Reventazón (Pt. 1)
An Encounter With La Llorona
At some point, someone had built a dam. Power. Strength. Reventazón. Giant burst, a name translated from Spanish. A river with currents so strong it could toss and break you, drag you away, drown you in seconds. Reventazón. A name that meant intensity, that signaled danger, that had carved itself into the mountains with spirit and could be heard thundering in rage from kilometers away.
But near Turrialba, just south of the town where the river opened up to form the Angostura Lagoon, someone had built a dam. Someone had narrowed the great river’s water, had turned its frothing foaming rabid white into a stream of muddy blue that now slithered lazily, broken, through the bottom of its own canyon wake. They had revealed rocks. Rocks that had spent their entire lives tormented by the water around them, that had been sanded down into smooth figures that littered the riverbanks.
That was what Diego hoped to find, huge eroded boulders with unlimited potential. That was what he, Caro, and Jota had driven hours to look for, and what they had spent the entire morning searching for. They’d run up and down the river banks, had waded cautiously into the water crossing from side to side bouldering hunting. Their morning had mostly ended in disappointment.
So they sat in a restaurant in the town on old sun-faded plastic chairs that made snapping and cracking noises under their weight. They drank beer. Diego watched the drops of condensation on his bottle glide and land on a stack of flimsy little paper napkins that by now had formed a grey mush. He was trying to not feel like his time had been wasted. So far they’d only found a single boulder that had any semblance of potential, a very normal thing to happen to anyone that spends time searching for climbable rock. But still, the potential he'd seen in his head for this place, the hours he’d spent staring at his computer monitor combing digitally rendered satellite landscapes and the bitter realization of how wrong he’d been about them, had left him feeling a little more defeated than usual.
And there was Jota, ever the optimist, waving his beer around as he spoke and spilling drops of foam here and there on the uneven cement floor.
“And plus I still need to figure out the electricity. And the toilet,” he was saying.
“You’re going for a toilet?” Asked Diego, looking up from the napkins.
“Maybe even a shower.”
“That’ll fit?” Asked Caro as she took a swig of her beer, surprised, eager. Jota nodded.
“How?” Diego asked.
“It should. I mean, oh man, people do a double thing. Like a shower slash toilet.”
The two stared at Jota for a moment, confused.
“What?” Said Caro.
“Like you have a shower and then a toilet that you know, like, folds.”
“Inside?” Asked Diego.
“Yeah, like foldable.”
“A foldable toilet?”
“In the shower?” Asked Caro.
“Not exactly foldable, what’s the word?”
Another pause as Diego and Caro shared a look and a quick smile, a hint of puzzled laughter on their lips.
“Wouldn’t that be crazy expensive?” Asked Diego.
Jota shrugged and nodded. He took a big swig of foam and immediately slammed the beer down on the dusty white plastic table between them, excited. “Retractable!”
“Retractable toilet in the shower,” said Diego, nodding slowly and looking at the beer that had spilled from Jota’s bottle that had formed a large puddle in the middle of the table.
“I’d no idea that was a thing,” he said, looking up at his friend. “And this goes where?”
“Well in theory I’d put it right behind the driver’s seat.”
“That really the best spot?” Asked Diego.
“It’s the only spot.”
“Not exactly cheap.”
“You said that.”
“I think it all sounds sick,” said Caro.
“Yeah, no, I’m all for van conversions it’s just the toilet seems like a little much.”
“Well what else am I gonna do?”
“Shit in a bucket?” Asked Caro.
Diego and Jota laughed and nodded each taking another sip of their beer and shaking their heads at the idea. The two had met years earlier at one of the only climbing gyms in San José. It was a small warehouse with simple hand-crafted wooden walls and old pre-owned plastic holds bought from gyms in the US that would have otherwise been thrown out. But Diego fell in love with the grungy old training wall and, as a man who had made his living photographing the Costa Rican surfing scene, soon found himself doing the same for climbing. In a matter of months he was the gym’s official photographer and social media manager, completely abandoned all previous surf related pursuits, and began following Jota and a few other prominent Costa Rican climbers on various trips across the country.
