The Shell of a Person

PURA VIDA

The way was just dust, and it wound through the Costa Rican jungle like a stream. It would surely become a stream when the rains came. The view from the bed of the truck, where I was riding with Ivy and the bags, was a smokescreen, a roiling dust devil that we dragged along by the toe. The road emptied out of the forest like a spill and frittered away on the bank of a river, which was evidently being pumped by an ocean tide, surging up somewhere behind the opposite bank.

Ivy and I stepped on the tires to climb out of the bed. Wade got out of the cab with the driver. We all unloaded the luggage onto the sand, careful to set the suitcases on their wheels so that they would not get soiled.

“Cuanto cuesta?” I asked the driver—how much. My Spanish was still weak. I had been rehearsing this conversation. 

“Tres mil.” Three thousand Colones, equivalent to six bucks. I made it with a red bill and a blue bill, and as I handed them over, I noticed a driftwood sign tacked to a nearby tree trunk. It read, Cuidado Cocodrillos! in ragged red hand. Caution crocodiles. 

“Hay cocodrillos aqui?” I asked—are there crocodiles here? My voice originated from somewhere three inches higher than usual.

“Si!” the driver said, stretching a metal smile that made him look positively nuts. Here was a man who could tell you what a human being tasted like. “Hay muchos! Tener cuidado!”

He stuffed my red bill and my blue bill into his pocket and got back into his truck. It started with a wheeze. He leaned his head out the open window and flashed the Sing Sing smile again. “Pura Vida!” he called, as the truck began to roll. It quickly caught the tip of a brown tornado and dragged it bumping out of sight.

Translated literally, Pura Vida means pure life, but the Costa Ricans, or Ticos, as they call themselves, use it as the Swiss army knife of words. It can be hello, or don’t worry about it, or who cares, or sorry I’m late, or good times, or anything else, really. I understood that the driver was using it to say goodbye, forever.   

 We left our bags and walked to the water’s edge, forming a line just along the bank so our toes nearly touched the water. The river was rising quickly as the tide dumped in.  It was ridiculous that we had to wade across; I mean, technically, we were still in the Americas, which, as I always understood, meant that a body of water should be an obstacle to nobody, the handicapped included. As for the crocs, they should have been driven to the inexorable brink of extinction decades ago. By now, they should be singing Que Sera Sera, resorting to vegetarianism and growing three eyes and sterile in the warm discharge lakes surrounding nuclear plants, which should represent their last strongholds. I assayed the placid vista. Here was nature run wild, raping the land and intent on murder, humanity’s just dessert for turning a blind eye. And we had foolishly signed up for this. 

“Just to make sure I understood correctly…” Ivy said, watching the water seep between her toes, now over her nails.

I clarified. “He said ‘Many crocodiles. Be careful.’” I angrily tried to impersonate the driver’s smile.

Ivy nodded vigorously and turned green: Mrs. Yuck with early-onset dementia. 

Wade started walking stiffly down the shore. He was born with his feet facing one another like praying hands.  Doctors broke them straight. There was no limp to his gait, just a stiffness that started at the back of his head and trickled down to his ankles, perhaps having nothing to do with his childhood operation. Wade walked like a dinosaur. I saw him gear down, lurch to a stop, and peer into the sand just in front of his obsessively clean feet. I had known him for seven years. He was tremendously quiet and inward, and only used his voice as an eleventh finger, to point.

“Guys,” he called.

Ivy and I ran over to see. It was a big swoosh of compacted sand where something had bellied down and slid in the water. Wade squatted and picked up a handful of the pebbly sand and let it fall through his fingers like in the movies. “Saltwater comes in this river,” he said, contemplating the watery no-man’s-land with narrow, steely eyes, “which means these are Salties. The big ones.”  A minute later we noticed their tracks were everywhere. We had been walking on them. Big bird feet, and the claws cut deeply into the sand.

