Most of the family was in a stunned silence when our then-useless Ford Expedition finally rolled to a stop on the other side of the bridge. An aunt was crying in the seat in front of me. I was imploring my uncle to put the car in park. That was enough driving for the day, thanks. My uncle hopped out of the car, let out a celebratory yewwww, and looked around at us with a grin.
I’d just completed a program studying international environmental law in Costa Rica for the summer. Before heading home, I met my family in Puntarenas, one of a handful of impossibly scenic towns strung around the southern tip of the Nicoya Peninsula. Halfway into our trip, some of us decided to visit nearby Montezuma, where we spent an eventful, boozy night dancing with locals and bonding. It was like The Sun Also Rises, but in Central America.
The next morning we had plans to explore Malpais. I’d read that there was good surfing, so despite being a bit worse for the wear from the night before, I was excited. My uncle, Dennis, at the wheel, we took off down a particularly unforgiving, pothole-addled dirt road in our rented Ford Expedition. My stomach was in the midst of an uprising, and I remember saying something to the effect of “this is the worst thing that has ever happened to me.” In retrospect, that was ill-timed hyperbole.
We hadn’t been driving long when the car started swerving. From the back I could see that my uncle was hunched over the wheel, almost standing up. What I couldn’t see was that he was also stomping hard on the brake, futilely attempting to slow us down.
The dirt path between Montezuma and Malpais is the only one that far south on the Nicoya Peninsula, an area of Costa Rica notorious for its terrible roads. It winds dramatically through dense jungle, and is difficult to navigate when your brakes are functioning properly — ours weren’t.
Immediately my uncle was able to maintain some control by swinging the car from one side of the road to the other. We weaved around a few blind curves, my uncle snaking across the road in an attempt to halt our increasing momentum — a tall order given that there were 12 of us total (yes, 12 people in a Ford Expedition). Still no brakes. And the road felt like it was getting steeper around each turn. We’d quickly reached the point where it would be too dangerous to do anything but steer, and hope for relief ahead.
We narrowly skipped past oncoming cars. A minute passed. More curves revealed nothing but a continuation of a seemingly interminable downhill dirt road. A palpable tension crept into the car, displacing any hope we’d had that the brakes would start working again. At the fastest, we were moving about 50 miles per hour. I’m not sure how many kilómetros that is per hour, but I know it’s many more kilómetros than I was comfortable with. One moment of wrong steering would have had us crashing through the forest.
The novelty of being in a runaway car had worn off, along with my hangover, when flat road finally appeared through a large clearing in the jungle. It was at the bottom of yet another steep pass, and would have been a welcome sight were it not for the very small wooden bridge that was also at the bottom of the hill, suspended above a gully. At the time, it appeared to be the exact width of a Ford Expedition chassis. It looked like it belonged on a golf course.
To make matters worse, there was another car driving toward the bridge from the opposite direction. We were already approaching at an awkward angle, going way too fast, in an over-capacity SUV with no brakes; so, if they tried to get on the bridge, we were absolutely going into the gully. I braced. My uncle, on the other hand, hadn’t flinched.
If there’s one person in my family who is made for these types of scenarios, it’s my uncle. The man took a semester off to hunt moose in Canada. Also, during our trip he would often sincerely muse about giving up the grind to live in a Costa Rican fishing village. People often tell me how similar we are. I’d like to think they’re referencing my adventurous spirit, though I suspect it has more to do with the fact that we kind of look alike. Either way, I hope it’s true.
The other car quickly pulled off the road; no doubt obeying the only Costa Rican traffic law, which states, “The right of way belongs to the person with the least control of his/her vehicle.” So, there was enough space to get by if we could get on the bridge at all.
We reached the bottom of the hill, and my uncle jerked the wheel. The car started to skid in response to the quick correction, its nose lurching onto the wooden crossing. As the front tires regained traction, the back end of the car slid over the dirt-strewn threshold, and onto the bridge. We skated across. It was masterful. I have to believe it’s the closest a Ford Expedition will ever come to being used as a rally car.
The road widened considerably through the clearing, and we coasted to a stop. Two elderly ladies got out of the other car, and approached us cautiously. I thanked them, attempting to explain in broken Spanish what had happened, and that we were fine. We were, somehow. Still, they looked like they were scared for us (it’s also possible they were scared of us, given what they’d just seen).
I still wonder what was going through my uncle’s head as we barreled down that road. Between the knowledge that most of his extended family was in the car, and that things could’ve gone very wrong, probably a lot. I’m sure he was scared, too. I imagine he, too, was wondering how in the hell we’d lost our brakes — a scenario, by the way, that seemingly only unfolds when the mafia wants you dead — on that road. If my uncle and I really are that similar, though, then I know why he was smiling once it was all over.