In April 1991, Costa Rica was struck by a 7.6 or 7.7 scale earthquake (experts still don’t agree on the magnitude). My girlfriend (now wife) Joni and I were in the far southeastern corner of the country, warming up in the Caribbean after a long winter. On this day, we’d rented bikes in a village called Cahuiti, rode a half-dozen miles south to Puerto Viejo, and spent the afternoon lounging on the beach. Around 3:30, clouds moved across the sun and at 3:57, as we were about to leave, the earthquake hit. This is what happened next.

There was a loud crack, as if a giant eggshell had split open, and the ground started bouncing, the beach beneath us bucking as if Thor was in the apartment below banging on the ceiling with his hammer. A roar filled the air like a jet airplane racing a freight train. In small earthquakes, the ground shimmies and rolls and you can ride it like a surfboard, but this was no small earthquake: The beach bounced, literally bounced up and down, and we staggered to stay upright, drunks just off the merry go round.

Palm trees whipped violently from to side, shedding their coconuts, until it seemed their tops would touch the ground. The noise through the fronds sounded like a hurricane. In the jungle, monkeys screamed—a high-pitched cacophonous siren of terror. Thor kept banging.

It went on forever, or, more likely, 60-70 seconds. But in a minute, a lifetime. It seemed it would never stop. That this might be the way the world ends, torn apart from within, shaken to death.

And then, it just…stopped. Absolute stillness. Silence from the jungle. The palms settled. A hush.

We took stock. There were only four or five other people on the beach. They were okay, we were okay. Dazed, shocked, but fine.

Then someone pointed to the ocean. “Hey! Where did the water go?!”

The sea of Crayola blue lapping gently on white sand had fled, leaving behind a reef and rocks and coral glistening and muddy in the overcast light. Fish, suddenly marooned, flapped frantically. For hundreds of yards into the Caribbean, it was dry. And out on the horizon, coming our way, was a band of white. A tsunami.

THE EASTERN SIDE OF COSTA RICA IS GUARDED BY MOUNTAINS, with floodplains spread to the coast like a long skirt. There isn’t much high ground to be had; all the way to the far end of the village of Puerto Viejo, there was no solid earth higher than a few feet above sea level. Where we stood, there was a bump maybe 10 feet above the former sea level, so we scrambled up it and waited.

The tsunami came in like a fast tide. So many years later, it’s hard to say exactly how big it was. In places along the coast, it crested at 10 feet and surged inland 1,000 feet. In a canal some miles north of us, two people drowned. But Puerto Viejo and this southern section hard up against the Panamanian border are protected by reefs, which dampened the tsunami’s impact. Was it three feet where we were? That seems about right.

The first wave picked up fishing boats that been moored in the little bay and swept them deep into the village. And then the water was gone again, back out to sea to catch its breath, leaving the reef naked and exposed. Three times the ocean charged back into the village, each time with a little less energy, until it settled into its new level and tap-danced against the sand, muddy and brown.

We recovered our bikes and threaded through the damp, sandy streets. A green and yellow boat rested against an open-air bar, where the afternoon drinking had only increased post-quake. A few houses were askew, but the dirt-scrabble village didn’t seem any more threadbare than when we’d come though earlier in the day. But when we got back to the pavement, the two-lane road that threaded north, we could start to see the damage: huge cracks in the asphalt, downed power lines, a bridge shifted six inches above the road surface.

Dark was beginning to fall and we picked up the pace, past scores of people walking along the road to check in with family and friends or to return home and see if they still had a home. When we reached Cahuita, it was near-black, but there was still enough glow in the sky to see that our hotel, a whitewashed, two-story cinder-block rectangle, was broken. It sat askew, the interior laid bare by jagged cracks. Our bags, left in a room on the second floor, seemed as far away as the other side of the moon, but I tiptoed gingerly up the crooked stairs, heeded the owner’s “¡rapido!”, hoped against an aftershock, and scurried back to terra not-so firma with all our possessions in about 90 seconds.

The power was out, the phone lines dead, and the village sparkled with candlelight. In search of food, we navigated sandy streets by headlamp and aimed for one of Cahuita’s three tiny restaurants. It was ablaze with lanterns, a party under way. With refrigeration dead, the family that owned it had thrown all the spoilables on the grill. Chicken sizzled, pork crackled. Every tourist in town, perhaps 15 at the most, had come for the feast. We ambled back to our hotel with overstuffed bellies.

We’d left our bags in a tiny room in an equally diminutive storage house that belonged to the hotel. In it were a single bed with a sheet, a toilet, a tile floor. Roasting in heat that approached 95 even at night and humidity on the same scale, the two of us settled down for an uncomfortable sleep. It felt a lot like summer in D.C., where I grew up.

Rest was not to be. My brain was electric with adrenalin, excitement, uncertainty. Although the door was closed, mosquitos flew sorties above our heads, leaving us with two choices: huddle under sheet for protection, where it was hotter, or take off the sheet and expose ourselves to attacks. Even lying motionless, it was impossible not to sweat, and our skin stuck together as if glued.

I’d finally drifting into something like sleep when the first big aftershock hit. In a fuzzy, dazed Chinese fire drill, we stumbled to open the door, grab our bags, and get out. When the earth stopped shaking, there wasn’t much to do but go back to bed.

