Capella

Punta Allen, Quintana Roo, Mexico

Punta Allen is a small fishing village at the tip of the Boca Paila Peninsula in Mexico, bordered on one side by a lagoon and on the other by the Caribbean Sea. The village, which is part of the Sian Ka’an Biosphere Reserve, is a three to four hour drive from Tulum, the nearest town. The road linking Tulum and Punta Allen is rough and covered in large potholes which, after just an afternoon of rain, turn into pools of muddy water deep enough that when a car drives through them, so much water is rolled under and spit out by the car’s wheels that it resembles a teenage boy’s mouthwash routine. I stayed in Punta Allen for a couple days in December with Luca. Luca and I have been dating for almost four years now, and we were visiting Tulum for the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day. We decided to drive from Tulum to Punta Allen because we read on Tripadvisor that one could pay for a boat ride through the ocean and the lagoon, where it was common to see dolphins.

After three hours of driving, when we were only about a kilometer away from Punta Allen and Luca was swerving to avoid what must have been at least our hundredth pothole, our blue rental sedan got lodged in the mud on the side of the road. The wheels on the passenger’s side sank so low into the mud that, as we stood in front of it, the car looked like it was glued onto one of those wooden balance boards designed for children to stand on until they lose their balance and one side plunges toward the ground while the other springs up into the air. Luca, who tends to be more fatalist than me, searched the internet for how much it might cost us to call our car rental company and ask them to drive all the way to Punta Allen to pull us out of the mud. Eventually, we figured it was a better bet to walk to Punta Allen and see if we could pay someone there to help us.

It was not our plan to stay in Punta Allen for the night, but when we got to the village, it was just a few minutes before 3pm, when the last boat tour was set to leave. A group of men stood behind the boat tour stand, all of them wearing colorful polos with pictures of sea turtles printed onto them beneath white letters that read Sian Ka’an. Luca did not speak any Spanish and I only spoke whatever words I remembered from college, pieced together into sentences that made little grammatical sense and were entirely in the present tense. I said some combination of the words for ‘car’ and ‘does not move’ until I saw the men’s faces contort into an expression that one would expect to see after saying their car was stuck in the mud. One of the men said he had a friend with a truck who could probably pull our car out, then offered us a room above his house for just 500 pesos per night. You can stay there for the night, he said while another of the men walked off in search of the friend with the truck, and then at 8 or 9 in the morning, you can take the first boat tour out with one of my captains. We agreed, although it seemed wrong to think about the boat tour when our car was still stuck in the mud, and we waited until his friend came back with the truck and a thick white rope. We rode together in his friend’s truck, saying nothing because my Spanish was not good enough to make small talk, until we got to the car. The man tied one end of the rope to our car and the other to his truck, then drove the truck forward until the car followed, smacking through a bundle of thick branches before jerking out of the mud. The car’s speed, which was just high enough to dislodge its tires from the mud, was also just high enough for the branches to leave little white scratches on the car’s passenger side. We only noticed them days later, when we took the car to a car wash before returning it to the rental company. Luca, who had insisted on buying the most expensive insurance package, worried that we would be charged extra for the scratches, and he did not stop worrying until we returned the car to the rental company and they signed off on our contract and said nothing about the scratches.

