La Isla Bonita

LA ISLA BONITA

200motels Travel

COZUMEL, MEXICO
“Thank God for the Queen of Spain!” exalted the
taxi driver as he sped us down the modern
autoroute leading to the south of Cozumel Island.
It was a clear, dry day and the temperature was
climbing into the high 80’s. On either side of the
highway the mangrove forests soaked up the life-
giving energy of the sun, striving to regenerate
themselves months after the devastating assault
by Hurricane Wilma had denuded the trees of
their leaves, leaving a barren tableau reminiscent
of the devestation visited upon the Vietnemese
jungle after an Agent Orange deforestation
campaign.

Above us the hawks glided on currents of hot,
rising air, their job of locating prey on the ground
made infinitely easier by the total absence of
vegetation.

The driver continued his litany of thanksgiving.
“The Queen of Spain called the state governor,
and when she heard the magnitude of our
suffering, she immediately dispached three
military cargo aircraft filled with water and food.
Otherwise we surely would have perished
because all our water was contaminated.

“The hurricane lasted two days,” he continued.
By the second day our houses were flooded and
the water was up to our chest. We had to go on
the roof in the wind and rain with our children,
who were all crying. We thought we were all
going to die, and we prayed to Jesus for our
salvation.

“Finally, by the grace of God, the storm moved
away. If it had lasted two hours more all the
people in my barrio would have been swept away
and killed.

“There was a great wailing of relief and thanks to
God that we had survived. We sat on our roofs
and waited for help, because we had no water or
food. When at last we saw the Spanish Air Force
planes circling above us, those of us who could
ran to the airfield to await their landing, and when
they landed we went inside the airplanes and
emptied them by hand, passing the cartons out
in a chain until all the supplies were stacked on
the tarmac.

“And so, because of the benevolence of the
Queen of Spain all the people survived.

“After came the Canadians and the Americans.
Then the Mexican Navy ships docked in the
harbor. They brought soldiers with trucks and
helicopters, and the soldiers and police patrolled
the streets to keep order.

“By the grace of God, all the people survived. Not
one person died. Unfortunately nobody was able
to save the poor animals and they all perished.
All the dogs and cats, the horses and donkeys,
the chickens and roosters. All dead! The only
animals that survived were those birds that knew
how to survive in the water, and when the water
receded from the town the streets were filled with
the corpses of the dead animals.

“This highway we’re driving on now, when the
water receded, was strewn with thousands of
dead fish all the way to the southern end of the
island, as far as the eye could see.

“For two months we had no work and we only
lived on what we received from the government.
They gave us water, food and ice every day, but
no alcohol or beer. Let me tell you, that was the
worst of it! I can live without seeing a woman for
two months, but two months without beer in this
heat, and nothing to do – that was the worst. A
black market developed where you could buy a
bottle of tequila for five hundred pesos, but
nobody had any money, and if the police caught
you they sent you to jail.”

He reiterated, “I don’t care if I don’t see a woman
for two months, but no beer – that’s the worst!”

My girlfriend Magpie and I had taken an
efficiency apartment in the center of San Miguel,
on the malecon, or oceanfront boulevard, just a
couple of blocks from the ferry terminal. For
whatever reason, the downtown business district
and central plaza, with its lush tropical foliage,
appeared untouched by the devestation, but that
might be because the authorities determined that
it be beautifully appointed for the needs of the
tourist business, which is the island’s only source
of income. This central plaza was a far cry from
what it was the first time I visited Cozumel twenty
years ago. Then, it was a devastatingly ugly
patch of dirt right out of a Sergio Leone spaghetti
western, a lazy, filthy unshaded mound of barren
soil surrounding a concrete bandshell, fit only for
“borrachos” and the North American dropouts
that inhabited the surrounding flea bag hotels.

At that time Cozumel was only visited by a few
hard-core divers and by small groups of day
travelers from the mainland attracted for
snorkeling excursions into its wonderfully rich
coral reefs. The town had one rickety dock, a t-
shirt store and a store selling silver jewelry. The
rest of the place was a real dive, with pigs and
chickens freeranging down the middle of its
shabby side streets.

