November 13th, 1997, Pavones, Costa Rica. Seventy-eight year old American expatriate rancher Max Dalton is mortally wounded in a wild west style shootout while trying to round up cattle belonging to local squatters that had trespassed onto his pastureland. The incident is the culmination of a land dispute between Max and his squatter neighbors dating back to 1992. 

November 20, 1997, Washington, DC. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms issues a strongly worded letter to Costa Rican president Jose Figueres, demanding a full investigation of the Max Dalton killing.

December 6, 1997, Washington, DC. The State Department issues a travel advisory, warning U.S. citizens to avoid the Pavones area, due to "roving bands of squatters... acting with impunity," and cautioning further that evacuation of the area may be necessary if Costa Rican authorities continue to ignore the problem.

December 15, 1997, Pavones, Costa Rica. American landowner James Pospychala, along with a cadre of local police sent to protect him, is driven from his property by a stone throwing, machete brandishing mob of squatters. A few days later his house is burned to the ground.

January 12, 1998, Washington, DC. Senator Jesse Helms urges the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) to hold back on a proposed $70 million loan to Costa Rica, until "concrete progress" is made in resolving the Max Dalton case and the land conflict in Pavones.

January 21, 1998, Pavones, Costa Rica

"All our lives are in danger," the basso gringo voice says when Billy Clayton hands me the cell phone at the cantina bar at some point between dinner and my third Pilsen. Billy wishes me happy birthday and sets me up with a rum shooter on the house, but I’m too distracted by the bizarre phone greeting to thank him."
..
"Who is this?" I inquire.

"I'd rather not say," the phone voice says.

"Where are you?"

"Nearby... but not… too near." 

"How did you get this number?"

"The Embassy."

There being no land line to Pavones, I left the cantina cell number with the Embassy people up in San Jose in case... just in case.

"What do you mean `our lives are in danger'?"

"Listen..." the lowered voice says, basso verging on profondo now. "If you want the real story about what happened to Max Dalton... follow the money."

Wait a minute, I'm thinking. I've heard this dialog before... while munching popcorn in a multi-plex somewhere. I surpress a giggle. I mean come on.

"Five point two million dollars from Union Europa for the southern zone."

"Huh?" Follow the money. What movie was that?

"At least a million dollars to the precarista movement." 

"Look," I say, still racking my brain for the name of the goddamn movie. "Why don't we get together sometime?" But the line has gone dead.

Billy Clayton is leaning over the radio by the register, trying to catch the news from San Jose maybe; I can hear static Spanish over the bar noise. A stateside story broke today, I hear. Bill Clinton in hot water again. Something about some salacious doings with a White House intern. Maybe Clayton cares, but I have my own intrigues to deal with here-and-now, plus this 21st day of January, 1998, is my goddamn Big Five-Oh, a potentially stress-producing benchmark, especially for someone whose life is… well, is what it is. And this week-long flat spell – a result of some mid summer doldrums in the Southern Ocean - isn’t helping. 

That call.

All our lives are in danger. 

My first thought is that the call was a prank. The fact that I'm investigating the shootout killing of Max Dalton for a stateside magazine is common knowledge in this remote little gobbet of paradise, and although all the norte expatriate residents knew and liked Max, a certain blackly comic slant prevails, and naturally so; it helps take the edge off the chronic uncertainty of the precarista (squatter) situation. And that deep, gravelly voice could've been disguised; plus the goofball movie allusion… 

All the President’s Men. Right.

The question is, which one of my motley crew of compadres slinked off to make the call? 

Iscan the cantina to see who's missing from my birthday festivities. Clay has a cell phone up at his Punta Banco hideaway and is something of a demented jokester, but he's currently two barstools down in besotted conversation with Mountain Mike. The two are reminiscing about Clay's terciopela encounter a couple years ago in the bush at Altamira. I've heard the story before. Clay's leg had turned plum-purple right up to his groin from the snake's bite, and Mountain Mike, with input from an Indian bruja, had concocted a tea from roots and tree bark that counteracted the venom. Still, Clay had spent three days in a hutch in the hills, racked by convulsions, while la bruja tended him.
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No, wasn't Clay.

