The 45-member hippie commune at the Pure Life Treehouse Community in southern Costa Rica is yet to learn of the Covid-19 pandemic, native Jerry de Jong said Monday, adding that residents spend most of their time pondering the cosmos and aligning their chakras, not reading news.
“You news, you lose man,” de Jong said Monday beneath a local coconut tree in Puerto Jiménez. “We spend our time trying to be en-lightened, not en-frightened.”
De Jong, a 56-year-old Dutch-Canadian with a pandemic haircut who’s lived at the Pure Life Treehouse Community for two years, said he hasn’t heard any news since the Notre Dame cathedral burned in 2019. He was thus shocked upon his reentrance to civilization yesterday to find everyone in the town of Puerto Jiménez wearing masks.
“It looked like the four horsemen of the apocalypse and Wal-Mart had a merger,” de Jong said of the Palí supermarket he visited in town. “I was like ‘Que pasó’ and ‘pura vida’ and all that, but people kept talking about Coroner’s virus and Koveed-19 and I was like ‘I don’t even know what that is, man’.”
De Jong, who left the commune in pursuit of a new flip-flop, said he has no plans to inform treehouse residents of the pandemic upon his return to the community.
“I’m not trying to be the town crier for a bunch of off-grid hippies,” de Jong said. “We rarely leave the community so unless butterflies carry the virus, I think we’re good brother. Thanks for the head’s up though.”
Prior to riding back to the treehouse on a wild horse, de Jong told El Peji that this would be his final visit to civilization.
“Two years in a treehouse and now everything out here looks like Mad Max,” de Jong said. “I’d rather spend my days naming tree frogs and weaving dreamcatchers than sit inside and wash my hands 37 times a day like you freaks.”
El Pejibaye 