We had to cross by carrying our bags over our heads, but Ivy could not carry hers, so Wade and I made two trips. It was the middle of the dry season. The river was only thirty yards wide and hip deep at low tide. Still, in the past decade, at least one eight-year-old boy and one adult man had been yanked under, drowned, torn into manageable chunks and eaten there. Small dogs frequently met that end. I did not know any of this then, as I dipped my toes in. The water was chilly and flat, and, as I waded in, I got the feeling that I was waking someone up. We made the second pass single file; Wade in the front, Ivy in the middle, and me in the back, doing what I always do in situations that offer quiet and danger, which is narrate my own hypothetical death notice to see if it sounds plausible.

“Three young Americans went missing in Costa Rica on Monday. Ivy Tronne and Lance Pototschnik of Maryland, and Wade Dignon of Pennsylvania are believed to have been killed by crocodiles while crossing a river to a secluded sea turtle refuge beach called Buena Vista, which lies on a peninsula that pokes down like a fang from the Guanacaste province into the Pacific Ocean. All three victims were twenty-five or nearly so. Wade was a part-time personal trainer at a small health club; Ivy was a waitress, and Lance, a man susceptible to improvement in almost every aspect of his character, was a substitute teacher and a promotional mascot. They went to Costa Rica because a google search turned up a one-month stay at the turtle rescue, bed and board included, for $109. It turned out to be a deal only for the crocodiles, which were unavailable for comment.”

The author of that undeniably witty piece would attribute our demises to cheapness, an inability to afford a regular vacation, and he would be barely more than half right. The rest of our intentions would be lost, which is always the saddest thing about death. We had come to Costa Rica to take account of our lives. We felt out of control. We were restless and dissatisfied, dying from those things like Washington’s men camped at Valley Forge. Life strayed harshly from old visions. I had lived long enough to see twenty-five annual runs of Shark Week on the Discovery channel, and aging myself in those terms had started to feel more comfortable. My life was just long enough to have a longview: sick child, naïve student, uninspired employee, wandering adult. 

We were all exactly half wet when we climbed out on the opposite side, and I had broken both of my sandals from catching them on rocks at the bottom of the river. I kicked them off. We scrambled up the bank for a view. There was a mile and a half of ocean that arced between headland cliffs like a giant bite. A brown beach fit the arc like dentures. Curling waves in the water made tunnels and turned into milk. Palm trees lined the rim of beach, and behind them, forever, was deep, exiled green.

“Where is it?” Ivy asked, in reference to the turtle rescue. She chewed the inside of her cheek when she was nervous.

I said, “I thought it was right on the water.” The dark sand was scalding hot, so I ran over to stand on tippy toes in the dinky shadow of a piece of driftwood.

“Maybe it sits back in the forest a little,” Wade said, lifting his foot to flick a grain of sand from a cuticle. “It has to be down there somewhere.”

Wade and I had duffle bags. Ivy brought two of those upright suitcases that glide like hockey pucks through airports but grab like anchors in sand. Each was filled to capacity and marked with a little red, silver and blue insignia that read American Tourister, which glinted very pertinently as she schlepped them along.

We stuck to the water’s edge, where the sand was cooler and packed hard so that the suitcases could roll more easily. Wade took one of Ivy’s bags, but she still struggled with the remaining one. Now she turned around and started dragging it backward.

“Let me know if I’m going to run into anything,” she said, eyes dimming like someone turned a dial.

I said, “Sure thing.” It was not the time to point fingers, but against my better advice, she had packed eight hooded sweatshirts for this tropical getaway, citing that it gets “chilly” at night and that she likes to be “cozy.”  She was going to die of heat exhaustion dragging a sack full of winter wear.

Wade plodded on like a camel. Sweat dripped off of my nose and earlobes. Sometimes a wave would lap up higher than all of the others and the three of us would wattle up the beach in retreat like hamstrung shorebirds and get splashed.

“Next time…if there is a next time,” Ivy said, “we’re spending at least two hundred dollars on a vacation.” She had been apprehensive about this trip. We knew very little about the place we were going. We knew it was a primitive camp built by a local man about ten years ago. We knew he had been living there ever since, “rescuing” sea turtles.

