Whenever I come back from a trip outside the U.S., I'm always struck by details of American life that I hadn't much noticed before. Yesterday, on my way to meet The Mouse for lunch in D.C.'s Chinatown, I realized that skyscrapers block the sun. BLOCK THE SUN. Not to get all John Muir on you, but isn't that sort of odd? Blocking large swaths of land from the sun and covering them with concrete means that nothing will grow there. For much of human history, if nothing would grow on the land, there would be nothing for people to eat. And if there were nothing for people to eat, they would starve and die. But instead, we grew really big brains and used them to build really big buildings, transport crops from elsewhere, and otherwise conquer the Earth and all of the limitations it imposed. Progress.
This all stands in contrast to my experiences of the last two weeks. Down in tiny Samara, on the Pacific side of Costa Rica, we spent two very slow and quiet weeks living as the Earth dictated. We slathered on lotion to block the sun's rays. We napped in the hottest part of the day when it was too hot to do anything else. We swam during high tide. Swatted flies that competed for our lunch, grew accustomed to the ants that crawled in our room. Awoke with the birds and slept when the sun set. Initially, the change-up of my normally self-directed routine made me restless. But in the end, I fell into step with nature's constant -- and often inconvenient -- rhythm. For us, it was a step back to a simpler time that existed many, many generations ago in our own homeland.
Three years ago, a friend spent a summer in Samara teaching English. When I told him today that two American car rental companies have set up offices in Samara, he was shocked. Pablo, the Costa Rican man who took us to a nearby island for snorkeling last week, told us that Samara did not have any white people roaming its streets five to ten years ago. "It's good and it's bad," he said. "The tourism is good for our economy and it gives us jobs, but it also introduces our children to new people with new ideas and new ways of thinking. That's not always good."
We could see the wariness on locals' faces. Not resentment so much as resignation -- an understanding that their conflicting feelings don't even matter because the change they're witnessing is inevitable. It's an unstoppable process that has already been thrust into motion. Italians, Americans, Germans, Canadians -- they're all snapping up property and building roomy houses and comfy motels to hold more of their kind. They hire locals to cook and clean and transport and guard, thus providing jobs to fuel the local economy. But they also drive up prices. And as Pablo told us, "People here were getting along just fine before tourism."
Samara is still relatively unknown to tourists. But as vacationers seek out spots that are quieter and less touristy than Tamarindo or Jaco, they'll trickle into Samara with increasing regularity. And to accommodate those tourists, Samara may grow to resemble the very areas that those travelers are trying to avoid. And then one day, when Samara perhaps has a Burger King and a Subway and a giant, all-inclusive resort, travelers will move on to the next beach town that is purer, less contaminated with the world they are trying to escape. They may leave behind a town that attracts only tourists who are less interested in cultural exchange than in packaged experiences that sample fragments of local life but never push them out of their comfort zones. A town that has changed irreversibly.
I love visiting other countries and cultures. It challenges my own ways of thinking and shakes up my routines and notions about the world. It makes me a better global citizen. But as much as we gain from our sojourns into other worlds, we leave behind traces of our own societies' values. We show up in our fashionable clothing with our ultra-portable laptops, shiny cameras and North Face gear, and we impart our ideas of progress. But is progress equal to to having more money to acquire more things? Is it the ability to buy a Coca-Cola on every corner? Is progress an ethic that values work more than leisure? The existence of farming conglomerates that grow, distribute and sell produce for lower prices?
Or are we merely teaching, by example, how to live in fruitless pursuit of the material happiness that is marketed to us? Are we, in effect, telling people who are happy and self-sufficient that they're measuring themselves by the wrong standards? That they're actually unhappy and poor and didn't even know it?
I don't know the answer. Maybe these changes are uncomfortable only for the one generation that lives to see life clearly on both sides of such progress -- the before and the after. Maybe the dark and the light of human nature -- the greed and the beautiful desire to achieve for achievement's sake -- conspire to make such change inevitable.
I know it's not black and white. But I think that exploring the shades of grey would make all travelers a little more aware of the exchange we take part in with every border we cross. And wouldn't that be progress?
