Superdeli in downtown Cancun, centro, closed at one in the morning. Shelley and I would roll in around 11:30 pm with the coolers already full in the back of the truck and an hour of dark road still between us and bed. We had been up since before the first dive. The cappuccino was for the drive home.

This was the early nineties, and there were no grocery stores where we lived, in Akumal, halfway between Playa del Carmen and Tulum. There were minisupers. Basic convenience stores hawking Cokes, Masa, small packages of cookies, maybe fresh tortillas, and a few aging oranges. If you wanted to feed yourself for the next two weeks you got in the truck and drove to Cancun. Shelley worked for a dive shop and I worked for a competing one up the coast, six days a week. So grocery shopping usually meant after work, at night.

We took turns on who drove. Shelley had a bright red pickup with a cap on the back. I had a burgundy stick-shift Nissan with an open bed and a couple of blue Coleman coolers that had seen better days, one with the lid off its hinges. Grocery bags got wedged between the coolers or bungeed down so nothing flew out on the highway.

Shelley had gotten there, I don’t know, three to six months before I did. From Florida, blonde hair bleached by the sun, blue eyes, a sweet smile. A cave diver. She homeschooled some American kids on the Calvert curriculum. Their parents owned some condos they rented to divers. She also led dives when she wasn’t teaching. She stayed about two years and went home to the States. And Shelley loved her sweets.

Cancun was small then. No Walmart, no Sam’s, no Chedraui. One list was a four or five store excursion, if you were lucky. You never knew which ones would have what you needed. SuperISSSTE, the government store, was always first. Rice, beans, cooking oil, candles for when the power went out, and boxed milk, the kind that keeps almost forever. It had a couple of checkout lanes. Boxes in the aisles, grimy floors, and sometimes the stench of something rotting.

Then Comercial Mexicana, San Francisco de Asís, another small grocery store that is now long gone. Then it was a hunt through supermanzanas, or neighborhoods, for small shops to round out whatever you could not find in the first stores, or hit shops like Parisina that sold fabric, bolts of cotton, and sewing notions.

Every parking lot had a guy with a rag over his shoulder and a whistle. No uniform, in plastic sandals trying to help you park your vehicle. Whether you needed help or not. You gave him a couple of pesos to stand by the truck while you went in, as security, since the truck bed was full of purchases. During the day, flip them a few extra pesos and they’d put a piece of cardboard on your windshield to block out the heat of the sun.

As with each of these stores, it was a scavenger hunt to find what you needed and what you wanted. And when it wasn’t on the shelf, is there a substitute? Where else could we maybe find it? Are they still open? You bought everything you saw when you saw it, because you didn’t know when it was coming back. That’s how Gary and I ended up eating a lot of Kraft macaroni and cheese, doctored up with the green canister of Kraft Parmesan and black pepper, on a diver’s budget and calling it dinner.

I was a new wife trying to run a household, in this case two rooms. What I was always looking for was coffee. Beans, from Veracruz if I could get them, and you’d think in Mexico that would be easy. No. The Mr. Coffee maker came with the casita, furnished. The royal blue coffee grinder we had carried down from our house in Baltimore. It was hit or miss shopping for coffee beans. When I found them I’d buy two, three, or even four bags and stack them in our bodega.

Whoever was up first made the coffee. The grinder whirred, loud at first, and you’d give it a couple of shakes while it hummed. If it was Gary, there was always a brief pause after. He’d turn the grinder upside down and give it two taps with his hand to get the last of the grind out of the blades.

Gary's kitchen, this week. Sound on.

The night I’m thinking of, we had done all the stores. Coolers sweating in the truck bed. Superdeli was the first place in Cancun with an espresso machine, or the first one we knew about. Bright lights, a clean floor, a little cafe where you could get a cappuccino and a pastry, and an import shelf we scoured every time because something might have changed since last visit. Oscar Mayer. Lunchables, which nobody needed. Danish butter in a can, always stocked and always good. Skippy, grab that. Stoli for about 80 pesos a bottle, four bucks, back when vodka first showed up in our part of Mexico. Espresso instead of instant. It felt refined to us. There were always a few Cancunenses at the tables with a coffee and cigarette at that hour, and a taxi out front hoping for a fare.

We had our coffee sitting outside. As we finished walking through the small store, we approached the one open cash register. That’s when Shelley pointed at the shelf.

Hershey’s Kisses.

Up until then there had never been a Hershey product in our part of Mexico. And here were two grown women at midnight in a pretend NY-style deli in Cancun getting excited over a bag of chocolate Kisses. Shelley put three bags in her basket. She kept a drawer in her refrigerator at home for sweets. Bubulubus and whatever candy some unsuspecting tourist had been conned into muling down from the States. The Kisses were for special occasions.

The drive home.

The highway to Playa, then on to Akumal, was two lanes and no shoulder. If you caught the edge you went down a big drop into the jungle. There wasn’t a light anywhere from the edge of Cancun to Playa. Windows down, listening to the one radio station, Radio Turquesa, until it faded out long before we got anywhere. After that it was a cassette tape or nothing.

If somebody broke down out there at night, you didn’t find out from a hazard triangle. You found out from a can of kerosene, or gasoline, burning in the road up ahead.

My friend Dan, American, a Texan I believe, lived in a casita a couple doors down with his girlfriend. He had been on the coast for a few years, looked after some properties and ran a laundry service in Tulum. Blond, tan, handsome, and he wore a gold chain with a cross off the Matancero, the 18th-century Spanish galleon that went down off Akumal. A really good egg. Coming home from a Cancun run one night in his combi, a VW bus, he did not see the cow standing in the road, and it came through the windshield.

Playa was a little more than half way home. You knew you were coming up on it because there was a radio tower with a red light blinking on top. And that was all there was. Then another stretch of darkness to Akumal.

We didn’t open the Kisses in the truck. Shelley squirreled hers away in the drawer in her refrigerator with the rest of her stash. Me, I put mine in the refrigerator so the ants wouldn’t get them.

Not long after the Kisses, Cancun got an Ace Hardware. For weeks it was all the Coconut Telegraph, the rumor mill up and down the coast, could talk about. Opening day you’d have thought the Super Bowl had come to town. The parking lot was full before the doors opened. People were tailgating at a hardware store. It was right before Christmas, so every gringo gift exchange on the coast that year was a first-world brand from Ace. I’ve read since that it may not have been a real Ace, as far as the company was concerned. Nobody in that parking lot cared.

Gary and I got a Cuisinart food processor that Christmas. From Ace. It’s still in the kitchen, Gary’s kitchen now. So is the grinder we carried down from Baltimore. I was there this past December and he made the coffee. The grinder, whirl, shake, the pause, two taps.

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Same coast, other days

They had no idea.

One Friday night in September, hurricane season, my husband Gary and I had dinner at Turtle Bay and shared a bottle of red wine. There were only a few tables, and the staff knew us. No rush to flip the table, so we took our time. Town was still small then. Most of the businesses in Akumal centered around the main beach, and many local families lived from the archway to the highway.

After dinner we walked over to the beach.

The moon was just rising, three-quarters full, glimmering on the water, and the breeze was heavy with humidity. The bay was flat calm, only the smallest surf washing up. The dive center was closed and dark. Only a couple of hotel rooms had lights on. Tipsy on wine, the moon, and the magic of the tropics on a beach all to ourselves, I skipped as I walked. “Let’s go for a swim.” I dropped my clothes right there on the sand.

Naked stepping into the water, egging Gary on to join me. A fisherman’s panga sat anchored a few feet offshore, in front of the dive center. Not waiting, I pranced into the sea. Something hit my right foot. Lightning-quick.

I pulled my foot up out of the water, blood. Bleeding like a hemophiliac, or a stuck pig. We could not tell what the injury was, or how serious. This was a Mexico with no 911, no first responders or ambulances, so Gary dropped my bare ass in the sand. Directed me to get my clothes on, while he looked for the security guards from Club Akumal Caribe, the oldest hotel on the beach.

He was gone several minutes. I shinnied into my shorts and t-shirt, not panicking, just bleeding. And then pain started.

Gary returned with a security guard. They were calling Nestor.

Dr. Nestor was the only medical care on the corridor without driving to Cancun. A young doctor the some folks referred to as “the doc in a box”, after the single-room clinic he ran on the highway across from Chemuyil. Gary and the security guy got me into the back seat of our SUV. I just remember hearing Nestor was on his way. My foot was elevated, covered with a towel, shoved into the bag of ice that Gary bought at the minisuper.

Waiting at the Akumal archway, the entrance to the beach and the road to the lagoon. Marcy and Memo, dear friends, stopped to see what the commotion was. Memo looks like Mr. Natural from Zap Comix. He always has, with his big beard. Marcy stuck her head in through the open back car door to reassure me, though the excruciating throbbing had me focused on my foot rather than the unfolding circumstances. Melting ice, tinted red with my blood, trickled down my leg.

Someone said Nestor was here. I don’t remember if they said it in English or Spanish.

