Thanks RR. And Backwards from Campeche to Isla Mujeres (1965-4)

There must be a ReIndoctrination Camp down in Half Moon (But Which Half?) Bay. Five Year Old Ryan has already caught the fever. What she doesn't realize is the Plotzers are already taking care of her problem for her. By the time this game comes up, it very likely won't even matter anymore. Blogmaid, you've got a perfect idea here for designer wrapping paper. No kidding. And many thanks to you and to multi-talented RR.



BACKWARDS FROM CAMPECHE TO ISLA MUJERES

So, picking up from yesterday, we're now in Campeche, Yucatan, Mexico. But Plotnik's memory is lax -- he can't really remember what happened between Campeche (great shrimp) and Merida (great everything) and Isla Mujeres (a billion stars).

He knows he visited the ruins of Chichen Itza, because he remembered them when he went again with his family 25 years later. He knows he stayed at a cute little pension in Merida where they had huge glass bottles in the courtyard with taps on them. There were large handwritten signs on these bottles that said: "Agua Potable: Safe Drink Water."

One night Plot caught the night watchman refilling the water bottles with a garden hose.

At the time he thought that scandalous, except that the city of Merida sits upon artesian water springs and the water is all safe to drink. But you couldn't convince the tourists to drink it unless you put it into phony bottles and tacked an "Agua Potable" sticker on the outside.

Plot has previously mentioned dysentery. The second or third day of this trip, by now several months earlier, he had gone swimming in the ocean at San Blas, on the Western Coast below Manzanillo. Always a good swimmer and comfortable with the ocean, he was astonished to get caught in a riptide and be unable to paddle back to shore. It was quite frightening -- he had to tread water hard just to stay in one place and absolutely could not help being swept slowly out to sea. To make things worse, a school of manta rays had come in, swimming all around him -- huge fins poking out of the water, enormous spikes on their backs.

He shouted SOCORRO! (HELLLLLLLPPP!) -- good old Spanish class -- and eventually someone rowed a boat out and pulled him into it. When he got to shore he was dehydrated and exhausted, so they took him into a little cafe. The owner graciously poured him an ice cold Coke in a glass filled with ice cubes. It was the tastiest Coke ever, but...he probably should have thought twice about those ice cubes, made with local water.

Or maybe it was the strawberries that his friend Pulga and he ate in Guadalajara the next day, covered with delicious local cream. By the time they got back to their hotel that afternoon Plotnik was beginning to feel very very very bad. But he was nineteen, so he figured he should be OK to board the bus for their 6 hour schlep across the mountains to Morelia. Que moron!

Plot and Pulga sat in the very front seat. Pulga was tiny ("Pulga" was her nickname, which means "flea"), but Plotnik's legs had to be held in the air for his knees to rest against the metal barrier directly in front of him.

The bus driver had a bunch of bananas suspended next to his rear view mirror. The road was very windy, and the bus smelled of overtaxed diesel fuel -- and bananas. Half way up the mountain Plotnik realized he was going to be incredibly sick. Above all, he needed not to have his legs up in the air anymore, if you catch his drift, but the bus was filled with standing passengers and there were no other seats. Diesel fuel, over-ripe bananas, nausea, the likelihood of imminent explosion, nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.

It was an express bus. No stops. The next three hours is a hideous blur. At the Morelia bus station, he ran for the bathroom. Pulga parked herself on a bench outside the men's room door, every fifteen minutes or so calling in "Estas bien?" and Plot would yell "Si. O No. No se."

As you can tell, Plot and Pulga had decided, before they left Berkeley, that they would speak only Spanish on this trip, despite the fact that she was fluently bilingual but Plotnik, though a Spanish minor in college, was far less conversationally capable. They pledged they would not speak English to each other, no matter how difficult it might be for one or the other.

And though they had known each other quite intimately in school, they were not lovers, not exactly, and really could have used a language both spoke well to define how they were feeling, about what they were experiencing and about each other.

