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| Dominical, Costa Rica |
When my girlfriend suggested I go to Iceland with her I scoffed, "I don't want to go to a cold island full of white people." It was a stupid and narrow answer, and I was punished with the discovery that I was among the throngs of white tourists in Costa Rica. I left Manuel Antonio National Park hoping to escape some of them and to meet my friend John in a small beach town called Dominical.
The bus was full of local Ticos (a term for Costa Ricans) when I arrived in Dominical,
but nobody else got off. The town consisted of two dirt roads full of
restaurants, bar and surf shops. Muddy water filled rutted ditches in the middle of the dirt roads. The beach featured signs prohibiting swimming
because of rip tides. I was halfway hopeful that this was the real Costa Rican culture I was looking for.
Tortilla
Flats was the only bar in town with its lights on. It was open-air with a long roof made of lacquered
bamboo covered by tin. A line
of palm trees separated it from the beach, where a gray curtain limited the
depths of the Pacific horizon and issued a coming storm. The waves emerged
from the curtain and grew to more than ten feet tall and then broke hard. When the storm began the only thing louder
than the thunder were the coconuts that the wind punched from their perch in
the palm trees then fell against the tin roof like gunshots. Blue
crabs and stray dogs scrambled for cover in the bar when the rain began. A howler monkey watched between dry rails of
a wooden staircase. Five televisions
showed the Braves and Giants baseball game. The bar was full of white people with American accents.
I sat at
the bar watching the game and taking notes.
Bumbarner was hitless through five innings. I talked to the
Americans at the bar thinking they were tourists, but they were residents. And
they had all moved here to surf. Steve had
lived here for four years and worked at the bar; James had lived here nine years
and worked at the surf shop; Rich moved here seven years ago and now ran the only dive shop in town. I sat between Rich and Johnny, an older man
in glasses who wore a fisherman's hat that he said made him look like a “wanker.” He believed that people were ruining the
world and their own miserable lives unless we allowed a philosopher king to rise up to lead
us. And that Google, too, needed to hire philosophers. When I asked him where he was from he stared off into the storm. Intermittent lightning illuminated the ocean
and its monstrous waves appeared as if frozen in their breaks, large watery
monsters foaming at the lips with whitewash, before the ocean went black and the dark was followed by the crash of those waves and the flickering of
power in the bar.
“I guess I’m a South Pacific Scot,” he said. “I could say I’m from
Planet Earth but that answer is too far out there for some people.”
I asked him why he moved here.
Again he stared off, a drunk philosopher, into the Pacific storm for another ten
seconds. He gave me a complicated answer
but the truth came out eventually: to surf.
Johnny and Rich both told me their histories. They were long, multi-chapter stories, like those of
traveling beach-dwelling hermits, living on the shores, captainin boats across foreign seas, avoiding their familes, farming, working, but mostly chilling. Each destination was described as a whimsical stepping stone that
led them to here, Dominical, Costa Rica, the fantastical reward for their go-with-the-flow
lives. They never talked about the idea of a next destination. They had arrived at their dream.
"The key to good health, to life," Johnny said, "is to shoot away five times a week."
"Shoot off?" I asked.
"He means to get off, you know, ejaculate," interjected Rich, now eating a second dinner after a long work day.
"All my friends with prostate cancer, didn't shoot away enough," Johnny said. I told him I never had a privacy in Costa Rica since I was traveling.
"Then sneak off to the bushes. That's what I do when my girlfriend doesn't satisfy me enough."
An hour later I watched Johnny pretend to slink off towards the bushes. From under the trees, he winked at me, a beer in one hand a box of food in the others. Then he shuffled the items into one hand and got into his truck. He attempted to back up five times between the palms before successfully driving away
into the rain. The game flickered on and off.
Bumbarner lost his no-hitter but the Giants won 6-0. Then the power went out with a clap of
thunder and a few seconds later the lightning lit up the waves, and this time they seemed
bigger, as if high tide might soon swallow all the bar. I could not imagine surfing them.
The next day John and I went surfing.
My first-time surfing, in Ecuador, I caught two waves. It was a feeling unlike others, riding water, participating in nature by joining its current, being weightless, and no word could describe it except…cool, but not cool as a descriptor but as a feeling. I understood, in that fraction of an experience, why surfers like Rich and Steve and Johnny pursued the
life. But I never caught another wave
again. I only ever rode the
whitewash. After three hours of being
battered around and sucking in saltwater I quit for the day and went to read my
book in the hammock.
At sunset I returned for the view. I sat on a log of driftwood and watched the sun go
down in a myriad of warm colors. Iguanas and crabs scampered along the beach
and a couple monkeys hung around the palm trees. The large waves bounced clouds
of mist against the sand and sent them upward, suspended in the air then disappearing into the remaining stretch of blue sky. All the best surfers were out with their
boards, as they had likely went twice every day, at dawn and dusk. I saw Steve and James and even several Ticos. They carved and cut and stalled. They trimmed their way through barrels and turned against the lips of the breaks and then out again. They jumped and spun
and switched positions with ease. They
were very very good. And as the sun set a few came in, but the best stayed out, until it was dark and they appeared like dimming shadows against the waves, refusing to get off their boards and come ashore.
The next day I tried again. But the waves were bigger. It was high tide and
instead of sand I was surfing over rock so I decided to quit for the sake of my health. On my way back I saw a local Tico running toward the water with his board. He had dark skin and long dark hair that blew behind him in the wind, an iconic profile of a native surfer, headed for the waves. His face was plain until he got into the
water and splashed against the first small wave. Then, still standing, he threw back his head, whipped his hair,
and laughed at the sun. This is what he
lived for. The next wave. To get his
legs off the land and ride the water. To me, the life seemed like it could be dull,
the same thing everyday, but for the surfer, the life is as different as each wave, each moment renewed by the next set
of breaks, as they lay in wait on their boards for the perfect wave to join. This was the
dream, like Johhny and Rich’s dream,
attainable here on nature’s rich coast of Costa Rica. But it was a specific
dream; it was a surfer’s dream.
When the Tico saw me watching him, he stopped whipping his hair and his
face went plain again, Then he
tucked his board against his chest, duck-dived under the oncoming break, and paddled
out where the other surfers waited on their boards.
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| Dominical, Costa Rica |
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