I whipped my shorts down to my ankles before his car was in Park. In Mexico, shots are given in the butt, not the arm. And Nestor had seen my ass almost as much as my husband had over the years. Nestor shot me with morphine without a second thought, and I hadn’t one thought of refusing. Pharmaceutical drugs could be bought over the counter at any farmacia. Valium, Percodan, Percocet. Morphine had no shock value. This was field triage. MASH 4077 without a Klinger. With my half moon raised to meet the needle, he hit my right butt cheek.

Nestor could not say what had happened to me, but he knew he could not stitch me up under a parking lot light. He said to follow him in our car to the Robinson Club on Xpu-Ha beach, a small all-inclusive that catered to German tourists. I had always heard the food was great there.

We followed him up the highway ten or twelve minutes and down the short paved entrance. His clinic was at the far end of the resort. With help, I hopped from the parking lot. Funny, thinking about Nestor’s clinic at the resort: instead of one room he now had two, each a bit smaller than his previous box. But hey a step up. Two rooms. The waiting room could seat maybe four people in folding chairs. No coffee table, no magazines, kind of the quintessential items you would expect to find in a doctor’s office. It had neither.

Thinking back, I can see myself on the table from the doorway of the examination room, a momentary out-of-body experience. The head of the table up against the left wall. Perpendicular. My feet weren’t in stirrups, but my right leg was in the air under the bright operating light, Nestor on the left side of my foot, his assistant, a man I never knew, on the right, assessing what happened and the damage.

I’m back in my body. Two men working on my foot. Gary watched. Turning from them to me and back again. Me, focussed at the ceiling, raging in two languages the resounding cuss-filled agony. Fuck. Shit. Damn it.

They buried their fingers in my foot up to the knuckle to clean the wound thoroughly. Marine injuries tend to be riddled with nasty bacteria. The pain was such that I had difficulty isolating where on my foot it radiated from. More morphine. Nestor then took a needle and thread knitting my foot back together. Sixteen stitches sweeping across the top, from the big toe to the fourth.

But I still feel pain, and it seems like it’s coming from the bottom of my foot. “Look at the bottom of my foot” I screeched. Sure enough, there was a single cut. A puncture wound, deep enough to need a stitch of its own. The mystery of which sea monster attacked me became more curiouser. Loch Ness, the Kraken? None of us could think of any creature that leaves a bite like that.

Friday night was soon to be Saturday, 11:30 pm, bandaged up to go. I was too out of it to absorb Nestor’s at-home care instructions. He handed me his only crutches. Too short for me, I wobble-crutched on morphine, trying not to fall over.

How Marcy and Memo knew we were home, I have no clue. They just showed up at our house. Dropping in was common in anyone’s home, because most of the people in town did not have phones. We had one but people still just popped in.

Marcy, drinking a Dos Equis beer, asked if we wanted to smoke a joint. It might help me sleep. I was in our bedroom, so Marcy and Memo came upstairs. All of us on our king size bed. Me laid back, foot elevated, passing a joint, and watching a worn-out videotape we had all seen a thousand times. Seinfeld. Marcy and Memo left after an episode. The joint did not help me sleep. It enhanced the pain. Scream until I passed out, wake up screaming. All night.

Saturday and Sunday were ice, elevation, pain.

Monday. Work day. We had our company office on 10th Avenue in Playa del Carmen; there was no way I was going. I slid down the concrete steps on my butt like a child to the first floor. Leaned back on the uncomfortable concrete living room sofa, watching the morning news on our pirated satellite service. I saw smoke coming from the World Trade Center. Gary was getting ready for work upstairs. I mentioned it, not frantically, just loud enough for him to hear: “Hey, a commuter plane or a traffic copter must have hit one of the towers.” He came downstairs, and we watched the jet hit the second tower. We did not know what to think. There was no news report yet on the tragedy that had not fully unfolded. Gary went to work.

My day was filled with napping and hobbling from the sofa, to the kitchen for ice, and the bathroom. Late in the afternoon, the phone rang. I raced to it like a lame horse at the Kentucky Derby, crutches and all. Slipped. Down I went. I grabbed the phone before they hung up. It was my mom, calling to see how I was, while fresh blood seeped from where stitches had ripped open.

Gary got home to find me right where he left me. It was dead at the office; the world was glued to the telly. The sun started to sink, a cocktail to wash down the meds. We flipped on the TV to the bootlegged Discovery Channel. We love documentaries.

The segment mentioned that boat-bottom cleaners in Miami and the Keys had been attacked by barracudas. Fascinating. Since as dive instructors we had always told divers they were docile, just don’t wear shiny jewelry. But barracuda attacks are more common than people think, news to us too. At this point we were not thinking that this is what attacked me. We were just dive pros, fascinated by the research and the scientists talking about this fish.

Until one researcher held up a barracuda skull. It was unmistakable. The dental records in my foot, especially the deep puncture on the bottom, were certainly from a barracuda.

Holy shit. I was bit by a barracuda.

And it was only after the bite that the Barry stories found me. Akumal Bay had a resident barracuda, Barry, a local celebrity snorkelers visited in the bay. I’d seen him once or twice myself, 4-5 feet long swimming in the middle of a huge fish ball. Now I heard he’d nipped a snorkeler’s swim trunks. I’m not saying it was definitely Barry. But he was a suspect. Even I was taken in by the tourist gossip.

So the barracuda bit me. But why?

The panga it was likely hiding under. Fishermen weren’t shy about cleaning their catch and dumping the entrails overboard.

Through the local rumor mill I’d heard that a woman in Tulum, the week prior, had been killed swimming with a silver necklace on, the fish hitting her jugular. And another attack along the coast. Phase of the moon? Who knew?

We presumed the culprit thought my foot hitting the water was a baby turtle. It was hatching season. Hatchlings swim toward the moonlight. Plausible.

Then I realized I had nail polish on, barely noticeable, a pale yellow, yet iridescent. Did the moon and the splashing make the light hit just right to catch the fish’s eye?

Something we will never know.

But the story does not end there.

In subsequent days I probably should have gone back to see Nestor. He never mentioned a follow-up, and as the ends of the gash grew closed, I carefully removed one stitch at a time myself, with a pair of nail clippers. MacGyver medicine. The worst of the gash was just before pig #4, where my Kentucky Derby slip had ripped it a little wider. The fourth toe, the little piggy that did not get roast beef, drooped. I could not flex it up, get it in line with the other toes. Ligaments had been cut, leaving it dangling.

I called my little sister. I still call her by her childhood nickname, Bugger. Bugger has a hardware store in her feet after so many surgeries. Could she ask her foot doctor if anything could be done? If so, I’d fly to Cleveland. His verdict came back: it would be like trying to connect two pieces of linguini.

Life settled back into the regular dramas of day-to-day life in Mexico. A couple weeks later the phone rang. Friends calling from Xcalak, a remote fishing village just north of Belize. I answered, and the caller was shocked to hear my voice. She had called to express condolences. They’d heard on the coconut telegraph that I had died.

Ah, the chisme. Gossip.

The toe and I worked out our arrangement over the years. I could curl pig #4 under; I just couldn’t uncurl it back. It wasn’t open-toed shoes that gave me trouble but closed ones, the toe getting caught under my foot. I even tried a string to pull it in line while I put a shoe on. The future was wider shoes, room to wiggle the pig into place. To this day I trip over it, stub it on door jambs, and have broken it a few times in the process. Only to give it a yank and straighten it out. And I cuss the same as I did back then.

The scar still hurts if you touch it. Yet I balance fine and can even do a tree pose in yoga, vṛkṣāsana. My foot aches when it rains sometimes. The scar on the bottom, the callus, molts like a crustacean. Twenty-five years later, I recently had my first follow-up since that night. My sister’s doctor. Yes, the same one. My pinky toe now looks like it’s humping pig #4. I had x-rays taken for the first time too. He says the damage makes me list to the right a bit, maybe reaching my lower back, and eventually it will tweak my knee. A custom orthotic is in my future.

Although I am not afraid of the water, I can be a nervous nilly. I don’t want anything touching me. Seaweed. A guppy. The sight of a barracuda makes my heart race, and not in a good way. So when that sand dollar scooted across my foot in Destin, my nephews got a good laugh out of my freak-out. What they didn’t know was who they were laughing at: a dive instructor, a cave diver, a woman who spent years teaching strangers that the water was safe.

I used to think feet were sexy. That my feet were sexy. Now not so much. I look at my foot every day and still think of that night. Too unbelievable to be true, yet it is. And I still love to dive. With gear on I feel a bit more on par with the sea monsters of the deep in their watery realm.

And skinny dipping will remain an activity for a pool, not the beach.

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Sink your teeth into these…

Diving is #1 and you are #2 a love story

You just met Gary on a beach in Akumal. I met him at a quarry next to Three Mile Island, and told him where he ranked.

Lunch Alone: A First Day in 1992 Playa del Carmen

A four-page resume, a $400 salary, and nobody to sit with in the cafeteria.

Cenote Wedding, 1993

Some people book a church. Some book a beach. I booked a hole in the jungle full of water.

