Into the Blue

Buettner himself, though, isn’t as bothered by the outside intrusions as might be expected. In the rural community of Juan Diaz, he is filming a video on what life was like fifty years ago. Up here in the hills, unreachable by truck, without electricity or plumbing, families of small subsistence farmers survive in simple shacks. Each family has a cow or two, a horse or a mule, a few banana trees, maybe a bean field, and a dirt yard full of dogs and chickens. Water is poured out of earthenware, and meals are cooked on an open wood-fired flame. The scenes are right out of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, with subsistence farmers in 2007 Central America instead of Depression-era sharecroppers in the Deep South.

Sitting in one family’s front room, drinking coffee with sugar in a tall glass, Buettner types on his laptop as he interviews the residents in his competent Spanish. “What do you do for entertainment?” he asks one of the women. She takes a moment to reply: “Oh, I find a sunny spot and maybe eat an orange.”

On the way down the hill, I wondered if Buettner believed that these people should be left alone by the developers and entrepreneurs—and, if so, if he’d be using his bully pulpit to say so. Pausing at an outdoor tavern on the way to Hojancha, as the sun set behind the hill, I asked him why he hasn’t been more vocal in advocating healthy lifestyles, why he hasn’t generally adopted a more activist stance like Steger’s.

“Because people don’t want to hear it,” he replies. “Look, I like Will. Will and I are cut from the same cloth. We both understand what a privilege it is to be able to do this. But I don’t think it’s all that effective to get on a pulpit and shake my finger at an audience and scold them for not spending enough time with their kids. I would rather do it in a more subtle way. To give them some information that helps them live richer and fuller lives.”

But what about these people here on the Nicoya? I persist. Don’t you worry about what they’re going to lose? “Look, it’s sad,” he says. “But it’s too late. It’s like leukemia and it’s already in the lymph nodes. As soon as the first gringo buys that spot on the top of that hill that whole area is gone. I see myself as a forensic investigator. I’m sifting through the wreckage of this civilization, trying to figure out a mystery, trying to give my audience something positive they can take away from it. So why not just enjoy it, and have a beer in front of this beautiful sunset, while we still can?”