LIVING LEGENDS: THE COSTA RICAN OXCART

By

ANA HERNANDEZ BROWN

From the sunny porch of the large country house where I am spending a long over-extended vacation, I rapidly tilt my head to my left and to my right, and then again to my left as if I can’t make up my mind which side to look at. The natural landscape that surrounds me has an overwhelming effect on me and that is perhaps the reason why I haven’t been able to escape this place as yet. The house I am at, is sitting atop a hill overlooking to my left the magnificent purple-blue mountains that cradles the central valley, also known as Meseta Central in Costa Rica. The valley or meseta is an elevated plateau with heights that begin at 900 to around 1,800 meters. To my right, to the north, I can almost touch the majestic grayish-blue mountains, where the sun is now playing a game of hide and seek peeking through the tanslucent curtains of mist covering the top of the awesome Braulio Carrillo National Park, one of Costa Rica’s best natural jewls. A long, narrow, winding blacktop road passes right in front of my house. It began snaking its way up from the nearest town below to the Braulio Carrillo mountains until it can’t go any further, ending in a very steep, muddy dirt road.

Both the dountry house and my share of the long winding road are on the outskirts of the city of San Isidro, a small rural town belonging to the province of Heredia, with a population of about 15,000 inhabitants. The peaceful, sleepy town of San Isidro is only about 12 miles east of San Jose, the capital city of Costa Rica. San Jose, is at the center of the central valley, and the fast growing provinces of Alajuela, Heredia and Cartago are San Jose’s nearest neighbors.

Thanks to the constant volcanic activity from the great volcanoes sitting atop the impressive mountain range which surrounds the central valley, the soil has been nourished with ashes and sediments invaluable for the rich agricultural productivity the whole area has enjoyed since colonial times. The modern blacktop road I can see from my porch, was until recently a dirt road. There are only a handful of houses alongside the road and the few automobiles that go by are forced to switch to a slower gear in order to reach the top of the steep hill. Most of the vehicles I see here are made for rough terrain, but there are also some city slickers who drive their fancy BMWs just to see how far up they can take them on the back roads. It is precisely here, between 4x4s and BMWs, where like a vision from the past, slowly inching its way up to the settlements in the mountains, I see an uncommon form of transportation and a living legend: the venerable Costa Rican oxcart complete with its boyero, the man that guides the oxen and keeps an eye on the heavy load he carries on his cart.

The pounding of the two wood tires against the paved road when the oxcart passes by, produces a dull grinding sound, as if someone was grinding bricks or stones. The colorful cart is pulled by a couple of handsome oxen, especially chosen for this task. They were born as baby bulls but are neutered in order to turn them into strong creatures of toil and trained to work in the fields and for pulling loads for the rest of their lives. Oxen are always chosen in twos to form the "yunta", as the pair of oxen is known all over Costa Rica. They are carefully selected for their physical similarities. For aesthetic purposes, they need to be very similar in size and in color so they almost look as twin brother, although not necessarily born to the same mother nor they need to be from the same breed. For more practical purposes, it si crucial that their horns have a similar shape so as to not interfere with the placing of the "yugo", the colorful, well crafted wooden yoke positioned directly over their hards and fastened by a large heavy leather belt around the horns and foreheads of the peaceful animals. The oxen are aligned together side by side in this manner to prepare them for the arduous job of pulling their precious cargo or to help farmers in the fields.

It is believed that in Costa Rica the oxcart goes back to the early Eighteenth Century. They were used by yeoman farmers in the fields to help them plow their lands for agricultural purposes, but the oxcart’s most important contribution was that of transporting the products from the fields to the main city markets. Every product imaginable produced in the fields: sugar can, bananas, cacao, and fresh produce. Even piles of wood and charcoal were taken by oxcart to market. But, of all the products transported by oxcart, it was coffee, known by many in this country as the Grain of Gold, that became the oxcart’s most important cargo. More important perhaps than the real gold from the mines that oxcarts also transported years ago.

Coffee transformed the Costa Rican economy in the mid-1800s, and placed this small country among the most prosperous in Central America, thanks largely to the oxcart, coffee became a very popular product in Europe and as its demand grew, oxcarts were filled to the rim with the coffee grain packed in bulging burlap sacks destined to go overseas. In a long, quiet procession, the oxcarts and their boyeros made the painstaking one-hundred kilometers journey from the central valley to the Pacific port of Puntarenas to devotedly deliver the grain of gold to waiting ships that transported it to the European markets.

The typical Costa Rican boyeros of yesterday and the few remaining ones today, particularly those who were born at the turn of the century, share many similarities. The old boyeros guided their oxen barefoot so the animals and the boyeros’ feet were exposed to the same roughness, warmth or dampness of the terrain during the long journeys. The canvas hat, known in the Costa Rican lingo as "chonete" -still worn by men in rural areas. They are now also popular as souvenirs. They were worn to prevent the damaging effects of the strong sun while working in the fields under the fierce tropical heat. The old boyero wore an apron down to his knees to keep his clothes neat and he always brought along his main work tool, the machete, strapped inside an elegant and elaborate leather case, decorated with a colorful fringe. The few boyeros that one can stil see today, are men usually short on words and guide their oxen as patiently as their ancestors did. They poke the oxen with a long pointed shaft known as a "chuzo" instilling a small amount of pain in the thick skin of the animals to make them obey their orders. Mostly, though, the boyero talks to them using kind words and some unique expressions such as buey!