I moved to Mexico in 1992 to explore underwater caves. Meant to stay six months. Stayed twenty-seven years. The caves were the easy part.

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There was a sign at the side of Highway 307. Cenote Chac Mool.

Hand-painted, on a simple old wooden board nailed to a post. The kind of sign you drive past a hundred times and don’t stop for.

The day I saw it, my husband Gary and I were coming back from a grocery run in Cancun. South of Puerto Aventuras on the jungle side of the road. The truck bed was full of dry goods, and coolers with all of the groceries iced down. We were tired. We hit the brakes and backed up to the sign. This was the Riviera Maya before it became the Riviera Maya. The dirt road led to a little cinderblock house with a thatched roof.

A short, big-bellied shirtless man in chanclas, sandals, walked out to our blue Nissan pickup. In our best Spanglish, we asked if we could see his cenote. He proudly said, “Si.” His neighbors were charging for access to their cenotes and he wanted to make some cash on his. The entry fee was ten pesos per person. A bit more than a dollar each.

We had Coca-Colas in the cooler. He took one of those too.

He led us with his own truck deeper into the scrubby jungle to a path. Fresh machete marks on the trees where he had hacked. It was hard to control our excitement when we saw the depression in the ground. A collapse in the earth where the ceiling of the cave had fallen in. We negotiated a rickety stick ladder over fallen rocks. Down to a narrower path of crushed white limestone that stretched across to a crescent cavern opening. A motmot with its blue-green iridescent feathers hooted overhead. Motmots hang out near fresh water, a good sign.

The water was clear, “gin-clear”, as cliche as it sounds, but cave divers would describe it that way. In the cavern, lit up by the sun, we stirred up a little sediment, and watched it float downstream. Another good sign of water flow. And beyond the daylight we could make out the faint darkness of a tunnel opening. The owner told us no one had ever dived it. “Did it look good?” “What did we think?” We could not hide our shit-eating-grins. This was a “glory-hole” We asked if we could return the next day with gear. The 15-minute drive home from the site was banter and theories of where the cave could go.

After coffee the next morning we loaded our tanks into the truck. Usually when we check out a new cenote we take only a single tank, a regulator, mask and fins, planning on only one of us getting into the water. This time we were confident there were going to be passageways to explore so we both loaded full sets of equipment, with a plan that this would be more than a “look and see”.

The owner met us at the entrance again. He watched us haul gear to the water and get into our tanks. Cave diving was uncommon. Locals, especially kids, would love to watch us suit up. Sometimes the kids helped by carrying our fins or a mask. Thrilled. Then we’d disappear for hours at a time and reappear. It would not be a surprise if there was a smiling face waiting for us as we surfaced.

We had explored some other cenotes in the neighborhood and had a sneaking suspicion that this one would connect to the others nearby.

We were the first cave divers into Chac Mool. It was 1997. The system is nine kilometers (five miles) long. We thought it would connect to Ponderosa, otherwise known as Sistema El Eden, a bit down the road. It didn’t.

Downstream, we found the largest underwater stalactite in the world. I saw it first. Gary was ahead, laying line, choosing compass bearings against the surrounding cave maps in his head. Sometimes he was so fixated on the compass it irked me. He did not go off course. Me? I went off it. I wanted to see what was there. We butted heads underwater. Often. Inside a massive room in the cave, darkness ate my halogen light beam. As I panned the room the light hit a stalactite. Startled. It was over my right shoulder. Nothing in any cave I had been in looked like this. I flashed my light to get Gary’s attention. I then pointed my light beam to illuminate my find through the bluish hue of the water. Small flakes of calcite snowing down from the ceiling of the cave from my bubbles. It was an enormous white drip-stone formation. We were near the ceiling. The stalactite hung down 12 meters (42 feet). Shouting cheers of victory through our regulators at the discovery. We named the calcite formation “Xix Ha Tunich”. Mayan for the “Big Water Stone”.

A cave no one knew about. We happened upon it all because I saw a sign on the drive home from a grocery run.

There were seven or eight of us who dove these caves in those years. I was one of a few women. We knew each other’s skills. We had the training, the equipment, and the respect for what could go wrong. My dear friend Harry died in this cave, so I have bitter-sweet memories when I hear the name “Chac Mool”.

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That’s how it was then. Ten pesos. A bottle of Coca-Cola. Maybe a small package of cookies won admission. Spanglish with a short guy in chanclas who owned a cenote, could not swim, and hoped he had an attraction people would pay to see.

Chac Mool was one of many spots I explored. You don’t get paid to explore. I did it because I loved it. That was enough. And maybe even the dream to be on the cover of National Geographic. I did make the cover of Dive Girl Magazine though. Among a few others. I made sure my parents got copies. Proof I was not wasting my life. Women’s Diver’s Hall of Fame. Close enough.

We did several exploration dives in Chac Mool, and then guided divers on both cavern and cave dives after. I have not been back in years. My memories of what it was are too good to risk. Today Chac Mool is a dive site. Cave and cavern divers still go. Cameras are not allowed. The photographer charges forty dollars per person in a group. Sixty if you dive alone for pics.

And I am not sure if the owner is still there. So do not show up with a Coca-Cola, cookies and drop my name thinking you can get in.

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The caves were the easy part. Everyday life was harder. Start here.

FAQs and answers for the curious.

What is a cenote?

A cenote is a natural sinkhole in limestone bedrock that exposes groundwater. The Yucatan is riddled with them. Like Swiss cheese. The Maya considered them sacred. Divers use them as entryways to the underwater cave systems.

What’s the difference between cavern diving and cave diving?

Cavern diving is done within the daylight section of the cave and usually under the supervision of a trained cave diver as a guide. No special equipment is needed to do a cavern dive tour.

Do I need special training to dive in caves?

Yes, cave diving is considered technical diving and requires specialized training and equipment. Message me if you need recommendations of training organizations.

What is “laying line?”

In an unexplored cave we lay a line through the passageway as we go. It does two jobs: it gets us out if visibility drops, and we survey it on the way out to map the cave.

Does the name Chac Mool have a meaning?

Yes! Augustus Le Plongeon named the reclining statues at Chichen Itza in 1875. Figures on their backs, heads turned, bowls on their stomachs. The name comes from Yucatec Maya, roughly “red jaguar paw”. The statues are associated with Chac, the Mayan rain god. Also spelled Chacmool as one word. Chaac with two a’s is the Mayan language transliteration.

Isn’t glory hole some vulgar term?

Yes, as I understand now the general context of the word. Back then I did not know. It was never said with intent of being lewd. We often used the term when we referred to a promising cave.

It took six of us to move Harry, we struggled under his bulk. He was a big man and the rough cut pine box corners bit into our hands on the shoulder of the road going into Puerto Morelos. We got him up high enough to slide the box from the bed of one pickup into the bed of another. Nobody wanted to be the one who dropped him.

There was a plane to catch, American Airlines Cargo in Cancún, and that was it. Get his ass on the plane. No time to be solemn about it.

My friend Harry was from Dallas. A stocky-built lawyer with a gold diver’s Rolex on his wrist, a gold chain around his neck, a gold wedding band. He was a cave diver and he came down a few times a year with his buddies to dive the cave systems along the coast. We finished every visit the same way. Dinner at Papaya Republic in Puerto Aventuras and Harry with a snifter of flaming Sambuca and three coffee beans sitting in the bottom at the head of the table.

He came down that last trip with Jack. Jack was Dallas too, older, up in his late sixties, a marathon runner, lean as a rail. Next to big burly Harry the two of them looked like a setup for a joke. An odd couple who had been diving together for years.

Harry and Jack were both experienced enough they did not need guides. They were diving Chac Mool Cenote on their own, a cave system Gary and I had discovered and mapped years before. Their dive, on this particular Saturday, went well and they were on their way out of the cave as planned.

Jack leading, Harry flashed his light at Jack indicating a problem, but not a panic. Harry got on the line to follow it out. That line, kite string, is a safety measure so you can find your way out in the dark. He had a heart attack in the cave. Jack led him out, yet Harry died on the surface.

Word got to me with the news about my friend Harry. Jack had already called Harry’s wife Linda in Dallas, now on her way to Mexico. I called her to say I would pick her and her daughter up in Cancún.

It was Labor Day weekend, 2002, which means nothing in Mexico except the US consulate is closed. Repeated calls to the consulate went to voice mail, as we tried to figure out how to get Harry home.

Once on the ground, Linda wanted to see Harry.

This was before refrigeration was something you could count on, and Gary and I were worried about what she’d find. To say it was a funeral parlor would be a gross overstatement. The place they’d taken him was a cinder block building with a roll-up garage door in Playa del Carmen. Three new caskets stacked on the right. A desk. We walked around back to a room, and there was Harry. A bit bloated. A bit blue. He was closer to room temperature than cold. Better than we anticipated. They asked if we’d brought clothes to dress him. We said no, he could just be put into a body bag. Harry would be dressed by a mortician in the US for a double funeral.

