To the Ends of the Earth

Lots of things blew Mr. Thornberry’s mind: the way the river thundered, the grandeur of the valley, the little huts, the big boulders, and the climate blew his mind most of all—he had figured on something more tropical. It was an odd phrase from a man of his age, but after all Mr. Thornberry was a painter. I wondered why he had not brought his sketchbook. He repeated that he had left the hotel on the spur of the moment. He was, he said, traveling light. “Where’s your bag?”

I pointed to my suitcase on the luggage rack.

“It’s pretty big.”

“That’s everything I have. I might meet a beautiful woman in Limón and decide to spend the rest of my life there.”

“I did that once.”

“I was joking,” I said.

But Mr. Thornberry was still grimacing. “It was a disaster in my case.”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw that the river was seething, and men were standing in the shallows—I could not make out what they were doing—and pink and blue flowers grew beside the track.

Mr. Thornberry told me about his painting. You couldn’t be a painter during the Depression; couldn’t make a living at it. He had worked in Detroit and New York City. He had had a miserable time of it. Three children, but his wife had died when the third was still an infant—tuberculosis, and he had not been able to afford a good doctor. So she died and he had to raise the kids himself. They had grown up and married and he had gone to New Hampshire to take up painting, what he had always wanted to do. It was a nice place, northern New Hampshire; in fact, he said, it looked a hell of a lot like this part of Costa Rica.

“I thought it looked like Vermont. Bellows Falls.”

“Not really.”

There were logs in the water, huge dark ones tumbling against one another and jamming on the rocks. Why logs? I did not want to ask Mr. Thornberry why they were here. He had not been in Costa Rica longer than me. How could he know why this river, on which there were now no houses, carried logs in its current as long as telegraph poles and twice as thick? I would concentrate on what I saw: I would discover the answer. I concentrated. I discovered nothing.

“Sawmill,” said Mr. Thornberry. “See those dark things in the water?” He squinted; his mouth went square. “Logs.”

Damn, I thought, and saw the sawmill. So that’s why the logs were there. They had been cut upriver. They must have—

“They must have floated those logs down to be cut into lumber,” said Mr. Thornberry.

“They do that back home,” I said.

“They do that back home,” said Mr. Thornberry.

He was silent for some minutes. He brought a camera out of his shoulder bag and snapped pictures out the window. It was not easy for him to shoot past me, but I was damned if I would yield my corner seat. We were in another cool valley, with rock columns all around us. I saw a pool of water.

“Pool of water,” said Mr. Thornberry.

“Very nice,” I said. Was that what I was supposed to say?

Mr. Thornberry said, “What?”

“Very nice pool of water.”

Mr. Thornberry hitched forward. He said, “Cocoa.”

“I saw some back there.”

“But there’s much more of it here. Mature trees.”

Did he think I was blind?

“Anyway,” I said, “there’s some coffee mixed in with it.”

“Berries,” said Mr. Thornberry, squinting. He heaved himself across my lap and snapped a picture. No, I would not give him my seat.

I had not seen the coffee berries; how had he? I did not want to see them.

“The red ones are ripe. We’ll probably see some people picking them soon. God, I hate this train.” He fixed that straining expression on his face. “Blows my mind.”

Surely a serious artist would have brought a sketch pad and a few pencils and be doodling in a concentrated way, with his mouth shut. All Mr. Thornberry did was fool with his camera and talk; he named the things he saw, no more than that. I wanted to believe that he had lied to me about being a painter. No painter would gab so aimlessly.

“Am I glad I met you!” said Mr. Thornberry. “I was going crazy in that seat over there.”

I said nothing. I looked out the window.

“Kind of a pipeline,” said Mr. Thornberry.

There was a rusty tube near the track, running parallel in the swamp that had displaced the river. I had not seen the river go. There were palm trees and that rusty tube: kind of a pipeline, as he had said. Some rocky cliffs rose behind the palms; we ascended the cliffs and beneath us were streams—

“Streams,” said Mr. Thornberry.

—and now some huts, rather interesting ones, like sharecroppers’ cottages, made of wood, but quite solidly built, upraised on poles above the soggy land. We stopped at the village of Swampmouth: more of those huts.

“Poverty,” said Mr. Thornberry.