The Rainy Season


 

Soon after Ann and I were married, we traveled to Costa Rica. She was taking her last college course as a study abroad course in biodiversity, so I flew down with her a week ahead of time, and we made a honeymoon out of it.


This was the mid-1990s, and the Internet existed then, but it wasn’t worth much (although in many ways it was markedly better than it is now). To do international travel in 1996, you got a Lonely Planet guidebook and made the best of it.

We spent a few days on the east coast in a lovely little village called Cahuita, where I spent $10 a night for a hut on the beach with hot running water. We then took a crowded, bumpy bus ride back across the country to the west coast, to the much more upscale Manuel Antonio. We knew it was the rainy season because our guidebook told us so. As we settled into our hotel, the rain was torrential. We just shrugged. “So this is the rainy season I guess,” was our take. Our hotel lost power, which basically just meant the beer wouldn’t be as cold. And the buses quit running due to bad roads, but I was able to book a 4x4 jeep taxi to get back to San Jose for my flight. We were well into this experience before learning it was just the rainy season; it was a hurricane. There were mudslides killing people on the other side of the same mountain that we were on. We didn’t know this because we didn’t speak any Spanish, and no one around us spoke any English.

I write this as a hear tree trunks crashing against the piers that my current house is sitting on, and the neighbor a few doors down just experienced a mudslide that pushed his shed forward a few feet, nearly


blocking the walkway to 14 of the houses in our little beach community. There was also another landslide behind houses 61-62, but they didn’t have any damage.

I need to throttle back my usual flippant tone and say that I feel for all the people affected by flooding in the area this past week. When I was in the National Guard, my unit was activated for the Flood of 93, and I saw just how devasting floods can be. More recently, I’ve done some disaster response work in other flood areas. Every one is different, but they all leave behind a mess that takes a lot of time and effort to recover from. 

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