Harry’s father, Harry Senior, had died the very next day after Harry (jr.) died, without ever knowing his son was gone. The two Harrys, father and son, were going to have one funeral in Dallas. Harry would get dressed there alongside his father.

Before we left the woman at the desk banged Linda’s Mastercard for $6000 USD on the spot for mortuary services, like a casket, paperwork and taking care of the body.

Now it was off to the Ministerio Público, which by some odd miracle was open on a Sunday afternoon. It was with a sigh of relief Linda signed a stack of paperwork, and received a bag with Harry’s Rolex, gold chain and his wedding band. His jewelry was not stolen.

That night though drained, we went to dinner at Papaya Republic. We told Harry stories. We ordered a Sambuca in his honor, coffee beans and all. It wasn’t solemn. It was awkward. The US holiday weekend had us in a holding pattern trying to coordinate documents and arrangements. Linda scheduled her return flight, and Harry was to be checked into cargo. With the paperwork from Playa the airline waived the need for his passport.

Tuesday morning I picked up Linda and Harry’s stepdaughter at their hotel. The plan was to meet the funeral people with Harry at their place in Playa. Then follow the pickup truck north, parked in the street with a pine box in the bed with Harry’s name written in marker on the box, the feet marked, and the head marked, so you’d know which way he was lying I guess.

Playa was a much smaller city than it is today, and where there are hotels and resorts, there was nothing but jungle on either side. And it was where the entrance to Mayakoba stands today, where the truck with Harry’s body broke down on the highway.

Parking behind the crippled truck, flashers flashing I got out, and walked to find out what was happening as the driver and his passenger buried their head under the hood.

“Oye, ¿qué pasa?” I asked with the questioning head nod gesture.

¿Necesita agua? Pretending to be a Green Angel, the Ángeles Verdes roadside crew.

Mexico was loaded with logistical problems, and this was one more. The hood was up. They had no phone, so one of them got on the radio chatting back and forth to someone.

Linda and her daughter stayed in my car. Linda is Mexican, and Mexico was never going to catch her off guard. A truck dying on the highway with a body in the back did not rattle her. She laughed and said it was Harry, playing a joke on us. And the clock was running, because cargo doesn’t wait.

We were to limp up to Puerto Morelos where a second truck would be waiting for us. The two pickup trucks were like bookends, with their tailgates backed up to one another. But now the question was how to get Harry from one truck to the other. That is where the six of us stood shoulder to shoulder on each side of Harry. Harry’s widow, his step daughter, me and three guys slid our hands under the rough pine edges of the box to hoist Harry into the other truck.

Once at the airport, Linda checked Harry into cargo with only minutes to spare to check-in herself. I hugged her and apologized that we would not be at the funeral, and she asked me to go get his passport once the consulate opened. Then she flew home with him.

You would think this is the end of the story. Oh no, wait there’s more.

A couple days later I called Linda and told her I had Harry’s passport. I mentioned she must have been relieved once they landed in Dallas.

I asked if the hearse showed up at the airport, yes she confirmed. She said they’d waited a long time, like hours, at the baggage carousel. Some people never got their bags at all. Harry had leaked all over the cargo hold. He wasn’t embalmed right, and he’d leaked. The plane sat on the tarmac for days while “hazmat” (hazardous materials experts) cleaned it out.

And when the funeral home in Dallas opened the pine box with Harry in it, they found what a border and a body bag and hot weather will do. Somebody in Playa put a big ole Texan’s body into a used, small, Mayan-sized coffin. The funeral director had to come at the casket with a crowbar to get Harry out.

There was a funeral. Harry’s father in an open casket. Harry in a closed one.

You cannot make this up. I’ve told it a hundred times and I love it more each time. For Harry and for Linda both.

He died in a cave, on the line, on his way out. Doing what he loved, and I get to say that because it’s true.

The last time I saw him, there were three coffee beans in the bottom of a glass.

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Passing customs I see Macon through the glass. He’s the guide for the climb from North Carolina. How nice for him to meet me at the airport at this hour of the night. A car and driver are waiting. The driver grabs my bags, tossing them in the back. We are scrambling out of the parking lot. Why are we rushing? The resort I am staying at is 10 to 15 minutes from the Airport. We pull into a hotel just on the other side of the tarmac. Following Macon, I am standing in a dimly lit, open air hotel bar overlooking the runway. A bottle of red is breathing. Macon walks toward me with two wine glasses in hand. The last flight of the night takes off, and like flipping a switch, the runways lights go out. I sip my wine in the dark at the edge of East Africa and think. Black and white, like a Bogart film. You read about nights like this. I am in it.

Springlands Hotel is a nice basecamp considering where I am. Nur, a guide, leads me to my room. No energy to unpack. A good night of sleep is what I need.

Today the others arrive. A day to rest, floating in the pool. One thing I don’t have floating is ice in my gin and tonic. I say hello to my team mates. I overhear someone in a hushed voice, the guy sitting across the garden had to be brought down the mountain in a makeshift wheelbarrow.

I am the only woman on the team. My ego is telling me I have something to prove. Hell, I am a cave explorer, a diving hall of famer. Full of bravado. I lead the charge hoofing up the dusty trail. The men and sherpas behind. On to Rongai Cave sitting at 2,600m or 8,530 feet above sea level. Not a bad first day.

There is a little less pep in my step today. Before lunch a few of the guys pass me on the trail. Then two more. The guy with a bit of a gut passes me. I picked him out on day one as the weak one. He doesn’t even look at me. Five miles to trek, following behind. The camp sits at 3,450 meters or 11,319 feet.

Arriving at camp, big yawns, my head aches.

I blow up a plastic flamingo I packed, mounting it on the top of my tent. My head swims. A little humor for the trail. The joke may be on me.

Macon is making popcorn, tonight’s appetizer to go along with the boxed merlot.

The sleep does me some good, but this dull headache is still gnawing at me. Wow these guys, the sherpas schlep our gear like it is nothing. Watching them head up the trail.

I am at the back of the pack today. Seven and a half hours. Florian is my designated porter to carry my WATER. Embarrassing. A porter to carry my day pack. Florian takes my pack, grinning, always grinning. The trail keeps going up. “Pole pole” in Swahili, slowly slowly. The altitude is catching up with me.

Looking around it looks like a desert. Desert plants. Big boulders. I take a mental note, a perfect place to hide and pee. Just planning ahead. Being at the back of the line, with Florian, gives me time to think. I park on a rock to rest. I am not the “mas macha” I was a couple days ago. The woman who disappears into darkness and returns. Being a big underwater explorer means nothing here.

The afternoon is long. The trail in front of me and behind me. No one in sight. I keep putting one foot in front of the other. I am not rushing now. The competition is with myself, not any one of these gray-haired guys. Florian keeps step. No banter. In Mexico, where I live, “chupi” is the nickname for a baby’s pacifier. I yell out “chupi”, Florian is quick to pass me the drink tube to suck. My babysitter. It’s 4pm, marching into camp. Tents up. The guys are in the mess tent. Dropping my jacket in the tent I join them. One of the porters is making cream of celery soup. Ugh. With minimal ingredients, no kitchen to speak of, it’s really good. Or maybe I am really hungry.

Two more sleeps until the summit. Full belly, a Ibuprofen, Diamox for altitude sickness and burrowing into my sleeping bag.

My knuckles are raw and bleeding from repacking, stuffing my gear bag each morning. Thank god this is a six-day climb. I am the last to arrive at the final camp before our summit attempt later that night.

Porters have carried two two-liter bottles of Coca-Cola for the guys who oversee the Kibo Hut. It’s liquid gold to these guys. Kibo is kinda like a base camp for the summit at 4,720 m (15,485 ft). Several teams are set up including us. The sun is bright and the winds are picking up. The plan is to head for the summit at 11 PM. Barring any clouds it will be a full moon. Before we break from dinner, Macon tells us to wear clean socks. What an odd thing to say. I am five days without a shower. Clean socks? Hunkered into my mummy bag, downing my sleep cocktail of Ibuprofen and Diamox the wind starts to howl. It’s hard to sleep with the wind ripping against the side of the tent. They say with the windchill it will be -20F on the climb. Yet I am snug in my cocoon.

I wake at 10:15 pm. I don’t feel rested. I dress. Outside, the windchill is below zero. I look at my socks and pick my favorites. They are not clean. Like some sports fanatic who thinks socks bring luck. I lace up my boots, hit the latrine tent, and don my headlamp. Another hit of diamox.

Balaclava up over my nose. The sky is clear. The moon, full. I’m at the end of the pack.

No snow yet. Scree under my feet. Slow going. Step and breathe.

Step.
Stop, leaning on my climbing poles.
Gasp.

I feel like a fish out of water. With each step, I stop to pull in a breath.

My feet are freezing. Moisture-wicking socks hold moisture. My favorite dirty socks, forming ice crystals. Why didn’t I listen?

My head is pounding. I grab only a glance to see where I am. The stars. Far below, the lights of Moshi.

Step.
Lean.
My long gasps are so loud I swear the whole mountain can hear me.

