Chasing Pelicans

Muck tells the story with full body actions and huge manipulation of his gravel-toned voice.


"I was in a boat, chasing pelicans," he begins, clasping his hands together and crossing his legs. We nod, by this time so accustomed to Muck's stories that not an eyebrow is raised.

"We're steaming along, clouds of pelicans rising from all around. Carrie's laughing, I'm yelling. All of a sudden, the motor falls off!"


He leans back in his chair, slaps his knees, laughs at the ceiling.

"Well I was like, 'Blow me! What do I do now?!' I was twenty yards from shore but the boat was rented and we had to return it a good mile or so down the beach. 'What do I do?' I say to myself. 'What do you do in this kind of situation?'"

He looks at us enquiringly. "I don't know, what DID you do?" I reply, dutifully.


"Well, quick as I can, I take note of two points near by, to remember where the motor fell. By this time the tide is trying to take us out, so I know my priority is to get the boat and Carrie back to shore. So I jump into the water!" He cackles. "And I start swimming. I swim as hard as I can, pushing the boat to safety." Muck front crawls from his seat.


"I swim and swim and swim some more. Eventually I get the boat back, get Carrie settled, and turn around to go back to the beach. 'Where are you going?' shouts Carrie," (he cups his hands around his mouth theatrically). "'To get the motor!' I shout, and carry on going before she can say anything.


"So I run along the shore until I find the point where I think I dropped the motor. I swim out to it. A boy is watching me and he knows what I'm trying to do. He just watches and watches as I swim. When I've swam for about five, ten minutes I match up the points that I took when the motor went down. I think I've got it pretty good. So I dive. I swim all the way down to the bottom - it must be a good fifteen feet.


"I don't find it. I'm running out of air and I have to pop up to the surface, quick, or else I'll drown."


"So what did you do?!" the audience cries, captivated.


"I dive again." Splash! goes his imaginary sea. "Same thing. No joy."

His shoulders heave with the remembered effort. "So I dive again."


"On the third dive, blow me! I find it!"


"You find it?!"


"I find it! My first reaction is to grab the thing and try and pull it. But this is a thirty horsepower motor we're talking here." He opens his hands wide and bounces them, weighing an invisible bulk. "There ain't no way I'm going to lift that thing out of the water.


"So what do I do? Well... There was only one thing for it." We can see where this one is going, but the magic is in the build up. "You didn't..." starts Taylor.


"I did!" exclaims Muck, eyes dancing. "I did!


"I eye up the distance to shore. I take a deep breath. I dive again."


He plunges through the air. The imaginary sea goes Pssssssssshhhhhhht around the old man. I submerge myself with him.

"I raise up the motor as much as I can, helped by the lift of the water. And I drag it, a few inches, along the seabed towards the shore. Then I run out of air and I have to drop it - thhdd - and go up for air."

He raises his hands as we return to the surface.


"I take another big lungful. Pop down again. Do the same thing. Run out of air."


More gesticulating, deep gasp. He struggles for oxygen.


"And then I go down again. Little by little, I edge towards the shore, slowly walking my way along the seabed. I feel like a merman or something!" He bares his teeth and shakes with merriment.


"I'm going for about twenty minutes, up, down, like a seal. By this time there is a small crowd of people watching me. I get closer and closer to shore, bobbing up and down as I come up for air. Then I get to the point where I can stand on the bottom, and bit by bit I bend down and drag it towards the beach. The water is up to my chin, then my chest, then my waist. Eventually, when I'm close to fainting, I heave the motor out of the water and in sight of the crowd, who at that point realise what I've been doing all this time. Someone comes to help me pull it out.

"I'm so tired I collapse on the beach."


He hangs his head to the side and we are there with him in his exhaustion.


"I'm lying there, dripping, next to an enormous black motor," he says, head still to one side. "I can't even move. But I've done it! I've actually rescued the motor! So I just lie there and try to recover." His chest heaves.


"Then a man comes up to me. He squats down next to me and he says, with a slight smile.... He says to me, 'What, by God, were you doing out there?"

"And I say...HA...I say..." I can see the punchline almost exploding out of him. He laughs his infectious laugh, claps his hands and concludes with a flourish;

"Chasing pelicans!"