Each time I came back, the island had
incrementally improved, and when the cruise
lines finally glommed onto its exotic tropical
beauty, a gold rush soon followed, with
government and private investment pouring in,
followed by an exodus of migrants from all over
Mexico, seeking opportunity, as well as rich
Mexicans and Spaniards who established
oceanfront residences. A new ferry terminal, the
muelle fiscal, was constructed directly in front of
the town square. A gigantic port built to process
cruise ship passengers was built a few kilometers
to the south. Shopping centers housing
boutiques for Cartier jewelry and Rolex watches
sprang up in formerly desolate lots overgrown
with weeds. Luxury resorts sprung up like
jalapeño poppers. Restaurants and bars
charging New York prices spread into the side
streets like kudzu vines overtaking an abandoned
jungle shack. Now the town, with its miniature
malecón, or oceanfront boulevard, resembles
nothing so much as a tiny Havana or San Juan,
much more charming than Cancún, and with a
distinctly Mexican and Mayan personality.

And now that Cozumelenos, as they refer to
themselves, are racing along the information
superhighway with the rest of us, with 100
television stations and internet cafes on every
block (not to mention the ubiquitous cell phones
that they have seized upon with the voracious
fury of a ravenous octopus), the people on this
once-isolated backwater are every bit as
sophisticated as the most jaded denizen of
Mexico City or New York. Since Magpie and I had
neglected to bring along a radio, we more or less
left the TV on in our room full-time for
background noise.

Mexican television is pretty good. There are a lot
of music video stations featuring the whole gamut
of popular music ranging from norteno music,
which is updated mariachi played by hard guys
dressed in vaquero suits and sombreros, to latin
hip-hop. There are plenty of movie channels,
most featuring dubbed-over American films, but
also with plenty of vintage black-and-white
Mexican westerns and romantic comedies. You
have the choice of watching CNN en espanol,
which is broadcast live from Atlanta, but with
really cool, elegant latin announcers sporting
sharp haircuts and modern suits. There are
always soccer matches featuring the best teams
of Europe and Latin America. And for hard-core
political junkies, there is a public access station
that shows parliamentary debates from the
Chamber of Deputies in Mexico City, which was a
real eye-opener!

The hands-down star of Mexican political
commentary for our week in Mexico was
undeniably Venezuelan president Hugo “Chavez,
who is not passing up any opportunity to project
himself throughout Latin America. He was on
CNN two or three times every hour all week, and
he had a lot to say about Mexico’s ruling party,
the PAN, calling them lap dogs of George Bush
and the Americans. Since this is an election year
for Mexico, the PAN deputies in congress are
highly exercised about what they consider
Chavez’ interference in the country’s internal
politics in favor of the left-wing candidate,
Obrador, who is the mayor of Mexico City.

Magpie and I watched a legislative session where
the deputies were debating a PAN motion to
investigate Chavez and statements by the
Venezuelan ambassador to Mexico to determine
whether they constituted Venezuelan
interference in Mexican domestic politics. It was a
raucous debate, the Mexican sense of political
decorum not extending to restrained behavior by
elected officials. The speakers all started their
speeches softly and politely, with reasoned
dignity, and then built up to a crescendo of
denunciations and accusations, sort of like
Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, to the
accompaniment of shouts, jeers, whistles and
points of order by the assembled dignitaries.
Everybody was playing to the home audience,
and they knew what their constituents expected
of them – something spicy!

The motion to investigate Chavez passed, but
later that day, when the Venezuelan strongman
appeared on the screen, as though in response,
he sang a song by the fantastically popular
Spanish singer Rocio Durcal, a kind of singing
Simone Signoret, who had died earlier that day.
Later on, the Venezuelan government
announced that it was increasing housing
subsidies for all its low-income citizens.

What effect all this is having on Mexican voters I
cannot say. But the other big story of the week,
the massive demonstrations taking place in the
States by undocumented Mexican workers
protesting the imminent immigration legislation
by the U.S. Congress, aroused plenty of
emotions and indignation. Every Mexican knows
somebody working in the U.S., so the issue has
an emotional aspect as least as strong in Mexico
as it does in the U.S.

