the mud. After the liberation, the group started the walk back.
    “Taking the wash?” Sanchez asked.
    “I’ll take the conventional route,” I said. “I’m with you guys from now on.”

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