Why I'm Like This by Cynthia Kaplan Page A

honeymoon and b) we won’t be having sex here. At bedtime I send him to the conciergo , or whatever, for new sheets because the ones on our bed are nubby. I sleep as if something hanging over my head were thinking about dropping down.
    The adventure begins!
    The big plan is to drive around the Costa Rican countryside, stopping first in the mountains, then heading southeast to the beach, and finally capping the whole thing off with a two-day white-water rafting trip through the rain forest.According to our map, which is about as detailed as a paper place mat in a New England seafood shack (how else would one know where to buy the best saltwater taffy?), there are only five roads and ten towns in all of Costa Rica. The only way to get anywhere is to ask directions, but this is something of a trick question for locals. You can’t give them your final destination and expect to get there. You’ll end up driving for days and if you’re not careful wind up in Nicaragua. You must proceed village by village, stopping in each to inquire of the next. This is how I learn the only Spanish I know besides huevos rancheros and Arriba! Arriba!: Qual es el camino a…? My new husband, however, speaks uno petito of Spanish and we slowly make our way north without running into any contras.
    The roads themselves are terrible—very narrow and full of crater-size holes. Costa Ricans are resistant to the ever-encroaching tide of tourism, so there is probably someone in every village whose job it is to “maintain” the roads with a shovel and a pick, and he is reprimanded if fewer than thirty rental cars per week break an axle. And nearly every turn is a hairpin. I don’t know if it is the fever caused by the bronchial infection I developed two days before our wedding or the nausea I feel as we navigate the serpentine mountain roads in our Jeep 4×4, but every time I look over at my husband I feel sick.
    Who the hell is he, anyway? I am consumed not with doubt, exactly, but with self-consciousness, which, I thinkguiltily, is the last thing I am supposed to be. I am supposed to be totally comfortable and at ease and having the unself-conscious time of my life. We’re finally alone! Tra la la. And it is either look at David or look a foot or so to my right, where the side of the road meets the sky. There are no guardrails and if for some reason we were to be forced off the road, say by a careening livestock truck or an infrequently serviced tour bus, we would end up two thousand feet below in a ravine.
    We wouldn’t be the first whose honeymoon ended in some kind of obscene tragedy. I’ve read of brides and grooms held up by gun-toting banditos or entwined for all eternity in tangled car wrecks. Why shouldn’t we sail silently off some cliff? What will we have left behind? Certainly not each other. That’s good. And our families? They’ll probably be relieved. No one really wants to be an in-law. And our hopes, such as they are, will never be dashed, nor our ambitions thwarted, nor our careers come to nothing. We’ll never get resentful or indifferent. We’ll never divorce each other and marry a younger woman and an older man. What a load off.
    Am I the only one for whom the most mundane of activities lead inexorably to accidental death? Of course, it would certainly be a shame to die on the way to an adventure travel experience. Ignominious, in fact. They weren’t brave; they weren’t even there yet .
    Our few days in the mountains are primarily spent reading, eating, and sleeping to the thrum of a continual tropicalrainstorm. I am secretly relieved that the potential for a mud-slide has preempted a four-mile hike up the side of a waterfall, and that the active volcano the Arenal region is known for is completely socked in by clouds. We drive toward the gray mass anyway, and settle for a few minutes of wistful gazing from a low-lying field where I pretend to be disappointed