In the moment after I got bitten by the “animal marino desconocido” (translation: unknown marine animal), I knew that my life was going to change. I wasn’t sure how, but I knew that this wasn’t just some small scrape or cut, that it would require some time to heal, and in that time it would change me.
Three years later, I’m still figuring out what to make of the whole event. It strengthened my interest in alternative medicine (since ultimately that helped heal the infections/subsequent allergic reaction(s) after the initial doses of penicillin so large that they made me allergic to the drug). It also has renewed my trust in the universe: this could have been truly awful, deadly even, and instead it was simply annoying. I was there by myself, and not only did people all along the way help me, but they told me stories that I'll cherish (and creatively reshape and retell) forever…
The Danish couple from yesterday’s bicycle escapade down to the Panama border promised to meet me at the bus stop this morning which I though was fortuitous: I didn’t want to explore the national park by myself, but even more than not wanting to be alone, I didn’t want to miss seeing it. So, it all worked out, I thought and hoped last night. But they’re not here yet. And the bus is. And none of us have international cell phones, that doesn’t come for another year or two in my travels.
So the bus arrives and I get on it, without my friends. Perhaps it isn’t that bad after all. There are lots of tourists in
The park is shaped like a tiny peninsula, with a horse-shoe shaped trail that traces the outline of the rainforest along the beach. It seems simple enough to navigate: one trail, lots of foot traffic. I buy my ticket and start walking.
Along the way, groups of tourists drop off. By the time I cross a tiny stream about 1 km into the park, most of the people have planted themselves somewhere along the sand on a beach towel.
I cross the stream and keep going: I want to see what’s ahead.
A man in a well worn polo shirt and shorts comes up to me. He carries a weathered Barnes and Noble canvas bag over his shoulder and I notice he walks quickly down the path, assuredly, even though he’s barefoot. He seems to know exactly where he’s going.
He greets me as he passes. It turns out he’s American, from
We walk along together for a while and Jasper tells me that he’s spent quite a bit of time here in Cahuita. He loves
Jasper smiles. “Perezosos are extraterrestrials,” he says.
“Huh?”
He nods. “I saw one crawl out of that stream back there. It got onto the land, came up to me and shook my hand.”
I laugh.
“I swear it happened,” he said. “It was a real extraterrestrial experience.”
We walk along the path a little further and then the path turns inland and Jasper walks out onto a thin strip of sandy beach.
“This is my stop for the day,” he says as he jumps onto a tree branch dangling above the sand. “I like it here. Hardly anyone makes it this far, so it’s great. I’ve got my fruit, a book, a joint. I’m set for the day.”
Jasper pulls a banana and a paperback out of the bag and sets them on the tree branch next to him. “You know,” he turns back to me, “if you go up a bit further that way, you can see turtles.”
“Really?” Sea turtles area another of my favorite tropical creatures; so old (some species are direct descendents of dinosaurs) and gentle (seeming, at least) and graceful in the water. “Just up there at the point?”
Jasper nods. “You’re better off walking along the beach here, though. From here on, the path cuts inland and gets kind of muddy.”
I look down the beach: an extremely thin strip of sand with very low-hanging branches.
“Just walk through the water when you can’t follow the sand,” Jasper tells me. “That’s what I always do.”
“Great. Thanks,” I say. “Maybe I’ll see you on my way back.”
“Maybe,” he says. He lies back on the branch and starts peeling his banana.
I start wading through the water toward the turtles.
“Oh shit!” Jasper yells when I’m about 15 feet away.
I turn around “What happened?”
“That monkey stole my banana.” He points at another tree and I notice the branches rustling. “Nature,” he grunts as he settles back into his spot.
I strap my Teva sandals to my backpack and walk for a while: on the skinny strips of sand when the trees don’t overhang so low as to permit this, ankle-deep in the water the rest of the time. I notice a few small boats out beyond the reef, and I wonder whether perhaps one of those is the snorkel trip I opted not to take because the recent rains have made the water so cloudy. It’s murky even here, inside the reef. When I’m wading through the water, I can’t really see my feet between the storm’s detritus of broken branches and strayed leaves and the sand stirred up by the waves.
The sun is shining, the point where the sea turtles hang out grows bigger: it seems more and more attainable.
And then something grabs my ankle and clamps it, tight.
It’s a sharp, deep pain. It sends me flying into air.