It was easy for Pulga and gruesomely difficult for Plotnik. He would get frustrated at not being able to express himself to her, then blurt out something in English. But she would simply stare at him, and if she answered at all it would be in Spanish.

(The girl was born in Flint, Michigan. It's not like she was English-deprived.)

He was learning fast, though he didn't realize it. One night on a rooftop in Mexico City, with the sounds of traffic pulsing below and heat lightning dividing the sky into quarters, Pulga told him the story of her life, and it had some very sad parts in it, and she said it all in Spanish. He was amazed to realize he could understand her every word, even through tears.

Like: "Que diras tu, si te digo que te quiero?"

It's the same in every language, isn't it? When somebody tells you she loves you and you're not ready for it, you never ever know what to say. Many years later, Plotnik did the same thing to Ducknik, on the Lexington Avenue Subway, and she stood there, flabbergasted, unable to utter a syllable.

Plot must have responded on that rooftop, though he doesn't remember what he said, and he supposes it must have been in Spanish. It seems to him, though, that this is the moment their trip began to flow downhill. He probably hadn't considered "love" to be a component of "summer vacation."

As their voyage stretched on from the sickness and eventual recovery of Morelia to the dry desert of Tula and Guanajuato and the amazing cosmopolitan high life of Mexico City, then down the highway to Puebla and Oaxaca where we first began this story, Plotnik found his frustration increasing and his desire to keep the language workshop running greatly diminished. He was tired of the whole thing. Or maybe he was just ready for a break from La Pulga, although he liked her even more than he realized at the time.

He figured that out the minute he was on the bus to the ocean with Kate and Marlene, realized they spoke no Spanish at all and he would have to be the communicator from now on.

But the dysentery -- that's what we were talking about and what's love got to do with it? -- never left him.

Whatever he ate, whatever he drank, out it came. He lost a ton of weight. (Plotnik weighed 160 pounds in college, maybe 10 pounds less than he does today, but by the time he got home that fall he was down to 130 -- Mummy P. didn't recognize him when she opened the front door.)

In those days sanitary facilities in the cheaper sections of Mexico, the only places Plot and Pulga traveled, were basically nonexistent or so awful you only used them in the direst of straits. But dysentery is dire, and can be sudden. You don't get to choose where you're gonna have to go. This part of El Gran Viaje was not very pleasant.

Plotnik was a Southern Shmalifornia beach kid. All through the interior of Mexico he had been looking forward to getting back to the ocean. When he and La Pulga parted company in Oaxaca and he and Marlene and Kate ended up in the tiny pueblito of La Ventosa, on the beach, sleeping on hammocks suspended above the rocks, where you jumped into your hammock from dry land, to rock yourself to sleep at night to the sound of gently lapping waves, but by the time you woke up in the morning the tide had come in and you were now swaying above the sea -- he had made a decision.

He would just stop eating. That's the only thing he could think of that could keep him out of those awful shitholes. And that's what he did.

While everybody was exulting over the glorious shrimp that were brought in in large misshapen nets at 8am from the shrimp boats who had just caught them out beyond the breakers, and the other travelers were inhaling the incredible rooster fish caught each night by the young boys high on the cliffs using pepsi bottles for fishing poles around which was wrapped strong fishing line -- these could be 100 pound fish and often these boys would be swept off the rocks into the ocean -- they always just swam back to shore and climbed back up onto the cliff -- and the local women smoked the fish all night in a communal oven lined with corn cobs -- and they served the smoked fish with steaming hot tortillas and salsa and lime juice -- by then Plotnik was eating only a little soup.

He tasted the rooster fish (it was amazingly good, especially given how hungry poor Plottie was) but he ate, at most, one meal a day and a small one.

He is here to tell you it worked. Whatever had tormented his stomach got sick of waiting and took off. Finally. By the time he and Kate and Marlene had gotten off the ferry boat and stepped onto what was then the almost uninhabited island of Isla Mujeres in the Caribbean, Plot was hungry as hell and wasn't gonna take it any more.