Vamos a la Playa

Sunrise at Playa del Carmen, Quintana Roo, Mexico

We walked the beach this morning before the sun came out. Out of our hotel room by a quarter after 5:00 we pass through quiet, empty, mostly dark streets until we get to the dock, where yesterday we watched streams of tourists return to their cruise boat. As we walk the beach and look out across the horizon, we can see the soft glow of Cozumel lights. Pockets of sky light up as lightning falls in the distance. There is no thunder, but we can hear the thud of dance music farther down the beach. We keep walking, letting the warm, dark water lap against our toes. As we draw closer to the music and the light, we pass three entangled couples on the sand. The warm, moist air carries the soft scent of booze and stale cigarettes. A few people are standing talking in the light from the club. They ignore us as we pass, huddle around each other, and occasionally glance toward the horizon. We turn around and walk back to the dock, then decide to explore whatever is on the other side of it.

Theater of the Sea

Past the dock there are more hotels, each with rows of empty lounge chairs facing the ocean as if it were a giant movie screen; nobody is here for the show.  The first light is here, but the horizon is still a dull gray, as are the buildings of Cozumel.  The water keeps lapping up on shore, bringing with it the scratchy fronds of seaweed that Sugata and I kept throwing at each other while we were swimming in the ocean. As we keep walking we notice that a number of people in uniforms have begun digging in the sand. The seaweed has been arranged in neat piles. Sugata stops to ask one young man what he is doing. He points to the seaweed and the hole he has dug as if it should be obvious.  He tells us he does this every day. Every day he digs holes and buries the seaweed in front of the hotel, every day the seaweed comes again. To me this seems both as pointless and as tedious as the task of Sisyphus. But it must be what the tourists want. A few gulls have gathered on the beach looking around for food, but the seaweed which harbors small beasts for them to nibble has been buried.

Seaweed that graces the beach, unless buried by hotel workers

Now that the dawn has come, a few more people have emerged. A darkly-tanned sixty-year-old woman throws a rubber champagne bottle toy for her dog. A shirtless muscled man jogs the shoreline. We decide to rest on some of the lounge chairs and watch the sunrise.  Another man stoops to take a picture of the gulls I suddenly wonder what it would be like here without these gulls, these sand-pipers, the gray pelican that floated past.  In this age where many species are going extinct, I like the visual reminder that humans aren’t the only species that seem to be making it.

Sand Piper with beach chairs

When I was a kid I wanted to be a wildlife photographer. I used to take my camera out in the woods to try to shoot pictures of squirrels. My camera had no zoom, so the pictures came out poorly—dark blobs with tails in a haze yellow aspen leaves.

Most wildlife photographers take pictures of things we could never dream of seeing.  We either have to go to zoos to watch animals pace unnaturally, or we have to go “away” to find real animals. I think of the photographers who set out to save the Great Bear Rain Forest through photography.

http://www.discoverwildlife.com/animals/canada%E2%80%99s-great-bear-rainforest-photo-spectacular

Or of people who photograph Polar Bears to remind us that their habitat is disappearing and that we may have something to do with it.

http://www.earthtimes.org/green-blogs/green-living/earth-watch-melting-ice-shrinking-polar-bears-hot-potatoes-21-Oct-11/

As I’m sitting in this theater chair watching gulls and observing the fact that other people like to see them too, I suddenly feel really sorry for all of us. It is hard being in a tourist hotspot. It is painful to be reminded of what people think they want. The sports fishing boats. The jet skis. The beach volleyball courts. The rows of palm trees planted in straight rows. The swimming pools right next to the ocean which are right next to the beach houses. These rows of theater seats looking out to the ocean. When it gets hot there will be more bodies in those seats, soaking up the sun. This, many suppose is the epitome of luxury. These bodies can open their eyes if they want to, look out to the bright sand and the aqua-blue sea and believe whatever they want about themselves. It seems we are thirsty for the sea, that we can’t get enough of it, yet even here, as we come right next to it, what does the sea mean to us? Is it there merely to reflect back to us that we are living a good life?

It is the off-season here in Playa del Carmen, but I’d hate to see what it is like here when it’s the tourist season.  A walk down Quinta Avenida: “Hey guys you want jet skis?” (The “hey guys” is a nice touch). “Ya wanna snorkel? Massage only $18.” Swimsuits in shops, swimsuits worn on hot or not-so-hot bodies, T-shirts displayed outside the shops that read: “I’m shy, but I have a big dick,” or “I’m in Playa del Carmen, Bitch.” Yes, the smell of tourism is in the air.

Yesterday we watched a thin, peroxide blond model posing right at sunrise. First she wore a bathing suit, then held a fishing spear while wearing a surprisingly revealing (deep v-neck) wetsuit. Of course she looked good. Of course the beach looks best--almost virgin as the dawn breaks over the water. At sunrise there is nobody around to mess up your own little piece of sand and sun. Everyone is still hung over from partying last night.

In parting, I’d like to leave you with a song.

I first heard this song in Guatemala when I was listening to the radio and trying to learn Spanish. The tune is catchy; the chorus will easily get stuck in your head.  It wasn’t until just a couple of days ago that I listened more closely to the rest of the song.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCVQpcY1au4

Correr

Estaba corriendo

I like to run, but the habits of slothfulness that have been cultivated in my “vacation” environment have had time to grow strong. For most of my two months here at San Pedro I have not gone out to run. Instead, I have woken up to the smell of wood smoke, an excuse enough, I figured, in itself. (The presence of wood smoke generally means it is after 6:00 p.m. Though most of the women use wood to cook, it is possible to get up earlier than the smoke. Our neighbor’s chimney is right next to our kitchen. Thus the strength of the smoke I initially found highly discouraging). 

