Oil As It Ever Was

December 26, 2006 by Susan Hansell.

How did I get here, to Torrance, CA, sharing a hot tub with a middle aged blonde, who happened to have been in Cancun in 1985, four years after I was there in 1981, on my way to Central America?

The short answer is that the blonde and I were both going through back problems, and together we had sunk ourselves into the tub for a little relief. The longer response involves her honeymoon, marriage, children, and South Bay SoCal lifestyle, I guess, compared and contrasted with my journeys onto various countries, cities, jobs, relationships, and writing gigs.

It’s an essay test!

Well, a second class bus ride from Mexico City had been my literal vehicle to Cancun. Although the Cancun airport was able to take passenger jets for a year or two prior to 1981, what occasional and expensive flights there were originated from a very few U.S. cities and a couple of points in Europe. No doubt the tourist aspects of the place built up fast, and by 1985 the flights were cheaper and more numerous. The blonde had jetted in.

Her destination was the Club Med on the point that had been the only “nice” place around Cancun until the Hilton Pyramid was finished, an event that had just happened when I arrived. In fact, the road that would become Hotel Row was still under construction in ‘81, mostly labored upon by Mayan Indian Mexicans who lived either in the town of Cancun or in its surrounding ruralities, the human abode constructions of which vicinities were almost exclusively thatch-roofed palapa huts.

The town itself at that time consisted of a divison between two sections: the Mexicans of apparently mostly Mayan descent were on one side of town, living on dirt streets and in tin-roofed hovels of homes stacked side by side; the middle-class (and generally more European-featured) Mexicans lived among a small contingent of American expatriots in cement, stucco, or cinderblock and tiled houses spaced evenly along curving paved roads.

Through a friend from Berkeley, I had a contact to an American who ran a small language school on the “right” side of town, and I stayed in an attic room of the school for about a week before I made my way further South. It was not possible to see the ocean from the town, but one morning I headed off in the sea’s direction, expecting to arrive at the beach after an easy two-or-three mile walk.

Before long, an open air jeep driven by two white guys who turned out to be Rich Brit tourists pulled alongside me and offered a ride; I hopped into the back of their rented old jeep. We proceeded on until the paved road came to an end and a group of men, somehow both standing up and bending over, working with picks and tar, made hand signs for us to stop.

Ours was the sole vehicle on the road. The workers appeared to have had no vehicle to get them to their worksite; perhaps they walked everywhere they went, as Cancun was teeming neither with cars nor people back then. The deserted-jungle-nature of the road and its environs, from whence Cancun-as-international-vacation-destination raised itself, is really something, I should say, although I never returned after 1981 to see it that way.

Anywho, the Rich Brits got out of their jeep, pulled out their wallets, tried to talk, then bribe, the Mayan-Mexican workers into letting us drive further up the unpaved road. When the workers refused their money, this pair climbed into their jeep in a huff, preparing to roar back to town in a royal cloud of indignation. Not before I got out, however, and told them I would find my own way to wherever it was I was going.

Maybe they remember me as some (one more) Crazy American Girl, or more likely they don’t remember me at all, but I turned to the guys who were working on the road, and asked them the direction of the beach.

Ah, you want to see the beach.

One of them told me he would escort me along the path to la playa; he gestured for me to follow, and I did. He led me to an incline and up through a thicket of topical trees and deeply green shrubs. I had a moment of second-guessing myself, when I turned behind me and could no longer see the road, then looked ahead without being able to see anything but more overgrowth. Yet it was too late to do anything differently at that point, so what good would being afraid do me?

And within a few minutes we cleared the growth and then, yes, a cliche, the untouched and unoccupied beaches of Cancun spread their white sands and blue waters as far as I could see in any direction. I gave a whoop of shocked joy and ran down the rise to the sand, waving my thanks to the guy who had been nice enough to take ten minutes of his time to show me the way. He returned to paving the road for Hotel Row.

Insert your comment on my arrogantly brief foreshadowing of 21st Century global “isms” here, among other offenses I have no doubt faux pased.

Yeah, well, like life itself, essays have a way of coming around full circle, if they’re C’s, or, if they’re better, to ironically (and perhaps endearingly) resonate insights. A’s are generally reserved for the transcendently bitter (sweet?) “truths” of experience, which bring me again to the blonde, and to my aching privileged self.

My own back muscles had been pulled by all kinds of over-stretches I had put myself through, or endured without choice, over the past two years: I married, moved, finished twenty-years of college teaching, and turned I’m-not-going-to-tell-you-how-old. My cat died, my mom died, and I found myself living near enough to Torrance to join a gym where I could swim everyday, and where, if I had to, I could soak in a hot tub or sweat in a steam room, nearly in solitude.

(I will leave it to you, dear reader, to sort, if you desire, my choice-changes from my forced-changes in the above list.)

Now the blonde had hurt her back playing tennis, she said, so when she gingerly made her way into the tub with me, looking older than I, and a wee worse for wear, dare I say, I offered the solicitous concern I usually politely present to someone slightly older, whatever that means!

She claimed to be worried about being able to be as active as she usually was with her husband and their children on their annual family golfing, tennis, and beach trip to Cancun, Mexico, the trip she had taken every year since she and her husband had married in Torrance, California, and then honeymooned together at the enviable locale of Cancun, in 1985.

And I, listening to her describe Cancun as “really nice after they cleaned up and rebuilt all the hotels after that last hurricane,” I comprehended that, oil-joking-snobbery aside, I was most likely the same age, if not older, than this blonde lady, and oh, so tre, well, downright unglamorously signifying the “same as it ever was” (i.e., “Once in a Life Time”) song, a Talking Heads ditty I lip-sync’d during the 80’s (so much for being cutting-edge; once upon a time, perhaps, as that song can regularly be heard in chain-grocerystores’ musak music) without the least prefiguring awareness that in twenty-five years I might have no G.D. idea how I had gotten here, or there, or to any of the times, places and peoples of my life, nor how little faith, nee good humor, I would have left upon said epiphany.

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