A Journey

by Christine Berlin '05

The owner of the hotel tells you that your cab is here, so you walk out the door, put your pack in the trunk, and climb in. Then you see the long scar on the side of his face and begin to wonder. Then he starts talking to you. He is speaking Spanish, as that is the language in Costa Rica, and you struggle to understand. You know your Spanish is not perfect but you have never had this much trouble understanding. Then it hits you: he’s drunk. Great, you asked this guy to take you to Quepos, three hours away! What are you going to do now? As you start to look at this guy with terror in your eyes you see his mangled hand. This puts you over the top. This guy is dangerous; you need to get away.

Then he pulls to the side of the deserted road. You are so grateful your sisters are in the car with you, but you are still terrified of what he is doing. He jumps out of the car, pulls out his knife, and picks some fruit off the tree. What is going on here?

He gets back in the car and he tells you it is a native fruit as he hands you three. You reach for the fruit in his mangled hand, and see that the arm is even worse. He sees your eyes grow wide and he starts to explain.

He was a bull fighter. He was in a horrible accident; he wasn’t supposed to live. Eight months in a coma and he had to re-learn to walk and talk; that’s why he sounds drunk. As he tells you what happened you are distracted by what you see out the window: the mountains, the rain, and the winding narrow road. He is driving rather fast for the conditions. There are no guardrails on the road and the rain is coming down hard.  His little car is whipping up and down the mountainside and you feel as though you are about to jump into his fated bullring.

Your heart is racing and you are terrified you are never going to make it to Quepos alive. Then you see the ocean and you know you are almost there. Then he pulls off the road again. He drives up this long lane and explains to you that this is where the locals come to the beach, over there is where you should eat dinner, here is where you should stay, you should visit this shop, and so on.

Here you are in a foreign country thinking your cab driver is going to kill you when all he wanted to do was get you where you wanted to be before it got too dark for women to be out. He had called ahead for you to the hotel and told them to hold the safest room for his customers. He wanted to make sure the pretty American girls were going to be safe from all the scoundrels and thieves in that town. He took you to the hotel and then walked you to the restaurant and told you who you could trust and where not to go and made sure you were as safe as possible. Then he left you for his three-hour return trip home to his family.

As he leaves all you can think about is how wrong you were about this guy. Here you thought he was going to kill you and all he wanted to do was help. What kind of world do you live in? How did all of that just happen? How could you be so wrong?

Christine Berlin '05 is an English education major at Wartburg College.