Jungle Diary: Water Signs
On the first real night of rainy season, the thunder is so loud and so close that the house shakes, the dogs wake, and the kids come scurrying in from their wing off the courtyard to convene in our room, where they arrange themselves on every surface—one perpendicular at the foot of our bed, the others layering themselves lackadaisically on a blanket on deck, flopping around like puppy dogs dreaming.
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I had already installed crib mattresses on either side of our elevated king-sized bed (so that when Margaret falls off, she has a soft landing instead of getting smashed onto the patterned encaustic cement Granada tiles) and Treva and Felix happily appropriate the tiny beds, unbothered by the fact that their limbs dangle to the floor.
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Now, they have all decided that sleeping in our suite is the only way. Besides, they explain, their rooms are too hot, even with the expensive fans we bought, and while the rains do, technically, cool things down a little, it’s still sweltering. Combined with that particular kind of chronic dankness that’s especially present and permeating everything when it’s actively pouring day after day, they have a point. Our bedroom is truly the only haven, thanks to the portable air conditioner that I insisted Lee install before we moved in. This does nothing to deter the infinitesimally small yet mighty mosquitoes, however, which proliferate to plague-like proportions in the evenings to wreak havoc on my unfairly delicate, perpetually protesting complexion.
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Every evening, the kids traipse into my sanctuary, to pee all over my toilet seat and hide my hairbrush before we read stories, and then to fight over who gets to sleep on the sofa that faces the window. I pretend, halfheartedly, to disapprove, but they all suspect I love having them in our room, and I do. Even Lee is tolerant of the camp-out in spite of himself. In past years, he would have put his foot down, insisting that we maintain the boundaries we had both been conditioned to adopt. Now, we recognize how fortunate we are that our kids actually want to be close to us, and how fleeting it all is. Only Horus, sixteen, sleeps in his own room, willing to trade the luxury of a livable climate for privacy, though after dinner on most evenings, he joins us all in the bedroom to update us on school dramas or to read us the occasional non-violent excerpt from his writing project, before returning to his lair.
Nate, the Tempest, brings the monsoon in earnest—waterfalls erupt through retaining walls. Streets are impassable. Sinkholes appear from which trees sprout the following day. The herd of goats that graze down at the baseball diamond stand still, forlorn, huddled together under the canopy of trees fringeing the makeshift bleachers.
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Locals calmly fashion ponchos and foot-coverings from plastic bags and ride perched right up on the handlebars of their ancient motos to avoid the sodden foam under the long-since trashed upholstered seats. Nicaraguans are generally unflappable, which is, simultaneously, an endlessly charming superpower, the explanation for various layers of breakdown, and the only way to truly live in relative peace in this environment, one that is so utterly perpetually consistent—during every season—in its intermingling of growth and decay, birth and destruction, abundance and want.
The plants display their opulence flagrantly, shamelessly. They sashay and sway, branches bowing with the weight of water, massive leaves sodden, soon to spring back up when the shower subsides, reinvigorated, sustained, waving, patient, wasting nothing, willing to linger until it’s time once more to eat the sun and blossom. Plant privilege.
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Brown-outs are especially prevalent during rainy season—more common in the evenings— although unlike previous years, we haven’t had any power-outages for more than a few hours since moving into this new house. I feel a combination of sympathy, relief, and a tinge of survivor’s guilt when the chat groups blow up with our foreigner friends and acquaintances asking about who else has lost power, or which of the many dysfunctional gated communities have been affected (they’re all dysfunctional), and who has called Union Fenosa, the electrical company. All the gringos call, not because anyone thinks UF actually cares, but because reaching out to them gives us a sense of purpose and agency, fuelling the various confirmation biases that we cultivate to continue to convince ourselves that this is paradise.
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Everyone’s house is flooded to some extent. For the poor people living in cardboard and corrugated steel structures in the barrios below the luxury developments built into the hills that overlook the bays, it’s ankle-deep mud in every room, and the various irritations and miseries that entails. For the expats and the ruling class, it’s overflowing swimming pools and truck windows accidentally left open. Our front patio is angled in such a way that the water collects in an expansive puddle right in front of the wood-framed glass doors, and every morning we put the kids to work, sweeping the water away from the threshold.
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Like most foreigners, we enjoy the hedonistic amenity of hot water…sort of. Our hot water heater is on a solar system, which means, therefore, that hot showers are only available when it’s dry and sunny, which also happens to be when cold showers are not only sufficient but preferable. What am I doing here? It really could be considerably worse, and is, for the majority in this country. This is also the season when the newbies discover the mould growing in the walls of their half a million dollar builds, along with the countless other corners their contractors cut. Theories of relativity.
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Nothing dries out. No matter how long the clothes and towels flap on the line under the eaves (we don’t have a dryer) they remain damp, and everyone and everything smells faintly rank and mildewed. We have mostly given up on cloth diapers, for the time being, until the sun returns. I bought a package of disposables for baby Margaret, though we’re mostly only using them overnight—she is naked much of the time when we’re home.