This issue has many conflicting aspects to it.
Nobody wants to raise the point that those
regions of the U.S. that have been most
impacted by Mexican immigration are areas that
were historically Mexican territory for many
centuries before they were annexed to the U.S.
as a result of the Mexican War of 1845, a war that
was described by many commentators of the
day, including no less an authority than Ulysses
S. Grant, who participated in it, as an
abomination and a blatant land grab. This area,
stretching from Texas to Northern California, was
the richest part of Mexico, so on one level you
could say that the Mexican people still retain the
residual sentiment that they have some
indefinable rights in that region.

Another aspect of the situation is that NAFTA,
unlike the European Union, made no provision
for movement of people across borders to
compensate for the inevitable dislocations and
contradictions that would result as a
consequence of free trade. This glaring omission
has unfortunate racial overtones to it, the
Americans and Canadians wanting access to the
not inconsequential Mexican market and cheap
labor pool without having to accept the possibility
that Mexico might come to them.

Anyone who takes the trouble to read the
classified section of Mexican newspapers, where
jobs are advertised as paying one hundred fifty
dollars a MONTH, knows that trans-border
migration is inevitable. The problem is that this
influx of cheap labor is depressing wages in the
U.S., where American employers are happy to
pay these substandard wages and no benefits
for work for which they would otherwise have to
competitively bid.

It should be noted that Mexico takes the integrity
of its own borders very seriously, maintaining a
large standing army, navy and air force, and has
long pursued a policy of forcibly repatriating
illegal immigrants back to their poorer
neighboring countries to the south.

Magpie and I enjoyed a week of near-perfect
weather during our Cozumel vacation, and every
day we visited a different beach or snorkeling
area. The big nature park at Chankannab had
been devastated and was closed for repair, but a
few kilometers to the south a beach called Playa
Sancho was open for business, and we rented a
couple of deck chairs under a newly refurbished
palapa.

I swam out a couple of hundred meters to where
the water was sparkling clear. The coral, which
had been covered in sand kicked up from the
hurricane, was arranged in little bouquets
separated at intervals of a few meters and
extending in all directions. Despite the bland,
almost lunar aspect of the sand-covered
landscape, it was clearly rich in nourishment, as
schools of large blue, purple and black angel fish
darted between the formations to leisurely nibble
at each for a while before zooming to the next. I
would hover at the surface above them, studying
each feeding group for a while, when some other
point of interest at the periphery of my vision
caught my attention, and then I would swim in
that direction. Sometimes it would be a
particularly large and colorful parrot fish or an
intricately sculpted coral formation that drew me.
I found a sunken ridge of coral fragments and,
knowing these depressions to be particularly
attractive to the fish, followed it for several
hundred meters.

All at once, I found myself in a murky, brownish
patch that, I discovered to my horror, to be
infested by a very large school of thimble-sized
jellyfish. This was a particularly wild stretch of
beach, Magpie and I being the only bathers as
far as the eye could see in any direction that day,
and jellyfish, even tiny ones can do a lot of
damage to humans with their toxic discharge, so
finding myself hundreds of meters from the
beach, in the midst of a swarm of them, filled me
with inquietude. I had once seen a television
show about an Australian diver who had just
narrowly escaped death after being stung by a
jellyfish no larger than a fingernail. Were these
ones toxic? Would the exertion of swimming
cause the poison to circulate faster through my
bloodstream? These were some of the questions
that went through my mind.

I finally managed to get clear of the swarm of
jellyfish, apparently no worse for wear, to find
myself comforted by a large heterogeneous
group of brightly colored tropical fish feeding on
a coral formation. Large blue angelfish;, lovely
grey fish with blue markings; grey ones with just
one large white dot at the posterior end of their
torso; fluttery blue and yellow fish resembling
delicate, charming feather dusters; robust black-
and-white checked fish with lurid, red bottoms all
swam about their business, taking no notice of
me.

Suddenly there emerged from this idyllic
scenario, as if to remind me once more that I was
in the midst of wild nature with absolutely no
device of human civilization to shield me, an
enormous golden barracuda, more than a meter
in length and headed unswervingly in my
direction. The face he presented to me had a
serious, not to say grave, aspect to it, quite unlike
the cute little denizens of the deep served up in
the Walt Disney “Nemo” movies, and the fact that
he was following a direct trajectory toward me
was not in the least reassuring, particularly since
I was about a half-kilometer from shore.