It didn’t take long for him to transition from a purely passive entity, documenting the process that makes a boulder in the woods go from anonymous, to named, to climbed, to published in guidebooks and social media for others to climb too, into one of Costa Rica’s most well respected developers. The search for the new was addicting, the excitement of discovery impossible to ignore. It was an obsession he shared at a level that was only really matched by Jota, and which inevitably lead to the growth of a very close friendship.
But Costa Rican climbing is difficult to find and even harder to develop. Thick tropical jungle makes most satellite imaging, and even in-person searches almost impossible. That climbers use wire brushes to remove moss so as to reveal holds underneath is a terrifying prospect to local conservation efforts. That chalk leaves unsightly and unnatural marks on everything that’s touched threatens Costa Rica’s tourism economy. Entire areas of the country with world class potential are outlawed by most entities without prejudice, and climbers are left little but what scraps they can find here and there, usually along the banks of rivers.
Things were frustrating.
In fact the last few areas that had had any semblance of potential that Diego and Jota had explored had proven to be total busts, leaving Diego with a profoundly worrying sense that Jota had begun to believe that the entire country had somehow been climbed out, that all the rock that there was to be found had been found. This, coupled with the fact that his best friend was constantly talking about, and now actively planning on moving into a van and driving up to the USA on a perpetual climbing trip with Caro, had left him with a radical sense of urgency that was, as he had sat listening to Jota talk about the vehicle that would eventually be used to abandon him, being challenged by an equally radical sense of defeat.
“Plus there has to be more stuff down river,” Caro was saying. The conversation had shifted away from Jota’s van and back to the boulders they had yet to find. Caro’s excited words infectious, slowly eased Diego’s quiet protests and prolonged lack of enthusiasm into a glimmer of hope. But this was not a smile without a second edge, as Diego found himself equally frustrated by that same enthusiasm, a somewhat irrational duality compounded by his inability to understand why Caro herself was not doing anything to stop Jota’s apparent decision to leave.
“We should get down to the banks before it gets dark, more chance of seeing boulders,” said Diego.
“You have the pins, right?” Jota asked.
Diego nodded, tapping his phone screen and unlocking it. He showed the other two a dirt road he’d found that would lead them to a marker he’d left on Google Maps, a small grouping of rocks on the Reventazón banks that seemed tall enough to be climbable. It was difficult to tell if these boulders would be any good from a single two dimensional image. All they had to go off on were the small contours of shadow the pixels showed, but of course shadows could mean anything. They could mean a large rock without any discernible holds, could mean simply that the time of day the photo was taken was just so that the shadows were larger than normal, or could mean success and something worthy of a boulderer’s time.
“Oh yeah, I saw these,” said Caro. “They look like they might be something.”
Jota nodded, finished up his beer, looked at the others’ nearly empty bottles and got up to get a third round, firmly ignoring Diego’s protests. They sat in silence for a moment as Caro looked through his phone, zooming in and out on the various markers Diego had left for himself.
“There’s a chance we find something. One of the girls at the gym is from here and she mentioned seeing tall rocks.”
Diego nodded, breathed out nervously, crossed his fingers, and reached for his phone back.
“I still think we need to leave soon.”
“You’re right, I don’t want to be out there after dark too much.”
“No?”
“I mean, if we have to, fine, but I don’t know, creepy night,” said Caro, taking a final swig of her beer and grimacing slightly at the still lukewarm bitterness of a beer that’s been opened too long.
“You’ve never had a problem with that before,” said Diego.
Caro nodded.
“I know, I’m just nervous, I guess.”
“Nervous about what?” Asked Jota as he sat back down.
“Beer?” Asked Diego.
“Oh the guy said he’d bring them over,” Jota said. He turned to look at Caro and nodded for her to continue.
“Just the river.”
“Okay.”
“It’s creepy. You guys didn’t feel, like, watched earlier today?”
“I mean yeah, but that’s normal,” said Jota. “Like evolution, you know?”
“What?” Asked Diego.
“Like it’s a river, its where predators drink water,” he said leaning back in his chair as if having proven a point.