The team is stopping, waiting for me. I sit on a snow-covered rock and Macon asks if I want to turn back. Through my tears, “No!”

I don’t quit. Anything. I am not quitting a mountain.

A new porter joined us at Kibo. She is on all fours in the snow, vomiting.

I keep going. I don’t know how far the summit is. The goal is the sunrise.

One foot.
Gasp.
The other foot.
Another gasp.

FULL STOP.

The cave diver in me surfaces. In exploration, one body is better than two. If my body gives out up here, I risk not only myself but all of us at altitude.

I think of the wheelbarrow. Being hauled down like the guy at the resort. Going home, telling everyone who thinks of me as “mas macha” that I couldn’t do it.

I can see the crest in the moonlight. Six hundred forty-two feet below the summit. 19,341’. I want it.

My head drops.

I’m calling it.

Eddie, accompanies me down, elbows lock. One slow step at a time. I am on autopilot. I slip in the loose gravel, Eddie catches me. Over and over. No thoughts, except step, inhale, down.

I plop myself in my tent, exhausted. My feet in dirty boots hanging just outside. Eddie unlaces them. I wrestle out of my jacket and snow pants. Suddenly, a hand passes a coffee cup of Coca-Cola through my tent door. The elixir.

Sleep.

It’s still dark. I have to pee. Wind gusting. I hate the thought of going out to the latrine. Feeling around for my headlamp, I find the elixir coffee cup instead. No pride, nor energy. Squatting, I pee in the cup. And a bit on my sleeping bag. I unzip the tent door, my bare hand shoots out into the biting cold to dump it. I refill the coffee cup again and again. Feeling better, I can only imagine the view from outside the tent. It’s kinda funny.

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If you missed my previous adventures check out:

It was 2010. I was a long way from Mexico. My friend Kelly had lived in Akumal, my pueblo on the Mexican Caribbean coast. Animal welfare was her thing. She organized spay-and-neuter clinics. The kind of woman who was not afraid to get dirt under her fingernails. Down-to-earth, hardworking, gritty. She invited me to join her on a Humane Society International project to Tanzania, “dog and donkey clinics” in the bush. Without a second thought I said “yes, but no buses.” Kelly explained we would have handlers and a driver to escort us.

The trip began in Arusha, Tanzania, just south of the Kenya border and home to Mt. Kilimanjaro. I climbed it two years later. A tale for another time. Yohana from Tanzania Animal Protection Organization met us. Donkeys are the John Deere tractor of many people in Tanzania. Yet, farmers are notorious for putting oxen yokes on their donkeys, which causes injuries. Kelly’s job was to talk to the farmers about their burros, vaccinate dogs and sometimes a clinic turned into field triage.

Our driver Ernesto drove us west from Arusha. A well-educated, handsome guy. Doing side hustle guiding and driving while looking for a job. We were not on safari and did not need a guide. That was not to say we didn’t want to have some fun along the way. We took the road less traveled in our Land Rover. Out to Ngorongoro Crater for a glimpse of the Big Five. I read the crater was the place to see black rhinos. We saw huge tusked elephant bulls, lions like the cliche, lounging in trees, and herds of wildebeest and zebra. Lots of zebras. No black rhinos.

We were quite the traveling road show. Village to village. Questionable hotels and dorm rooms. Fried street food in the small cities, kebabs or coo-coo and chips, fried chicken and French fries. We avoided water and juices. Cokes or bottled beer. Less chance of a parasite that way.

I remember one day the only thing we had to eat was stale crackers and warm beer.

A few of the towns had a local bar. We went in the evening for a beer and a game of pool.

Across the road from a rice processing plant, women sifted discarded husks in a field for half grains of rice. Bagging the rice to take home. The women had a great laugh as they tried to teach the two muzungo (white people) Kelly and I to sift rice. We never got the hang of it. The husbands sat under a shade tree. Kelly went over and talked donkey yokes. From the field across from the rice mill, we were ushered into a beat up old car and on to the next town.

At the clinics I helped with rabies injections for the dogs. In an open-air metal barn the town queued up for vaccines. Grubby, skinny hounds were led by boys and men on lengths of rope.

One stop became a donkey M*A*S*H episode.

A donkey’s back achilles tendon had been slashed with a machete by a pissed off neighbor. From what we were told, the donkey had gotten loose and tramped into the guy’s garden. The animal was in desperate condition lying in the dirt. A makeshift needle, heavy thread, a five-gallon bucket of water. Kelly prepped to suture. He was not sedated, just patient. Big brown eyes. All of town gathered around to watch. Kelly with the help of some of the guys sewed and closed the gash. The donkey would be lame, but alive. Then with rope, fabric and gauze Kelly made a makeshift sling to hold the hind leg up. He was going to make it.

Two weeks later we learned a hyena killed him.

Juma was our point person in Kahama. As we drove in an old beater through the outskirts of town, I saw a woman plowing the yard. A stick with a scoop tied to the end as a hoe. A mud brick house behind her. Juma said a lot of households were run by women now. The men had died in wars or from HIV/AIDS. Here she was, plowing by hand.

From Kahama, we were to continue west headed to Kigoma. Our driver said he would not go any further. Full stop. Hijackings on the highway. He bowed out.

We took the bus.

On the bus with the partially shattered windshield, we pushed through a crowd at sunrise to get on. Yohana came to see us aboard. Inside, Kelly and I grabbed two seats together. I took the window. Kelly took the aisle. We did not plan to get out until Kigoma. Heavy backpacks on our laps. We dehydrated ourselves so we would not have to make a potty stop and risk our seats. Plus a hole in the floor over skid-plates as a restroom was far from appealing. Prince Valium helped us sleep along the rough highway. Time drifted by.

Delirious, we arrived in Kigoma, the furthest western part of the country. And we had hotel reservations! Off the bus, we wandered looking for our hotel. Suddenly I saw a zebra, and I thought I was hallucinating from dehydration and sedatives. “Hey Kelly, I see a zebra.” Kelly saw three zebras, only for us to realize we were standing in a small herd was roaming near our hotel. The hotel was small and resort-style but a far cry from posh. The window air conditioner was loud and we were grateful for it. Two beds. A private bathroom. We did not have to share.

The next morning, we were taking a boat up Lake Tanganyika to Gombe. Gombe is where Jane Goodall’s camp was with her chimps just south of the Burundi border. A big wooden boat with an open berth. No cabins, no seats, no head. It reminded me of a “chicken bus” in Mexico or Guatemala. There must have been an easy 70 or so people on board. Chickens, big plastic containers of gasoline, cases of Coca-Cola, flour, other supplies. Chock full.

For me this was a ride to the next stop on my adventure. To the other passengers, it was a grocery run.

You had to find a place to sit. You either stood the entire time, or you found a little spot on the gunwale. We parked our butts for three hours on the rail as we made our way up the lake. As we took this heavily burdened boat up the lake, a guy had to bail water at the same time because there was a leak. Someone was always bailing water out of the bottom of the boat. I wondered how many people on board could swim.

I sat next to two young Tanzanian boys and took a picture with them holding up the Tanzania flag.

The day was hot. A woman near me stood with her toddler in her arms. She looked tired. She did not speak English. I gestured. She handed her child to me. He slept against my chest until her village. Then I handed him back.

The boat stopped at little villages along the lake. We were the last stop. There were fewer and fewer passengers with each stop until we were the last people aboard.

At Gombe we were staying in the cinder block dorm building. Our dorm room had a toilet with no seat, or door. You could do your business and shower at the same time. A communal room with tables and chairs for socializing.

Baboons everywhere. The windows had bars on them to keep them out. From the inside it felt like jail. At night baboons rattled the bars and tried to get into the building. When baboons roar, they sound like big cats, like lions.

During the day, we hiked the mountainside with a guide. We found a troop of chimps and sat with them. I swear one of them was less than two meters from me, about five or six feet. You could take pictures. Just keep a low profile. There one time I sat in tall grass on the mountainside and looked across at the Congo. Wow, there’s the Congo, there’s Burundi, there’s a chimp.

Jane’s camp was different. A roof over open air. Walls of chicken wire. Her desk. Her bed. Her books. No walls between her and the jungle. From wherever she sat she could see out. More rustic than our dorm.

Three or four days later, we did the whole boat trip in reverse, back down the lake to Kigoma. From Kigoma we flew to Dar es Salaam, our gateway back to the States and Mexico. That night in Dar es Salaam, we had a nice hotel room. Two women who had not had a shower in a few days. Questionable food, warm beer, and here we were in a nice hotel. Each of us had what we considered to be nice clothes. If they were clean, they were considered nice.

That night, dressed up in our clean clothes, we went to the hotel restaurant. The hotel was a nondescript chain. The restaurant felt fancy after time in the bush. The menu. The drinks. The service. They brought us a gin and tonic with ice in it. We did not talk much. What do you say after a trip like that. We were grateful. The shower. The ice. The clean clothes. The whole trip.

We took our separate planes home from Dar es Salaam.

It was not goodbye. Never is, with us.

