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.

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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.

Trying to get out of my head

I am struggling. I’m starting to feel like something is wrong with me. I try to focus on the words, but they’re not coming. I feel like there are only a precious few minutes each day when I am able to think. If I miss that window, my ability to feel much of anything is gone.

I’m pretty sure it’s the medication. (That, and maybe anxiety about our incoming president.) As I understand it, the metoprolol limits my liver’s ability to process adrenaline. So, I suspect once I use up my day’s allotment, I simply cannot get excited about anything.  For months, I had been overwhelmed with gratitude that I had not died from my cardiac arrests. People told me that eventually that feeling would fade. After the U.S. election, I felt the gratitude slipping away from me as if drifting on a current. I used to be able to take Adderall to clear the fog. But since my heart attack, I'm no longer able to take it. 

For the record, I just successfully ordered my breakfast entirely in Spanish. A very tasty order of Gallo Pinto, which is rice and black beans, along with eggs, a small tortilla and a wedge of queso blanco. It’s really pathetic to note that as an accomplishment. But I’ve been feeling so stupid lately that I had started to doubt even my ability to navigate through something as simple as a breakfast order. Small victories. 

God, I sound tedious. I’ll talk to the doctor. In the meantime, I am going to simply abandon any attempt at structure and switch to stream of consciousness.

In Enlace periodico, a small newspaper about the Brunca region, I ran across this beautiful quote from one of the featured writers, Uriel Rojas Rojas, a member of the Bruncas, one of Costa Rica’s indigenous tribes. Rojas documents the history of his people.

“Es necesario saber vivir en la diversidad, eso fortalice el verdadero sentido de la existencia humana."

Which translated means, “It is necessary to know how to live in diversity, that strengthens the true meaning of human existence.”

Hacking my way through the jungle

I need to write.

I keep waiting for that grand moment of clarity when the words careening around in my brain will add up to something coherent and meaningful. That they will cut through the chaos of 2016 like a machete through jungle.  

But the clarity doesn’t come. And the jungle in my mind remains choked with vines that grow faster than I can push away.

Which is why, I have decided, that I need to stop waiting for this grand moment and just start writing.

Maybe the act of typing will be my machete. Maybe I just need to force myself to randomly hack away, not worrying about where my blows land, until the cuts become cleaner with practice and I will start to see the path ahead of me.

Which is why, starting today, I will revive this long-ignored blog and will write. Every day. To get through 2017 and what so many of us fear the new year will bring.

In less than a month, Donald Trump will be president. Seriously, how the hell did we get here? I want to figure out what I can do, how I can be part of the fight against the expected attacks on civil liberties, public education, labor rights, the environment, immigrants, racial justice, science, religious freedom, health insurance ... it all feels like a game of whack-a-mole on steroids.  

In my 52 years on this Earth, I've acquired a few skills that might be helpful in standing up for social justice. But at this point, I'm so overwhelmed and confused, that I don't know how to contribute. Which is why I need the clarity. 

I will write about what I am thinking about at any given moment. My writing will meander and I won’t angst over my lack of cohesion. Because that’s the point. Some posts will be long and rambling. Others, short and maybe kind of pointless. Some of them, I hope, will be good enough that I will sit back and wonder what orifice I managed to pull those insights from. But, I repeat, I will write every day.

I am announcing this vow on a public site, so that I will take it seriously enough to live up to it.

My father always told me that if you want to lose weight, you tell the world you’re going on a diet.  Fear of public failure can be a powerful motivator.

Even though I will write in a public forum, this web site will be my little secret, anonymous to all but the most random of explorers. That way, I won’t be afraid to write poorly, as I hack through my jungle full of thoughts.

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I am sitting on a beat-up couch under the large open-air canopy of The Tucan Hotel, in the tiny town of Uvita, Costa Rica. This is the fifth year that I have plopped myself on this same couch, surrounded by brightly colored hammocks strung about, where I watch the owners Tra and Bette, American and Italian respectively, the Italian cooks, Christian and Al, and the Tica housekeeper Loraina, take care of the parade of young international hippies who drift in and out.

My husband is working today on the property that we bought four years ago, a sliver of land that sits between the Pacific Ocean and the beginning of what is known as the Talamunca Mountains. White-faced capuchins and howler monkeys visit our property, as well as coatimundi, anteaters, toucans, grissons and at least one jagurundi, a kind of wild cat slightly larger than a lynx. 

We chose this location, because it overlooks a stunning land formation that juts out into the ocean. A mile-long vertical sand bar, it is shaped like a giant whale's tail. Bahia bellena. 

My husband’s plan is to build a resort here. He has hired a team of Tico farmers, who drive down from the mountains every day to construct it. Mucho trabajar. 

Me? I’m spending the next three weeks here on vacation, playing housewife. Which is a nice break from my daily life. And, at the risk of sounding privileged, much needed, considering the year that I have had. Which I will explain later.

The money to buy the land and to pay for all this construction comes from the beer cans that Jeff has spent his life – and our life savings – collecting. He has amassed the largest collection in the world, which he has been selling off piecemeal. A weird way to finance this type of project, I know.  If my life were a television sitcom, I would remind any readers at this point that Jeff’s plan is so crazy, it just might work.

I feel a breeze blowing through The Tucan and it’s past 11 a.m. Enough writing for the day. I think I will go in search of sloths.

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Pura vida.

Goin' to Kathmandu

In September, my mother and I visited Nepal. While in Kathmandu, we befriended a couple of Americans, Amanda Contrino and Joshua Bookman, who were getting married at a tiny village about an hour outside of the city and scored an invite. The event caused a great stir with the people in the village. A woman asked if my mother would pose with her for a photo.