The Hardware Store

Pecos is making a walking stick and considering building some primitive furniture. I’m more concerned with having screens on our windows. While, like everyone else up and down these mountain roads, we keep windows and front and back doors wide open during the sunny days, when evening approaches we shut everything tight against mosquitoes and moths. We need a few basic tools as well.

We risk our lives against other vehicles and drive up and down the busy Pan-American Highway near San Isidro until we see what looks like a hardware store, or is it an auto parts store? It is the former. Like most of the other stores we’ve been in, this one has about 20 clerks per customer. Everyone is eager to help us. Pecos goes off to gather a bow saw, hammer, hooks, sandpaper, varnish – each time calculating the price by currency conversion and remaining unsure if the items cost a little or a lot.

A helpful clerk is waiting to help me. I point to the windows and demonstrate the wind blowing through. Ah, yes, screening, how do you say in Costa Rica? I am told the word but the rapidly-fired syllables fly past my head. How do you say in English, senora? Shreen, si? Close enough, I nod, thinking how good I’ve become at pantomime and how I can now take anyone in a game of charades. My friendly clerk takes me to a back wall where several types of screening hang on huge rolls like linoleum tubes back home. Apparently the mosquitoes come in several sizes here. I demonstrate again and he cuts to my estimated lengths.

I pantomime the need for wood lathe to nail and hold this screen on the wood window frames of our house. He takes me out back to a huge open-air lumber yard, where wood of all sizes is stacked neatly on shelving three stories tall. I point at the screening in my hand, demonstrate building a frame for it, and he immediately leaps up for a hand-hold and swings his body around. He wrenches his legs up and scales the high shelving.

From about 20 feet above and sometimes dangling by one hand he pulls out board after board – all too thick. I keep demonstrating smaller, smaller, por favor, and he swings dangerously on the wall pulling out one selection after another. None are lathe but after this effort I feel I must take the three thinnest that he’d found, about an inch square and 12 feet long and suitable for another project at some point. No problemo and he falls far to the ground and scrambles to his feet. He will bring the boards around to our vehicle.

It takes about 30 minutes for two clerks to painstakingly enter all of our purchases into the computer and then to give us a receipt. We carry the receipt to the caja, cashier’s station, up front and Pecos pays with his credit card. I head to the car with the purchases and Pecos goes back in to look at a drill. My clerk rushes up to the car with my three boards and tells me to wait. He goes back in the store and returns to the parking lot with a handsaw, then without measure or question promptly cuts my boards at random places so that they will fit inside the car. I thank him for this extra service.

Pecos returns and has already decided that my boards are unsuitable. He asks why I didn’t simply request aluminum framing cut to size, necessary tools for working with aluminum, and a spline to roll the screening in its track. I am seriously tempted to smack him.

On the way home he pulls into a commercial saw mill and talks somehow to the owner while I sit in the car and study my Spanish language book. He tours the lot and is given three pieces of good lathe for free. These are then cut by the mill owner to a precise measurement for us to carry home. Without asking I am certain that like many men elsewhere and despite the language barrier, these two aficionados of proper wood have bewailed the bungling attempts of inexperienced builders everywhere, particularly if they are women. 