Alex? Alex hasn't moved from his usual corner stool, nor has he apparently missed a beat in his rap about the seraphic inter-dimensional beings he occasionally converses with, especially after a rip-roaring surf session has sufficiently heightened his metaphysical percipience. Also according to Alex's cosmology: flitting around the earthly firmament are vibrational traces of the consciousnesses of past dwellers of any given space, and that these mind bits of "bros past" will interact with the inter-dimensional beings, as well as the consciousnesses of current space-dwellers. Something like that. 

Tonight the unlikely victim of Alex's ramblings is Carlos Lobo, variously described as a "one man army", "crazier than a drunk Hawaiian", "a sufferer of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder" (from the year he spent holed up in his house, defending it against continuous precarista snipering, drive-by shootings, bomb throwings and ground assaults), and - by mis compadres, Erik and Joachim - as "the straightest, most loyal man in Pavones."

Carlos? Carlos speaks not a word of English. No, wasn’t Carlos.

Erik and Joachim? The caller had mentioned the embassy as the source of the cantina phone number. Erik and Joachim know about my Embassy visit, my intelligence sharing with the State Department, but they're here also; I've just had dinner with them. Who else knows about my Embassy visit? No one. No one I know of. 

Whoever made the call knows. 

Shit.

Probably not a prank. 

Besides, that Union Europa tidbit was too out of left field for the conversation not to have been the real thing. Union Europa. Some sort of international banking crew. Follow the money...

No, definitely not a prank. But it still could've been someone I know, a Pavones norte who somehow found out about my Embassy visit and wanted me to have the information… but did not want to directly involve himself in the Dalton matter. 
Erik and Joachim have warned me about what might happen if… 

They suggested that if I have problems it will come from the river side of my house (which is primitive and except for the bodega, or strong room, cannot be locked). Suggested that I sleep in my camper, which is parked in the yard, and that I should keep the Browning 9mm Erik lent me within reach at all times. 

And of all the players actively involved in the conflict in Pavones, it's Erik and Joachim - with their dead of night retaliations against the most militant of the squatters during the two year period in the mid-90s when the land war here last reached flash point - that I should listen to in matters of personal safety. The two, camo-clad, black-faced, outnumbered 50 to 1, AK-47 and sawed-off, buckshot-loaded twelve gauge brandished out their stripped vintage Land Cruiser. The two roaring down the rutted dirt track between Pavones and Pilon, quivered-out surf racks tagging them as warrior/waveriders, on moonless nights their headlights and million-candlepower spot the only illumination for 20 klicks on this wild, lawless coast (no electricity back then). The two scanning the dense, ink black bush of potential fields of fire, popping off rounds to let the Down South world know that of the remaining norte landowners who hadn't been driven off by precarista intimidation and outright violence, someone was out there ready to rock and roll, maybe kick some ass of their own.

Surely, these guys know whereof they speak. So I have taken certain precautions, although I still sleep in my upstairs sanctum overlooking El Rio 

Claro.

Billy Clayton sets up fresh Pilsens as Alex sidles over, wishing me a "Happy birthday, dude." I hand the phone back to Billy, who has abandoned the radio and is now eyeing me as if to ask who the phone caller was. Had he not been the one who handed me the phone in the first place, Billy would have been my first choice as to the caller’s identity. With the possible exception of Erik and Joachim (hard to say one name without the other – a Rosencrantz & Gildenstern kind-of-a-thing), he is the most knowledgeable of the resident nortes regarding the various intrigues of the land conflict here, albeit the most skittish. 