Breaking boundaries

My new best friend Dina runs past me down the beach, shouting and flapping her arms.

She is usually fairly dramatic. But then I notice a small boat approaching the shore through the gathering folds of darkness.

'I'm going to Sayulita! Someone sent a private boat!' She cries, beautiful eyes bulging with excitement. I look at my companions, preparing for a quiet night in front of the fire. Look down at the remains of my flame-toasted frankfurters.

It takes about fifty seconds before I am hauling myself over the side of the boat after her, laughing because I have no idea what we're about to do.

I just couldn't say no to a night-time panga ride.

I know it is the right decision the moment I sit back and introduce myself to the crew. Aside from Phillippe, our chaperone, there are two older people there who introduce themselves as Muck and Carrie, amidst peals of slightly maniacal laughter.

Carrie is all over Muck - evidently they have not seen each other for a while. She has several holes where teeth should be and talks a lot about their days touring with the Grateful Dead. Muck has a long, grey ponytail, a voice like Louis Armstrong and the glint of LSD in his eyes.

'Away we go!' cries Muck, and the wind whips my hair saltily. The air is soft on my skin and the stars peer at us in disapproval.

I am still confused as to why we have this boat, but it soon becomes clear that this is standard with Muck and Carrie - their stories being unerringly incomprehensible and bizarre. I find out later Muck 'got lost' in Sayulita for three days. When he came to that afternoon, he donned his knight's hat and commandeered a panga to fetch Carrie, who he'd left a hundred miles away in Yelapa, providing a convenient steed for my and Dina's adventure.

We swig Ricea - the local firewater - and laugh because it is all that good.

Bioluminescence sprays from the front of the boat like welding sparks. We put our hands in it, spellbound. The water feels warm. I bend backwards out of the boat so the spray is above my head and the starry bottom falls out of my world. I am soaked.

'I can see the light!' screams Muck in his half-voice, waving an imaginary lasso. Dina climbs onto the prow, picks up the painter and surfs her way to land.

Just like this movie-scene journey, the subsequent few days could never be justified on paper. I did try.

But how could I explain the speed with which Phillippe drove from Boca de Tomatlan up the coast to Sayulita? The glow that greeted us at the huge orange mansion that someone called Taylor was renting, purely for the purpose of 'picking up strays' like us? The magical brother/sister trio that was borne when Taylor, Dina and I were joined?

The dancing on the bar. The hole in my foot. The circuits around town in a golf buggy.

These events are best left to the imagination. For it is there that invention can draw freely, lavishing scenes with the deserved paint of legend.

I become Carrie's mascot. She even gives me a dress. I find out later she is bipolar, which wouldn't have bothered me had she not thrown all of my belongings down the stairs in a fit of rage and then called me baby afterwards. I then understood how it was that Muck could 'lose' her for three days.

For that moment, though, no one can stop smiling. Least of all me. I have taken the power back. I am Ju again. The world toasts me with another synchronicity.

Last week I read two random pages of a book about 2012 - two pages that happened to be about England.

Today I see the same book at Taylor's house and randomly open it. It falls apart at the same pages I read before. At the top of the page I find the following lines, that I hadn't noticed first time round.

'Ultimately, it boils down to what you, the observer, wants to see.'

Taylor tells me I can keep the book.

Serendipitous. Spontaneous. Extemporaneous.

Carrie was nervous about returning to Yelapa. Apparently this was because she accidentally stole a horse.

'But how can you accidentally steal a horse?' I ask.

'I don't know,' she replies, 'but I think it was the happiest hour of my entire life.'

Plaster me to myself

Yelapa pushes and pulls my mind through every kind of emotion. Overriding all is a thick inertia and a damp listlessness that pushes me to the floor and sticks a knee in my back.

I am pole-axed. The heat, the boredom, the beauty.

There's little to do here apart from think and drink - something that despite my best efforts just isn't my thing.

So I sit at the proverbial sidelines and watch the locals being sucked into a vortex of routine alcoholism. They sing happily about the lack of hangovers in Yelapa as they order their morning michelada.

I am watching the prologue to Sayulita's sequel. I grasp for the remaining Mexican spirit with both hands.

