We had breakfast at the new cafe, after surfing. A group of young men were playing football on the beach. The line up filled in with the tides. Saturday. Saturday in February. We sat at the cafe in the air conditioning eating breakfast burritos and talking about the current and imminent changes to our small town.
Our small town…. We are foreigners here. The culture, the climate, the culinary staples, the landscape, the sun and the dirt are not mine. We are visitors here. Long time visitors, yes, but still agents in a foreign land. Surviving and occasionally assimilating. Will this ever be home? Does it work like that? I often wonder, and do not know.
On the dusty beach road there is construction. Substantial. It is all coming. This morning over breakfast we are resolve. Accepting the inevitable. Plotting our relationship with a greater trafficked. future landscape. Shipwrecked in paradise, watching the coconut trees get bulldozed. The Canadian women is opening a new real estate office. Make your dreams come true in paradise, the marketing tag line reads. It is happening. The breakfast burritos are good. The tide is filling in. A puff of offshore wind. A strong undertow. Under a coconut tree the boys talk barrels and Asian women. Sandy feet. Decades of ritual.
At breakfast the conversation shifts between land prices and line ups. Travel plans. The cost of empty waves. Far away private islands. Ruined expectations. The price of a breakfast down south versus here. Luxury surf concierge services. Jack Dorsey on a rented boat. Black Range Rovers with tinted windows. $100,000 for a week in jungle luxury. Relative riff raft and consummate predictions. The town is changing.
On the front porch watching a variety of traffic pass. The flatbed trucks direct from the hardware store transporting cinder blocks and rebar. The clean white rental cars ferrying tourists to the beach. The low riding local cars and askew pick up trucks. A dump truck filled with dirt. A backhoe with the driver speaking into a cell phone. Two young women on a dirt bike riding towards the small town center. New Hilux trucks with surfboards spilling out the rear. Solemn day laborers slowly walk past on their way to a job site. The chickens roam the front yard with careless abandon.
Shipwrecked. Speculation. Heraclitus said “there is nothing permanent without change.” The trees out front are so dry without rainwater yet somehow getting taller.
That lucky old sun….. On the front porch watching the traffic pass, sipping coffee, Sarah Vaughn on the record player, we ate burritos and paid the bill with a debit card. Then drove home in silence. Fleetwood Mac on the radio. Tomorrow the tide shifts and the tools are different. The truck doesn’t lock. The radio is working today. You have to turn the key three times for the engine to start. There is a shift in the vibe today. It might be permanent.
