Chapter 8
CHAPTER EIGHT
When the sun woke me at five in the morning, I knew I was in a completely new realm of existence.
In my old life, if I had been woken up at five, I would have thrown sharp objects at the rioting birds.
But now I rejoiced with them. This was a new land, and I was a new person, willing to forgive my winged friends for their noisy transgressions.
Minutes later, my phone buzzed. It was Adrián. “We have a meeting at Café Bavaria this morning,” he said. “Be ready in an hour.”
I was both excited and nervous. Excited, because I was going to document abuses in Corporate Hell, a.k.a.
Café Bavaria. Nervous, because I’d be spending the entire day with Sexy Junior Oligarch Adrián.
He was a whole lot of temptation wrapped up in a whole lot of potential aggravation.
We were obviously politically incompatible.
And there was that pesky “vow to focus on myself” thing.
So, despite his astounding hotness, I would resist a romantic entanglement.
We were going to be friends. Friends with incredible, yet resistible, chemistry.
But I still needed to know more about him. Just, you know, in case.
“How often do you work for your dad?” I pretended to occupy myself with Google Maps, but I was making a mental list. Did he smoke? Did he have a Madonna-whore complex? What were his thoughts on cobalt mining?
“Pretty close to full-time.”
“So why were you working at El Río Bungee?”
“It was my part-time job in college. I don’t do it very much anymore.
But a friend was sick and asked me to cover his shift.
” He turned off the road leading out of Carmen and into a roundabout.
“So I guess our meeting was fate.” He winked at me and then whipped out of the roundabout and onto a main artery.
Right on the side of the road was a twisted motorcycle, surrounded by police and an ambulance.
Jesus Christ, I couldn’t go more than ten kilometers without seeing a traffic accident.
Was I going to get used to this? I looked at Adrián, who was silently crossing himself.
“ Pobrecito ,” he said. Then he looked back over to me. “I had a motorcycle. But I totaled it.”
I wasn’t ready to speak again until we got to the Pan-American Highway. A tollbooth station was blocking the road. Adrián pulled coins out of the glove box and tossed them into a plastic bucket. They clinked loudly on their way down the pipe.
“So you’re all set to be a semi-reluctant hotel mogul, huh?” I asked.
“Pretty much.” He looked at me and smiled. “What do you want to do? Be a professional radical?”
“Is that an actual position? If so, yes.”
“But why on coffee farms?”
“Because I’m interested in economic justice and sustainable environmental practices.”
“Then why are you drinking out of a plastic bottle?” He gestured at my Alpina water bottle. “Is that sustainable?”
I gulped.
“I don’t understand why you Americans are so obsessed with the origin of your coffee. I don’t see you making sure your breakfast cereal is sustainably sourced. What is the terroir of your oat milk?”
“Fair point. Maybe we should be examining all of our products this way.”
“But you don’t. So your fascination with ‘ethically sourced’ coffee is virtue signaling.”
Damn. He was good at this. I decided to go back on the offensive.
“I don’t understand your problem with sustainable production and fair trade.
You say you’re concerned about the pickers at the conventional farms losing their jobs.
But if the market share shifts, they’ll go work at the ethical, sustainable farms. They’re migrant labor.
This way, they migrate to better working conditions. ”
“That’s a lot of assumptions. Most of the fair trade organizations create price floors, which artificially manipulate prices. How is that fair to the sellers who invested their money and deserve to make a profit?”
“But the commodity prices aren’t fair,” I said. “They don’t include social and environmental costs.”
“Sure they do. The market takes negative externalities into account through supply and demand.”
“That’s not true! Even the IMF admits all costs aren’t factored into pricing. Ignoring social costs causes social problems. And ignoring environmental issues causes the literal death of our planet .”
“Dee.” He casually passed another car on the right shoulder.
“Price floors have knock-on effects. They can create surpluses. Which means the farms are stuck with coffee they can’t sell.
Which means they hire less labor. Which means more hungry families.
