Vamos a la Playapocalypse

I took a rather strange assortment of beach reading to Yelapa. First up: Uglies, part of a very good sci-fi series Josie plowed through last summer. I won't go into the details except to say that something about the group of outlaws who had fled the plastic-perfect-captive life of the City in order to live free in the forest (growing their own food, making their own shoes, etc.) resonated with our Robinson Crusoe accommodations.

We loved many things about the pelapa/treehouse at Casa Isabel, and the path along the coast to get out to it was stunning:

But the sleeping arrangements proved somewhat torturous: I basically laid awake each night in the swinging bed upstairs listening to the waves crashing on the beach and the wind in the trees, waiting for Simon to wake up downstairs and call out in the pitch-black dark, because he couldn't get out of bed on account of the possible scorpions on the floor. When it came (and it always did, eventually) the awakening would be followed by an awkward flash-lit game of Musical Beds, winding up with me back upstairs with a sweaty, itchy boy thrashing around next to me for the rest of the night.

Josie had it even worse; her hammock bed was strung up right next to a cliff!


Halfway through the week we switched to a little apartment right on the beach -- less interesting, in many ways, but with slightly more to offer in the creature comforts department.

One morning shortly after the move, I picked up Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Several people have mentioned this book to me recently, hinting that even though it's devastatingly grim, there's some vague glimmer of hope at the end that makes it inspiring too, in a way that none of them could quite articulate.

I have to say it was pretty surreal to be sitting on a sunny beach in Mexico following this father and son on their journey through a burned-out, frozen-over, post-apocalyptic landscape -- foraging for food in abandoned grocery stores, sleeping under a tarp in the freezing rain, hiding from marauding gangs of cannibals. The bleak, desperate world of the novel was so utterly denied by the bright sun, the cool breeze, the kids playing in the surf, the friendly waiters bringing margaritas at every meal.

But then the sun went down, and the story got grimmer and grimmer. This wasn't the kind of book you could possibly put down half-way through and hope to fall asleep -- believe me -- so I just kept going, deep into the night, waiting for that elusive glimmer of hope I'd been promised.

And yes, there was something beautiful in the father's determination to protect his son, to keep him alive at all costs, to send him forward into the future as a fragile embodiment of hope. And I did see that hope flickering in the son's heartbreaking attempts to make sense of the horrors around him, and his father's responses, and to formulate some kind of moral compass out of it all.

It turns out the mother had given up early on -- killed herself because she couldn't stand to watch the world slide into hell, taking her kid with it. The father struggles with this too -- how many bullets does he have left in his pistol? Enough for both of them? Yet he keeps resolving, over and over, to keep going.

But why? Is that dogged refusal to give up supposed to be the glimmer of hope? What exactly does "hope" mean in this situation? It's not like there's any chance of reviving the old, pre-apocalypse society, which (even if it hadn't been riddled with apocalypse-inducing flaws) has clearly vanished for good. In fact, the father has decided that he'll never be able to convey that lost world -- crosswords, sprinklers, salad, radio, Congress -- to his son without also transferring the loss itself -- so he doesn't bother.

What he's offering his son instead is pretty basic: We're the good guys. We carry the fire. We don't give up. We're hiding from the bad guys. They eat people.

By the end of the book the good guy creed seems to have tentatively expanded from "We don't eat our children," to "We might be willing to take in someone else's." This might represent a significant step up Kohlberg's ladder, but it wasn't really enough to convince me that the mother hadn't had the right idea.

The next day, more sleep-deprived than ever, I sat on the sunny beach again, struggling to return from McCarthy's shattered world to the warm, friendly one in front of me. It felt like a long journey back. And there were moments -- like the scene outside the grocery store where two dogs, one with a foot-long, badly-healing gash in his side, had cornered a third, who lay whimpering on his back, baring his teeth at his attackers -- or when a beautifully tanned blonde woman with a double belly piercing came over to warn us not to let our kids play in the river, because the water had tested positive for cholera and typhoid -- or when I plowed through David Foster Wallace's essay about 9/11, where he describes a group of good-hearted small-town ladies silently praying as they watch the horrors unfold on a giant tv screen in Mrs. Thompson's livingroom -- that made me feel like we're actually teetering just at the edge of that bleak, desperate world. All the ingredients for the apocalypse are assembled; and we're just waiting, margaritas in hand, for the other shoe to fall.