Bamboo Farm

Pecos has stayed busy on and off for several days, building shelves from slab wood for the kitchen and bedroom and two side tables. Pecos hauls planks to our yard from the nearby patch of jungle, cuts desired lengths with The Kid’s skill saw, then peels the bark with his machete and uses a bow saw to cut legs to fit. Very rustic. Some of the wood has narrow rainbow streaks in it, cut from a eucalyptus – not native to Costa Rica but now common in this region on cultivated tree plantations. The streaks are gold, brown, army green, bluish-grey and lime green.

The Kid has come to help Pecos install a suicide shower at our rental house. This is the common name of the gadget that is often installed just above a showerhead, found with exposed wires in even the finest hotels in this country. With a flick of the button, water is diverted through the 8” round box, where it is heated to produce a consistent tepidly-warm, but not hot, temperature. After a month, Pecos was tired of taking icy cold showers, although I found it wasn’t quite so unbearable if one also carried in a bucket of hot water to offset the cold splashes. Once the body and brain begin to go numb, the frigid water actually starts to feel warm. The $22 cost would be worth it as long as the suicide shower doesn’t live up to its name. We remind each other to be careful when one of us enters the bathroom – no touching the wires while bathing. Luckily for me, they are far over my head.

The Kid stays for dinner. We are having a brown, hairy vegetable I’d bought at the market and whose name I can never remember. It peels to reveal a red skin like a radish but cooks and mashes nicely like potatoes and tastes like sweet and white potatoes mixed. Pecos has made a tomato, onion and avocado salad and a few pieces of chicken are on the grill. For dessert we have a fresh pineapple that our landlord has brought us.

The Kid sits politely on the living room’s cement floor so that we aged ones can have the two plastic chairs that comprise our entire household seating inventory. These chairs are hauled around countless times during the day – now to sit in the sun, then in the shade, then to use as an impromptu laundry basket or sawhorses, then again to sit on the porch – and are brought inside after dark so that we have a place to sit other than the bed.

We tell The Kid how we’ve looked at the offerings of several furniture stores but that the upholstered furniture seems expensive, nearly identical from place to place, and not all that well made. We’re concerned that built-in upholstery may mold while our future casa/cabina is closed up for several months each year. We’d hesitated over wood furniture – handcrafted pieces being of excellent workmanship and good prices, but nothing was just right for our temporary living.

The Kid asks if we would like to visit a bamboo farm the next morning. Pecos especially is excited as he has visions of raising bamboo, although it is unlikely we can grow more than a few clumps near the creek on our high, dry finca. We are still undecided about what we will grow to sustain our finca and keep it in some sort of production.

We head out of San Isidro in a direction we hadn’t yet been, first winding past dense residential areas before leaving town. The Kid tells us this well-paved road, like so many others, will run out of blacktop soon and a few dozen miles ahead will dead-end high in the mountains. We pass sugar-cane fields near the road and a few new hotels are located in the narrow valleys below. The Kid turns onto a dirt lane and suddenly there is a dense bamboo forest on both sides. Tall bamboo towers high above us, nearly forming a tunnel for us to drive through. We have shrunk to the size of insects, driving quickly under this monstrous grass. A few clearings have heaps of bamboo scrap and neat piles of bamboo logs.

Restored to human size, we arrive at the center of the farm and park near the office and racks of 30-ft. bamboo spears that are drying upright in the sun. Inside two huge open-air workshops the size of small hangars, half a dozen workers craft furniture in every style. A fifty-foot row of bamboo rocking horses line the edge of a platform-turned-showroom high overhead, reached via a tall staircase. The showroom is full of chairs, tables, sofas, rockers, dressers and furniture of every bamboo-imaginable type. Floor lamps are constructed from one thick bamboo stalk and bamboo roots in order to balance. The bases look like crocodiles that would sneak across the floor.

From the rows of look-alike bamboo furnishings we pick out a small, sturdy sofa and two chairs that are different from all the rest. Price: equivalent of $160 total and Pecos convinces the clerk that he should throw in a tall side table at no cost. This set, however, has been sold and we are told that if we return in three days the workers will have built us identical pieces. A few days later The Kid goes in his jeep and returns with our new furniture tied on top. We visit Las Ropas Americanas and buy several solid color cushions and pillows that look like new for seats and backs –these changeable pieces are velvet and silk - some with beadwork, fringe or pleats.

Our living room is now furnished! It is colorful and cheery. Our two chairs of ugly plastico are no longer allowed indoors and I plan to recycle them the minute they are no longer needed – to a far, far distant market. 