So, so, sola

Survival, potency, and mastery

This past week I have considered writing something substantive, meaningful, or useful regarding how to cope with elections, or the chemistry of synthesizing estrogen from yams and horse urine, but the feed is saturated with the former and the latter is so far afield. I have nothing much useful other than a short story about that one time I doula-ed a scorpion out of my room in 2016, The (unofficial) November of Scorpions.

Liberia is the name of the smaller, more tourist-friendly airport in Costa Rica, and for five years I flew into and out of her, always slightly unhinged that I might have accidentally sent myself to Africa, where Big Liberia is. 2016 was the third of five years whence I had accidentally nearly amputated a bit of myself, lost my debit card, and taken the deepest breath I’d mustered in four years having both walked away from a dangerous interpersonal relationship and cast my vote for the first female US President.

On my previous trips, I had heard howler monkeys and donated pints of blood to local mosquitos, but I had not seen either a jungle snake nor a scorpion. But in 2016? I saw eight.

As teachers and writers and sages all seem to say, the first and the last are always the most memorable, and this was true for me with scorpions. (In fact, I’m curious how many encounters with scorpions are first and last, given their remarkably potent venom?)

The first came to me just after 9pm as I crouched in the corner of a jungle-side kitchen with one hand on the feeble router and another holding the phone akimbo such that I was a human antenna. Refreshed in bafflement I could get no official news sites to display, only the Facebook page of my peripheral friend Adam who both holds reason and degrees in political science. She - my first scorpion - held vigil in a patch of moonlight a few feet away, and I stayed until my phone collapsed from exhaustion, counseled only by her occasional skittering.

There were others - on a chair outside my room, on the jungle path, scurrying in a jaunty and characteristic way. I wondered if it was a wet year, or a dry year, or if there was a biblical foretelling that I’d missed somehow. Most of my years of bible school were spent in the other room because of my precocious habit of asking questions that disturbed the indoctrination of the other children.

Scorpions - the google promises - signal survival, potency, and mystery, which I mis-read as mastery, and for good reason.

Because on my final night in Costa Rica, before heading back to the United States divided, I met my final scorpion.

My bingo card of lodging was full - I’d spent a week sharing a room with a retreat leader, a week in a familiar shipping container eco-hotel, a week in a lavish retreat center, and now I was so-so-solo (sola, if you’re savvy) in a remote and extra budget friendly shipping container deep in the jungle. While it was surrounded by seemingly shipwrecked fellows akimbo and 50 yards away from one another, the others were all dark.

I was alone alone, in a container in the jungle with only a billion beautiful noisemaking creepy crawly mysteries at my threshold, and so I scurried through my teeth brushing and crawled into bed when she caught my eye…

She dangled from the curtain chain with such poise that I could tell immediately that she was both regal and very much animate. It was just the two of us in the container (right?). Me in my bed, her… six feet away…

And the rest of humanity - security, stability, reliability - out beyond a curtain of darkness and a dense forest of. Well. Forest.

We adorable Americans talk about forests as though they are trees, and they are that, but they are also ecosystems and minefields and three dimensional living cosmos.

Stacy, via WhatsApp, offered me no answers to my first two questions:
1. Can they jump?
2. Will it kill me?