Victory at Sea

I forgot how dramatic the summer storms can be. "It’s like watching ‘Victory at Sea’," Marsh once said, as we sat on our front porch, mesmerized by the performance. Bolts of lightning attacked the distant horizon and hurtled through the sky over the Pacific. Thunder bombarded our ears and clapped so explosively we jumped in our chairs. As I witnessed the same spectacle last night I thought, Snow birds really don't know what they're missing.

Admittedly, the heat is tough to contend with. I don’t like it either, and will leave again in a few weeks. But it’s worth enduring in order to experience the tropics at their most intense. The greenest of green vegetation, washed clean by the torrential rains, shimmers and steams under a glaring sun. The jungle reclaims itself, shoots tree limbs over roads to form cooling canopies, overwhelms untended land with towering new growth. Even the ocean ratchets up, its color changing to vivid turquoises and emerald greens.

Faced with such intensity, mere mortals are forced to relax and give in. We move more slowly, take more naps, spend more time at home, as we adapt to the natural world that now has the upper hand.

I lived here year-round my first seven years in Nayarit. We who savored the storms, coped with the humidity, and knew how to slow life down to a crawl, thought of ourselves as the only true expats. “Welcome back,” we said smugly to returnees every fall, hoping they would pick up on the superiority we felt. My come-uppance is the slip in social status that I feel now, when locals say "welcome back" to me.