The Night the Beach Began to Move

In the summer of 2019, a twenty-year-old marine biology intern named Adriana arrived at Ostional Beach in Costa Rica to help monitor olive ridley sea turtle nests. Her supervisor, a weathered biologist named Carlos who had spent thirty years on that coastline, told her the most important skill she would learn was listening. Three nights into her rotation, Adriana woke to a faint scratching beneath the sand outside her tent.…