There are good Mexico days and bad Mexico days. I was having a bad Mexico day. Perhaps it was the scorpion on the inside of the shower curtain while I showered. Maybe it was the make-shift flame thrower of a Bic lighter and can of hairspray needed to kill the cockroaches. Maybe it’s because I left home almost three months ago to a place where I did not know the language or culture. Maybe because the day ended in “why”. Why was I here?

Bad Mexico days make you question every decision you made up to this point.

That day also happened to be February 14. Valentine’s Day. Hallmark had not found its way to the Caribbean coast. Chocolates? No chocolatier. Hell, Hershey’s Kisses had not even been in stores yet. But that afternoon Gary got down on one knee and asked me to marry him. Secretly I believed it was because I was crying and he had not thought of a gift.

He had chosen Valentine’s so he’d remember the date.

Of course I said yes. Yes, because we renovated the house in Baltimore together. Yes, we relocated to a foreign country together. Yes, he was my exploration partner and we knew we had each other’s back.

There was no ring for the moment. His mom’s ring sat in a safety deposit box in Baltimore.

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We picked Halloween as the wedding date. I always said because getting married is fucking scary. Gary picked it because it was his grandfather’s birthday. And it was also just before Mexico’s Día de los Muertos, Day of the Dead. So why the hell not.

We wanted to be married in a cave. Of course it is hard to get a justice of the peace or clergyman into an underwater cave. We picked the cenote that would look beautiful in the photos.

Invitations were sent to the printer.

Then our friend Buddy offered to build us a platform over the water at Dos Ojos. We’d been exploring that cave system. A huge cenote, drip-stone covered in moss and mold, clear blue water, mot-mots calling, a true hidden-world feeling. On the invites, all 15 of them, I crossed out the original location and penned in Dos Ojos.

The process of getting married in Mexico is through a justice of the peace. We went to the Registro Civil (Civil Registry Office) in Playa. It was a lengthy document, in Spanish. Typed out on a real typewriter with real carbon paper and kept in the municipal records in a bitácora. Now this document is probably the biggest fuck up I made in Mexico. And it all has to do with my name. I did my name wrong on the form. Maiden name, mother’s last name, and Walten. I have many aliases in Mexico. That is part of the reason I still go by Walten today. Undoing it in two countries isn’t worth it.

The other box we checked wrong was who owns what. If we own things in “common” or separate. We could not read Spanish. We just took our best guess, and checked the box. At that time we owned nothing but the dive gear we arrived with, so did not over think the decision. Blood tests done.

Destination weddings were not a thing, so we did not invite people from abroad. We could not justify asking people to fly in for a wedding in the jungle. The only exception was my parents. Who also served as a mule, to smuggle in bottles of champagne from the States. I bought a small bouquet from the only florist in Cancun for $40. A guy hawking silver at the top of the hotel zone in Cancun sold us wedding bands, $12. Still in a drawer somewhere. And a cake from the only bakery in Playa, $30. That was 50% of our wedding budget.

By October, we had moved to Akumal, a beachside village with eleven full-time residents. The people who worked at the hotel in town lived in Mayan villages in the Yucatán, Katunil and Sotuta, and went home to their families by bus or colectivo, once a month.

The morning of the wedding I drank a Bartles and James wine cooler for breakfast, overlooking Half Moon Bay from our condo at Las Iguanas. Calming my jitters. And there waiting was the mother of the bride in a tropical print outfit, with pretty sandals. I marched her right around and told her to put on her jungle shoes. The jungle is no place for pretty sandals.

Cenote Dos Ojos lies about halfway between the village of Akumal and Tulum. About two kilometers into the jungle. Today you can drive right up to it. Back then there was a very rough road not made for cars. Our friend Buddy, part inventor, part zen disciple, built jungle road warrior trucks. Frankensteins of the automotive world. We loaded the wedding party up into the back end of two trucks and headed out to the cenote, where Buddy had built the platform over the water. We were the first people to be married there. And maybe still the only.

Of course the JOP was late. No one warned him he had to hike two clicks into the jungle. We had to tip him extra for the hike.

There were about 10 people there along with my parents. Most everyone was a cave diver. Someone brought a plus-one. Gloria. Originally from Havana, she offered to sing a Spanish love song. A cappella, her voice rose up into the dark where the lights didn’t reach. My dad toasted Gary, called him a gentle man, then toasted us. Even the toughest cave divers had a tear in their eye.

Once back by the highway, a woman in a huipil was waiting with her young son. He walked up to me with a handful of wildflowers he had picked, and handed them over. I gave him a kiss on the cheek as thanks.

The reception was at La Lunita in Akumal. The restaurant was not open yet for the season, but Annette the owner extended an invitation to host us and our ragtag wedding party. A tiny skeleton bride and groom sat on top of the cake as we did the celebratory mordida, “the bite” where we try to shove each other’s face into the cake.

Gary and I were married more than twenty years. I can’t tell you the year we divorced. Divorced in the US, still married in Mexico. We weren’t going to pay two sets of lawyers in two countries, and there was a better reason than that. If anything happened to either one of us in Mexico, the only people they let into the ICU are spouses.

My ring. It was beautiful, and I had it for years. Kept it in our safe so I would not lose it diving. I still wish I had it. A safe is only safe if it doesn’t get stolen. One of the many times we were robbed, they took the safe, and the ring inside it.

What remains from our wedding aside from the story are images stuck together in an old wedding album, sitting in a Texas storage locker. Of course my dad, proud of his oldest daughter, would always show friends and family his favorite photo from that day. Me squatting in the jungle with my skirt hiked up, peeing. His daughter is in her element.

Missed the reception?

You can still buy me a drink.

What's the strangest wedding you've been to? Tell me in the comments.

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There are more stories on the way. Pull up a chair.

I was 27 years old. I felt all of 7.

Foreign face, foreign culture, foreign language, and I am the foreigner.

My first job, in Mexico, at the first all inclusive resort in Playa del Carmen. Seemingly the first American to be part of the resort staff.

Two months before I had an office in Baltimore. A window, a secretary, business lunches, and business suits. A dive shop owner and cave explorer, Mike Madden called long distance one day and asked me if my boyfriend Gary and I wanted to come work for him in Mexico.

“What does it pay?” Mike told me to fax my resume.

Four pages. Four pages that took me 20 minutes to send since the long distance connection to his fax machine kept dropping. Let’s see there was marketing for Kraft General Foods. New frozen pizza test marketing for Pillsbury, beer promotions with NASCAR, event marketing for Lipton Ice Tea. Coca-Cola, Pepsi, 7 up and blah blah blah. Yes I was proud of my resume.

A fax came back. “Nice resume.” “$400”. “Dollars”.

“A month.”

I was to run a dive concession at the new Diamond Resort. Sharing a space where two girls who handed out beach towels to guests, as I hustled people to try to Discover Scuba classes in the pool. Ironically it was only a handful of years earlier I was the tourist taking a discover scuba class at a resort myself.

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Yet it was these two cute girls, young women, who handed out towels, Nellie and Gina, who watched me eat alone for a week. One day I saw them across the dining room sitting at a round table. They smiled and waved me over. I was embarrassed at being recognized as the lonely girl. Part of me almost passed at the invitation, because sitting with them meant being face to face with the fact that I was a foreigner who did not speak their language. But I knew how uncomfortable it was to eat alone.

So I walked over to join them.

A corn tortilla on its own is dry. A little sweet, a little nutty, warm cornmeal smell, not a meal until it is holding something. Up to that point I had been tearing them in half and eating them like bread. Pushing food on my fork. I had little experience eating tortillas aside from roadside taco stands. Gina watched me and laughed. Then she showed me. Slap the tortilla flat across your left hand. Bring the right hand up, slide it across the left. One motion. Roll.

That was how you ate.

We built a vocabulary broken in two languages.

Those first weeks working at the resort I commuted up from Tulum. Living in a palapa on the beach with no electricity or hot water at a place called Gatos. The studio Gary and I planned on renting would not be available until after the Christmas holiday season. A plight around the world of needing a place to live versus tourists who need a place to stay for the holidays. Evenings we listened to the shortwave radio spinning the dial for any signal that sounded like the outside world. And in the middle of the night we listened the the rats rummaging through the care package my parents had given us when we left Baltimore.

The road to the resort was dirt. Playacar was jungle. Where the Xaman-Ha aviary is now, was a garbage dump. A far cry from the booming international destination it is today.

There were good Mexico days. What people do not tell you when you become an expat is that there are bad Mexico days. Day to day life is frustrating. Convenience had not yet made it this far south. The gas station was out of gas. Immigration was a ferry ride to Cozumel. Groceries were a trip to Cancun with a cooler in the back of the truck and a half dozen stops to fill it.

The frustration compounds. Tears follow.

One night I remember getting drunk on Dos Equis, donning my red power business suit and matching shoes. Yes, I brought a couple suits from the States. I thought they might be useful. I went across the street to Mike’s home to use his phone. One of only a few phones in Puerto Aventuras and drunk dialed my mom. Collect. Drunk crying that Coca-cola used to pay to hear what I had to say, and here in Mexico no one cared. She listened, I blubbered. She told me, “you can come home anytime”. To return home was to admit failure. I was not going to fail. She knew I would not come home. She ended the call as she always does, “God bless you and keep you safe.”