“He’s been living alone with turtles for a decade?” Ivy had said, incredulous. “C’mon, at this point, it’s safe to say he’s put it in a turtle at least once.” We figured this guy was living alone. Maybe a few PETA nuts stopped by every now and again, but there would be nobody like us. No way. 

Ivy faced front, took a one-hand grip on the handle of her bag, like you drag a wagon, and started sprinting down the beach, the wheels cutting deep tracks in the sand. Thirty yards later, she doubled over and grabbed her sides. She waited like that, the statue Agony, until Wade and I caught up. Then she took off again, made twenty yards progress, and doubled over once more.

“Can I help?” I asked when Wade and I caught up again. Pride stood by her like a bodyguard intent on catching bullets, and she answered by sprinting off, ten yards this time, and nearly fell over.  When we reached her again, I grabbed the handle of her bag, and she let her hand slip away like a defeated rival. Now Wade and I had three bags each, almost two hundred pounds between us. Ivy walked dizzily behind, unencumbered, stupefied, ashamed.  Frazzled wisps of hair made Medusa’s halo around her numb face.

“I can’t believe we brought so much stuff,” she said. I wondered what any of us had ever done to give her trouble believing our capacity for poor judgment. Maybe it was just an expression. I never underestimate myself that way. I used to eat ants off the floor. I have done things that make me tremble at night. I had no trouble believing I had packed too much. I had received a brand new duffle bag just before the trip, for Christmas. I’d packed seven million tee shirts, my fifteen-piece electric grooming kit, a full bottle of Barbasol Beard Buster, my exercise resistance bands, a football, religious tokens for the plane rides, a gigantic bottle of three-in-one body wash, shampoo and conditioner, stomach antibiotics, three pairs of shoes, Water Babies sunscreen, a mosquito net, a book I expected to read, ten books I knew I would not read, and a darning kit, just in case my socks became unpresentable around the secluded wilderness camp. I had weighed myself holding the bag on my bathroom scale, then put the bag down and did some simple subtraction to determine that it was just half a pound under the threshold at which the airport would charge me a fee to check it. I had seen this as a job well done: just half a pound from perfect! You really are too damn good!  I remember being so proud of myself that I had eaten a bowl of ice cream and gone outside to smoke a cigar and look up at the stars.

It was eleven-thirty and the russet sand was getting even hotter, somehow. I was already hydroplaning on a slippery layer of blister jelly forming under the skin of my supple foot-bottoms. As proof of angels, I found an old pair of crew socks poking out of the sand. They were dirty and maintained rigid horizontal when I picked them up and held them out for appraisal. Well aware of the leprous feet that may have shucked them off, I happily put them on. It was heaven inside.

Waves of heat made slick mirages in front of us. I thought I was hallucinating when the form of a person stood up from a big imaginary puddle.

“Human person!” I shouted. I threw out my arm to point and hurled sweat droplets toward the target.

“Where?”

“Where?”

We were seeing it from the side. It was halfway down the slope of beach, looking out into the ocean. We plodded on, watched the form grow and grow, turn into a woman, then a blonde woman, then a young blonde woman with a green bikini. And now she faced us and yelled.

“Stop!”

I stopped so suddenly that Ivy ran into me and bounced off.

“Are you here for the turtle rescue?” she called.

“Yes!”

“Yes!”

“Yes!”

Joy blew the roofs off our houses, sucked us into a funnel cloud of relief. 

“You look terrible,” our savior said. It was lost on us that she did not seem happy to see us. “Wait there. I will help you with your bags.” 

THIS IS YOUR SHOWER, THIS IS YOUR GUN

“No drugs, no alcohol,” the girl said, leading us under a hanging sign that read Pura Vida and motioning for us to sit down at a stretch picnic table, fit for twenty, in the heart of camp. She was called Bertel: just twenty years old, blonde, German, and pretty like a rifle can be pretty. “No sex.” She cracked a smile and slammed it shut. “No fun.” Her English was perfect, but she built her sentences from bricks, and you got the feeling that nothing could thaw her frozen heart except maybe to watch you march with your knees locked.

