Summer won’t go away. The afternoon clouds and cooling rains have been few. We are a third of the way through May, and Green Season has yet to step forward. From 8 in the morning until 4ish in the afternoon, the heat of the sun is best avoided. I sit on the back patio in the shade, moving my rocker and floor fan whenever a shaft of sunlight encroaches on my space.
I’m not complaining. I came here for year-round warmth. All the rest as well, amazing greenery, mountains plunging down to rainforested oceans, smoking volcanoes, microclimates, and wildlife galore, but the climate was the clincher. I love the sunshine and the heat. Other places have amazing scenery and wildlife too, take Alaska for example, but you freeze your ass off most of the year in those places.
Keeping cool is the key. It can be a challenge. I have never had air conditioning, not even when I lived at sea level. “Air conditioning is for wimps” is one of my mantras in Ticolandia. I remember a world where air conditioning was a luxury that you went out to enjoy. The movie theatre, the bowling alley, restaurants, banks, offices of doctors and lawyers, all places you could temporarily chill out in that freon-powered air. Now there are too many people who cannot live without it.
This is how much times have changed: Growing up, my family often vacationed at a Delaware beach town on the Atlantic Ocean. We stayed in cottages with windows open and fans blowing. Sometime in the early 1970s, a large oceanfront house was built. It featured central air conditioning, the whole house cooled by a massive, constantly humming unit. To us it was a sacrilege. Why seal up your house and miss the steady breezes and the briny air?
You came to the beach for sun, sand, salty water and got sunburnt and slept by the slow whirr of a fan, and awoke in the early morning with the air now cool enough to pull your slim cotton bedsheet over your body.
Those days are long gone. The average person is infinitely softer. The idea of taking a cold shower in the heat and then sitting in front of a fan would bring tears of rage to the typical air-conditioned wimp of today. Beach houses now are routinely sealed up and artificially cooled and if one steps out to the balcony to watch a sunset in the warm afternoon air, they will run for cover within minutes of the sun’s disappearance. A little nature is great as long as there is a climate-controlled enclosed room awaiting you.
Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I am the outlier. Maybe there is nothing noble or admirable about stewing in your own sweat on a day when the sun is so directly overhead that you barely cast a shadow. Maybe sitting in a sweat-soaked t-shirt and drinking a cold beer inside a warm bar with fans blowing futilely proves nothing.
I admit, there have been times when the heat and humidity were so great that I welcomed a blast of AC. Once on a stifling hot day in Quepos, I walked into the blissfully cool Banco de Costa Rica, took a numbered tab even though I had no business to transact, and sat for fifteen minutes until I felt rejuvenated.
For me air conditioning is like any vice I occasionally embrace, say alcohol or ganja. Great in occasional doses, but bad for you in excess. And now, one day after writing about the long hot summer, the rain arrived. A steady one-hour downpour followed by overcast skies and a sweet, refreshing breeze.
Who needs AC? Not I… except on certain brief occasions.
Read more of Don Mateo’s writing from his newly published ebook
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