La Isla Bonita

(continued)

By Dean Borok

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I immediately removed the chain from my neck.

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

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

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