A few days later I went down to the marina in Puerto Aventuras and walked into the Cedam Dive Center office where Mike’s secretary Beti worked. Beti was about my size. She dressed for the office. She had a friendly smile and not much English. The two suits I brought from the states, from the life I left behind, draped over my arm, the matching red and white patent leather shoes in hand. I told her in Spanglish that I did not need them here. If she did not want the clothes she could give them to someone who would.

She took them.

The only suit I needed in Mexico was a wet suit.

I have no idea if the shoes fit her.

I never asked.

I think she thought I was a crazy gringo.

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In 2012 I was on a clowning trip with my best friend, Patch Adams, and a group of other volunteer clowns in Guatemala City. “Guate” was one of the most dangerous cities in the world. Our purpose was to go to orphanages and hospitals, mental institutions and, well, clown around. Make people smile, make the kids laugh, make a connection. Just what Patch Adams does. The real one, not Robin Williams in the movie. Lots of stories came from that trip. But the one that makes me cry almost every time I tell it is the old folks home.

A retirement community is way overstating what it was. A series of one-story, cinderblock buildings. Each old person had a room which looked more holding-cell like, than a home. A basic bed, small table, a chair. A few staff people flitting around the compound.

I had been living in Mexico for quite some time and knew poverty. But there was something about walking the grounds of this stark place that made the air feel heavier. Desperate. Lonelier. In Latin America, family takes care of the elderly. There was no family here.

We were there for a special lunch in a community room. Music playing, somebody’s birthday, clowning around with these old people as they ate their sandwiches on white bread. (White bread? No tortillas?)

In the corner was an old woman with fresh lipstick on. She had a small frail body like little old ladies do. Long hair pulled back from her face. You could tell in her earlier days she was a beauty. Like the vintage Buicks and Chevrolets still rolling through Havana. Dings, a touch of rust, and still something regal about them. She was dancing to the beat with a sock monkey. Just a toy. Dancing in the corner like no one was watching.

Except I was.

A woman who had probably lived better days. Days dancing with friends and family, at weddings, at parties, at birthdays. A whole life. Here she was, dancing with a sock monkey.

I choked up.

At the same time, maybe I had a raw nerve deep down. I didn’t have kids. Maybe when I’m old I will become the old lady dancing in the corner.

Maybe that is what triggers the tears

Maybe a glimpse of possible reality.

When I got there it was jungle. Sand roads, and one gas station in Playa. One in Tulum. A garbage dump where the Playacar aviary is now. The state of Quintana Roo was younger than my little sister. Everybody was a transplant. People from Mexico City who saw an El Dorado. Mayans who didn’t speak much Spanish saw work, foreigners seeking a better life saw a paradise. People running toward something, people running away from something. All of us figuring it out with whatever was at hand.

I stayed 27 years.

What I saw in that time, people going today will never see. Not because I was special. Because I was early. Because I was stubborn. Because going home meant failure and I was not going to fail.

These are those stories.

Not just Mexico. A life spent in places most people see on a map and wonder about. Smoking shisha in Istanbul. Jane Goodall’s chimps in Tanzania. Schooners in Greenland. A clown suit in Guatemala City. The first internet reservation service on that coast, built before most people knew what the internet was.

I never thought any of it was remarkable. It was just what I did.

My brothers in arms, Jim Coke and Dan Lins, told some of their stories over happy hour. They’re gone now. And their stories were buried with them.

I’m not going to let that happen to my stories.

You don’t have to go to the highest mountain or the deepest cave to have an amazing life. But if you’ve ever stood at the edge of something and wondered whether to jump, these stories are for you.

I’m a woman who after all these years is still trying to figure it out.

Welcome.

Buy Me A Margarita

In the spring of 1985, I was a senior at Clarion University in Pennsylvania. A band geek. Marching band, jazz band, concert band. I played the baritone sax. The biggest in the saxophone family. It was almost bigger than I was. The university announced a trip for the symphony to Mexico. The director said they didn’t need a bari player. But if I could learn bass clarinet, I was in.

I learned.

The harder part was the money. My parents were going through a rough spot. I may have embellished the home situation when I pleaded with the director for a scholarship. I got it.

The only other big city I had ever experienced was a band trip to NYC in high school.

Landing in Mexico City, I had a nervous excitement I had never felt before. Spanish was not really spoken in the US at the time. At least not in Pennsylvania. Everything was foreign. VW Beetles, trucks, horns, men pushing diablos stacked with cases of Cokes. The city felt enormous and small at the same time.

We were told no shorts. Prostitutes wore shorts.

One evening a group of us girls went to a bar around the corner from the hotel. Guys took turns singing songs in Spanish and we would sing them back in English. Happy Birthday, back and forth, two languages. That night a car literally jumped the curb in front of the tuba player in her scooter-skirt.

I spent one afternoon sitting on the steps of the Presidente Hotel flirting with the doormen. When they got closer, I’d scoot up a couple steps toward the doors. They’d back away. I’d scoot back down. Nobody said a word. Teasing on the staircase.

Our first concert was at the Palacio de Bellas Artes. There was no internet. No photos I had scrolled through beforehand. So I had zero expectations. Inside, the ceiling made the space feel cavernous. I was sitting in the middle of the orchestra, watching people filter in through the doors at the back of the concert hall.

I had been playing bass clarinet for six months. I was faking it and I knew it.

But when the music started, the acoustics took over. The sound blended and filled the room. The music hung in mid air. Whatever I was honking got swallowed by the hall. Only me and the person sitting next to me knew.

We played three concerts.

One day we toured the ruins of Teotihuacan. Arid, dusty, the sun scorching. No people hawking t-shirts, keychains, or ceramic mini-pyramids. On the way back we stopped at some roadside stalls. I bought some obsidian bookends and a handmade tablecloth. My mom still uses it. At this pitstop I had my first taste of pulque, a fermented drink that dates back to pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica.

The next morning off to Acapulco.

Acapulco was small then. People sunning themselves. Little kids swimming in their underwear, clutching their mother’s leg. Barkers with their wares going blanket to blanket on the sand.

Saturday night we played at Sinfonia del Mar. An open-air amphitheater near the famous La Quebrada Cliffs. Our backs to the sea, playing into the carved stone seating that amplified our sound. Waves crashed behind us and seemed to blend with the music. Across the water you could see the Tarzan House, once owned by Johnny Weissmuller and John Wayne. After the concert, our hosts provided mezcal in bamboo shot glasses. They told us to just shoot it back. It was vile tasting. We all shot it back anyway.

Our last day was Easter Sunday. A bunch of us attended mass. Not in one of the churches like Mexico City, the ones that looked like architectural art. This was a cinderblock building. Unfinished. Rebar protruding from the top of the support beams. One block back from the hotel, one block back from the beach, and it could have been a different country.

Five months later, an earthquake leveled parts of Mexico City. The opera house survived.

When I stepped off the plane and on to the tarmac, the humidity wrapped around me like a warm, wet blanket. I love that feeling. A baby blue and white Volkswagen bus (a combi), was waiting to take us south along the Cancun-Tulum corridor to Akumal. The combi’s sliding side door was missing and a side of a baby crib acted as a door. One set of the bench seats was removed so dive gear bags could be stacked. I sat on top, I was in charge of the beer. A cooler filled with cervezas bien fria. All of us knocked back beers, including the driver. And I watched the side of the road through the baby crib slats.

The highway 307 (or the carretera) to Tulum was equivalent to a rural road in the US. Far from the likes of the four lanes of today. Driving was certainly the most dangerous part of any trip. No shoulder, and if you catch the edge, it meant a tumble over the edge and into the jungle. And possible death.

The same shitty road into Aventuras Akumal still exists today as you get off the highway.

Our group stayed at a condo on the beach. Gary and I were offered the “crowsnest” a roof-top, palapa covered room. A romantic place for the cute couple. It was there where we were robbed the first night. I wish I could say it was the only time I have been robbed. It was not. The next day, a passport turned up in the shower. Another passport and wallet were gone. The second passport was later found in the jungle.

We took our dive group in that combi with the baby crib door, to the dive sites. Quite literally we would park alongside the road, careful not to topple into the jungle, and trek into the jungle with our gear.

We always asked the land owner for permission to dive. The owners often lived in a palapa with little or no electricity. A coke, or a small package of cookies, or a couple of pesos served as a thank you.

Today many of the cenotes have concrete or wooden stairways leading from the jungle floor to the water. We had barely a path to follow, sometimes jumping from heights to get into the water. Gran Cenote which tour buses frequent, had one single parking space, and a stick ladder to climb out. Each step was strategically placed on the wobbly rungs. One cenote Maya Blue now referred to as Cristalino was an effort for me to climb out of. Slippery rocks, grabbing saplings. My right leg slipped in between two rocks, up to my knee. I fell backwards. Landing on my doubles, on my back. “Is my light ok?”

