An Opportunity for a Better Epicenter

Suddenly, the beach sand rumbled and bounced and shook, and monkeys screamed from the trees without end. It was a few minutes to four on April 22, 1991, and my girlfriend (now wife) and I were on a remote Costa Rican beach just north of the border with Panama, lounging under cloudy, humid skies and starting to think about riding our rented mountain bikes back to the village where we were staying. Less than an hour before, even though such a thing doesn’t exist, I had been thinking this feels like earthquake weather. Then, bam.

It was the tectonic movement of a strike-slip fault. Our section of shoreline was lifted 1.4 meters. A tsunami measuring two meters swept into the hamlet of Puerto Viejo, retreated, then returned and retreated several more times. The earthquake, now known as the Bocas del Toro quake, measured 7.7 magnitude on the Richter scale. We were less than a mile from the epicenter.

Ten thousand people were left homeless. Nearly one hundred thirty were killed. We made our way back to Cahuita, tiptoeing over buckled bridges and downed power lines, to find our cinder block motel collapsed on its foundation. That night, one of the two village restaurants began cooking its perishables and serving them to the handful of foreign travelers for free. There was joy—we were okay—and concern—now what?

In the days that followed, with no electricity, cut off from communications, and separated from escape by collapsed bridges, we fended for ourselves by purchasing the little food left at the local tienda (cans of tuna, crackers, hot sauce) and bottles of mineral water from a bar. Locals were kind and generous, fellow travelers passed what information they could. Every night, we gathered by candlelight at the restaurant to share the diminishing food. The mood was, if not quite festive, communal and warm.

Our experience was precisely what author Rebecca Solnit discovered when researching her book, A Paradise Built in Hell, about how people react to disasters. Putting lie to the pop culture myth of feral Darwinism, Solnit learned humans typically respond with altruism, solidarity, and mutual aid. This happy finding forms the foundation of hope on which she bases her optimistic essay, “Flipping the Script,” which begins on page sixty-two and argues the climate crisis can and should be the means for redefining how we see abundance and what we call austerity.

Let me just say that I am tired of reading about the climate, thinking about the climate, and struggling to determine whether and how much we cover the climate in Adventure Journal. But the climate has gone from a bit player that steals the occasional scene to a main character chewing on the scenery from the moment the curtain rises. Now, the climate crisis is everything everywhere all at once, and those of us who spend big chunks of our recreational time outdoors understand this intuitively and empirically. Much as we might like to avoid it, we cannot.

That’s an opportunity. Modern media is filled with apocalyptic reporting, which fits an easy narrative, but if you look, you will find stories of positivity and resilience. In Glen Canyon, Utah, as Zak Podmore reports beginning on page forty, the plummeting waters of Lake Powell are revealing ancient ruins, recovering ecosystems, and rapids now being run by recreational boaters. All were lost, submerged for decades, but are, thanks to drought, returning to the light.

The natural world is resilient. Are we? I believe it to be true with everything I have. In Costa Rica, I saw people sharing, not hoarding. I saw people helping one another to evacuate. I saw hope and even laughter amid the ruins of rubble and drywall. Disasters reveal that which is most important: commitment to life, connection to people, the abandonment of trivialities, distractions, and materialistic baubles. What we need are visions like Solnit’s and examples like the restoring rivers of the Southwest—proof that a better world is there for the making—and I hope, as we move into the future very much together in this, that AJ can play a role in turning this thing around.