Take Vehicular Advantage

Up before three in the morning and off to the airport.  We’d been sleeping irregularly, up at odd hours, this whole trip long so we knew we’d be “up.”  We’d gone to bed early in anticipation the night before.  We were all packed.  We were ready.  But still, no one wants to get up at three in the morning.  The guard dutifully knocked on our door at three fifteen. He needn’t have bothered.  We were already puttering about.  Down below our car was ready.  I went out to the porch and took one last look at the stars that I won’t see again, at least not like this, for some time and closed the door on our vacation.

It struck me that I should meditate during this early morning drive.  I wouldn’t be able to fall back to sleep like the kids.  I asked the driver to turn down the benign Latin pop he had on and waited a few minutes till we were down from the winding mountain road and through the town Quepos before setting the timer.  I noticed restaurant that still had a dozen people chatting and a smattering of young people ending their evening, on the steps of the town’s main square.  And then quietly I tried to slow my heart down and release whatever thoughts I had.

But when the car stops, you can’t help but open your eyes.  Fifty yards before us is a large, red tractor-trailer backing impossibly into a space that seems far too tight.  He barely clears the roof but he cannot get the cab to clear the trees on this side of the road.  He pauses, and the truck itself seems exasperated as it lurches forward and tries the turn once again.  And then again. 

For the first time since I have been in Central America my China traffic sense kicks in.  Someone is going to cut in front of us.  It’s a pointless, calloused instinct that has been piqued by this delay.  It is four in the morning on a country road.  There is no one behind us.  I look and confirm.  The truck tries again.  We are delayed but it isn’t the delay that bothers me.  It’s the sense that someone is going to take vehicular advantage of us.  In China, we would necessarily press closer to the truck so that he felt our urgency and no one else would consider cutting through.  This time the truck rumbles all the way forward, crestfallen, giving up on the turn and allows us to pass. 

Hours later we have flown up and over the mountains surrounding San Jose leaving this all behind.  I took out my book, the remarkable and boilent, intensely boilent novel, “A Brief History of Seven Killings” by Marlon James, who is now the first Jamaican author to have won the Booker Prize.  As suspected it well complimented a trip to Central America where the Caribbean is never far away, where the complicated history with the United States is only ever so dissimilar. 

And now we’re killing time in the lobby of the Houston Airport, Marriot Hotel.  We got in with twelve, yes twelve, hours to kill here.  I suggested we rent a car and go have a look at country’s fourth most populous city.  But this was voted down, decisively.  Nothing much going on to suggest this is Texas, and not just anywhere America, other than the occasional twang in the diction.  I took a walk outside to see what I could see.  But it was just airport landscaping.  Snapped a picture of manhole cover to prove it wasn’t New Jersey.   

And soon, sooner now, the return to the place where traffic ethics are precisely as my instincts know they should be.