The houses in Punta Allen were short and colorful, some orange, others blue or deep red. Most were single-story houses with flat roofs made either of concrete or of corrugated metal. We walked through the village in the afternoon after our car was dragged out of the mud, staying along the edge of the road so as to avoid stepping into another pool of muddy water. There was a house with a tall pile of large white and gray rocks in its front yard, the pile topped with a sign that read, in pink letters: Casa de la Iguana. Ten or so black iguanas lay on the rocks, the color of their bodies blending into that of the rocks, except for a few of them who had yellow spikes along the backs of their necks and their spines. The iguanas lay so still that I thought they were statues or rubber toys put there by the owner of the home, the veins along their torsos resembling the manufactured streaks on textured rubber dog toys, until I saw one twitching and then another scrambling into the pile of rocks. Luca, who knows far more about animals than I do, said that the iguanas with yellow spikes were probably males. The yellow spikes make it easier for birds or snakes to see them, so if an iguana has yellow spikes and is still alive, he is signaling to all the females that he is fitter than his competition. It felt like translating from another language, reading the yellow spikes on the iguana’s backs like a historian might read ancient texts, except the yellow spikes were not words so they felt less like a language that we were supposed to understand. Besides the iguana house, many of the other homes in Punta Allen had plants in their front yards, mostly coconut trees and little green shrubs that sometimes turned into vines crawling up around the house. One home had a trashcan made of plastic bottles, with their caps still screwed on, arranged into four stacked rows and bound up into a cylindrical bin. Some had dogs, unleashed and wandering around the block, others young children sitting with their legs crossed on plastic chairs. The house we stayed in had two stories and was dark yellow, the color of a ripe mango. We stayed on the upper level, where there were two rooms, each with two full beds, opening onto a shared porch with a couple of wooden deck chairs. On the porch’s ceiling, little tan-colored geckos spread their toes and stuck onto the plaster. Most were unmoving, so still that I wondered if they were sleeping and how they could possibly sleep while hanging upside down. One gecko was tangled up with an orange butterfly, the two of them attached in what looked to me like some sort of mating ritual, before I realized that the butterfly’s soft head was lodged in the gecko’s mouth.

The man whose house we were staying in told us to come down and knock on his door if we needed anything. We asked if he had a bedsheet, not because it was cold but because I find it hard to sleep without anything covering me. He said yes, he would bring it up once it was washed, and Luca asked if there was any good place to see the stars. The man told us to wait a couple hours until it got dark, then go to the dock on the lagoon side, and walk all the way down until we saw the canopy at the end of the dock. There, he said, we would be able to see the stars. Luca studied physics in college, which ended up having little to do with stars but attracted people who liked talking about stars. He knows every planet’s size relative to Earth’s, every major constellation and many minor ones too, a list of the brightest stars and the dimmest stars that are visible from Earth. Before going to see the stars, we found a restaurant near the ocean called La Carnada. Luca ordered a beer, then asked the waiter if the fish came with bones, because he hates bones. I ordered the chicken quesadilla and a bottle of water. The restaurant was small with only a handful of tables, the one next to us populated by a large group of people who wore cargo pants and T-shirts and spoke English. I made eye contact with one of the women, who looked to be around 40 years old, and she asked me what we were doing in Punta Allen. I recounted a short version of our car episode. She said that she and her husband were from San Francisco, but lived in Punta Allen for six months of the year. For fly fishing, she said, and I nodded as if I knew what fly fishing meant because her tone implied that everyone should know what fly fishing meant.

By the time Luca and I finished our meal, a brown dog had come into the restaurant and was laying beside our table. The group of fly fishers were loud and likely drunk. Two young girls sat at another empty table, passing a sheet of paper back and forth, playing a game. Luca had found one stray bone in his fish fillet, which he did not mind. He hated bones only when there were many of them, because he hated the process of picking them out one by one and arranging them on the edge of his plate. I hated bones because once, I had choked on a large fish bone and I coughed so much that I felt like the inside of my throat was getting scratched open by both the bone itself and by all the hard air that I was coughing up.

