Como Zona de Guerra March 26, 2018
In honor of Palm Sunday, the beginning of the Easter celebration, one-thousand-nine-hundred-and-eighty-nine years to the day (according to ancient sources) when Christ walked into old Jerusalem, all of the paved streets around the Plaza have summarily been removed. It is almost worthy of nostalgia, as Puerto Morelos reverts to the days of yore, when this place was a dusty little port town, with a square planted in the middle, three uneven tracks wide. Only now the tracks are hills.
On the eve of general school dismissal throughout Mexico, traffic is already incapacitated. One unreliable source, allegedly close to Laura Fernandez, confirms that this bad timing is deliberate, that is, to keep out the despised Merida crowd, who trash our beaches two weeks every year. If so, the plan didn’t work, as La Playa is packed with sunbathing families. Meanwhile, a line of cars stretches back to the mainland highway exit.
The open-air restaurants off the Plaza—Los Pelicanos, Punta Corcho, and La Sirena—have been rained upon with Polvo overnight, covering everything with a centimeter of dust. This morning, the potted plants are white with it. No one even bothers to sweep—high-pressure hoses are called for. Fortunately, the water is restored on this part of town.
I climb onto the roof of Anthony’s place to escape the rattle and grinding hum three stories below. From here I assess the golden ribbon of Sargasso stretching to the reef, where 3-foot waves break like a zipper, north-to-south, in the prevailing current. In the immediate foreground, across Melgar Alley, our newest lighthouse stands still in the sun, without any indication yet of dissolution, although Quien Sabe as to whether those cement boys used seawater and crusted sand, like they did the last time, when our sentinel against shipwrecks disintegrated like a beach castle with rebar.
This does not keep the monster cruise ships from encroaching close enough to catch an aided glimpse of the illuminated Arecife Reef and the dark village beyond, which time is remembering. If the Crucero passengers train their scopes on us today, they might think that an earthquake has struck, or a war has started. Progress and destruction become indistinguishable at a distance.
By afternoon, the mayhem expands around the Plaza, effectively isolating it as a stranded island surrounded by rubble, but a foot-trail network is emerging, at least for those not additionally stranded by wheelchairs and such. Retirees in golf club cars do not stand a chance. This is worse than the mortar-blasted barrio I once visited in Mexico City to retrieve my mail, and it gets worse. Since a sewer line burst in front of Casa Martin earlier today, La Sirena, awaiting the Sunday dinner crowd and featuring a prime rib special with baked potato, currently smells like shit. On the corner of the Oxxo, Cafe D’Almancia, and the church (not necessarily in that order), an amazing fountain has formed from the digging at the busy intersection, a 10-foot geyser, at least at first. Now the gushing spring is less than a meter high, flowing like a creek out of town toward the Manglar, closing our street and our only egress from town. The DK container has lost its water supply again.
French Isabel, at a spry 60, and as bohemian as ever, roams about the plaza taking twilight photos of the developing situation among the mounds. She still owes me 200 pesos for shoes from two years ago, but the old girl is a French bohemian and thus has no intention of repaying, despite my rude reminders about the importance of integrity, to which she invites me to go do something to myself, in exquisite Parisian.
Anxious grackles and Cenzotle mockingbirds patrol the altered landscape, trying to figure out what the hell is going on. So are the honking drivers, who are mostly steering in reverse at the moment. Isabel clicks away like a war correspondent, dodging a giant smoking grader as she might a German Panzer. She crouches to steady her aim, with a small river in view, amid major earthen upheaval beside the Catholic altar. She is still not wearing any shoes.