Monday, July 14, 2008

Idyllic Zihuatanejo, Mexico, Where Families Come to Play

By Sandy McLeod

 “Are you going to Zihuatanejo again?”

 

“Sí.”

 

“Why?”

 

“Because every time I go there I meet someone interesting.”

 

“Oh.”

 

Well, it’s true.  Zihuatanejo, about 140 miles north of Acapulco on the west coast of Mexico, is a fascinating place.  It is the neighbor of Ixtapa, a hot destination for those in search of the Cancún experience on the west coast.  It is Acapulco many, many years ago, before the horrible bloodshed of narcotraffickers made that place too dangerous to consider returning to.

 

But Zihua, as it is called by the locals, is the not Hard Rock Cafes and big resort hotels or even Troncones, a beach to the north which has been taken over by gringo surfers.  Zihua is where the workers live, and it has several lovely small hotels and a wonderful curving beach where vendors are gentle and smile when you say “No, gracias” to their trinkets held aloft – and then wander off leaving one to wonder how they make a living?

 

It is a place where Mexican families come to play fútbol with an inexpensive rubber ball and splash in the warm water after work.  Sometimes early in the morning a fisherman will be standing waist deep in the small surf, casting a net to catch what he can to sell at the market in town, although most of the fishermen have pangas, small narrow wood or fiberglass craft with outboards, which allow them to go outside the bay for a living.

 

It is hot and sometimes close and at night we sleep with the sliding doors open, listening to the small surf pound on Playa La Ropa as the overhead fan turns.  On occasion we hear geckos chirp, a good sign because they eat insects.  Once in a while we will see an iguana sunning itself on a stone wall.  Pelicans swoop low over the water looking for fish and a variety of small birds dart from palm tree to palm tree.  As the heat rises in the late afternoon hawks take advantage of the thermals to soar effortlessly overhead, engendering envy in me for their freedom.  On occasion there will be a vulture or a frigate bird hovering on high, contrasting with the hummingbirds sipping from the flowers on my patio. 

 

So I sit and read and chat with Georgie and play the ukulele and draw and take the occasional photograph.  I make an attempt at writing but it is too relaxing and the pen falls from my fingers as my mind wanders.  I finish my beer, nod to my friend the black bushy tailed bird whose name I do not know, and head for a swim in the 85 degree water.  I can empathize with the Tim Robbins character in The Shawshank Redemption who wants to escape to Zihua and build a boat on the beach there.

 

Each time I have been to Zihua I have met someone interesting.  The first time it was a man who had a little palapa restaurant on Playa Las Gatas, easily accessible only by panga from the main dock in town.  It is an isolated beach, although in plain view of Playa La Ropa where our hotel is, and at night only generators create light although I understand an electrical hookup with the town is coming.  The seafood he prepares melts in your mouth.  His beer is cold and he rescues sea turtles that hatch on shore and keeps them until their chance of survival is better than the one in tens of thousands usually afforded such offspring.  I’ve read only three percent of sea turtles reach sexual maturity.  The rest die young.

 

Last year I sat next to two sisters from Maui on the flight down.  The daughter of one was to be married on the beach the following Saturday and her auntie was going to sing the “Hawaiian Wedding Song” and accompany herself on the ukulele.  Every morning when I ran on the beach I would see her.  She was staying at a very expensive hotel a few doors down from us and each day a different member of the family would be walking with her.  They came in all week but on Friday night the rainy season struck with a vengeance.  All electrical power, save for that from individual generators, was out.  But the women of the wedding party came to our hotel the next morning to get their hair done.  They walked back under umbrellas but as we flew out late Saturday afternoon the sun broke through.  It must have been a soggy but still beautiful wedding and I’m sure my friend played and sang with great aloha for her niece and the rest of the wedding party.  

 

This year it was Ephraim.  On flights like this with three across seating I prefer to sit on the aisle.  So we always wait for the inevitable window seat passenger who always seems to show up after we are aboard.  This time it was a short Mexican man in a heavy coat.  He politely stood by us until I asked if he was the one we were waiting for.  He smiled and nodded and slid into the window seat.  During the three hour plus flight Georgie got him talking.  What a story he told.

 

When he was very young he came to the United States.  His father had been murdered, when and where I’m not sure, and he left his mother in Zihuatanejo for El Norte.  He had gone through the typical immigrant experience which so many patriots in this country deride: a series of low paying jobs which barely kept his growing family alive.  Now he lived in San Jose and worked road construction.  He evidently was skilled because he made enough money to own two houses and send two of his three children to college.  His oldest daughter was a nurse and his second girl was attending San Jose State.  His son had just graduated from high school and in a few weeks was going to San Diego to join the Navy.  To get to Zihua he had to fly from San Jose to San Francisco and then to Los Angeles.  He had been in transit for at least ten hours when we first met him.  He had not been home for 30 years and now he was going to see his mother.

 

She did not know he was coming.

 

When we deplaned in Zihua the heat and humidity blasted us.  Ephraim still had his coat on and we helped him take it off.  He was wearing a light green suit with a dark mock turtle neck shirt and brown shoes.  Perhaps he borrowed the suit; the pants seemed far too long.  Or maybe it was stylish and I just didn’t get it.  I told him in Spanish he was very handsome and he smiled happily, his rough hewn features beaming like the morning sun coming up over Zihua.  We shook hands and he told us he would be on the same flight back to LAX in seven days.  Then he disappeared into the officialdom of Zihua’s airport, as did we with our passports, and we lost track of him.

 

Ephraim had told us his boss had given him just a few days off.  It worked out because he added them to the Memorial Day holiday.  So we watched for him after we boarded our flight back to LAX, confident that he would show up as he had in Los Angeles, and he could tell us about his homecoming.  But Ephraim never made the flight.  The empty seat by the window was never filled, even though it was otherwise a full flight.

 

Whatever happened to Ephraim?  I have no idea.  I hope for the happy face answer but we will never know.  He was such a good man, hard working, successful, and finally so happy to see his mother after all those years.  There is a Mexican proverb about this sort of thing but my Spanish is all jumbled up as I write this.  Instead I can only think about the empty seat by the window.  Just that damn empty seat.    

 

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Sandy McLeod, a MexiData.info guest columnist, is an English language essayist with Việt Tide, a California-based magazine mostly in Vietnamese where this article first appeared on June 29, 2007.  Prior to his retirement, with a Ph.D. in comparative culture Dr. McLeod taught history of the Americas in college.

 

Reprinted with permission.