Living Fences of Costa Rica

The trees are saying little. It’s hard to talk with barbed wire in their mouths. And, contrary to romantic imaginations, trees don’t have much to say.

The ones that have mouths work full time in Costa Rica holding up kilometer after kilometer of living fence. Over the machete cuts, they grow Angelina Jolie lips, calluses that kiss and grip the steel wire.

Living fences border the gravel, clay, and asphalt roads that wind and unwind their ways through, around, and over the rich, green hillsides of Costa Rica. Some roads, like the clay route from San Juanillo east into the mountains to Santa Cruz, climb, descend, and veer so that a driver can manage only a few kilometers in half-an-hour.

If you slow down or, even better, walk along the side roads, you’ll begin to see the mouths of the trees form into facial expressions from Middle Earth or Narnia or the yet unrecognized Costa Rican world of Boca de Cerca–like computer-generated special effects in a Walden Media movie. Puzzled, grim, ominous, never amused. The tacit, silent advice to humans is to stay out.

Other species don’t seem to take these fence faces as serious warnings. They take liberties. Pigs set up camp on the road’s side of a fence, porcupines hang from the wires like hairy fruit, and calves stand in the road and wonder about you.

Meanwhile, the fence-trees live their own lives, sprouting new little branches, waiting brownly through the months of the dry season, or gulping up the heavy rains of the green season. They munch on barbed wire and mostly keep their own counsel.

Sometimes they talk to themselves in mumbled grievance and boredom– about the weather, the chattering birds, or the scrabbling lizards. The talk is apolitical, non-denominational, and, with a mouthful of barbed wire, barely intelligible. You have to listen closely, especially when there’s wind in the leaves.

Based on extensive arboreal eaves-dropping, here are the main things on the minds of trees:

1. Half a year it’s dust–other half mud.
2. My roots are barkin’.
3. I should charge the birds rent.
4. Sun rises. Sets. Rises. Same old, same old.
5. I coulda been a Guanacaste easy.
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6. Frog was right. It’s not easy bein’ green.
7. It’s awful dry around here. Too dry.
8. Ctensosaurs bob their lizard heads like they know something.
9. I’d rather be watchin’ stars.
10. Breakfast, lunch and dinner–barbed wire.
11. There’s nothin’ to do.

These monologues, by the way, are all muttered in Spanish. Trees don’t work in the tourism industry. Prefiero mirar las estrellas, (see 9 above).

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Written by VIP Member Tom Vander Ven who is Emeritus Professor of English, Indiana University South Bend. He and his wife Cyndi, also a teacher of English, have a home in Baltimore, but, after a month in Nosara, they now live 30 minutes north in San Juanillo, where through August they’re writing and loving the mellow climate of Guanacaste.

Andrew Makarik

to@welovecostarica.com

Andrew Makarik is the main editor of WeLoveCostaRica, a fan of this sunny country. He is also a loving husband and a has a lovely daughter. By being a devoted family man and the biggest Costa Rica fan, he wants to make more people feel at home there. WeLoveCostaRica unites people and helps them find new home or a new travel destination. This website is a friendly community where everyone can find not only information, but also new friends and travel pals. Andrew is also passionate about IT and programming, so he himself maintains a friendly atmosphere in this cozy environment of WeLoveCostaRica.com.