She was a camp assistant, but I already wanted to call her an officer. She was the right-hand-man of the camp owner, Felix, who had lived there for ten years, had built this primitive place with his bare hands, and, based on first impressions, may have killed a person, but had probably never sodomized a turtle. He had a crew cut and gold hoops in each ear. A raised scar crossed his lips diagonally. He was grinding a machete on a wet stone on a palm stump when Bertel introduced us. He spoke at least enough English to say hello, but it was already clear that this German girl was his mouthpiece. We were lowly volunteers, and here, Pura Vida meant Work Makes Free.

“And the number one rule of the camp,” Bertel said, narrowing her eyes, locking us inside of them for a moment, “if you find a raccoon in the kitchen or the hatchery, you must fight it…And beat it.”

Pura vida.

“Have all of you had your vaccinations? Taken medicine to prevent disease?”

We had not, and she got the idea when we locked eyes with one another, frowned, and by imperceptible nods of the head, made a tacit pact: If I get malaria, smother me with a pillow.

“If you are bitten by an animal, you must go to San Jose immediately for rabies medicine.”  Ivy chewed the inside of her cheek till the skin turned white and scraped off like wet paper.

The camp was built on stilts over a gravel pit. A giant whiteboard with rules written in Spanish and English cut the pit in half. On one side there was a sink, a full bookshelf and the long picnic table, and on the other was a small table, another sink, a counter with dishes and sauce bottles and packets of Tang, and two orange barrel coolers with their spouts pointing over the edge, beckoning empty cups.

“This is where you can drink,” Bertel said.

“It’s also where the ants drink,” said a seventy-some-year-old woman who had just walked out of a weathered plank door that I had assumed was a cupboard. She was soft-eyed and breezy. I was sure she had been a keen herbalist at one point in her life, but clearly, she had not yet lost her sense of sense. She put down a mug on the long picnic table and dropped a packet of Tang beside it. Lithely, she swept her knee up and over the bench. Horizontal wrinkles stretched over her thighs, but the motion was easy, like she kept young muscles inside an old bag.

“It is true you find many ants,” Bertel admitted, eyeing the old woman as if to determine whether or not to hang her for defamation. “But the water is clean. We pay for it.”

“It’s really not bad if you use the Tang,” the old woman said, ripping open her packet and pouring the contents in her cup.

“This is your toilet,” Bertel said, as she pulled a free-swinging door along shot hinges. It was in a closet of corrugated metal with screws poking out all over, like one of those shrinking death rooms. The porcelain was tiger-striped with oxidation, posing a real risk of Tetanass, and there was no top on the tank. Bertel was telling us how to use it—to open a valve to let the tank fill up before flushing, and never ever ever ever put paper in the toilet, the septic can’t handle it, put it in the adjacent bucket instead—when a bug the size of a grape climbed out of the bowl and scuttled around the seat. My brain coughed and a random memory fell out: a Stephen King story called “All That You Love Will Be Carried Away.”

“This is your shower.” It was in a closet connected to the shrinking-toilet-death-room. One inch PVC poked through the metal and hooked downward. “Wet your body, turn off the water, put on your soap, turn on the water, wash your body, turn off the water.” Water had to be pumped from a natural spring a couple of hundred yards outside of camp, usually every day, but since there were not many volunteers at the moment, we should try to conserve so that it could be done every second day.

 Toothbrushes could go in a cup outside of the shower—“Be careful, somebody always knocks the cup over and never tells you. There will be rocks and dirt in your brush half of the time.” There was a six-inch mirror hung there—“It’s the only mirror here. I hope you don’t need to look at yourselves much.” Wet clothes could go on the rope lines, or on the barbed-wire fence to dry—“The barbed wire leaves brown rust lines on clothes.” Food scraps could go in a hole in the pasture beside camp. “Big bulls come in at night to eat from the hole. Make sure they only get your rinds. You will need all of the nourishment you get.” There was no electricity here, but there was one tiny solar panel that could charge something small like an iPod. Since there was no artificial light, we would go to bed and get up with the sun—“The first night will be hard. The second you will fall asleep immediately.” 

