The following
article appeared in Poets & Writers, March-April, 2002:
Buddha
in the Mango Grove
by
A.E. Peterson
Hidden
halfway up an unnamed mountain in the Central Valley of Costa
Rica, looking out over a valley of fruit trees, soft rolling hills,
and a scattering of brightly colored houses, is the Julia and
David White Artists' Colony, a little-known enclave for writers
and visual artists. The Colony was founded in 1998 by William
White, an expatriate from the United States, as a place for serious
artists to reside and work. It is also an opportunity to experience
living in Costa Rica, one of the few countries in the world that
has no army.
Costa
Rica's Central Valley is a patchwork region of steep mountains,
winding dirt roads, and small, dusty towns. The landscape is dotted
with shiny coffee bushes, tall fruit trees, horses, and cattle.
The land is highly fertile because of the concentration of ash
from the eruptions of nearby volcanoes Poas and Irazu. On the
slopes of Poas, sweet, plump strawberries grow.
Nearly
4 million people live in Costa Rica, including more than 25,000
expatriates from the United States. Two-thirds of the entire country's
population live in the Central Valley. The popularity of the region
probably has much to do with the climate: Because of the high
elevation, the weather is always cool and pleasant, with temperatures
usually lingering in the 60s and 70s. Costa Ricans say that in
this part of the country, it is eternally springtime. The rainy
season, July through December, is the most vibrant time of the
year. Plants grow tall, colors change from yellow to deep green,
and each tree seems to bear some kind of fruit. It is also during
the rainy season that the Colony hosts its residents.
Eighty-four
writers and visual artists have worked and lived at the Colony
since it opened. Currently there are facilities to host four artists
at a time—two writers and two visual artists. Cottages for
two composers are being built and should be completed by the 2002
season. Residents usually stay for one month, although longer
residencies can be arranged under special circumstances. The Colony
provides accommodations, studio space, and all meals. Travel expenses
to Costa Rica, which can be quite expensive, are the responsibility
of the resident. There are no formal requirements of artists except
to be present at the Colony on weekdays.
When
they arrive, residents are welcomed at the San José airport
by White or his assistant and are then loaded into an SUV and
driven out on the highway, past fast-food restaurants, hotel complexes,
and a giant shopping mall. It takes approximately 25 minutes to
reach the town of Ciudad Colón, and along the way the North
American influences begin to dwindle. The road narrows, English
words disappear from signs, high-rise hotels give way to one-story
stucco houses. Just before town, there is a turnoff onto an unpaved
road. Roosters and dogs roam before the SUV's path, the road rises
steeply, a grazing white horse lifts her head, and then an orange
gate appears, marking the entrance to William White's farm. Inside
the gate, a sign in Spanish warns, Danger. Do Not Enter. Poisonous
Farm of Snakes. You Can Be Eaten, or something like that, and
a cobbled drive winds through a grove of bamboo, past White's
house, on to the artists' facilities.
Residents
reside and work in a square building that faces the road. On the
front porch, leather rocking chairs made by local artisans provide
a place to read or to watch the hummingbirds flutter among the
tall heleconia. The two visual artists' studios are on the top
floor. Each is a large, high-ceilinged room with three walls of
windows that offer plenty of natural light during the day and
a panorama of the star-filled sky at night. The windows to the
south face the valley, and the north-facing windows overlook a
plateau of guanacaste trees and bamboo.
The
writers' studios are on the ground floor. Each has a desk, a full
bed, and a bathroom with a shower. The rooms are simple and pleasant.
Desks are set in front of large windows, and it is easy to spend
the better part of a morning watching the butterflies drift by,
listening to the creak of the bamboo, thinking of the sweetness
of a mango that has just fallen off a nearby tree. (It is said
that one of the Buddha's favorite places to meditate was in a
grove of mango trees. At the Colony, mango trees are everywhere.)
However, the studios can also be somewhat noisy. Not only are
the footsteps of the artists working overhead audible, but other
sounds drift up from the valley and along the road: dogs barking,
roosters crowing, church bells tolling. The acoustics of the valley
cause sounds to be amplified, which can be distracting.
Next
to the studios is the Nine Muses, a one-room building that houses
a kitchen and living room and provides a computer with Internet
access. Residents gather here to talk and prepare breakfast and
lunch, using groceries that the Colony provides. If the food supply
runs low, which occasionally happens, residents may go outside
and gather fruit. They may also buy groceries very cheaply at
one of the stores in Ciudad Colón. To reach the town, one
turns out of the gate of the farm and walks down the steep hill,
past the horse and roosters, over the bridge. The center of town
is not far. Approximately
ten thousand people live in Ciudad Colón, and the main
road may seem surprisingly chaotic after the pace of Colony life.
Buses grumble and cars clatter down the road, chattering schoolchildren
in light blue and navy uniforms fill the sidewalks, music drifts
from open doors. There are grocery stores, lunch counters (called
sodas), a post office, a café, and several pharmacies.
And if all of this is not enough, one can catch a bus that leaves
every few minutes for San José, the capital of Costa Rica,
where even greater distractions can be found.
On
weekdays at the Colony, dinner is served in White's house, a simple,
one-story rambler that is within sight of the studios. Residents
gather around the dining room table and feast on regional dishes—a
majority of which feature rice, beans, plantains, tilapia (a freshwater
fish), and yucca root—accompanied by frothy fruit drinks
(called refrescos). White usually joins the residents for the
meal, recounting the day's news from the television and slipping
jokes into the conversation whenever possible. The meals are usually
lively (during my stay, at the end of one dinner everyone broke
out into rounds of "Old MacDonald"), and they are often
followed by ice cream. It is a time for residents to discuss how
the day's work went, and it is also a time for White to enjoy
the company of the artists and to entertain them with one of his
many strange anecdotes.
