This was around ten years ago, so the details of the beginning of the day are a little fuzzy. My wife and I, in all of our kidless glory, were on a no-reason vacation to a goat farm on top of a mountain. We had a few days to explore the area and, as it has been since we started dating, it was up to my wife to layout the plan for the day. She wanted to explore Irazu Volcano, and my response to that proposal was a pure stink face. I don’t know why. I think I was being fussy for fussy’s sake.
She wanted to see some sort of green, volcanic-soup lake in the volcano’s crater, and I was simply against it in a way that I now see reflected in my sons’ responses to just about anything my wife and I suggest that we do. Of course, as any married man knows, the correct outcome to such a stalemate is a long drive to look at a lake in a volcano. So we left.
The ride up the volcano was mostly uneventful. Our aged SUV struggled up the looping turns, ever upward. At one point just over a little bridge, a car in front of us lost its hubcap. It popped off a rear wheel and bounced into the roadside forest. I thought to myself, ‘Huh. I never saw that happen before.’ (Unbeknownst to me, this was the universe giving us some sort of foreshadowing.)
I honestly don’t remember much about the actual volcano visit. We arrived. We walked around. The lake that was supposed to be the carrot, leading me to complete the trip, was completely dry. I remember some German tourists. There may have been a gift shop.
Upon the completion of the highlight of the visit, that is, staring at an empty hole for a while, it was time to return to the goat farm. We started our descent down the volcano. The road wound down through forest patches, pastures, and small towns. At one point we rounded a curve, and we began to pick up a little too much speed as the road became steeper. I stepped down on the brake petal and nothing happened. I stepped down harder and still nothing. I looked over at my wife, who was sitting shotgun, taking in the scenery, and said, “The brakes don’t work.”
I of course tried stepping on the peddle harder. Nothing. I pulled the emergency brake. Nothing. I think I even put the automatic transmission in park without anything happening. My wife sat weirdly calmly next to me and watched me try all of these maneuvers.
The car was slowly picking up steam and I was afraid somebody, or something might appear in the road in front of us around each looping turn, so I flicked on the four-way lights and started laying on the horn hoping everyone could hear us coming and get out of the way. I told my wife, “I’m going to look for somewhere to crash.”
I slid the tires on the right side of the car off of the paved road and into the roadside gravel, hoping that would help to slow us down. In my head a ‘good place to crash’ was going to be a soft turn where we would fly off of the road and into a pasture, avoiding trees and families in houses. With the four ways on, two tires off the side of the road, one arm constantly honking the horn, and strangely calm wife next to me, I put both feet on the brake and pulled on the steering wheel, arching my back to put all of the pressure that my little body could muster onto the brake pedal, hoping that something would happen before I intentionally sent us flying off of the road.
Slowly, the breaks started to slow us down.
“We’re stopping.”
The car rolled to a stop. I pulled it over on the side of the road directly across the street from a tiny convenience store. Having just narrowly avoided a devastating crash, we walked into the store and reported what had just happened to the old man behind the counter. His immediate response, “Your breaks got hot.”
I remember thinking, ‘That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.’ We asked him if there was a mechanic nearby, and there happened to be one at the gas station a few hundred meters down the road. Since hot breaks clearly wasn’t the answer, we called the mechanic and asked him to come up and review the deathtrap, that is, car.
The mechanic ambled up the hill, listened to our story, took a quick look at the car, and reported, “Your breaks got hot.” He said it happens from time to time when people press on the breaks too much while descending down the volcano. He told us they would have cooled off by now and we could safely drive it to wherever we were going. We flatly refused to get back into the car.
After some negotiating, he agreed to drive the car down to his shop and really take a good look at it. We walked down the hill to meet him. Upon further inspection, he found nothing wrong with the car. The breaks got too hot and stopped working. Just before I was about to find a good place to crash so we wouldn’t kill anybody, they had cooled just enough to allow us to stop.
We drove, ever so gingerly, back to the goat farm and then eventually back to the beach where, even though there was nothing really wrong with the car, we decided to sell it, simply because we were unable to ever trust it again. We both felt a palpable increase in appreciation for life, having narrowly avoided a deadly situation. Personally, the new appreciation for my life was great, but the real silver lining of the situation was knowing the real truth.
I told her we shouldn’t have gone to see that stupid volcano.
About the Author
Vincent Losasso, founder of Guanacaste Wildlife Monitoring, is a biologist who works with camera traps throughout Costa Rica. Learn more about his projects on facebook or instagram. You can also email him at: vincent@guanacastewildlifemonitoring.com
