Measuring Change

UVITA COSTA RICA – Dona Marie watches over the crossroads. The restaurant sign bearing her image has been a landmark here there was little else in this village. But since the highway north of here was completed in 2010, much has changed. Today, there are two banks, two grocery stores, three car rental agencies and numerous restaurants. Dona Marie is no longer the only game in town. Upstairs from the Dona Marie, there used to be a karaoke club for local Ticos. At night, we’d walk through town and hear the drunken voices of locals singing along to Spanish pop tunes. I’m not sure when it closed, but we don’t hear the singing anymore. Instead, there is a local craft brewery.

-->

  

My favorite time of day to walk around is between 4:30 to 5. Sunset is at 5:20 this time of year – although being so close to the equator, it varies little throughout the year. There is a perceptible shift in the collective mood as people gather on the street, chatting and exchanging news about their day – Uvita’s equivalent of rush hour. Today, there was an actual traffic jam of four cars backed up at the stop sign. I never saw anything like that when I started coming down here five years ago.

In November, which is part of the rainy seaon, we’re told that 150 inches of rain fell in two weeks.  That’s got to have an impact on the environment

One man – John – told us that when it rains like that, the rivers are so raging that the sound of the tumbling of the boulders being pushed downstream is deafening.

Such forces leave a definite mark. When Jeff and I walked out to the mile-long Whale’s Tail (The area’s famous sand bar that is shaped like the tail of the visitors that come every September), it had a new appearance.

In the past year since I last visited, a giant pile of smooth river rocks had been deposited near the end of the sand bar. Our guess is that the rains had washed them into the bay from the Uvita River and then the tides swept them onto the sand bar.

Each year, I spend the same three weeks here. So, I measure out the changes to this area in neatly delineated one-year increments. It’s a very short-sighted view.   

I’m reading a book by Jack Ewing, a local ex-pat who came down here in 1972 and bought a cattle ranch, just north of Dominical. In the eighties, he allowed the land to revert back to its natural state. Today, Hacienda Baru is a nature preserve teeming with white-faced capuchin monkeys, agoutis, pacas, coatimundi, otters, crocodiles and even a puma. My guide showed me a line of trees with barbed wires protruding from them. They were once the ranch’s fence posts. Today, they stand more than 50 feet tall.