Magpie is fond of reminding me that barracuda
do not attack humans. They also say that about
sharks. But these are wild animals we are
describing here, and they do not follow any
literary rules of etiquette, as guys who have lost
arms and legs, not to mention even less
fortunate witnesses, would be happy to attest if
they could still be around to discuss it.

I took a page from the Octopus School of
Wisdom, and started thrashing my arms and legs
wildly to let the creature know that I was alert and
robust, and he swam away.

Deciding that I had had enough Wild Kingdom
for one day, I made a dash for shore, stopping
every few meters to turn around and make sure I
wasn’t being tracked. I was plenty alarmed. Next
thing, I came face-to-face with another barracuda
(or maybe it was the same one? How would I
know? It’s not like they wear license plates!) I
performed the same thrashing manoeuvre, and
this one swam away as well.

At length, I reached the shore and made it back
to the palapa where Magpie was relaxing with an
iced rum cocktail. She had immediately returned
to shore after experiencing the jellyfish. When I
told her about the barracuda, she casually
remarked, “Maybe they were attracted by your
gold chain. In their mind, the sunlight reflecting
off the gold reminds of the glittering scales of a
fish.”

I immediately removed the chain from my neck.

The Palenkar reef, which stretches between the
Fiesta Americana Dive Resort and the El
Presidente Hotel is our favorite snorkeling site.
There is a small beach at Dzul-Ha where, for the
price of a drink, you can inhabit a shaded table
on a seaside terrace all day and walk into one of
the world’s greatest coral reefs at your leisure.
Magpie and I put on our snorkels and swam
southward in the direction of the Fiesta
Americana, about a kilometer down the beach, in
search of a beautiful undersea forest of purple
fan coral where we had spent many hours
exploring the previous year.

Every modern artist works by the rule that colors
and shapes possess the latent energy to release
emotions in the beholder, so it is a mystery to this
writer why more artists have not taken to the
undersea world for inspiration in the same way
that Georgia O’Keefe brought the mysteries of
the orchid or the American Southwest desert
landscapes into the salons of the art world. Why
have not dress designers gone in search of
striking color combinations and patterns so
readily available as to be literally at their
fingertips just by donning a mask and wading
into the therapeutic, warm coastal waters of the
Mexican Caribbean?

Alas, the marvelous coral forest was gone,
decimated by the furious devastation of the
hurricane. Shattered fragments of fan coral lay
on the ocean floor, covered in grey sand, the
myriad of exotic sea life that formerly sustained
itself on them in such harmonic tranquility also
gone. But as we swam, a closer inspection of the
terrain made apparent to us that the miraculous
restorative evolution of nature was already at
work in this hidden garden. Tiny purple fans the
size of maple leaves were already springing from
the ocean floor, and vibrant, green patches of
brain coral had affixed themselves like skin grafts
to the surface of dead formations. Magpie
returned to our beach transfixed at having been
privileged to witness the rebirth of nature at such
close proximity, and we wondered aloud how this
powerful, eternal cycle of destruction and
restoration may have transformed the psyche of
the indigenous Mayan civilization. The Mayans,
who had a highly evolved culture of architecture
and astronomy, also had great mathematical
expertise, having discovered the concept of the
number zero. They also had a written language,
which implies literature. Tragically, the
conquering Spanish destroyed all the written
records of this great civilization. What marvels of
philosophy and poetry, inspired by the terrestrial
paradise they shared with the animals of both
land and sea were lost to the drunken
conquistadores and sociopathic agents of the
Inquisition? Who has the insight to imagine what
psychic imprint of wisdom is left on the souls of
the surviving Mayans, secrets locked forever in
the genetic chemistry? That is the role of the
artist.

On our last full day of snorkeling in Cozumel,
Magpie and I went to Playa Paraiso, just north of
the cruise ship terminal, which we know from
previous trips to be a real hotbed of sea life.

The cruise ship pier being under repair from the
ravages of Wilma, the ships, huge, immaculate
floating hotels with names like “Pearl of the
Caribbean,” were moored at sea right in front of
us. At the side of each ship’s hull, near the
waterline, was a solitary little door were the
shuttle launches would pull up to disembark
cruise passengers and bring them to shore for a
day of sightseeing. You expect passengers of
huge ships like these to disembark down a big
gangplank at a dock, so seeing ferries pull up to
this little side door was a bit incongruous.

