Costa Rica and The Last Resort

By Bobby Neal Winters

There are some days, some weeks, some periods of time when I have a soundtrack.  Not always, but definitely sometimes, and definitely last week when I was on vacation in Costa Rica with my beloved wife of 40 years.

The song was “The Last Resort” by the Eagles and mainly Don Henley.

This is one of those songs I’ve known for years, I am not sure how many, but more than 40. Like any good song, you don’t necessarily understand it or even like it at first. It’s as if it were written in Spanish and you are in a Spanish course.  At first you only learn a word or two, and you understand certain parts.  Then you learn more words and understand it differently. Then you learn something about the culture, and it takes on a new, different meaning.

It’s like that only the language is English and understanding requires not only words and culture, it also requires understanding life. Understanding yourself. Understanding human nature.

Let’s start out with a little context to begin with.  During the few days Jean and I were there celebrating our 40th anniversary, Costa Rica was paradise.  The weather in San Jose was sunny for the most part and the temperature hugged 70 degrees.  It would get up to about 75 in the day and down to about 65 at night. There was a nice breeze when it was needed. The sun was high in the sky, and I got a little color on my face.

We took tours to the mountains, saw green vistas, saw the clouds below us, saw the butterflies, the humming birds, and the animals.  We saw insects other than butterflies, but they didn’t have any interest in us.

I don’t know if you’ve ever had the feeling of an idea setting up housekeeping in your brain, but that began to happen with me. That idea was, you could come to live here. This could be your retirement home. You could move down and set up shop. You could move down your daughters and their families to be with you.

You’ve found paradise.

But the soundtrack was keeping house in my brain too:

Some rich men came and raped the land

Nobody caught 'em

Put up a bunch of ugly boxes

And Jesus people bought 'em

So you see there was a conflict. I’ve fallen in love with a place, but anyone else can see the same qualities in it that I have. We can flee someplace in an attempt to escape the bad, but then we take the bad with us.  Ultimately wherever we go becomes just like wherever we’ve been.

That is not a new problem.  The various authors of the Bible knew about this, but you know where to find one, so I will continue differently.

In writing this song, even as far back as 1977, Henley had some idea of the shape of an answer:

Who will provide the grand design?

What is yours and what is mine?

'Cause there is no more new frontier

We have got to make it here

I tried to be careful when I said he had the shape of the answer rather than saying he had the whole answer. 

He seems to be saying this: Rather than go to a paradise and ruin it with our human nastiness, let’s stay where we are and transform it into a paradise.

Like I said, that’s kind of the shape of the thing, but the problem with that is that it misses a crucial step. For me to create a paradise, I would have to be perfect.  And the Good Lord knows that I am not perfect.

The first step to creating a paradise is to recreate myself. Not only do I have to stop looking to another place to improve my environment, I have to stop looking even outside of myself.  I have to look inward and improve what is in there.

This is not a new idea coming from me. It’s been around a while. I like to think of it as being the best kind of religion, rightly understood: Fix myself first; others who are seeking a way might see something they like and follow along.

There is more to it than this. Not everybody would agree, not even Don Henley:

And you can see them there

On Sunday morning

Stand up and sing about

What it's like up there

They call it paradise

I don't know why

You call someplace paradise

Kiss it goodbye

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.