The walk back from La Carnada to the man’s house was dark, the walk from his house to the dock even darker. I could just barely make out the outline of boats tied to the start of the dock, the water slapping against their sides like the branches had slapped against our car, except the water left no white scratches. There were no lamps hanging overhead and as we walked on, any light from the village was drowned out by the trees and the distance. I could see only the faint red glow of Luca’s cell-phone flashlight, red so as to preserve our night vision. The wooden planks on the dock were spaced out, up to two inches of space between adjacent planks. I was scared because it was dark and because I knew, from the men at the boat tour stand, that there were many animals living in the lagoon. I figured there could easily be a crocodile or some big snake in the water that might hear us, crawl up onto the dock, and bite us. Luca is a hyper rationalist, the type that would never be scared of crocodiles crawling up onto the dock because the likelihood of any such thing happening is so low. When his phone’s red light flashed over a large bug scuttling across the dock, I thought to myself that I would have long turned back if Luca was not so eager to see the stars. It’s a spider like the ones we see back home, he said to me. Only later, once we were beneath the newly washed bedsheet in one of our room’s full beds, did he tell me that its tail was far too long to be a spider’s tail and that it was most probably a bark scorpion. But they don’t really sting unless you bother them, he said, the presumption being that we knew what bothered them.

At the end of the dock, there was a canopy, like the man said there would be, where one could stand behind the wooden railing and look out into the dark lagoon. It felt like what I imagine an alien would feel like on Earth, like an invasive species who has no idea who it might be eaten by or what to do to prevent being eaten. Luca, who was already sitting on the dock with his legs crossed, touched my arm. There’s Jupiter, he said, and Mars down there. I sat next to him, crossing my legs, careful to position them such that only my flip-flop touched the gap between the planks so that even if there was an animal, it would bump into my shoe before getting to my skin. Jupiter was brighter than I expected it to be. It was bright enough that it felt close, closer than any of the lights in the village. If something bad happened and we needed to escape, it seemed to me like we would be better off heading toward Jupiter than going back to the village which was, at this point, so far away that we could no longer see any of it. When I tilted my head back down from Jupiter, the air above the lagoon was still black. It was black enough, I thought, that it was almost certainly hiding Jupiter’s real distance from us. There could easily be millions of black lagoons between us and Jupiter and I wouldn’t know because, in the dark, they all merged into one. Mars glowed with a tint of red. Luca held his cell-phone up, opened to an app that one can use to scan the sky and read the names of stars and constellations. I pointed to the bright star near Jupiter. Capella, Luca said, reading from his cell-phone. It sounded like an Italian coastal town where we would go and order lemon pasta. I felt the way all the books say one is supposed to feel, like an incredibly small part of something so big that I could never even understand its size, but a part of it all the same, like I was possibly staring up at real faces far away on Jupiter that were at once staring down at me. I also felt scared, which none of the books say one is supposed to feel. The sky was still black and so was everything all around us. Every so often, we could hear the water splashing against the dock posts. I imagined the water was carrying with it a bunch of spiky creatures, and if they were to climb up onto the dock and attack us, no one would even hear our screaming because we were so far from the village. There could very well be hundreds, even thousands, of faces hiding in the darkness of the lagoon, peering up through the water at me and Luca, licking the bottom of my flip-flops with the coming of the waves. The lagoon, I thought, was not so different from Jupiter. It too was a world I did not know, except it was right beneath me, so close that I could slip right into it if I walked too fast and my flip-flop got wet and my foot slid straight into the night’s water.

Luca likely would have stayed for longer if not for me being so scared. The way back down the dock was equally as dark as the way there, black until we got to the end and heard the water against the line of boats, and then saw the first light from the village. In the village, a group of men, including the one who owned the house in which we were staying, sat at an orange bar counter outside of an orange house. They drank beer under a lamp’s soft light, speaking to each other in Spanish and laughing about things that we could not understand. The man who we knew waved at us as we walked by. Luca asked me if we should try to buy a couple of beers for ourselves. We can ask them where to buy some, he said. I told him it would feel too much like intruding. We would have to walk up to them and I would have to arrange some combination of the words for ‘beer’ and ‘buy,’ interrupting whatever joke they were laughing at just for us to maybe get two beers. I told Luca we should probably get back and sleep early. We had the boat tour the next morning and we didn’t want to be late and miss the dolphins.