To get to town I have to wade through a river. If I change my mind and turn left I am in the jungle, ants weaving over my toes and guacamayas dropping fruit onto my head. Comfortable in the knowledge that both are there if I need them, I build my contented nest on the beach and leave only when the guilt outweighs the laziness.

Days are cupped by mountains that shield sunrise and sunset, tinting mornings grey and evenings pink. Time is measured by the pangas that leave the beach for the mainland every couple of hours. Day trippers descend like zopilotes, eating the soul from the place and disturbing the peace with pina colada demands.

I construct a loose kind of routine around my daily swim that makes me feel like I'm achieving something. I am coaxed from my feeble attempts to write by the indolence within.

I am my own worst enemy.

I struggle with personal paranoia. I find myself withdrawing from social situations for no apparent reason. In the middle of a conversation by the evening beach fire I will suddenly lift myself out of the circle of warmth to retreat to my tent and my thoughts. I develop headaches at parties, fall asleep when I'm supposed to meet people.

I spend hours hula hooping because it is easier than interacting.

I don't really understand why and feel myself resisting it, projecting myself back to a time when life just seemed a little more in focus. I worry that in pulling closed my shutters and pursuing this solo journey I have somehow lost the Ju that used to infect a room so easily.

I try to find her and she laughs at me from a great depth.

The more I fight the more uncomfortable I get. Inside seems to be conflict after restless conflict, interspersed with a fundamental need to be close to nature.

We can never be completely free, for at the very least we have the boundaries we set for ourselves.

But I am really quite happy in this isolated state. So why resist?

I seek out pockets of solitary peace and the weeks drift by unchecked.

An Englishwoman and her castle

Yelapa, Jalisco. Fourth of January.

Crescent of yellow. Angle of jungle-furred mountains. A sandy shelf just below the waves that pulls you into the water and keeps you there.

I am alone once again.  Eva grew her own graceful wings just before New Year, and is at this moment flying south with la banda to hoop-busk at road junctions.

I am sitting cross-legged, boiling pasta outside a tent at the top of the beach. A tent like a castle, with a foam mattress and real sheets and acres of space to fill with sand collected by sea-washed feet. It has been lent to me free of charge by Freddy, who I met yesterday on the beach. 

I lie back into its yellow folds, contemplating the night ahead.

I have just completed the three hour round trip by panga (fishing boat) and bus to Puerto Vallarta to get money and food sufficient for a long stay.

I have liquid alcohol, con jugo de naranja gratis, for sunset Screwdrivers; and solid alcohol, in a can, to cook with.

A corner of the fridge at the bar next door is mine, as is the semi-hot shower in Freddy's room when I want it. There is a tienda should I need any more food, and a woman who delivers exquisite wedges of pie right to my door. There is a sandy-bottomed river to laze next to, a car-free warren of a town to explore and the clear turquoise pool of the sea approximately twenty seconds' walk away. Should I wish, I need only sit with my new friends for a little while before I am passed a cigarlike joint or a sip of ice-cold beer.

I struggle to think of anything I could possibly add to the list of things I want.

Best of all, I seem to be riding high on some injection of spirit. I want to shout all the time. It is the new decade and an era of hope. I am believing in what I am doing and it is paying off. Once again I woke up this morning thinking of my man, but it is with acceptance rather than resistance that I dream of that place across the seas.

This is my time now.

The coincidences are coming thick and fast and each one hits me like the waves hit the sand. The most recent seem to be vehicles for handing me information.

Two days ago I was told to read a book called Fingerprints of the Gods. Today I went to an empty house on the hill and found Fingerprints of the Gods lying on the terrace in front of me. I spent an hour reading about the possibilities of continental shift and the clues imprinted by ancient societies, while a wet wind blew papaya leaves out to the ocean and tiny green parakeets chattered mysteries.

I pay attention to events like this. I believe it's the most important thing you can do. Did you know that the main reason I'm in Mexico is because a complete stranger said; "There are answers for you in Mexico"?

The answers are emerging, wrapped in the shiny crumple of further questions.

By the time I left that house I'd decided to stay in Yelapa. I feel like something wants me to stay here, more than just me. There is someone I have to meet; something I have to learn.

I turn back to my pasta. It has taken forty five minutes to cook on the alcohol burner. I tip it out onto a plastic bag and start frying onions for the sauce, all the time listening to the crash of the water ahead.