Perdido

Beach-walking in the movies is graceful. It is light, fun, frolicky and romantic. But beach-walking in real life is sometimes more congruent with a twenty-minute, turned-to-eleven, hard-core Stairmaster workout- the grace and glamour sinking into the three-inch deep sand divots left behind each trudging step. But sandy beaches are long distances and degrees away from offices and cubicles, both farther and further from that type of sinking, so grace or no, beach-walking is hard to beat.

Especially yesterday, as Joy and I took advantage of the sky’s blueness, and the sun’s brightness, in a three-mile beach walk down to Manzanillo: a small town at the southern-most edge of Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast. The walk was fun and fantastic, though Grace got f*cked, and the freckles on my face- for once- multiplied faster than the bug-bites on my legs. 

Not too long after we started out, a new friend joined our camino: his tag said his name was Bassam, but we called him “lost dog”, or “perdido” for short. He trucked along with us all the way to Manzanillo, sometimes ahead of us, sometimes behind or in parallel, but never far enough away that Joy and I could avoid the glares of other beach-goers as they associated the dog directly with us as he trotted through their picnicking places and sabotaged their sunbathing setups. 

Nor were we able to avoid such association as Perdido followed us up two flights of stairs, into the famous Maxi’s Restaurante, and sat right next to our table as we ate lunch and drank a beer, and as all the patrons and employees glared at us like the grace-less gringos we surely appeared to be.  As we were finishing one of the waiter gruffly asked, “¿Es suyo?”, to which we honestly replied that no, it wasn’t our dog, and then tried to keep from both bursting into laughter and dying from embarrassment as Perdido dutifully kept to our heels as we walked out of the restaurant and back up the beach.

 

He went swimming in the ocean with Joy and peeing in the forest with me, and , not surprisingly at this point, came all the way back to our bungalow in Punta Uva and made himself at home on our porch- it was a lot cool and a little heartbreaking to have found such a fun new friend for a day. But alas, with the name and number from Perdido’s tag, our neighbors helped us contact his owner. Perdido’s slight hesitation to go home with the owner when he came was a little cool and a lot heartbreaking… 

…but tomorrow’s a new day and another walk down the beach.