There were other reasons/excuses. The guidebook suggested that running alone outside the town limits might be dangerous. Still, it was one or two weeks after that myth was dispelled before I made it out. With Sugata sleeping in, the bed seemed impossibly cozier than the curl of moon and a few cold stars. There have been stomach problems to contend with and monthly cycles that have make running less convenient. It has not been too hard to notice the poverty of my numerous excuses; the challenge has been in breaking free from them.

At some point, discouraged by my lack of discipline in two area of my life sacred to my sanity, I began setting my alarm for 5:00 a.m. so I could write and run before my 8:00 Spanish class.

I’ve seen so many things on this run not: men snagging avocados from the trees with long skinny poles with baskets at the end; swarms of very tiny insects brought by the rains, caught in beams of light; a moth the size of my hand disabled and swooped up by a skinny blackbird; an entire cow skinned, butchered and stacked in bloody pieces in the back of a pickup; an orgy of dogs, the female-in-heat with two males going at her rear and one at her face, two or three others circling around and snarling; the partially bloated body of a dead puppy. (I’ve been told that when the stray dogs here grow too numerous they put out poisoned meat. There used to be a veterinarian, a foreigner, who began spaying and neutering the strays here, but she didn’t manage them all. Thus said, I felt distraught for quite some time at the disappearance from our neighborhood of one adorable golden puppy. Felt great relief to catch sight of him a week later); fishermen standing in their wooden boats, the frilly, waxy green leaves of coffee plants, numerous spectacular sunrises. Each run brings the delightful and the dreadful.

The best time to go running is 5:30 a.m. At this point the moon is still crisp, but dawn has begun, its full glory to be revealed within the half hour. I run on the Finca road. 

First I pass a couple of schools, (one of which has band practice almost every afternoon. They have played the same songs for countless days, still not perfectly, but quite cheery. They are far more tuneful than the Evangelical song services I’ve heard blaring some evenings from one of the neighboring, yet unidentified churches).

The first view I have of the lake is just past one of the corn fields where the tassels wave just above my head. (I’ve heard reported and read in the newspaper that the corn crop will suffer this year. The rains have come later than expected, too late to do much good for many of the corn crops. One of the locals informed us that the name of the people who live in San Pedro—the Tzu’tuhil—get their name from the corn flowers).

On a good day, the sunrise is jaw-dropping. A few clouds hover over the mountains directly across the lake. The sky changes in stages. First there is an ember-like glow, The clouds brighten. Other colors emerge. Orange clouds set off the turquoise sky. I glance to the volcano above me and see that the first golden touch of day has reached its peak. Sometimes, there is a brief instant when everything is covered in a surreal orange glow, all the puddles from the previous night’s rain light up, the corrugated tin roofs (at least the ones that have not yet rusted) radiate the light back into the air. I keep glancing at the sunrise, marveling at what all the early-risers who live here get to see every day. (And there are a lot of them)

Sunrise from the roof of our house.

A little farther down the shoreline vegetable patches run straight down to the edge of the water. (I hate to think what chemicals might be used on these patches. Whatever it is would flow directly into the lake. Two generations ago, the lake was clean enough to drink from. Now it is not. The introduction of the herbivorous carp as well as some other species of fish, helped the cyanobacteria flourish by stirring up the bottoms of the pond. Several other species of fish have died out. The fish that were introduced much earlier by the native peoples tended to attract fish-eating birds. Now I’ve only seen an occasional egret. The lake keeps going through changes. Plastic has become a problem near the villages. A couple of Sundays ago, Sugata and I joined a group of local fishermen in cleaning the plastic out of the lake near the Casa Rosario Spanish School. We paddled out in kayaks and collected bottles and bottle caps, bags and pieces of bags, and various chunks of unidentified plastic. I think there are plans do this cleaning on a bi-weekly basis. My teacher told me that somebody came to teach the vendors at the market how to avoid supplying plastic bags and the consumers how to stop using them. She said that for a while, people were using less plastic in the market in San Pedro, but that eventually the convenience won out and people are using just as much plastic again).  

Fields near the Lake

 

I run past fancy tourist houses, some dangerously close to the edge of the lake. (The lake has been creeping up higher in recent years. From the Casa Rosario Garden Spanish school where I study, I can see water lapping over a cement slab where the school’s restroom once stood. What used to be neighboring houses look like decorative arches in the water. Trees, now waterlogged, and bare-limned, stand twenty meters from what is now considered the shore).

Wood for fuel

They have been doing construction on the Finca road, paving it, not with asphalt, but with slabs of cement. Each day there is a new obstacle course: piles of sand or rock, slabs of wet cement, and strings to mark out new slabs. Around thirty workers are hard at work every day quite early, unloading sand from trucks, chiseling cement, packing sand, smoothing cement, digging ditches. I, and ten or so other runners, mostly locals, make our way through this obstacle course of sand regularly, (Four women, six or seven men). There are others who pass this way, of course, dozens of farmers headed up to their coffee or their corn with spades and machetes, men with huge bundles of firewood braced against their foreheads over their bent backs (I’ve seen a man carry a huge chest of drawers by himself in this fashion as well, but not during my run), women carrying tubs of corn on their head to grind, or tubs of ground corn to pat into tortillas.

These guys were happy to receive this picture in print.

Usually I only run far enough to go up one rain-eroded hill. (When it rains the streets turn into muddy rushing rivers. Those which are not paved and which run downhill are highly likely to develop miniature canyons. I’ve been impressed with most of the unpaved parts of the Finca road. Sand-pack roads. Though it might rain buckets the night before my run, there are no puddles to dodge).

I gasp a few times at the top and catch my breath as I look out across the lake. Then I run back through it all again.