Billy's problems started on the morning of September 16, 1991, when Costa Rican Hugo Vargas was gunned down, the first death in the squatter wars. A fired up mob had stormed a norte surfer's oceanfront property just south of El Rio Claro and the panic-stricken local caretaker had opened fire with a buckshot-loaded scattergun. Vargas had been killed on the spot, another campesino severely wounded, gut shot. Billy had run the gauntlet of enraged squatters in his van to rescue the caretaker and his family; then, that night, after the cantina had been surrounded by a machete-brandishing mob, Clayton fled Pavones, hiding under a tarp in the back of a truck. He would not be able to return for a year.

"Look, there were rumors that a gringo was gonna get bush-whacked," Billy told me a couple weeks ago. "It was just a matter of who. There was a hit list... Max was on it... I was on it."

"Who warned you?" I'd wanted to know, but Billy stood up suddenly and turned seaward, shaking his head, as if he'd already said too much. The wave in front of the cantina that day was shoulder high and Billy and I watched a hot local kid named Meco rocket by as a distant thunderhead morphed surreal and vaguely angry, spouting veined lightning in the liquid gold over the distant Osa Peninsula.

"On a certain level..." Billy had muttered, and I was not sure whether he was addressing me or simply having a thought that had inadvertently found voice. "...it was the wave here that killed Max." 

So true. Without that miracle of a wave roaring in from the southern latitudes, none of this would be here. Not the settlement, the farms, the fish camp, the school, the church, the roads and bridges (such as they are), the cantina itself. Nor the people, the expat nortes who have settled here, looking for their own little piece of paradise. And nor would the squatters, the precaristas, be here, looking for their little piece.
And, certainly, absent that wave, nor would I be here, contentedly settled in after well over a year of wandering the coast between Tijuana and the Panamanian frontier. 

"Don't worry about it, bro. Probably just another harmless whacko," Alex says after I run down the basics of the clandestine phone call, although I omitted the vital detail of the caller’s mention of the Embassy. “We got our share of whackos around here."

I have to smile at that. Much as I like the guy, Alex himself has been known to evidence some peculiar thought processes, even aside from his goofball cosmology. He'll expound at length on his deep involvement in the postmodern peace and brotherly love movement, then, with nary a connective, suddenly be discoursing on the merits of the Chinese version of the AK-47 assault rifle and the design subtleties that make it less likely jam up in adverse bush conditions on full automatic, while the inferior Czech model will likely fail. That, or the artistry involved in constructing a pipe bomb with a uni-directional blast locus, and how to position the device to blow a big enough hole in an inch-thick bank vault to reach through to grab the goodies.

All this while looking like a fugitive from the rock band Kiss. Alex is in fact not a gringo, but a Mexican national, although his English is flawless. A former Tijuana gangbanger, Alex had escaped the perils of that dead end through the surfing life; he ducked south to Pavones some five years ago, toting a hollowed out surfboard packed with cash to buy land with, and an assortment of weaponry with which to defend that land. When I pointed out the possible inconsistency implied in his commitment to pacifism while simultaneously surrounding himself with the tools of warfare, Alex frowned at my failure to see the larger picture. "We are all bros, bro,” he replied, “but if a bro fucks with you, you got to be ready to wax his gnarly ass, post haste.”

The cantina is starting to cook as representatives of the various Pavones factions materialize from the surrounding bush and attach themselves to cerveza bottles and plastic cup rum shooters. Wenste and his cabal of  precaristas-at-the-point are outside by the seawall, Wenste looking mean-drunk  under his straw sombrero; he's probably packing weaponry under his tattered guaybera. Luis, another squatter, albeit of considerably mellower disposition than Wenste, and a buddy of mine - he's nicknamed me Malo, Bad, which I admit I kind of like - wishes me feliz cumpleaños and insists on buying me another Pilsen, although by now I've made the move to cane juice.

El Gitano (the Gypsy) is cross-eyed drunk and running amok at the bar with the 5,000 colones (about $20) I gave him this morning for his help in my investigation. Aka El Brujo (The Sorcercer), Mal Ojo (Evil Eye), El Gitano is a binge-type alcoholic, self-professed dabbler in the occult and accused child molester. El Gitano, of course, is a precarista himself.

