I watched them all load up from the vantage point of the tree house, as Bucky advanced the throttle on the skiff. The light hull zigzagged out the channel as the birds flew from their roosts on the markers. They disappeared around the end of the island, and I headed for the hammock. It had been an emotional night for this cowboy.
I woke up thirty minutes later and felt much better. I had decided to take Bucky up on his offer of the Jeep. It was a rust bucket held together with duct tape and baling wire. It would never make the trip to Cancún and stay in one piece, but it was time to drive somewhere. Tulum seemed the perfect answer.
Driving is one of those things that you get so used to in America, but it doesn’t seem necessary on an island. My horse and my bicycle had served me well during my time here, and I really had no need for wheels. But that morning, I was ready for a road trip.
I went for a short swim to wake up, packed an overnight bag, then jumped in the Jeep. I buzzed through town and waved to everyone, then caught the ferry to the mainland and started up the sandy road that led north to Tulum.
I guess I wasn’t watching where I was going, and being away from driving for so long proved to be my undoing. From a distance, the puddle that lay across the road looked just like that—a puddle. Plus, I was in a Jeep, the vehicle that had earned its stripes in World War II. So I didn’t even bother to slow down; that is, until the puddle turned into a pothole the size of a swimming pool.
Well, when I finally cleared the mud from my face, eyes, and ears, I was literally up to my ass in water. Only the windshield of the Jeep was visible.
My first thought was a movie image of the dreaded quicksand pit that slowly swallowed people who panicked. Those who didn’t panic or move were eventually rescued by the screenwriter, who would write in a convenient nearby vine that could be used by the human plum who was stuck in the pudding.
I was sitting in a half ton of steel, and there was no vine in sight. I sat movie-still for about three minutes and watched the level of water on the windshield. I was not sinking.
The only redeeming thing in this mess was that my waterproof fishing bag, which held my towel, a change of clothes, my lucky conch shell, and my book, floated from the backseat to the front. I grabbed it and hung it on the rearview mirror, then slowly squirmed from behind the wheel and floated out of the Jeep, feeling for the bottom. To my momentary delight, I found hard sand, not mud, beneath my feet. I walked out of the pothole and just looked at the mess I had made.
My day was not going very well so far. My ex-girlfriend had flown away, and I had drowned a Jeep.
I was rescued from a slide into depression by the sound of a badly running engine coming out of the jungle. I felt my luck changing as a beat-up pickup belching smoke came around the bend. I recognized the driver as a local fisherman named Chino, who sold us bait at the lodge. Unlike me, Chino had the good sense to steer around the pothole. He slowed to a stop.
“Hola, hermano,” he said with a sardonic smile. “Looks like another one of the giant iguana attacks to me, Tully,” he said as he examined the nearly submerged Jeep.
“No, it was aliens from the Pleiades who set this trap.”
“Happens all the time,” Chino said in a matter-of-fact voice as he groped around in the bed of his truck. He pulled out a thick piece of rope, which he tied to his bumper. “I got mine done,” he added.
I waded back into the muddy water and was quickly up to my waist in muck.
Chino whistled and said, “Now that’s a pothole.”
I connected the Jeep, climbed back out, and watched as Chino fired up his truck, revved the engine, and dragged the Jeep free and moved it to the side of the road. Water poured from it as if it were some kind of giant sprinkler can. I knew it wouldn’t be running anytime soon.
“I’m heading to Playa del Carmen, Tully, but I ain’t in no hurry. I can take you back to the lodge if you want.”
“That Jeep ain’t goin’ nowhere, Chino. I’ll call Ix-Nay from Tulum. I have appointments there.”
“I bet you do.” He laughed.
Before I jumped in his truck, I grabbed my waterproof bag and dashed through the palmetto palms for the ocean. I peeled off my mud-soaked shorts and T-shirt, went for a quick rinse, and changed clothes. I was kind of feeling human again.
