It’s been my dream to live by the ocean ever since I got my first taste of it as a teenager. I grew up in Toronto, and in 1985, when I was 16, my family vacationed in Hawaii. We went to a little resort where I got my first surf lesson, and I immediately knew I wanted to surf, to be near water, to live that life. In 2010, at 41, I made the dream real. I wound down the small ad agency I ran in Toronto and moved to a small town called Ojochal on Costa Rica’s south Pacific coast.
So I got away from sea level. Ojochal is in a little valley, partly surrounded by a U-shaped ridge, and in 2015 I moved to a small hillside house. That same year, I also left Canada behind for good, to truly dedicate myself to my new community. I got involved in charitable work, organizing lifeguards and collaborating with local groups to improve safety on the beaches .
Driving on a local road one dark night, I skidded to a stop just short of a giant boulder that had rolled onto the highway. More than once, my wife and I just barely missed huge landslides along the Cerro de Muerte, or the Hill of Death, en route to her parents’ place. An acquaintance of mine died when his Jeep was swept away by a flash flood while he crossed a ford—a low-water river crossing used often by locals.
We dealt with lightning strikes during the rainy season. Once, our washing machine exploded after lightning hit an electrical pole beside the house. Our driveway washed out repeatedly. Falling trees cut our power and phone lines two or three times each season, until we dug a 400-plus-metre trench to bury them. And every year I cut back the foliage from the house—as the summers got hotter, we missed the shade, but it was better than a tree crushing the house.
It was busy the first morning. Women were cleaning mud out of their houses and men were collecting water and supplies. The water had receded, leaving a brown ring—anywhere from calf to knee level—on every wall and door. Chairs, plates and furniture were scattered about. The mud was so deep I had to keep scooping out my boots. A woman named Marisol showed me her fridge, which lay outside her house, on its side. “Do you still have a mattress?” I asked.
And yet by 2019, my family—which by then included a baby son—was asking if Costa Rica was the right place for us. We started to think beyond our own lifetime, to what we were leaving for our child and his generation. It wasn’t just the hurricane, but the constant push and pull of the elements, the lack of infrastructure and the knowledge that it was all just going to get worse. At the same time, local families were being displaced as neighbourhoods filled with expats and their new homes.