Maybe half the cantina crowd tonight is of the preca persuasion, ranging in mien from mellow to not-so-mellow to outright nasty. The vibrational mix is edgy, with some former and even current enemies occupying adjacent barstools. 

The cantina, being the only watering hole within many miles, is de facto neutral territory; those who enter here have an unspoken agreement to temporarily put aside their quarrels. Still, with the nearest real police presence a good two hours away (if the road in is passable and the bridges intact), the so-far lack of bloodshed is in my view something of a miracle. I can’t help but wonder, however, how Billy Clayton - a human lightning rod in the land conflict here -- feels as he serves up cervezas to malvados who not so long ago waved machetes in his face and threatened to dice his gringo ass into fish chum, and who just might be sitting at the bar, his bar, planning his demise.

Alex has wandered off so I return to my table, join mis compadres, Erik and Joachim.

German expat Joachim Gerlach is a former European stunt driver, jewel thief and all around international scammer whose connections run the gamut from the Israeli Mossad to the most vicious criminal organization on the planet, the Bulgarian mafia. His partner, Erik Rheinhold, is a Dutchman who came to Pavones "because of an Arab with a knife..." The story got better from there, it's upshot being that the fellow's knife was no match for Erik's gun.

Then, a year having been spent in prison, and seduced by his buddy Joachim's idyllic accolades of the Down South surfing life, Erik arrived innocently wide-eyed and ready to unwind in the lineup, but within days found himself armed to the teeth at a dead-of-night bridge blockade, looking to bush-whack the squatters who stole Joachim's $30,000 grubstake.

Having committed themselves to fight the precas on their own terms, Erik and Joachim's lives got nothing but crazier from that night on. I've become tight with the pair over the seven months since the battered old rig I call La Casita Viajera first rumbled down the dirt track to road’s end, the search for my long-missing old friend, Christopher, aka Captain Zero, having come to its disorienting denouement. With respect to the Dalton matter, they have in fact become my confidants. Although I have other friends amongst the Pavones expats, it's these guys I trust, and, I believe, vice versa. And trust is everything down here.

I tell the boys about the phone call, the cryptic missive from my Down South Deep Throat. Erik, who is the more sanguine of the two, smiles at the spy vs. spy theatricality of the affair. Joaqchim does not. "Listen, my friend," he says to me in his light German accent. "This is a box of snakes you're dealing with." 

"The Union Europa connection is interesting," Erik muses, ever more analytical than his volatile partner and brother-in-arms. "Maybe it's not just the Dutch who are financing the precas." The fact that his countrymen, through their embassy, have been funding the squatter movement is a sore point with Erik, especially since Max's death. He and Joachim were close to Max, had for a time acted as his bodyguards. 
The two argue the Union Europa point - plus the possible danger I’m subjecting myself to in my investigation - in what sounds like a conglomeration of Dutch and German. It gets heated. Finally, I request that they maybe include me in the discussion by reverting to English, since it's the possible future of my ass they're debating. But they simply shut up, Erik sighing, Joachim red-faced.

"If he's careful,” Erik finally says, referring to me, blithely sipping his rum and looking around, “he'll be all right."  He seems bored with the conversation now.

"Hey, man. Happy birthday," Joachim says, hoisting his rum.

I return his grin. That's right. The Big Five-Oh.

I look around at the cantina crowd, something out of early Peckinpah as updated by Quentin Tarantino. If I'm thinking a candle-festooned cake is about to be wheeled in, followed by this lot breaking into the birthday song, well, I've got another think coming. No, Dorothy, you're not in... well, even Baja anymore. 