It may have been early morning, but Chino was already ahead of the day. From his shirt pocket, he produced and fired up a big fat joint and held it in my direction. “They call it da kine. I got it from that Rasta band that was playing down at the Iguana. It is so strong, it will take your mind off pussy for nearly ten seconds.”
I burst out laughing. It was the first laugh I’d had since I left the dinner table last night—a very long evening.
“Ten seconds?” I asked as I took the joint from him.
After the abrupt departure of Donna Kay and now the Jeep mess, I was more than happy to help him turn his ganja into ashes. We traded the joint back and forth as we drove.
As the buzz came on, I settled into it, staring at the tops of the palm trees passing by and occasionally glimpsing the green ocean.
Chino turned up the radio, and Celia Cruz sang to us. “That shit working yet?” he asked.
I nodded my head and smiled. “I believe so. I am only thinking of coconuts, amigo.”
My first view of the ruins had been from the back of my horse. Shortly after I arrived at Crocodile Rock, Ix-Nay had given me directions to a beach trail that led all the way up from the Punta Margarita ferry dock to Tulum. I had met an American geographer in the Fat Iguana who was working on the site and had offered to show it to me. I had decided to go up early and camp out on the little beach under the cliff, to get a look at the place as the sun rose out of the Caribbean.
That morning, I woke before dawn, took a swim, and then rode Mr. Twain up the bluff to the ancient city.
Just as we reached the top of the cliff and the entrance to the ruins, the sun rose over the eastern horizon. I expected to see a bunch of rock hunters and scientists taking measurements and chipping away at rocks, but there was nobody there. I sat on my horse, surrounded by silence and history.
For the moment, I was the king of Tulum. Staring at my kingdom of ruins that morning, I found myself with a head full of cosmic questions, and I certainly had no answers—so I decided to survey my domain on foot. I tied Mr. Twain at the base of the tower they call El Castillo, and I ascended the stairs, heading to the top. The tiny stairs told of small occupants back in the old days.
On the way up, I passed what appeared to be an old altar and wondered if that was where they sacrificed the virgins. Reaching the summit, I scanned the panorama of my kingdom and declared all things to be well. I took a few pictures with my camera and then descended to my waiting steed.
The true spiritual essence of the morning and my rule over the ruins was brought to a swift conclusion in a split second as I transformed from the King of Dawn into a gringo trespasser. Standing next to Mr. Twain was an angry-looking guard in a soiled uniform, pointing an M16 carbine at me and shouting in Spanish. My reign was over. He looked as if he not only would shoot me but might eat me as well if I didn’t do what he said.
As frightening as the situation was, I couldn’t help but think that the guy with the gun looked very familiar to me.
Now I don’t know if adrenaline is supposed to speed up your thought processes, but I can tell you that the sight of the gun pointed at me jump-started something. I did know the guy. Of course he didn’t come to the Fat Iguana in his uniform, but I recognized his face.
His real name was Hector, and he was a Jimi Hendrix freak. He would regularly show up at the bar and repeatedly punch every Hendrix tune we had on the jukebox. I shared his love of Hendrix, and one night in the bar, as he was loading up the jukebox, I asked him how he had become such a fan.
It seems that as a teenager he had spent time in San Francisco and had worked for a caterer who did all the Bill Graham shows. I guess Hendrix liked Mexican food, and Hect
or had actually met him. Jimi had signed his Giants baseball cap, which he never took off his head.
“Hector!” I blurted out. “I’m Tully, the other Hendrix freak from the Fat Iguana.”
Hector lowered the gun. The next thing I knew, I was having coffee in the guard shack, which was covered with Playmate cutouts, Hendrix posters, and pictures and brochures of Las Vegas.
It was there in the shack that I met Dr. Destin Walker for the first time. Dr. Walker was studying the windows in the tower, trying to figure out if there was any truth in the legend that the Mayans had used them as some kind of light system to guide their trading ships through the coral reef.
It was my long conversation that day with Dr. Walker that had put me under the spell of Tulum. It also got me thinking more seriously about the world of magic lights atop rocky shores that were meant to keep us from danger. I found myself heading up there quite often while the scientists were there. Dr. Walker had even hired me to help him with his research from time to time.
