The tranquility of this pueblo, specifically of my neighborhood, was disturbed by the prolonged yelling between the couple next door. They shouted and cried and cursed at one another for more than an hour, until about 11:00. Even when they stopped, the night was hot and muggy, the bed was hard and polyestered, and by the time that morning came around, I was determined to forego another night there. I told my host so when she called to inquire about how I was doing.
She had the immediate advantage on me because we were speaking in her language, and she was able to get in about 50 words to my 1. I didn't understand quite a few of them, so I was flipping through my mental dictionary while she had gone through three more thoughts. She was much more determined than I was in her belief that I was going nowhere but to one of her rooms that night. So she came to pick me up and to show me the other possibilities. First, she took me to her 83 year-old father's house and introduced me. The room she showed me was indeed very tranquil because we were in a town about the size of Greensprings, Oregon, but it had no door, and was directly across the hall from Papa's. Next she took me to her house, in an even smaller town, at the end of a dirt road, and led me to the pink bedroom with the pink bedspread and the pink curtains and the pink flowers, across the hall from the one she shared with her husband. Then she took me on a tour of Las Tablas, regaling me with non-stop, high-pitched, laughter-infused monologue after she had made me coffee and breakfast, after she had given me home-made cane honey and home-grown watermelons, after she had dropped off a portable water-cooler, before taking me on the 45 min. drive to the beach at Pedasi where she left me for 4 hrs while she took care of her business as Director of Adult Education.
During my stay at the beach, three things happened that caused me to really appreciate the extent of what she had done. The first was that I had time to completely read The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz which led me into a place of willing suspension of negativity. The second was the apparition of a young, bikinied woman on an almost totally deserted beach lolling around in shallow water, getting up and crawling away a short distance on all fours before throwing herself full-bodied into the shallows again and rolling around in the water like a porpoise. She was the embodiment of the wild abandon that Don Miguel had just told me to strive for. The third was a local guy who had been walking up and down the beach since I got there. Of indiscriminate age, he was lean, sinewy, and brown. I found out upon talking with him that he had been taking care of the beach there at Playa Toro for 40 years, picking up trash, gathering flotsam to make palapas, and hosting free camping. Several fishermen came and went with their heavy-duty rods. Then the beachkeeper picked up his Clorox bottle with the line wrapped around it, scampered over some partially submerged rocks, and began making cast after cast into the surf at sunset.
Shortly thereafter, my host returned, picked me up for the return drive, and took me back to the little house with no number where I'm sure I'll dream about sea creatures and fishermen.
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