“Ouch!” I yell. The pain burns as it shoots up my leg from my ankle. Something bit me. “Ouch!” I scream and jump onto a nearby tree stump to examine my foot. It’s a deep puncture wound, a half-crescent, shaped like a giant tooth. “Something bit me!” I yell.
No one answers. I look around: Jasper has blended into the trees of the rainforest and the snorkel boats are dots across the reef. “Help!” I wave my arms at the boat. “Ayudame!” I wave my arms toward Jasper, toward the thick rainforest canopy. I must be 2-3 kms inside the park by now.
No one answers.
My leg starts to throb; I can feel my pulse: a new shot of pain with each beat of my heart. Blood slowly seeps to the surface of my skin, then it starts pouring out.
Oh fuck. This is really bad.
In that moment, I am very clear and certain that I need medical attention. Somehow, I have to find a doctor to look at my leg. And no one is going to rescue me. I somehow will have to walk on that bad leg the 2-3 kms out of the park to get to a doctor.
I look down at my leg, now trailing blood. I take off my t-shirt and tie it around my ankle and hope it will stop the bleeding, or at least protect the wound from some of the muck in the water I have to wade through on my way back.
Things will never be the exactly the same after this.
When I get back to Jasper, I find him lying in his tree completely naked, smoking his joint.
He looks up at me. “Back so soon?”
“Something bit me.” I show him my leg.
He jumps out of his tree. “This is terrible.”
“It really hurts.”
“I wonder what could have bitten you.”: He stares at me. “I’ve never heard of anything like that happening out here.”
“It really really hurts.”
“Is there anything I can do to help?”
Put on some clothes, I think. “I need to get to a doctor,” I say.
“There’s a clinic in town,” he says.
“Okay. I have to get there, though. We're pretty far in.”
I start walking.
“Wait,” he says. I turn around. He’s still not wearing any clothes. “Let me come with you. Just in case anything happens along the way. I feel so bad. I told you to go out there and then this happened and…”
Jasper finally puts his pants on and grabs his book and canvas bag. We start walking. The trip seems much longer this direction, but that doesn’t surprise me, really.
On the way back, Jasper tells me bits of his life story, interspersed with his musings on philosophy, ecology and
Because of the increasing tourism and economic development (even in my injured and pained state, I gather this is the real reason for the prostitutes’ arrival, not the pizzas), Jasper is looking for another tropical undeveloped place to spend the half of the year that he’s not working in
“Hourly work,” he replies. His last job was packing boxes somewhere.
And where does he live?
“I usually don’t talk about it,” he says. “Most people don’t understand.”
But he tells me: in
“Last winter was really cold there, wasn’t it?” I ask.
“I have a military sleeping bag,” he says. “Sub-zero. And I belong to a health club. The sauna there saved me.” He has a P.O. box, a health club membership, eats only organic foods from the local health food store and he sleeps…in a military sleeping bag in the park. He hides under the bushes; if the cops catch him they’ll send him to a shelter. “Those people are sick in there. Really sick. And crazy, too.”
He’s careful not to let on that he’s homeless; the revelation got him fired from his last job. But that doesn’t deter him: it’s not about money, for Jasper it’s about leading a minimally consuming lifestyle.
He’s been homeless other places, too.
He has family, in
By the time I’ve found all of this out, we’re close to the front of the park.
“I’ll let you go the rest of the way yourself,” he says to me once we hit a particularly crowded section of trail near the entrance. “I don’t think you were bit by anything poisonous. You’d have collapsed by now if there were poison in your system.” I suppose that's a comforting thought, potentially at least.
At the entrance to the park the rangers are particularly unhelpful.
“Did you see the animal that bit you?”
“No. I jumped out of the water. It hurt.”
“We can’t give you an antidote if we don’t know what animal it was.”
“But it hurts!”
“We can’t give you the wrong antidote.”
“I need to see a doctor. Where’s a doctor?”
They shrug.
I walk out into the town and start asking for a doctor. At the general store, they point me down a few blocks. “There’s a clinic there.”
It’s noon now, and very hot. I hobble along the dusty shade-less road to the clinic. Twenty minutes later I find out it’s closed. In fact, it’s always closed on Saturdays. Just my luck…
I hobble back into town, back to the store again. There’s a taxi there and I ask the driver to take me to the nearest emergency clinic which is open.
“It’s in the next town,” he tells me.
“I don’t care,” I say. “I need to see a doctor today.”
