Missing Pictures

April 21, 2010

The howler monkeys are back and I could not be more delighted. I’m not sure why I’m so thrilled by the sounds of rumbling indigestion outside my window, but I am.

Mini-Course update: Last Thursday was maybe the most fun I’ve had since I’ve been here in Costa Rica, visits from loved ones aside. I remembered my running clothes and ran up to the farm with a handful of kids. They had all decided they were going to run but only about five or six actually ran the whole way. It is wonderful to be with a group of fun, dynamic kids who beg you to do something with them that you love to do anyway. This is the first time in my teaching career that I share common interests with students, and it feels great. Outside of a few books, movies and the Mets back when I had TV access, I never really had many interests in common with my NYC kids.

Arriving at the farm sweaty and happy, we were pleased to learn that this was the long-awaited day: cow milking! And it doesn’t make much sense to milk your cows and not milk the goats at the same time, so we got to do that too. I had learned once how to milk a cow and a goat, probably about ten years ago. Needless to say I did not get the same strong, steady, frothy stream that some did, but I got milk from both cow and goat! The last activity was to wait out the downpour (the first real sign of the rainy season’s arrival – quick, fast, hard afternoon drenching) and feed the baby goats.

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Now I’d like to share a fun little story that I am choosing (with heroic effort) to put in the Exciting Life Adventures category, instead of the Reasons To Hate My Life in Monteverde category. Last Thursday night as I was sitting on the toilet I looked past the trashcan and saw on the door frame a tan and black splotch. I looked closer and concluded that it was a bundled mess of five or six multi-colored cockroaches, of the type I’d seen when we went to the butterfly garden.

(insert picture)

When I finished my business I moved closer to the mass of roaches and crouched down to get a closer look. Upon closer inspection I realized how far from the truth my initial observation was - I was actually looking at two male scorpions, snuggled together, head to head, I’m assuming for warmth. They may have been, in fact, plotting how to make my life miserable.

(insert picture)

Gross. Why are they so gross? I sighed. Up until that point, I had only seen one scorpion in my house since I arrived last August. Oh yes, plus the one outside on the porch on one of my first days, before I really even know that scorpions were a reality of Monteverde life. I chose the same plan of action last Thursday night as I had on my two previous scorpion-in-the-house encounters: I walked away and pretended to ignore them.

I say pretended to ignore because of course it was the first thing I told Ji that night when he called. Most appalling to him, it seemed, was not the fact that I had two scorpions cuddling in the bathroom, but that I had done nothing about it. I explained that with two of them being perched on the corner of the door frame, capture or extermination seemed uncertain and I didn’t want to piss them off and send them scurrying into another part of the house such as my bedroom, where I was about to snuggle in for the night.

“What’s keeping them from just going into your bedroom during the night anyway?” asked Ji with a laugh.

“Please,” I shot back, “that’s not gonna happen.”

And almost as if I had willed it into being….

I woke up at about 2 a.m. because I had to pee. I hate getting up in the middle of the night, even if it will alleviate the ache, and laid in bed trying to will myself back to sleep. And then I heard a noise. A faint little noise. A clickslap noise.
“Hmm,” I thought. “That sounds a lot like exoskeleton on tile.” Pause. “Nah.”

And then I heard a second noise. A distinct, loud noise. A rustling of the plastic bag in the trash can right next to my bed noise. I sat bolt upright, slammed on the light and there it was: a small, tan and black male scorpion walking around the top edge of my trash can, tail up and claws extended, open and reaching. Luckily, I have a large, heavy knife that I keep unsheathed on my bedside table (that’s another story). I grabbed it and flicked the scorpion into the trashcan.

After my heart stopped pounding I figured I might as well pee since I was now awake and alert. I crept slowly towards the bathroom, knife in hand. I stabbed at the wall a few times with the knife blade in an attempt to turn on the bathroom light. When I finally found success I glanced down, expecting to find only one scorpion, but there were still two in the same place, same tender embrace. After some rapid middle-of-the-night mathematics I came to the unsettling conclusion that there were now THREE LIVE SCORPIONS IN MY HOUSE. Holy. Crap. I didn’t know that they traveled in packs.

At this point in the story, even though I am the main character of this autobiographical tale, I get confused. I had three ugly and poisonous creatures in my house and had captured one. They had shown themselves very capable of coming into my room in the dark and performing acts of great balance and athleticism. I needed a plan of action, so I tied up the trash bag with the scorpion in it, put it in the dining room so I wouldn’t hear the rustling while I tried to sleep, and CRAWLED BACK INTO BED. That’s right, I once again turned my back on the lovebirds. I’m not sure why I thought this was a good idea, but I once again chose to pretend to ignore the situation. Pretend to ignore, because I didn’t try to sleep, but stayed up reading for a least an hour.

When I did finally sleep, it was not very restful. I spent a lot of time thinking about how to capture scorpions. In the morning I awoke to no scorpions in the bathroom and felt half relief (now I really can ignore them!) and half dread (where the hell are they now?). I looked for them with minimal enthusiasm and found them cuddled behind the bathroom door. Poor babies, they had gotten chilled in the night and curled up behind the door for warmth. I wish they had frozen to death. I finally mustered the courage to flick them into a plastic container with my big trusty knife.

(insert picture)

Here they chilled while I showered and got ready for the day. I flung them into the woods on the way to work and tossed their companion in the trash where it will slowly die of starvation and I won’t feel bad about it. Come on, you would have killed at least one also.

Update: This morning at work our Belgium volunteer showed up a few minutes late and looked haggard.

“I killed twenty-one scorpions last night,” she whispered to me during the lesson. “I didn’t sleep very well last night.” I thought I must have misheard.

“Twenty-one?”

She confirmed with a grimace and a nod. She found one in her closet and suspecting company, investigated. She found a mother with her seventeen babies (gag, vomit) and killed them all. She counted them up and added them to the three she had killed earlier that evening, giving her the staggering sum of twenty-one. Later in the day she showed me a picture of them all, laid out neatly on a white background. I almost threw up in my mouth. She wins. I’ll stop complaining.