Tropical fruit

In planning this past winter’s snowbirding, I lamented to my friend Theresa, long experienced with all of the yogic parts of Costa Rica, that I was having a hard time finding a good place to stay. It was hard squaring the seeming illegibility of a place that got electricity only 30 years ago with my general desire for comfort on the road. She told me to avoid San José. I told her I had an early morning flight out of San José. She handed me an Airbnb listing on the outskirts of San Isidro, a small town a half-hour east of San José’s airport, and told me to book it for as little time as I could. I did, blind.

I don’t take Theresa’s advice often enough. The room was tiny, but the property felt impossible, sited at the foot of the cloud forest, with a Finca-grade coffee farm that sloped down to a fern gully. As I discovered this, I walked around in a dreamlike stupor, astonished that I had something the size of Lisbon’s whole botanic gardens exclusively to myself. I took so many pics that I thought my phone would catch on fire. I wrote the first marketing page for text from a small table that overlooked the jungle. I spent most of my final two days in Costa Rica wandering this garden in silence, looking at all of the trees that were planted, eating non-Cavendish bananas off the vine, and marveling at the coffee plants.

I picked a coffee cherry one day. It looked like a dark purple grape; you could have easily mistaken it for one. It gave easily off the branch. It had that sticky character that you get from mango, lychee, or rambutan, reminding you that coffee is a tropical fruit. I gave the cherry a firm pinch and the bean squeaked out, mint green, covered in sticky tropical-fruit residue. I ate the husk; dried, this would be cascara. I thought of all of the weird fruits that I had encountered in Thailand, how mangosteen barely exists outside of their country, and how I felt so different in my connection to food while visiting there. Coffee lit this part of my brain up; I was not expecting it to do so.

Most of you have never seen what pepper looks like, how it grows on vines, looks green, tastes floral. Most of you have never eaten wild ginger out of the ground, cut with a knife, juicy, light spice. And most of you don’t know what a pineapple bush looks like, or that pineapples even come in bush form in the first place. I had never seen coffee in person before, even though I’ve brewed it every day for 2 decades, even though I’ve created such an important connection to it as part of my morning ritual & global travels. These are facts to impress others at dinner parties, but they speak to something darker.