” Ugh, I hated that this made sense. “Intervening with the market creates more problems than it solves.”
I turned toward the window, little sparks of anger flying off my fingers. The whole this-is-the-way-the-world-is-and-we-can’t-do-anything-about-it thinking really drove me up the wall. Because you hit a complicated situation, you’re just supposed to do nothing ?
“Hey,” he said, reaching out for my hand. “Let’s not talk about this. I hate politics.”
The softness of his voice took the edge off my anger. Besides, it was so freaking humid today, it was easy to get irritable. “What do you like, then?”
He paused to consider. We were now out of the city and into a more rural part of Costa Rica. Nothing but green lined the highway. “Smart women.” He stopped looking at the road and looked right at me. “Smart, passionate, naive, idealistic women.”
“I’m not naive.”
“I was talking about women in general.”
“Right.”
Adrián started slowing down the Jeep. “ Preciosa , I think Google Maps is trying to drive us straight into a waterfall. Can you check the directions?” Preciosa .
It was impossible to stay mad at this guy.
I looked at the map. I had never navigated anything well, even metaphorically, so how was I supposed to interpret directions in a country that didn’t use addresses or labeled street names?
Plus, I was completely overwhelmed by the scenery.
This was my first time out of San José and I couldn’t believe the roads.
They were barely wide enough for one car, twisting in and out of mountain passes, skirting streams, and bordering ravines.
I felt like I was on a green-and-blue rollercoaster that took dips through the hills and did loops through the clouds.
I was disoriented, dizzy, and awestruck. What did east or west mean to me now?
But Adrián didn’t say anything about my navigational incompetence.
He just squinted at his phone as he drove.
After a few wrong turns, we saw a small sign almost overtaken by the massive leaves of sombrillas de pobre —a plant aptly named poor man’s umbrellas.
Adrián turned right and we both caught our breath.
Calling the road a road was an act of charity.
It was a narrow swath of earth carved out of the mountain on the left and buffeted by tumbling hills on the right.
It was paved, in a sense. In the sense that someone thought it would be fun to fill it with different-sized rocks.
I swallowed hard, and Adrián pretended to look blasé.
It would take just one awkward roll over a large rock.
.. or a sharp stone puncturing a tire.
.. or a little bit of earth giving way.
.. and then we’d be over the side, rolling like children down a grassy knoll, except on fire and with glass shards in our eyes.
Adrián put the Jeep into four-wheel drive and we puttered on, getting out occasionally to remove sloth-sized rocks or push the Jeep out of a rut.
I relaxed a little when I realized that even if we did skid off the road, there were lots of cushy bushes to break the fall.
People survived stuff like that all the time.
.. probably. But then the road veered to the left, narrowed, and dropped precipitously.
That’s where I lost any pretense of being okay.
The road was now lined by a sheer rock wall stretching down into the abyss.
Adrián stopped the Jeep and we got out to assess our chances.
Where the road turned stood a lone tree trunk, stretching up to the sky in barren stillness.
Its singed branches were an ominous sign; beyond there was nothing solid, just fog rolling over the valley a thousand feet below.
I clung to the trunk and watched light rain fall in almost horizontal sheets.
Adrián turned to me. “What are you thinking?”
That we are going to die a painful and slow death, impaled on the gearshift, hanging upside down in the Jeep, flames just beginning to flicker at our feet.
“Mmmph,” I said.
Adrián kicked a little rock and watched it free-fall down the side. We couldn’t hear or see it touch the bottom. “You know, we don’t have to go,” he said.
“Are you scared?”
“No!” He laughed a hollow laugh. “Concerned, maybe.” Then I started shaking.
If Adrián was scared, and Adrián was the driver, and an extreme guide on top of it, there was no way I was going down that road.
Adrián walked away from the tree and puffed out his chest. “What the hell,” he said.
“We all have to die someday.” He took my hand and led me back to the Jeep.
“What are you talking about?” I stood in front of the door. “I’m not going if you think we’re going to die.”
“We’re not going to die.”
“But it’s a possibility.”