The day of Donna Kay’s departure, I had gone to Tulum looking for that morning magic, but after the Jeep was attacked by travelers from another planet, I arrived at a different Tulum than the Spanish had first seen.
Back in 1518, a Spanish expedition led by Juan de Grijalva bobbed on the waters of the Caribbean. They set their gazes shoreward upon a high cliff wedged between the indigo sky and the turquoise sea. There, a city of red, white, and blue buildings stretched so far down the coast that Tulum appeared to them as large as the city of Seville back across the sea in the land of the Inquisition.
It took the Spaniards a while before they ever set foot in Tulum, due mainly to the fierce determination of the Mayans not to be conquered. But in the end, gunpowder trumped arrowheads, and that was that. The old “Excuse me, Great Nations of Europe coming through” machismo overpowered the Indians, and the gun-toting, armor-laden, overreligious, disease-ridden, gold-lusting, self-anointed crusaders from the civilized world finally managed to get ashore. Funny thing was, after all that bloodshed in the name of God and Country, it was the mosquitoes that sent them packing after three months.
Chino deposited me, my waterproof bag, and my buzz at the main entrance to the grounds, where a parking lot was filled with tour buses that made the daily trek down from the hotels in Cancún with loads of gringos. Unlike the Spanish before them, these gringos were armed not with metal helmets and muskets but with Instamatics and video cameras.
I paid my entrance fee and joined the throng of visitors who combed over the ruins like ants. Today the crowds were actually a welcome sight. It was as close to the real world as I had been in a while, and I was thoroughly entertained by their going about their vacation activities of taking pictures, posing for videos, eating ice cream, buying T-shirts, and yelling at their misbehaving children in four or five different languages. I looked for Hector, but another guard told me he had gone to town to get lunch.
I sidestepped the crowds at the base of El Castillo and headed down to the beach. It too was packed, but I managed to find an unoccupied spot in the shade of the bluff. I laid out my towel, took off my shirt, got out my book, bought a hot dog and a beer from the beach vendor, and went on vacation.
Several beers later, I took a walk down the beach past the altar at the north end of the city. I still had my Jamaican ganja buzz going, and I just sat on the rocks and watched a flock of pelicans dive-bomb a school of pilchers repeatedly, wondering how many times a pelican dives in his life.
I got tired of counting, and the Technicolor shimmer was no longer visible on the water because the angle of the sun had changed. A bank of gray clouds started to fill in.
I returned to my spot in the shade of the bluff and moved my belongings to the shelter of a thatched hut on the beach. The sand and sea were now becoming less occupied as the loudspeakers from the parking lot had begun to blare out the announcement that it was time for the buses to leave.
I waved to my fellow vacationers as they gathered their bags and souvenirs to take off. I used a creative combination of waves I had learned in my rodeo days in Heartache when I rode my horse around arenas, carrying the American flag. It was quite a trick to secure that flagpole with one hand and acknowledge the crowd with the other. I had learned to mix my waving up, starting with the “unscrewing the lightbulb” wave, followed by the “washing windows” wave, and finishing up with the ever-popular doublehanded, open-palmed “Pope” wave while I secured the flagpole against the saddle with my knee. My waves in the rodeo arenas had drawn a big response. People waved back, whistled, and clapped. Here on the beach at Tulum, people looked at me like I needed to be locked up.
“The bus is leaving, sir,” one overbearing American woman shouted at me. I waved at her and said, “I’m not on the bus, ma’am,” and heard her say to her husband as she waddled by, “He should be under the damn bus.”
All that waving had made me tired, and I still had no idea how in the hell I was going to get home. I had called the lodge from a pay phone outside the guard shack at the ruins, but I only got the machine. I knew they were all still out fishing. The look on Sammy Raye’s face earlier that morning told me they would be fishing until the sun went down. I left a message about the Jeep and just said I would find a ride home.
My day in wonderland had been totally void of any thoughts of how that return trip might happen, so I decided it was time to think up a plan. I arranged my towel against my waterproof bag until the two items created a makeshift pillow, perfect for a thinking man to rest his head on.