The tour continued. “This is the kitchen, where your food is cooked.” It was dark, with a couple of burners fed by a pitted propane tank. A tub of rice was soaking beside a greasy tub of beans congealing. “If you are a vegetarian, or if you are allergic to fish, or wheat, or dairy, write that on the whiteboard so the cook knows what to make in addition to rice and beans.”

“What if you’re allergic to rice and beans?” I asked.

“You die,” Bertel said. She had forgotten that one is supposed to laugh or smile after such a joke. There is a softness of hands required to toss comedy back and forth. Bertel was steel, and humor smashed against her like eggs. She had been working as a camp assistant for a whole year, and if she had been anything but metal when she arrived, it had smelted away.

“Now,” she said, covered with runny egg goo, “go upstairs and choose a bed and put up your mosquito nets before lunch. I am taking the kayak to the river to pick up the cook.” Apparently, the cook was a local woman who knew better than to wade the river. Bertel turned to go, but the gravity of a missed point brought her head and shoulders back around. “Be careful about leaving your bags open on the floor. Scorpions move in.” Then she went to the river to get the cook.

We were amazed to find seven stacks of bunk beds crammed into the upstairs barracks. We were more amazed to see that most of the beds showed signs of occupation. Who and where, and mostly, why, were all of these people? Someone was even napping in one bed. Under his mosquito net, he looked like something a spider was saving for snack.

The whole floor shook when you walked on it like it could all go crashing down any second. It might not have surprised Wade, Ivy and me if it had. The floors we had built our lives upon had been feeling precarious for a while. We each had a shit architect and maintenance man to blame.

Through half-inch gaps in the floorboards, you could look down to the picnic table and gravel pit. As you walked on the floor, dust puffed out between cracks in the ceiling below. Ivy and I chose an empty stack nearest to the open side of the building. I would sleep on the bottom. You could see the beds from outside. Ivy climbed up and began tying strings on her mosquito net to wires that hung from the rafters. I tucked the corners of my net under slats in Ivy’s bed, to ruinous result.

“Mine looks like a shitty cobweb,” I said, frustrated. “I bet we don’t even need these things.” The inept frequently deny the necessity of skills they do not possess. The inept frequently die of malaria or dengue fever.

Ivy said, “I’ll come down and help you in a minute.” In college, she had helped by saving my life, at least bi-weekly. She would find the place the alcohol had brought me down, often under a tree or in a bush, grab me by an ankle, drag me leaking to the futon in her living room, take off my shoes, cover me with a blanket, and wake me the next morning when I was late for class or work. “Your face looks green,” she would say. “And you’re late.” But that was Shark Weeks and Shark Weeks ago.

I knew Wade’s would be immaculate. He could play the Tin Man without makeup or airs and had the steady, bare work ethic of a molar tooth. People like Wade built the pyramids. His net was a box now, a perfect gossamer box with square corners and sides that hung parallel to the horizontal bunk supports. It was disgusting how good it looked.

“I think it’s time we had a heart to heart, Wade,” I whispered across the room—I had to whisper because of the person napping—“I hate you. You and your friggin’ lacy box.” I almost had him smiling, which would have been monumental. Wade’s heart could not beat more than twice daily. I have sat on petrified logs with more vim and vigor.

The room shook violently when Ivy landed on her feet beside me. 

“Wade, that is beautiful!” she beamed. Then she turned to my handiwork and put one hand on her chin like a schmaltzy art critic. “I see toilet paper in a tree. But I see shitty cobweb, too.”

“It symbolizes hopelessness,” I said. “Will you please help me now?”