It turns out that only the emergency room is open on Saturdays. A line of mothers and sniffly infants are waiting outside when I arrive in the taxi. A clinic official at the front looks at me – clearly out of place – and asks what happened.
“I got bitten by something,” I tell him. “In the national park.”
“Did you see it? The animal that bit you?”
“No.”
The official escorts me to the front of the line and then inside the building. There’s a sole plastic chair in an otherwise bare hallway.
“There’s a problem,” the clinic official says.
“What?”
“It’s Saturday.”
“But the clinic is open, right?”
He nods. “But you have to pay Monday. You have to promise to come back and pay us on Monday.”
I promise this man I’ll come back on Monday, if only someone will look at my leg today. He nods and tells me, “Wait here.”
A doctor steps out from a closed metal door across the hallway. He escorts me into his office and I explain, yet again, what happened, and that I didn’t see the animal. He examines my ankle, the deep puncture wound on one side and the scratches on the heel and the opposite side of the ankle bone. “It looks like a jaw grabbed you,” he says. “And this was the tooth.”
Nothing I hadn’t figured out for myself already.
“It’s probably a turtle,” he says, “based on the shape of the bite.”
“A turtle?” I’ve never heard of sea turtles biting anyone.
He shrugs. “Maybe you stepped on its head.”
He goes on to explain that the big issue with marine animal bites is to avoid infection. He’s going to prescribe some antibiotics for me and I must take them every 6 hours. “Every six hours,” he says pointing to his watch. “It’s very important. Even in the middle of the night.” Oh, and I need to take the antibiotics on an empty stomach each time. Okay, I tell him. But where do I get the prescription filled on a Saturday?
“No problem,” he says and hands me the piece of paper before leading me into an exam room. I get up on the table, figuring he’s going to clean and dress the wound. Wrong again.
“Drop your pants,” he tells me.
“Excuse me?”
“Drop your pants,” he repeats and points a big needle at me. I do as he says and he shoots me in the butt with something he claims will help the pain.
It does help. And quickly. My leg doesn’t throb anymore.
The clinic official comes into the room and puts a band aid on my ankle. “Follow me,” he says and leads me outside and into another building.
The lights are off in this building, everything is shut, closed. The clinic official points at a darkened window with a slot underneath. “Pharmacy,” he says. “Where’s your prescription?”
I give him the slip of paper from the doctor and he shoves it into the slot. “Now just wait here.” He points to some empty wooden benches in the middle of the unlit room. I go and sit on the bench.
A door pops open.
“Excuse me,” a little man appears from behind the darkened pharmacy window. “Excuse me,” he repeats. “Can you please spell your name.”
I give him the spelling then go back to the bench. A few minutes later, he walks out and hands me a bottle of pills which I need to take, “Every six hours.” He points emphatically to his watch. “Every six hours,” he repeats.
Okay, I’ve got it. Every six hours on the antibiotic for the mysterious turtle bite.
I ask the man from the pharmacy where I pay for the prescription and he shrugs. “It’s closed,” he says.
“So Monday?”
He nods and smiles. “Yes, Monday.”
The nearest bus stop is at the bottom of a hill. I walk down, my antibiotics in hand, half an hour after the taxi dropped me off at the clinic. Amazing. I’d never have gotten medical attention this quickly back at home…
I just missed the bus, the stressed out young guy sitting on the bench informs me. He’s late for work, and the phone lines are down in this little town so he can’t even call to warn them.
His girlfriend flags down a car passing by and gets in. The young guy tries the same thing, but no one stops for him. He jokes with me a bit as he waits for another car to drive by. He asks how I ended up there, and I tell him I was bitten by a turtle in the national park.
“I’ve lived here all my life, and I’ve never heard of a turtle biting anyone,” he says. “Wow. You’re really having a bad day. Worse than mine.”
A driver stops and picks us both up. He doesn’t even want taxi fare for the ride .
Bad days are in eyes of the beholder. Personally, I think I’m pretty lucky: I wasn’t bitten by anything poisonous, I found help (Jasper) when I really did need it, I ultimately got myself to the clinic, they took me quickly, gave me a painkiller and some antibiotics and a final diagnosis: “mordura de un animal marino desconocido” (bite of an unknown marine animal), all for the mere promise that I’d return Monday to pay the bill (I did return; the grand total for all my treatment and medicine: roughly $20 US). I walked away from a sea monster – that seems like a pretty lucky day to me.
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