fourteen conversations with the sea; ¿como se dice en español roomie?; where the island ends and where it begins; beach reads

fourteen conversations with the sea

here, at the edge of the world (my island vertigo is ever-present), or at least where sea meets land, where what was once a two-dirt-road paradise for the few meets a modern machine...

i see cancun on the horizon, like a little miami with its glistening twin condos and dollop of green-grey smog on top.

here on isla mujeres, though, nature pushes through. the water is absolutely turquoise, an empty blue, fish-belly blue, like all the caribbean postcards you've ever seen. really. the sea lends this color to the downward facing surface of the clouds, begs them to touch down for a taste.

through the sand, and right before my eyes, tiny almond-shaped and velvet green seeds sink, wait, and emerge delicate baby mangroves. the sand is too loose for their young, threadlike roots but a few survive and strengthen and form a wall between the road and the vacation rentals and the hotels called "CrystalMar" and "Isla Paradise", a dense wall that keeps out the fumes of hundreds of little red taxicabs.

on my side of the mangroves is a stunning stretch of beach, and when i wake up early enough for a walk (between camp and swimming dock), they talk to me: the melodious blackbirds, the white herons, the pelicans, the yucatan poorwhils, the water. the beach breathes an energy unlike any i've encountered, anywhere. it is at once so calm that it seems at first sterile, as if nothing could hurt you, not even something from the unpredictable sea; but that's just it, there is something frightening, uneasy, tempered about it, the sea is boss and the island is cautious.

i'm washed clean, browned in a matter of hours, let alone days, adored by mosquitoes by night and sandflies by day, dusted in a powdery layer of salt. my fingernails are pink and look like the pearly, ridged inside of broken shells, i sleep with ten tiny piles of tracked-in sand and my bracelets still on, let my nose get sunburned, jump off the dock (squealing), swallow saltwater and i float, i float, i float until my breaths are slower than the waves and i cease to be the onshore-me...i could be a sleeping bird, or a log, or even a newly emerged chunk of pirate ship.


¿como se dice en español roomie?

camp is like this:
the driveway, the kitchen (outdoors, geniusly constructed atop flowerbeds) to the left, cooking fire...shower teepee to the right, follow the lane to bottle and lumber storage-slash-work area, up the bunker and there's the torn tent on your left (gathering water and families of ants), treehouse to the right. the ocean. the ocean opens up ahead and on a clear day the mexican flag is visible on the mainland...onward and the path leads to the sawdust composting toilet-teepee on the left and further still, our tent.

when after two nights the mosquitoes in the treehouse had finished with my arms, legs, and feet and had moved on to the fleshy areas of my neck, chin, nose and earlobes, i moved in with diana.

diana is from mexico city (originally guadalajara). she is studying to be an anthropologist. she is dark-eyed, sultry, sturdy, with a huge smile, sharp tongue, and she is much more beautiful than she knows. the day i met her she was crying and her eyes were red and puffy. "how did you sleep?" she asked me, without even halting her crying, but with a most clear and tender sincerity.

down the beach is a barbaric tourist attraction, where two beautiful whale sharks live in an offshore rusted-fence cage. people pay ten, sometimes twenty bucks to touch them, lift them out of the water for a photograph, and if they're quick enough, a photo with a kiss. early morning, though, before anyone has arrived, diana takes me swimming beside the shark's cage, and with sadness and fear in both of our eyes we tread water and talk about what it's like to be "solita", just little old me, women traveling alone.

she works at a hip little lunch spot on punta sur called "el pueblito", where i walk thirty or forty minutes to visit her, sometimes hitch a ride on a tourist's rented golf cart. we drink our beer chelada, with the juice of two limes and ice and tons of salt on the rim, make friends with the sundry group of el pueblito regulars, and watch the sun turn a thick pink and vibrate over the darkened water, leaving only the shadow of cancun and then darkness.

we dance all night to reggaeton at the beach bar, speed home between glistening lagunas in a new friend's vw bug, and stay up late in our candle-glowing tent eating peanut butter and banana sandwiches on tortilla. when my bikini is wet she lets me pick one out of her bag (she has ten), lends me her tweezers and tee shirts, bargains for me with the taxistas and the street food vendors. we compare bug bites and love-wound stories.

here we're like sisters. and the beach is ours, these streets are ours, and somehow we're the originals, we've been here before, a long time ago.


where the island ends and where it begins

the kids at the poc-na hostel called it "bottle island", which does little justice to the project. rishi has a dozen descriptions: his floating eco-garden, his love boat, his spiral in the sun, the love key, isla botella, his spaceship. this one, he says, will fly.

rishi has done it before, this is his third baby. his second spiral island in puerto aventuras was made from used plastic water bottles, bamboo, plywood, earth and roots floated for seven years. there he lived, collected sunlight for power, kept flowers and vegetable gardens and plump cats until it was washed ashore, intact but folded in half, destroyed by hurricaine emily.

he built a lovely camp on the beach, and he started again.

the evening i was brought to the camp i was met by four existing volunteers, an american couple named donny and brit, and two canadian guys, tree-planting buddies, chael and mike. in the first days we stuffed floatable bottles into plastic net bags, tied the bags, laced the bags together, doubled them up, carried them to the water, stood in knee-deep mystery-mud while we tied them to the existing structure, sawed-to-fit pallets, nailed plywood, and stood atop the thing sunflushed and sweaty, dreaming of a clean dive off the dock.

after working out on the island, you can feel the waves in your knees for hours.

at night we stayed up by the coals, in the seabreeze. party boats passed in the laguna, and we cooked spaghetti and stayed up late singing and talking, making little island-related ideas big, bigger, shouting to be turned into reality.

after the others left, work slowed to mostly gardening and cooking, which i relished in...i prepared huevos motuleños and shakshuka, tupperware bowls filled with jamaica tea and limeade, and constructed rishi's "trash and earth modules", which are bags of unfloatable trash snipped open, filled with soil, and used as beds for flowers, fruits, vegetables, herbs. rishi taught me how to mulch with dried grass, and stack the modules to create stepped walls, which will eventually be the walls of the floating island's structures.

rishi is wise and kind and a creative vegetarian chef. his eyes are clearblue and reflect any light, at any time, he is tan and patient, and it is nearly impossible to be in a bad mood around him. he turns the fireside logs into space-age pleather upholstered chairs with heart and diamond shaped backs, and he up and builds anything that comes to mind: a tripod for the sand sifter, shelves for the kitchen, anything. "you see," he says, "you don't really want to leave" when, on what was supposed to be my last day at camp, i pulled a muscle in my shoulder and could hardly move. "i know," i said, and he dropped his days work, took me for chai lattes, and drove me to the masseuse.



beach reads

the teachings of don juan, carlos castaneda
little birds, anais nin
the curious incident of the dog in the night-time, mark haddon