Two water tanks sat on the bunkhouse balcony so that gravity could deliver water to the fixtures downstairs. They were four steps away from the stack where Ivy and I would sleep. They were huge things, five feet high and four feet wide, and now Ivy and I had to come and see something about them because Wade was pointing with his voice again. “Guys,” he said.

 We put our hands on the rim of one and peeked over.

“That’s not our shower water,” Ivy said. Stage one is denial. 

“No,” Wade appended, “it’s our shower water, dishwater, toothbrush water, and toilet water.”

It was a rich amber color, and thick, eddying with lighter and darker golden clouds. I dunked in my hand, and it disappeared completely six inches down. I yanked it out with a shriek, momentarily forgetting object permanence.

“Well,” Wade said, perkily by his standards, as I furiously dried my hand, “if you told me this was beer, I would believe you, and I would jump right in here with one of those big wooden bath brushes.”

“No alcohol,” I scolded, in my best German accent. 

Ivy said, woodenly, with finality, “I am going to die here.” Acceptance is stage five.

To summon everyone for lunch, Bertel took a big white conch shell off of the bookshelf, raised it to her lips and blasted away, blue-eyed and red-faced, into a hole drilled at the spire. The low drone vibrated the air and conjured Lord of the Flies and savages. This really was too much.

“You’ll get used to it.” The old woman with the Tang said that. She was at the table too. “In a couple days, you’ll be so hungry you’ll start to salivate like Pavlov’s dogs when you hear that.”

 The rest of the volunteers came from all over at the sound of the horn. I was dumbstruck to see that they hailed from a multitude of first-world countries. How had they all heard about this tiny, godforsaken place? Britain was represented by a mid-twenties fat girl, who, from her first word to her last, would remind me of Veruca Salt, the indulged, spoiled, petulant girl who is attacked by a swarm nut-sorting squirrels in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. She was the assistant manager of a bed and breakfast and four cats. She seemed as miserable with herself as us three incomers, and her smushed face was slightly reminiscent of Eduardo, the fetal pig I dissected in college lab. Spain’s ambassador swung his hairy legs over the bench and under the table now. The camp girls, especially Britain, would stick to him like slugs. He had bright blue eyes and the incredible self-assurance of a nudist.

Denmark brought a small, unrefrigerated box of milk, a Canon camera and a gigantic smile to the table. He was the only one who did not look wistful at all. He sat down across from me, reached over the table and shook my hand. “Hello friend,” he said. His English was at that halting yet decipherable stage that would have been tremendously sexy if breathed into your ear by a red-lipped Latina but only sounded goofy booming from the curly-haired chest of an oddly-forward Danish man. Straight away, he explained that he was an ambulance driver back home, that he had been a police officer, but that job turned out to be “too much typing,” and that it did not bother him one bit if his milk was warmer than his own blood. 

Australia sent their official meter stick from the vault: a girl with sandy red hair and a compulsion to cuss. There were two Swiss boys, university age, and two more Germans as well, rounding out the dirtiest international gathering this side of germ theory. Everyone had sandy clothes, bleaching hair, and tawny skin with a clear coat of wax, from constant sweating. Obligatory hellos flew around like bumble bees, highlighting the fact that everyone spoke English, and therefore, we had no excuse for awkward silence, and if not for Denmark, I am sure it would have come to crickets.

“My friends,” he addressed us three new campers with the banal iamb, “do you enjoy photos?”

We shrugged. Sure. We guessed so.

“That is good news, friends, because this day I have taken a photo of a new animal to show to you!” He fumbled with the bulky Canon around his neck and flipped through some digital photos. “Yes! Here it is!” He turned the camera around so we could see the viewing window. “See! Look at the new beast!”

He had captured an image of a possum’s butt just as it was retreating into some underbrush. Ivy covered her nose and mouth and snotted a laugh into her hand. Wade almost smiled.

“Oh, that’s a possum,” I said.

