I love my truck more than you love your vehicle. I’m not a car guy. I never have been. I always owned used vehicles from my teens to my early twenties. I didn’t give my car much thought. It was my way of getting to work and not much else. When my wife and I were living together in Pittsburgh, PA, I gave up my car completely and used the bus.
When we decided to leave Pittsburgh and move to the tropical beach, I thought Costa Rica was going to teach me something deep and meaningful about life and how to live it. And it did. However, the methodology was nothing like I had expected. Costa Rica was going to teach me to appreciate the things I have and one of the ways it was going to do it was through cars.
I’ve documented my Costa Rican vehicular experience before but I’ll quickly share the highlights. I’ve been the owner of three old, unreasonably expensive SUVs whose problems included three exploding windows, one exploding battery, constant AC deaths, a brake failure while descending a volcano, a rebuilt transmission, a rebuilt four-wheel drive system, and a host of other problems that required the cars to spend more time with shady mechanics than with me and my family.
After many years of car torture, I purchased a new 4×4 truck. The anticipated monthly payment made more sense than the frequent and unexpected money hemorrhage in mechanic fees. It’s a stick shift. It’s not fancy. There are no bells nor whistles, but guess what? It works. It works consistently. When I turn it on, it turns on. When I hit the brakes, it stops. I love it. Now, it’s not exactly breaking news, ‘Guy That Has New Truck Likes It!’, but Costa Rica has taught me to appreciate a reliable, functioning vehicle in a way that wouldn’t have been possible without all of those soul-crushing and bank emptying SUVs.
I can tell a similar story about laundry. It’s safe to say that doing the laundry is nobody’s favorite thing, me included, but I have a deep appreciation for my washer and dryer. Whenever the mood strikes me, I can go back into the sweaty, dusty backroom of my rental house and put my clothes into a washer that works properly and then move them to a dryer that dries my clothes every time.
Costa Rica taught me that isn’t the case for everybody. When we first moved to a little apartment at the beach, our landlady had a washer on her front porch and a clothesline in the front yard. In theory, handing your clothes to a nice lady who cleans them is an ideal situation but I’m the world’s sweatiest man. The shame of the thought of that poor lady touching my underwear was too much to bear.
After we moved, we inherited a type of washing machine that I didn’t know existed. It’s a tiny apparatus with two bucket-sized vessels that had the capacity to hold all of three outfits. One little container washed the clothes and then an alarm would tell you to put the clothes in the other little container which would spin to get the excess water out. After that we’d take the clothes to the front yard and hang them up. If it didn’t start raining, then, without fail, a neighbor would begin burning yard waste the second the clothes were hung up.
We continued with a series of not-so-great washers and clotheslines for years. It wasn’t the end of the world, but it wasn’t what you’d call convenient either. What it ended up doing was changing my relationship with doing the laundry forever. Now I transfer my clothes from an automatic-style washer and put them in a gas-powered dryer and in between feelings of disinterest in doing laundry, there’s a palpable appreciation for how easy it is to do.
Vincent Losasso, founder of Guanacaste Wildlife Monitoring, is a biologist who works with camera traps throughout Costa Rica. Learn more about his projects at: Instagram and facebook.
