Osprey, Neto and Me

I love the osprey who spend summers on a tower at the edge of a pond at the Boulder Country Fairgrounds. The resident osprey pair fly in from separate far-away places about the middle of March. And the drama begins. 

Some of us follow the osprey every year, hoping for eggs to hatch and healthy baby birds who learn to fly.

 We don’t know where the osprey spend their winters and we wait anxiously for their arrival. We worry that they may not both arrive safely. Usually the pair arrives on different days. The fun begins as we watch them get to know each other once again. 

The osprey are bonded as a pair until one of them dies. Only then do they find a new partner.

It’s a policy not to name the osprey who return to Boulder every spring. But if they had names, they would be Lynda and Ernesto.

Neto and I are very much like the osprey. For one thing, I’m older than he is. We live far apart, in two separate countries, and once a year we meet up in a familiar place. We try to arrive on the same day, but never at the same time. When we get together, we trade stories about places we’ve been and people we knew together. I imagine that’s what the osprey do, too.

The birds spend time remodeling their nest and making sure they have food. The female shrieks, “Food… Food! I’m hungry. Bring me a big fat fish!” And Ernesto leaves the tower and swoops down to find a fish for them to share.

Nights are especially tender as they share space on their perch, high in the sky, and watch sunset together. 

This year both osprey arrived at the nest on the same day. That’s where mine and Neto’s story differ from the osprey pair. I arrived in Puerto Vallarta on Sunday, April 9, after an especially easy travel day. Friends met me at the airport and took me to lunch before I checked into Las Palomas, the sweet little hotel where Neto and I stay before going by bus to Mazatlán.

While my trip was easy and predictable, Neto’s journey was simply horrible. He boarded the bus in Mazatlán at 10:45 p.m., Saturday night, expecting to arrive in Puerto Vallarta five hours ahead of me. He slept all the way to the state of Nayarit. He awoke when two inspectors boarded his bus in front of a clinic, near the bus terminal in Tepic. It was 3:30 a.m.

“We believe some people on this bus have Covid,” the inspectors announced. “Everyone needs to be tested.” 

At 5:30 a.m., the inspectors allowed the young people to exit the bus, believing that only people over the age of fifty-five might be sick. A few elderly people in the front of the bus were coughing. Neto began to think he had a fever.

Passengers had to surrender their ID’s. They were not allowed to talk to each other or make calls on their telephones. Neto texted me to say he was going to be late. The passengers sat quietly on the bus for four more hours, until 9:30 a.m, when employees of the clinic boarded the bus and began testing people.

 At noon the passengers were informed that they all tested positive for Covid and would be quarantined for 24 hours. My plane was scheduled to arrive in ten minutes.

All the passengers were escorted off the bus and into the clinic. They were given a cot  and a sandwich. I received only sporadic texts from Neto, and most of them were too cryptic to understand. Was he really sick? Was he contagious? Should I catch a plane back to Denver?

I didn’t hear Neto’s voice again until noon on Monday, when he was allowed to make a phone call and leave the clinic. He was not allowed to get on a bus to Puerto Vallarta because, after all, he tested positive for Covid. 

Neto caught a taxi to a different bus company and decided to take a bus to Guadalajara. At 5:00 p.m, Monday afteroon,I received a text from Neto. He was in Guadalajara and expected to meet me at the hotel  in six hours, by 11:00 p.m. 

By midnight, Neto still wasn’t at our hotel. I called him. His bus was not the newer, faster, express bus that travels on the toll road. Instead, it was an older, slower bus that stopped in every small town to pick up more passengers.

At 3:00 a.m, Tuesday morning,  a lovely hotel security guard walked Neto to our room, where I was waiting for him. The trip, which normally takes less than eight  hours, took more than fifty-two. I was as happy as an osprey to see him again! It had been a long, hard flight!!