He looked confused and started inquiring about the word’s pronunciation. I suddenly held little hope for enjoying myself here.  More than anything, I wanted Denmark to stop narrating his search for the word “possum” in his bullet-stopper of a pocket dictionary so that the rest of us could delve into a more relevant topic, such as sub-human camp conditions. Australia would speak first: “The shitter is disgusting,” she would say. “A tiger beetle lives in there. I move we replace it.”

“The United States seconds that motion.”

Or we could talk about why everyone had come here. That’s the question I was most interested in. These were no animal activists, no scientists. These were people like me, all relatively young—except the one old lady—single, unmarried, no children, and wrestling with something.

The old lady, Flannery was her name, mercifully cut off Ivy as she was spelling possum for a fourth time, and asked us where we were from. We told her about an hour outside of the capital in D.C. She was from Frisco and asked if we had met Donkey because he was from Maryland too, Silver Spring, she thought. And where was he anyway? It was lunchtime.

“He’s sleeping,” said Britain, annoyed, as if this Donkey guy was a zoo tiger hiding in its den. “He’s always sleeping. I think he’s depressed or something.”

“I imagine things will be a little different around here when he takes over for Bertel,” Flannery said, acceding in her tone that Britain might be on to something.

“Is Donkey his real name?” I asked.

“No,” said Britain. “Felix started calling him that. It’s because he’s always moaning about something. Moaning like a donkey.”

Creaks on the stairs and, speak of the devil, here he was: dirtier than everybody else and starving, built like an elongated seven-year-old between a big towhead and giant feet. This was the sleeper the spider had been saving. And Britain was right, something was definitely eating him.

“Donkey, these guys are from Maryland, too,” Flannery told him as he sat down at the end.  “How crazy is that?”

“Small world,” he said, and then his blue eyes glazed filmily-over like a dead fish’s, and we all knew not to speak to him anymore.

 Lunch was served in two metal bowls as wide as basketball hoops. One was full of rice, the other with vegetables afloat in yellow broth. I had armed myself with a fork, knife, and spoon, but now I saw that the first two were unnecessary. Nobody else had even picked them up.

“You can get it down faster with a spoon,” Britain explained, as if this was one of our goals too.

I spooned some rice into my dish and then grabbed the soup ladle and scooped out a balled hunk of ham the size of a fist.

“Jackpot!” I said, plopping it onto the rice. “This is the thickest piece of ham I’ve ever seen! I didn’t expect to eat so well here!”

Across from me, Denmark was slurping the unrefrigerated milk through a straw, smiling. “Friend,” he said, with mechanical alacrity, “I do not believe that is ham.”  

I was stunned. I knew ham when I saw it. “What type of meat is it?”

“I do not believe it is meat, my friend.”

“It’s disgusting,” Britain butted in. “I hate it. I would kill for meat and potatoes.” Except she said potatoes without the second T: potA-oes.

I sliced the side of my fork through it, stabbed the excised hunk and tilted it before my eyes, like a doctor who has identified cause-of-death during an autopsy. I put it in my mouth, which caused Australia to wince and cuss. Squishy ham, or the love child of ham and an over-boiled potato—a hamshtable—is what it tasted like. Ivy was chewing up a bit beside me, or maybe she was chewing on her cheek. She talked to the reflection in her soup bowl. “I am going to die here.”

Since it was our first meal, we would not have known that what came next was a treat—a plate of deep-fried yucca cakes—but for the fact that Britain went nuts. “It really is the best thing you get here,” she raved, with bits flying out of her mouth like popcorn. “Not exactly meat and potA-oes, but it’s bearable.” And she moaned.  

“It is quite good,” Denmark said, “but,” he knit his brow now, “in English, doesn’t yucca mean the opposite of good?” He smiled hugely so we understood that this was a joke. “…Yucca is very similar to your word ‘yuck’, you see?…hehe…my friends?” There was silence and the gritting of teeth. 

We were relieved when Bertel appeared at the head of the table. “Eat quickly,” she ordered. “Our fruit for the week has arrived at the river. We must go pick it up. Finish your food.”

