Life is not a straight line (nor is this trip)
There’s no fun way to lead into this story, so I’ll just start from the top. It was late February and we had been in Costa Rica for three weeks when we got the phone call. We don’t get too many calls from people on the road, so something in us immediately steeled. It was Tim’s brother, Ben, and he was calling about Ruth, his sister. She had received some results from a MRI after a scan for a suspected herniated disk; there was a fuzzy glowing blob that shouldn’t be there. Whatever it was it wasn’t good.
I’m acutely aware of how commonplace the scenario sounds, how predictable the story’s progression - “scan”, “bad news” - we all know what’s next. That all-too-familiar to any one of us word, “cancer”. But none of it felt common, it still doesn’t. This was Ruth - vivacious, witty, hungry-to-live, Ruth. Ruth, who was turning forty in a few months.
With very little deliberation we decided to book a ticket back to the States, no return flight. As fate would have it, we had been staying at the home of friends-of-a-friend just outside San Jose - an instantly warm Tico couple, Mar y Sol and Miguel. Had we not been blindly welcomed into their home, the practicalities of our predicament (namely, what to do with our car) would have been infinitely more exasperating. Fortunately, we could trust them with Babo while we flew back a few days later to Park City, UT, to join Ruth and family.
The details of Ruth’s illness, which is a rare form of blood cancer called multiple myeloma, are complex and perhaps not material for our travel blog. (Family and friends have created a website dedicated to her treatment, however, at www.jra2z.com). It’s maybe worth stating the obvious though, that the experiences featured through selectively curated social media posts aren’t the whole of it. There are arguments and frustrations, doubts and anxieties and our world is as subject to slight tremors and colossal upheavals as any of yours.
But we’ve begun our journey again. With a renewed sense for our precious minutes on this planet and how we’d most like to spend them. As I write this I sit on the deck overlooking a river in the mountains north of San Jose - the home of that generous couple that first took us in back in February, and can’t seem to shake us. After just two weeks back in Costa Rica, much has changed this time around. For one, it’s the rainy season, which is no hyperbole in the tropics, in the jungle. But it’s fresh here in the mountains and the country has exploded with color. Besides the weather though, our means of travel has differed - for now. Sparing you the long, bureaucratic version of the story, the outcome is that Babo sits in customs’ custody, awaiting release in a month’s time. Meanwhile, Tim and I find ourselves at the mercy of public transport, necessarily humbled by the nuances of this challenge for locals and backpackers, in the rainy season. However fraught, it can be said that this mode has exposed us far more to the kindness of strangers. From the night we spent with Ronald en route to the Osa Peninsula, to the Uber we shared with a fellow traveler back from San Jose.
If there’s anything that this trip is teaching us it’s that the road is not linear and stuff goes awry. But that isn’t just part of this journey - a lesser footnote in it - that is It. And just when you think it’s really bad, you pause and breathe and realize it’s actually fine. Or will be. Or not - but either way, you’ve just got to make it work. And then you remember that none of this is a given, not at all. So you try to be more grateful, less irritable and more kind. Because - ask Ruth - that’s all that really matters.