“So?” Asked Caro.
“So we all evolved to get anxious and nervous around one. High alert. The ones that didn’t had the shit kicked out of them by like a saber toothed tiger or whatever.”
“I guess that makes sense,” said Caro.
“Is this about something else?” Asked Jota.
“No, I just haven’t ever felt so paranoid before,” she said. “it’s stupid.”
“It’s the Llorona thing, right?”
“No,” said Caro.
“That’s a thing?” Asked Diego.
“It’s not,” said Jota.
An older man in shorts and a friendly beer belly peaking from a tattered polo shirt walked over to their table, three opened beers balanced on a tray.
“It so is,” said Caro.
“She’s just freaked because some chick at the gym told her to be careful about this stupid—”
“Fucking stop, dude,” said Caro.
“Alright, fine, it’s a thing in like,” Jota paused as the waiter placed his beer in front of him. “Thanks. In like the sense that it’s a legend. No one’s ever seen it. It doesn’t exist.”
“Then why all the stories?”
“Everyone’s read the Bible, doesn’t mean it’s true.”
“I’ve seen her.”
The three looked up. The old man was standing, arms crossed low over his stomach, a serious look on his face.
“You three out here looking for her?” He asked.
“No,” said Diego. “We’re here for vacation and we think one of our friends decided not to come because she was scared she’d see her.”
The old man nodded.
“You saw her?” Asked Jota, but the old man only raised an eyebrow and looked down at the floor. “Was she crying?”
Jota immediately caught a glance from Caro, who gave him a “no shit” sort of look that made him snicker and nod.
“She was,” said the old man. “I was younger. Maybe about your age. It doesn’t exist anymore because of the dam, but there was a place down the Reventazón, maybe a couple of kilometers down the river from here, where the water was blocked by these giant rocks. It’d form a perfect little pool with just enough current that the water wouldn’t go bad.”
“Rocks?” Asked Diego.
“Yes. Four or five of them, so big they stopped the water. Used to be the water was fast, you know? Formed a perfect pool.”
Diego nodded. The old man continued speaking.
“We’d go party there at night.”
“Bet you got a lot of ladies there, huh,” said Jota. The old man laughed. Caro shook her head and sighed.
“What happened when you saw her?” She asked.
The old man’s expression changed suddenly, and he got close to the three, speaking softly.
“You know how the story goes, she killed her child, regretted immediately. Cursed to look for the soul she murdered forever on the banks of all the rivers of the world. She’ll never find a thing, and she will always cry. That’s what we heard. It was a small group of us. We’d taken some beers down to that pool and had almost finished them. Dead at night, too. Back then you didn’t need lights because there weren’t any. Not in this town, at least. We’d made a small fire so we could dry ourselves up when we got out of the water. I was sitting next to it, talking to a girl I’d been dating when the fire went out. Big fire, too big to just blow out with any wind. But it turned off like that,” he said and snapped.
“Then what?”
“It got cold. This place doesn’t get cold like that. Not so suddenly. You could feel the heat getting sucked out of the air by the water. Then we heard her. My friend Tomás heard her first. It was quiet, coming from around the bend. Crying. It got louder and louder. The worst sort of crying you could imagine. I’d never felt that sort of pain before, haven’t felt anything like that since. Don’t think I ever will. We sat there near our pool, saw a woman come around the bend, on the other side of the river. We held our breath as she passed us crying. Then she was gone.”
The three of them were quiet for a moment, taking in the story as the old man stood straight again. Jota took a swig of his beer, then looked at the old man.
“How’d you hear her?” He asked. The old man looked at him, confused. Jota looked at Diego with a smile, triumphant.
“It’s the Reventazón at full strength, right?”
“Yeah,” the old man said.
“It’s loud.”
Caro shook her head. The old man agreed.
“Very loud.”
“Yes.”
“So how’d you hear her over the sound of the water? Especially if she was on the other side of the river?”
The old man paused and nodded, then sighed.
“Tomás and I have been asking ourselves that exact same question for over fifty years, kid,” he said and walked away.