The tide had just gone out; the beach was wide as a football field, flat and shimmering, and we volunteers were scattered across it like shells, black silhouettes pushing through a headwind of light. Way in the lead, Bertel’s silhouette had a ponytail that swung to the sides like a cat o’ nine tails. We had a long way to go, clear to end where the headland cliff extended into the sea, and I hated that I was thinking about work. It was my own fault, of course, for looking out into the ocean, wishing I never had to see the inside of a public school again. I was a substitute teacher part-time, among a few other things, these days.

I was walking down the aisles of a classroom a few weeks ago. It was eleventh-grade history and kids were supposed to be completing a worksheet about the New Deal, but one student had a calculus book open instead.

“That’s not history,” I told him—really, I didn’t care.

“I know,” he said, “but this is more important to me. It’s due next period and I have no idea how to do this stuff.” He had to find the area under a parabolic curve, and I explained that this meant he had to set up an integral, solve it, substitute his upper and lower limits, so on and so on.

By the time I was finished, his face was deformed, frozen in a grotesque rictus of disbelief.

“You know calculus?” he said, gasping. “Why are you a substitute teacher?”

It worked both ways, as a back-handed insult and a back-handed compliment. I frowned, smiled, and then leaned into his ear. “The night of your graduation, your very last graduation, Life, with big furry arms and a solid, prison-hardened body, is gonna climb into bed with you, put a razor blade to your throat, smile a brown rotten smile, and whisper, ‘Boy, you can forget about your dreams, cuz you’re gonna be my wife for the next few years.’ And there won’t be a damn thing you can do about it.” I wish I had said that, but all that came out was, “Just wait. You just wait.” 

The same day I made a comment about another student’s pathetic grammar (I had wanted to wound him, somehow, ever since having him in that history class, in which he had laughed all the way through the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire documentary, rife with images of real charred bodies.) I think I asked him if his mother had insisted that he be put in this honors class, and he told me flatly that he would never need to write when he got out of school, so he could not care less.

“What about a job application?” I pursued, feeling I had nailed him to the wall.

“Nope. I’m in the family towing business. I’ll never need to do one of those.” I noticed he was wearing the company hoodie, IL and Iterate Family Towing, or something like that, emblazoned across the chest.

“Well,” I said, “what if you decide you don’t want to be in the family towing business?”

This killed him. He could not even answer, he was laughing so hard. One of those silent asphyxiating laughs. He had both hands on his stomach and his head leaned back so far that it rested on the desk of the student behind him. “Why,” he said, a full minute later, gathering himself, wiping away a tear, “why would I ever not want to be in the family towing business?”

He was making a conscious decision to accept nothing from his education but a few stunted facts—Hitler bad, slavery bad, Lincoln dead, Einstein smart—and he would definitely turn into one of those benighted Americans I had seen while visiting the Dachau concentration camp, who posed for pictures in the gas chamber, giving big dumb thumbs-downs while barely containing grins. We stared at one another. He was smiling, I was snipping his parachute lines, fastening him to railroad tracks, feeding him grenades.  This waste-of-good-stem-cells was going to spend the rest of his time in school screwing off and annoying teachers, and then he would graduate and slip seamlessly into the career of his dreams, and life would be exactly what he expected, and worst of all, very very worst of all, worse than anything, he would be happy.

We were all the same at the turtle rescue. We had all come here because we felt like we were on the brink of answering an important question about ourselves, and also on the brink of answering it too late. I think we were hung up on the idea of purpose.  Most of the people here had taken huge leaves-of-absence, five and six months—Bertel had been here a whole year—to allow ample time to figure things out. I could not tell if it was working. Donkey there, the devitalized silhouette that looked headless from my perspective behind him, obviously did not even want to live on this planet anymore.

There was a river at this end of the beach as well, but we crossed at the mouth where it was only five steps wide. A rusty truck was backed-up on the rocks on the other side, the bed full of fruit and vegetables in green plastic bags. We all took two bags, someone grabbed a huge rack of eggs, and we turned around and walked back with the current of light.