If Alex's notion that we leave vibrational traces behind us in our earthly travels is correct, surely the cantina – this end of the road, ramshackle wrinkle in space-time - would be bubbling the ether tonight. Whose phantasmal vibes are even now pulsating through the celebratory continuum of my Big Five-Oh, colliding with those of this oddball mix of multinational vagabonds and wild- ass locals? Who that has come before is now missing? 
Max is gone, of course, shot down on his own land that drizzly November day and left to die… 
Gone from paradise.

And how about Owen Handy, the Vietnam vet brought to Pavones in the late 1980s to teach weapons and hand-to-hand combat techniques to those nortes who hadn't already been driven off by preca violence? Although Handy's courage in battling the most violent of the squatters is undeniable (he'd stood his ground in full-blown firefights in which automatic weapons were used against him), the pressure of living in a guerrilla war environment had eventually driven him out.

Gone from paradise. 

Or the Right Reverend Loren Pogue, the gringo expat whose fiduciary schemes ran the gamut from hilariously in-your-face land swindles to cocaine trafficking to the black market baby business, and who boozily oversaw his nutso enterprises from his banana port brothel. (His business card proclaimed him the proprietor of a local home for unwed mothers.) Perhaps best known locally for having shot an unarmed precarista in 1989, the Reverend is currently serving a 27 year sentence in a stateside prison for... well, you name it. 
Likewise gone, gone from paradise.

Or how about Winfred Zigan, who, like some Bob Hope From Hell, would catch and eat assorted cantina bugs (the bigger and crunchier the creepy-crawlie the better) to entertain the beer-guzzling expat troops on bleak and womanless post-surf session nights? Winfred fled Pavones in 1992, not because he'd recently been shot in the head in a squatter-related tiff (a mere crease of the scalp), but from disgust when completion of the dirt track from Golfito began to afford easier access to Pavones for the multitudes Up North. In Winfred's view, the squatter wars were a minor nuisance. That which, well, bugged him, was his perception that Pavones was getting civilized - notwithstanding the fact that electricity had still not yet arrived. 

Winfred elected to beat cheeks further south (yes, that natural direction of vanishment), but since the road ends here, his escape was by sea. Rumor has it that he is now the lord and master of his own otherwise uninhabited island somewhere off the coast of Panama, his battlements no doubt directed seaward, protecting the sanctity of his own private perfect wave. (Winfred would no doubt approve of the State Department travel advisory urging U.S. citizens to avoid the Pavones area, for how it has kept the surf lineup uncluttered with those uncommitted, here-on-a-two-week-surf-vacation lightweights he so detests.)

No, not gone from paradise. On the contrary, Winfred has only dug in deeper.

How about the itinerant Aussie who was strung up here in the cantina for some now-forgotten, surf-related faux pas back in the early 80s? Bound and gagged, noose tautly rising from his outstretched neck to an overhead rafter, he'd been left teetering on a chair while the boys hoisted brews and staggered around, occasionally bumping him to test his balance. He'd eventually been cut down, patted on the behind and informed he could go now.

Definitely gone from paradise is that discourteous Aussie, but what sort of jagged, get-me-the-fuck-out-of-here vibrational traces still linger?
Just one more, and I save the best for last.

Danny.

The Waterman Who Would Be King. 
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To be continued… maybe… although I may excerpt again, I’ve decided not to finish this book, in spite of the effort I put into it. Why? Because I live here now. Enough said.

A final note: If you’re thinking that Pavones sounds like a dangerous, violent, god awful place and you want no part of it, fine. Don’t come. But for me, its history is part of its allure. This is, or was, the frontier. It ain’t the ‘burbs of Oshkosh, folks. 

And the truth is that – for better and (for Winfred, anyway) for worse – Pavones has changed in the five years since the above night at the cantina. The squatter problem is over. There have been no new incidents or “land invasions” and the few remaining conflicts are being settled peacefully, in court. 

As was the case even back in ‘97-’98, some of my best friends are squatters. 

Costa Rica is the safest, most peaceful country I’ve ever been to. 

I love this place, and its people.
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