An undetermined amount of time later, the thinking, sleeping man was awakened by strange sounds. I opened my eyes to Hector, who was playing air guitar on his M16 and singing the words to “All Along the Watchtower.” Hector’s wake-up call was accompanied by the sound and sting of rain. The sunny panorama of the day had quickly been displaced by a sudden squall that blocked the sun and erased the horizon. A nearby clap of thunder and a lightning flash sent me scrambling from the beach to the shelter of the overhang of the bluff.
Hector followed. “Have you seen the big boat?” he asked in Spanish.
“What boat?”
“That boat,” he replied, pointing his gun at the beach. I looked out at the gray ocean. At first I saw nothing. Then I heard the sound of a bell ringing across the water. Seconds later, the huge bowsprit of a very large sailing vessel poked a hole through the rain and mist. It was followed by the graceful lines of a long green hull.
If the residue of ganja wasn’t affecting my vision too badly, I could swear I saw a very old woman, dressed in a yellow foul-weather slicker, shouting orders to the crew. They all moved swiftly at her command along the decks of one of the most beautiful two-masted schooners I had ever seen.
“I see you later, Tully. I got to go to work,” Hector called out as he ran through the rain along the path that led up the cliff.
I barely heard him. The bell rang again, and command was passed forward with a series of shouts. Then the large anchor dangling from the hawser beneath the bowsprit splashed into the water.
15
Schooner Fever
If meeting Cleopatra Highbourne for the first time that afternoon on the beach at Tulum was the beginning of an odyssey to the distant shore of Cayo Loco, then the boat that she commanded was the barb at the end of her hook that reeled me on board.
I had caught “schooner fever” at an early age back in Wyoming. The carriers of this infection included the movie version of Captains Courageous, Grandma Ghost, a songwriter named Fred Neil, a novelist named Patrick O’Brian, and Captain Adam Troy.
Captain Troy was neither a ghost from my past nor a skeleton in my closet. According to my mother, he was much worse than that. He was an actor. His real name was Gardner McKay, and as the skipper of the schooner Tiki, he was electronically transported from the back lot of the 20th Century Fox Studios in Hollywood to the screen on our television set as the star of a new series called Adventures in Paradise. I didn’t have to go t
o the library to find out about Gardner McKay, because he came to the doorstep of my house in Heartache. He arrived on the cover of Life magazine, and I devoured every word about my new hero.
In real life, Gardner McKay was actually descended from a long line of shipbuilders and sailors. He had pet lions, played on the studio basketball team, and seemed from the magazine story not to be too caught up in his success.
The TV voyage of the Tiki lasted three years. I was on board for all thirty-one episodes as I grew up in a world of cows, ranches, and lots of snow. I remember clearly that the last episode of the show was entitled “Blueprint for Paradise.” Captain Adam Troy and the schooner Tiki were exactly that to me.
Now, a decade or three later, I was standing in the rain on a tropical shore where a schooner had come back into my life again. The crew was launching a dinghy that was headed for the beach with what looked to be some kind of sea witch at the helm.
If you have spent much time around boats, and you see a small vessel heading for a dock or a beach, you just naturally stand by to offer a hand or tend a line. That, along with a strong sense of curiosity about the vessel that lay at anchor off the ruins, is what instinctively took me to the shoreline where the tender from the schooner was headed.
My assistance wasn’t needed as two of the four sturdy black oarsmen leaped from their positions in the dinghy and held it in the knee-high surf until the remaining rowers disembarked, followed by the woman who would soon steer the course of my life. She waded nimbly ashore in my direction. She was wearing a green straw hat with a large brim, banded by a wilting pink hibiscus held in place by a blue ribbon. All this action was set to the backdrop of the green-hulled schooner, bobbing gently on the turquoise water behind the reef. Meanwhile, as the gray squall clouds tore apart like tissue paper, the setting sun reappeared above the horizon. It was quite a sight for a cowboy from Wyoming.