White
is a thoughtful, quick-witted man with a soft Southern accent.
For much of his life he practiced as a clinical psychologist in
Los Angeles, but he began thinking about moving to Costa Rica
in 1990. Now 74, he has a sharp memory for names and events and
often spends afternoons sitting on his porch, looking down across
the hills of mango trees, recounting to visitors stories of his
children, his family, and his childhood in Georgia and Alabama.
He was raised by a liberal family in the segregated South. In
Mississippi, his grandfather dreamed of living to see black and
white children attend school together, a dream that was in fact
realized before he died. His father, a football coach who served
in both World Wars, was an outspoken pacifist. White says that
he learned a great deal about the realities of war from his father,
who taught him, in White's words, that "war does not work
as a means of solving problems. War disguises the existing problem
and postpones a real solution, while at the same time creating
new and always bigger problems. Thousands, even millions, of innocent
people are murdered in the process."
In
1991, when the Gulf War began, White decided that he wanted to
leave the United States for good. He says, "I saw George
Bush begin firing up the nation, turning Saddam Hussein into ‘evil'
while the United States was depicted as ‘good.' The more
evil Hussein was made to look, the more evil George Bush seemed
to me, until they became indistinguishable. How could the people
fall for it?" Later, White adds, "Like father, like
son. The younger Bush is doing the same thing, and the people
fall for it again. War is an addiction in the United States."
Costa
Rica abolished its military in 1948. White first became interested
in the country in 1987, when Oscar Arias Sánchez, then
its president, was awarded the Nobel Prize for drafting a peace
plan that led to the end of a long period of violent conflict
in Central America. After a trip to Costa Rica, White decided
that he wanted to live there. On his fifth visit, in 1991, he
bought the 17-acre farm that now houses the Colony.
At
that time, there was only a shack and a barn on the property.
White planned to build a house to use as a home base and to spend
much of the year traveling. His two children were grown, and he
had always wanted to travel. He spent one year converting the
barn into his house, then built a second house for visitors. But
in 1994, just as everything seemed to be coming together and he
was about to set off traveling, his daughter, Julia, committed
suicide. A poet and playwright with degrees from MIT in both literature
and astrophysics, Julia had worked in the Space Lab at the University
of California at Berkeley and at the Royal Court Theatre in London.
She was 29 years old. A year and a half later, White's son, David,
died of a drug overdose while visiting Spain. David was a composer
and musician. He was 33.
White
describes the next two years as a kind of stupor. He sat on his
porch and looked down into the valley, thinking only of his children's
deaths. Then, in 1997, he began to focus on the idea of founding
the artists colony as a memorial to them. "I had to do something
to keep from going batty," he says.
For
much of his life, White had entertained the idea of creating a
space for artists to work. Many of his friends and acquaintances
have been notable artists and writers, among them James Baldwin,
Aldous Huxley, Henry Miller, Betty Friedan, Anna Mahler, and Roy
Harris. (When I asked how he'd made friends with these people,
he said he had no idea. A friend once told him, "Artists
like you because you have an interest in what they're doing but
you're no competition to them.") One evening he appeared
at dinner with a peacock feather and said that in the late 1940s,
when he worked as a reader for the Sewanee Review, he went to
visit Flannery O'Connor at her Georgia farm, and finding her gone,
took away with him several peacock feathers that were strewn about
her backyard.
The
idea for the Colony sprung from White's interest in what artists
do and his desire to support them; it was realized as a memorial
to White's children and the artists within them. Not only does
the Colony bear their names, but their portraits hang in the dining
room, painted from photographs by Pat Berger, a former resident.
Another former Colony member, Noel Harvey, has undertaken the
project of publishing much of Julia's poetry.
The
Colony is in its fourth year now, and although it has gone through
much development, there is still an unspoiled beauty to the farm.
Several paths wind up through the hills, and there are many fruit
trees, including papaya, coconut, banana, orange, lemon, sweet
lemon, grapefruit, water apple, and avocado. Coffee bushes are
scattered across the hills, and in the autumn, when the beans
turn bright red, they are harvested. Birds are abundant, including
several kinds of hummingbirds, parrots, and macaws. A sloth was
once spotted moving slowly through the trees. There are snakes,
salamanders, and frogs. There are also countless varieties of
butterflies.
It
is easy to become enchanted with the lush, rich beauty of the
farm. However, the Colony is still young, and as it grows, a good
deal of construction is taking place. The farm that once held
only a shack and a barn is now dotted with several buildings,
and more will be built. Currently, in addition to the artists'
facilities and White's house, there are three other houses on
the property that White rents out for income to fund the Colony.
Another small building, called the Biblioteca, holds a few relics
from Julia's and David's lives; it also holds Julia's ashes. White
plans to build at least one more house to rent out, two composers'
cottages, and an amphitheater. He also hopes to construct several
gazebos with electrical outlets for writers with laptops who wish
to work outside. In addition, there are plans for a building to
host visual art and writing conferences from January through June,
when the Colony is closed.
Plans
are also underway to build new cottages for the writers in secluded
locations, away from the noise of rest of the farm. They will
be constructed from the golden wood of bitter cedar trees, harvested
from White's land. (Costa Rican law requires that any cutting
of trees be approved by a government agency and that every tree
removed be replaced.) Each cottage will be located in a forested
area above the other buildings. From here, it is a short walk
to the top of the farm, where there is a stunning view: a patchwork
of fertile farms, a rolling green valley, the folds of distant
mountains, and the glimmer of the Pacific Ocean, all spreading
out gracefully below.
