“A hundred suspicions don’t make a proof” – Feodor Dostoevsky. In the early 1990s, I spent most of a year in a rural area of Costa Rica, caretaking a property that had been carved out of the jungle a couple of decades before by an energetic North American. The small farm was remote and isolated. The nearest pay phone was twenty minutes away. We made a weekly trip to the closest city for supplies and to catch up on the local happenings. In those pre-cell phone and pre-internet days, we had a shortwave radio and listened to BBC and VOA to keep abreast of world events.
On the road each week, we passed the guarded entrance to a large coffee plantation. One day, we joined some friends on a tour of the finca. I had never been on a coffee farm before, and as an avid coffee drinker, I felt a little like a junkie walking through Afghani poppy fields. I almost felt lightheaded. The coffee beans looked good enough to pick and eat raw. The farm was immense, with numerous outbuildings and a small private airstrip.
At the end of the tour, we sampled some of their coffee and met a friendly couple around our age who were part of the family that owned the finca. They had two young children, as did we. On our subsequent weekly trips to town, we ran into the same couple on occasion and always stopped for a brief chat.
One of the closest neighbors to the farm I was caretaking was a Tico about my age. He was running his family’s dairy farm. He had graduated from UCR a decade earlier and spoke good English. For a guy raised in the campo of Costa Rica, he was quite worldly. We discussed anything from the recent civil war in Nicaragua to Franz Kafka to the Sele’s chances of making the next World Cup.
One day, I joined him for a beer when we saw each other in town. I told him about the coffee farm we had visited and asked if he knew the family. He gave me an odd smile, said he knew of the farm, and then said the word “Coffee,” laughing. I was confused. He motioned me to come in closer, then leaned forward, covered one nostril with his thumb, and pantomimed snorting a line.
On my drive back to the farm, I considered his insinuation. For years, there had been a steady flow of cocaine from Colombia to the US, and it was possible that Costa Rica, with its absence of a military and minimal policing, would be a point of transit for shipments. But the nice couple with the two preschool kids? The coffee farm actually a hacienda right out of Scarface? I wondered.
Then one evening, I was up late reading, enjoying the quiet and solitude of the farm. I went to bed past midnight, turned out the lights, and as I lay in the dark, I heard the sound of a small airplane flying low. Why would a small private aircraft be flying at this crazy hour? I thought of my friend, and also of the proximity of the coffee farm’s airstrip to the farm I was caretaking. It took me a while to fall asleep that night.
I did not hear any other airplanes the rest of the time on the farm. I saw the couple on occasion in town, and we chatted as always.
I had long forgotten about this until recently, when I was on an extended bicycle ride. The route took me back to this stretch of Costa Rica I had been away from for three decades. I passed the entrance, saw that the finca still had the same name, and that it was still in existence – as a coffee farm.
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Don Mateo