Three times we went through this until finally we said “screw it” and left the bags outside and the door open. Every mosquito in Central America came for the party. And then something else did, too—I could hear scuttling and clacking across the floor. “What is that?” whispered Joni. “I don’t know.” Scritchscritchscritch.

Another aftershock. Running for the door in my bare feet, I felt and heard a crunch under foot, like I’d stepped on a kid’s plastic toy. I dug out the headlamp and cast its beam—the floor was covered with a dozen five-inch jungle crabs, which skittered away from the light into the corners of the room. After that, sleep came easily.

IN THE MORNING, WE WOKE TO THE ANTICIPATION that authorities would arrive and deal with the situation. They didn’t.

We wandered back to the restaurant, which was becoming ground zero for the handful of visitors, and sorted between rumor and fact. The single road to Limon, the major city on the east coast, was out of commission, every bridge on it damaged or destroyed. The only way back to San Jose, the capital, was through Limon, which meant 30 miles of jungle or beach. We heard that one man was killed by a falling palm tree, but couldn’t confirm it. The locals focused on their own issues—teetering houses, lack of power, diminishing food—and if there were any kind of local government or official, they remained hidden.

You always wonder how you’ll respond to an emergency. We quickly realized we were on our own and there was nothing to do but take action. The sole store in Cahuita, a tiny bodega, was badly damaged. The floor was littered with collapsed shelving and quake-tossed groceries, but we tiptoed through broken jars and busted bottles and bought as much food between the shards of glass as we could fit into our bags—loaves of bread, tins of tuna, cookies, a jar of hot sauce. Then we went to the bars and bought as many bottles of water as they’d sell. And then we walked through town and tried to gather information.

Over the next few days, not much changed. We ate at the restaurant until they ran out of food, grilled chicken dwindling to eggs dwindling to nothing, and then started on our own stocks. A white helicopter landed, bringing a rush of hope, but quickly buzzed away without leaving a scrap of information. Nobody knew anything. On the third night, we heard a rumor there might be a boat on a scrap of beach to take people to Limon, and we set an alarm to wake us well before sunrise, crabs beware.

At last, a rumor was true. For $25, we climbed into a glorified dugout canoe with 15 others. An hour of motoring up the coast and the boat made a Normandy-style beach landing at the Limon airport, a scruffy little facility that had, by luck, the only unbroken and thus landable stretch of asphalt on this side of the country. We splashed ashore.

But if we thought the airport was our salvation, we were wrong. In the crowds that milled outside in the sun, rumors flew even wilder than in Cahuita. Soldiers barred us from entering the building, but no one told us what was happening. There were no public flights, it seemed, no rescue flights, only very expensive charters. We stood in line, baked in the sun, didn’t know quite what to do.

When nature called, we snuck into the airport. Joni tracked down a pay phone and rang her sister to tell the world we were okay, but a Spanish-speaking operator dialed the call and at the other end Joni’s sister picked up the receiver, listened, and then said, “A collect call from Johnny? I don’t know any Johnny” and she hung up.

When it was my turn, I stayed inside and tried to look inconspicuous as officials beetled back and forth in the darkened building. There was another American hovering about, a guy in North Face t-shirt, Smith baseball hat, and knee brace who’d been on our boat, and we gravitated toward each other. It was Eric DesLauriers, a ski-film star. I knew his brother, his dad, and his sister, but our paths had never crossed. And here, a thousand miles from snow, we met.

We wandered toward the small airline counter and struck up a conversation with a red-haired American airman who was loitering at one end. “What are you guys doing here?” we asked. “Oh, we’re Wyoming Air National Guard,” he responded. “We supposed to be in Panama City drinking beer, but they have us here on rescue work, bringing in supplies and taking out the injured.”

“Really? Well, if you can get us back to San Jose, we’ll buy you all the beer you can drink.”

“What, nobody’s taking care of you? Let me see what I can do.”

Twenty minutes later, he pulled us and all the other Americans who’d gathered at the airport out onto the tarmac. “We’ll get you on the next plane out,” he said.

But it wasn’t to be. As we stood in line to get on a C-130 transport plane, the German ambassador to Costa Rica walked up with a cluster of German tourists and demanded passage. The guardsman apologized, but said there was nothing he could do.

“We probably have time for one more flight before dark,” he said. “If you don’t see us by then, we’ll back back in the morning.”

We waited on the tarmac in the sun and mistook the buzzing of mosquitos in our ears for the returning C-130. The sun disappeared headed west toward San Jose, where we wanted to be, and disappeared behind the mountains, leaving a milky blue twilight. Then came a buzzing that was no insect. It was the National Guard. You might grumble about paying taxes, but when your government steps in like that, you will never be more grateful.

An hour later, we were in the San Jose airport, walking under electrical lights for the first time nearly a week, chilled by the air conditioning and dazed at the normalcy of it all. There wasn’t much to do but shrug, catch a cab, and look forward to a shower.

The April 22, 1991, Costa Rica earthquake lifted the Caribbean coast by as much as five feet, killed at least 52 people, injured 600, and left up to 10,000 homeless. In Limon, only one major building was damaged, perhaps because it is built on rock, but in towns farther south, where the soil is alluvial deposition, up to 50 percent of the homes in some towns were destroyed. The transportation network on the eastern side of the country was devastated, and damage estimates ranged from $43 million to hundreds of millions of dollars.

Before the quake.

Tagged as: survival