Cave lights back then were custom-made plexiglass canisters with a battery inside. Crafted in someone’s garage in Florida. Heavy, expensive, and they don’t bounce well. The light survived. My knee, not as lucky.

I hobbled. It was the middle of our trip. I wanted to keep diving. That night I retold the story to our hosts. Someone produced a handful of pain meds. I continued to dive painfree and a wee bit woozy.

The big dive of any trip was to Nohoch Nah Chich, Mayan for the big bird house owned by Don Pedro. Mike Madden has been the primary explorer of the cave system. A couple-kilometer hike into the jungle. Don Pedro’s boys lashed our gear and tanks on to horses as we followed them through the scrubby jungle.

The boys used a rope through a crotch of a tree, as a makeshift pulley. Lowering our gear down to a stick platform at the water’s edge The staging area to set up for the dive. The water was so clear you could see the white calcite dunes and glimpses of the stalactites from the surface.

Returning to Baltimore I went to Johns Hopkins Sports Medicine Center for my knee. Of course the doctor wanted to know how the injury happened. As they were running tests, the attending doctor kept bringing in other staff saying “tell them how you got hurt, tell them,” and they looked at me like I was crazy.

No life altering injury, but my knee aches became a barometer while diving if I was close to getting “bent” (decompression sickness), and if it is going to rain.

And Mike Madden, whose dive shop filled my tanks, less than two years later he became my boss.

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I worked my way up in the PADI dive certifications and became a dive master for Sea Colony Aquasports. Aside from the general public the dive shop also did scuba training for the midshipmen, plebes, at the Annapolis Naval Academy. Ah, the handsome middies in their summer whites…. Oops I digress. Certification dives were done in a Pennsylvania quarry shadowed by the Three Mile Island Nuclear power plant silos. And no the fish do not glow, although there were non-stop jokes about the nuclear plant. I loved check out dives with the middies, yes ma’am, no ma’am. They took instruction well, and there was no goofing off when diving with them.

It was there at the quarry next to Three Mile Island I met a dive instructor, Gary. I flirted with him over pizza and beer.

Gary and I talked on my commute home from work, almost every night. I had a cell phone, the big box one that sat between the two front seats. In that first month my cellular bill was well over $1200. I would talk about ads I had read about becoming a commercial diver, a merchant marine, or joining the Coast Guard. He shared stories about underwater cave exploration in Belize. Teaching cave diving in Florida. Cave diving. Huh? Never heard of it.

Finally, Gary asked me out on a date. The issue was that I had recently got engaged to a guy in Atlanta. A short-lived engagement, with an ugly ending, for another day.

One night sitting in a booth over dinner, I told Gary diving was number one and he was number two and as long as he understood that, we would get along great.

Weekends spent diving, rock climbing or working on house renovations he had started on his childhood home, where I then lived.

I had found a pair of rusty steel 72 cubic foot tanks in a barn in Virginia. The tanks were visually inspected at the dive shop. Gary offered to teach me how to dive doubles.

Off to the Three Mile Island quarry.

The steel tanks would turn me over on my back like a turtle. Over and over. Fighting each time to right myself.

It was not fun. I was frustrated. Crying in my dive mask. Gary said, “forget it, just get out of the water.” I took his words as dismissive and that pissed me off. I showed him. I fought my way to stay right side up, swam around and stubbornly crawled on my hands and knees on the shore getting out of the water on my own. So there.

I then started learning how to cave dive. I started my training in my rusty 72’s down in Florida, camping at Spring Systems. I was trying to learn the gear and the rules of cave diving. Wrestling my 72’s into the fill station at the end of each dive.

Some guy, bedraggled and tired from a day of diving, sat there watching me. Grinning, asking about my tanks and if they were new. I looked at him like he like he had three heads. No, they are not new. Look at the scuffed up paint and rust, thinking about how I found them in a barn. He kept prodding me about my tanks. I am thinking who is this jerk. Later that evening I learned that guy at the fill station was the Sheck Exley, probably the most accomplished cave diver who ever lived. Father of cave diving to some.

Sheck was teasing, ME! Swoon.

I had not finished my certification. Gary and I started running cave diving trips to Mexico anyway in 1990. Mexico. The mecca of cave diving. We stayed in Aventuras Akumal.

An area I did not know was going to become my home.

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I rented an apartment in Villefranche-sur-Mer for two months. It wasn’t a vacation. I can work from anywhere, and this apartment was above a soap factory, with a partial view of the Mediterranean from the dining table. Most mornings I walked to the Boulangerie de la Paix for a croissant, made an espresso, and opened the laptop. I felt grounded.

From the table I could see the old clock tower on the church, with its bells ringing on the hour and the half, and a slice of the Mediterranean where I saw porpoises a couple of times. Across the way, red tile roofs, windows and doors open, laundry drying on the line. I fed the pigeons on the balcony and even named a couple of them. With the sliding doors open, a purple and gray feathered dove would walk right into the apartment while I pounded on the keyboard. And on the wind from the balcony, lavender, jasmine and lemon verbena, wafted up from the soap factory downstairs.

At that point I still had a couple of clients. One I had worked with for five years, and she finally couldn’t afford it anymore. Effective April 1st. She wasn’t joking. Maybe we’d pick it up later if things changed. I get it.

The other was a startup I was a sounding board for. With the time difference we talked once a day, six o’clock at night my time. I was doing it for free, with a promise I would get paid. And I didn’t mind. I’m a risk taker. To be honest it was not very rewarding. Even before France I felt like my work was unread and ideas brushed off. Numerous times over the course of nine months I was asked what my value was. Then I got accused of sending AI slop. By people who weren’t reading it. No pay, nobody listening, and I was getting resentful and not doing my best work. Nine months for free. Nobody made me. I kept getting on the call because I’d rather be needed than paid.

I learned something about how some of my staff must have felt, all those years I didn’t listen to them.

One morning I sat down with the espresso to answer a hundred questions about myself. What I believe, what I’m afraid of, how I work. An interview, and the interviewer was a machine. I figured I’d knock them out before lunch. It took ten days. I have told people since that exercise did more for me than a therapist, a clergyman, or a business coach. None of it was new. Years of therapy had already shown me what I was hiding from myself. But it all came up at once, at that table, and I knew it was time to blow up my life again.

Since I sold my company, Loco Gringo, and came back to the States I had been trying to fit in. I built an AI app for hospitality and shut it down. There are all these consultants and coaches, and I thought I could be one of them. Can I do it? Yes. But the tedium of picking up clients, building frameworks, one-on-one calls. I got a couple of consulting gigs, lovely people. I cared more about their businesses than they did. Which is not the compliment it sounds like. Nobody hired me to do that. Wrote business articles, ebooks, and gave them away hoping somebody found something useful in them. It was busy work, and it left me empty. Not uncaring. Just meh.

And the reeled-in, vanilla Kay was not making money. So why not bring out the mouthy twin. She doesn’t give a shit.

Some mornings at that table, some of the thoughts I keep buried came up in the answers. I went back to school after I sold Loco Gringo so I wouldn’t start having gin for breakfast. The master’s degree was never a crown, only a validation, and I’d known it the whole time. I tried to push through it the way I push through everything. White knuckled. Then I shut the computer and sat there and tried to find the courage to look at it.

On day two, looking out at the water, I typed: is my life held together with duct tape and wire ties?

That’s a cave diving joke. Duct tape in some cases could be considered a permanent repair, and we went through wire ties by the bag. Zip ties, the rest of the world calls them. I have always been a bit of a gear or gadget gal. It turns out I collected diplomas and certifications the same way. In case the first one failed. I do love to learn. But that’s not what the stack was for.

Every afternoon I took a break. No matter where I walked, La Régence, the train, the waterfront, I went past the soap factory, doors open for the passers-by. I walked up to La Régence, where the locals hang out at the restaurant facing the street. The retirees with a coffee, a few women with their little dogs and a spritz. I had stayed a couple of nights there on an earlier trip. The rooms were basic, but I was traveling alone and I felt welcome and safe, and some mornings I still went there for breakfast, ten euros for a coffee, a croissant, and juice. The owner worked the bar some days. He recognized me and knew I’d order one Aperol spritz and take a sidewalk table. He spoke to me in French and broken English. I spoke back in a mélange of English and French, and Spanish always crept in. Regulars, strangers, the bartenders, all of them swapping stories of the day. Me at my table, watching people live. Then I walked back to the apartment and got on a call to be a sounding board for free.

One night I tried to push things ahead, being the leader that I am, and it backfired. I overstepped. After I got home, I quit with a text message.

I can skydive, cave dive, get on an overloaded boat in Tanzania to a place I had never heard of, and all of that is a walk in the park compared to saying who I am out loud.

That was March. I write stories now. Anyone can write about business, and let’s face it, it’s kinda boring.

The soap factory is Terres Dorées. I had walked past it on every trip to Villefranche and never gone in. This time I walked past it several times a day for two months. A few days before I left, I went in. Bought gifts, and several bars for myself. I use it every day.

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