Anyway, what interested Magpie and me was
what was teeming beneath the surface, not what
was going on above it. We adjusted our masks
and snorkels and jumped in.

You’re immediately transported to another planet.
Floating above this world in the clear, warm water
you soon forget that you’re in water at all, and it
is like flying through the air at the top of an
atmosphere whose inhabitants are also flying few
feet beneath you, as though you were flying in
the air above the birds. That is part of what
makes exploring sea life so fascinating, an extra
vertical dimension that you don’t get on dry land.

One wonders what our culture would be today if
the ancient inhabitants had had access to those
mundane objects that we so take for granted
today, the sealed diving mask. Of course, the
engineering expertise it takes to fit a glass lens to
a rubber mask that forms a vacuum around your
eyes and nose has only been perfected in the
last century. Prior to that, people could only gaze
over the water’s surface and speculate on what
took place beneath. If previous civilizations, with
their great sculptors and painters had had
access to this simple instrument, the mask, might
not our world today more reflect that which takes
place over 90% of its surface? Would not our
architecture reflect the inspiration of coral
formations, our clothing and interiors mimic the
shimmering, gaudy reflections of the deep?
Would not the epic poetry of the ancient Greeks
and Romans have recounted mythic adventures
that took place beneath the ocean’s surface, our
religious deities portrayed as gods residing in
magnificent undersea palaces? Unfortunately,
now that we have the tools to study these
heretofore forbidden regions, the masks, scuba
tanks and undersea vessels, we have not the
artistic inspiration or curiosity to bring them into
our cultural realm.

Magpie and I found what we were looking for:
what had once been a huge school of silver fish
that resided in these waters. On previous visits,
we had been astounded by the size of the school
– millions of fish, a carpet of them, stretching
hundreds of meters. This immense megalopolis
was an astonishing sight, and we wanted to see
it again before returning to New York.

Unfortunately, this swim brought home to us a
more graphic understanding of what damage
Wilma had effected on the marine environment
than had any of our previous excursions. The
huge school of fish had been completely
decimated. Where once existed millions upon
millions of fish was now reduced to a small group
of perhaps several thousands. All those millions
of fish gone! It would take years for the school to
return to its former size. People see the surface
effects of the hurricane, Magpie had kept
insisting, without giving any thought to the
damage done to the marine life by the seismic
churning of the sea.

The stupendous magnitude of the damage was
incontrovertible, yet what was left of the school
behaved eerily like nothing had gone amiss.
What that school of fish does there, I couldn’t
possibly imagine. It had been there for years that
we knew of, and never broke ranks, even to hunt
for food. Was it in the path of a current of
microscopic algae and could just sit there as its
food was brought to it? The shimmering reflection
of the sunlight on the fish’s scales reminded me
of what Magpie had told me about barracuda
confusing my sparkling gold chain for a fish, and
now I came to really conceptualize the logic of
that.

What marvel of intelligence or communication
causes fish to gather in the millions, to instantly
separate and regroup as though by
instantaneous thought transference, swimming
back on themselves and forming a complex and
intricate geometric ballet, forming kaleidoscopic
patterns of visual enchantment?

Might it not be indicative of a collective wisdom
formed by billions of years of evolution? Who
says that fish are stupid? People have never
given any thought to submarine intelligence
except in dolphins who are, after all, mammals,
and therefore more comprehensible to us, but
who knows what thoughts or wisdom are locked
in the mind of a fish.

People are generally conditioned to think of fish
as dumb corpses packed on ice in a Chinatown
stall, but I have had occasion to look into the
eyes of many a live fish in his own natural
environment and have discerned from those
experiences a lively intelligence and curiosity.
They have not hands to construct, or a spoken
language, but who can imagine the thoughts,
memories and emotions that might be trapped
inside them, that might obsess them?

We came across a huge eagle ray, a monstrous
spotted creature at least ten feet across, with a
barbed tail at least twelve feet long. His face,
impassive and pensive, was eerily humanoid. He
stared as us for a moment without curiosity and
then fluttered his batlike wings at us, as though
to bid us adieu, before swimming out to sea.

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