Kat Wiebe: The Beat Goes On

Playa Blanca

In 1992 I discovered a place in Central America, a powerful, potent, moody, rainforest beside the Caribbean that had been settled by Islanders who hailed from Africa. Cahuita was quite the contrast from Banff, where I had been living since I left home after high school. My childhood friend said, let’s go on a trip, and pointed to this impossibly remote spot on a map! I said, why not?

Calle Humphries

Cahuita

Only a year after a major earthquake shook the country apart, the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica was still recovering, and primitively outfitted, with halved logs for bridges, and rustic electrical wiring that was reliably unreliable. The highway that skirted the Caribbean was potholed and rutted, and the forty-km journey from the region’s main city could take an hour. The town, when finally approached, seemed far, far away from civilization. Its culture and landscape so unique, that it felt like another world.

Plantain leaf.

The place hit me: orchids and reef and reggae and rainforest.

It was just so powerfully different from where I was from. Yet it resonated so deeply with me as a human being. Many travelers felt it too, and indulged in Bacchanalian partying that created a tourist economy for a small segment of the town.

But below that edgy scene, was a quiet rural lifestyle that evolved from generations of toil. And hard-working families that understood the cycles of growth and were still utterly connected to the land, and to the community that sustained them through the years they were (happily, many will say) segregated from the Spanish society of Costa Rica. The families that lived here were descended recently from cacao farmers, turtle hunters, fishermen, and still rendered their traditional coconut oil in the backyards and grew kitchen gardens full of herbs and roots and fresh fruit, and used the gigante palms’ plentiful coconut milk to simmer their rice and beans.

Letty's ma.

If you could find your way past the drunken men shouting ribald comments from the boarded sidewalks of the rickety town, and not get sucked into cheap booze and cigarettes at the Crocodile Bar where white women from Europe and Canada bidded for the hunkiest surfers who competed in a sandy beach volleyball arena at sundown; if you were sober enough to turn left at the Correo on the corner and walk past the Guardia Rural station where uniformed guards with machine guns patrolled below bare streetlights, you might catch a glimpse into the quiet, bucolic life that was conducted on the gorgeous lush coast.

Letty's kitchen.

You would see rainbow-hued laundry making sails in the limpid afternoons, cozy dwellings on stilts painted pink and purple, yawning shadows cast by the Afroed palms in the breathtaking heat, and the sexy Caribbean in hues of turquoise and blues, rolling, waving, stretching to the horizon beside black sand, protecting the reef.

Home away from home.

Around that corner I found a family that facilitated my deep and soulful immersion in this place, in this culture. And I’ve spent the last twenty years living with it, and from it, going back many times, bringing friends and family here.