Medication

A Work Injury, a Trip to Mexico

Hello, and thank you for reading. In this installment of Caption Adventure, you’ll find excerpts from a true story in which a temporary disablement from a table saw injury opens the door to a not quite post-COVID-19 family trip to Mexico. While most of the stories in my book in progress, Always Something, Never Nothing, are of the not-so-hardcore adventure genre and are driven by the troubles we tempt just by getting out there where the weather and topography are ambivalent toward our safety and stamina, a few chapters fall under the equally unofficial category of semi-relaxing family travel. “Medication” is of the latter category, and it’s one of my favorites because 1) it was probably the easiest to write and 2) who doesn’t love a spur of the moment family vacation story in which a traumatized appendage plays a featured role?

If you’ve read the first two installments of caption/excerpts, you might note that this third installment jumps ahead a decade. The rationale behind this leap to a story that comes much later in the book is that this leap lands us on a sampling of two sub-categories of adventure covered in Always Something, namely: the above referenced “slightly off-beat family travel” sub-category and the “trouble will find you right where you are” one.

I started writing “Medication” as soon as my right hand was up for typing. This typing was good therapy for the hand, and the writing helped me untangle the trauma and memory of a freak accident and to witness from a partially detached perspective the unconscious mind doing some important work of its own. And the timing of the vacation and subsequent story would soon take on greater significance: About four months after this Mexico vacation, my family very suddenly embarked on a forced displacement in Seattle for emergency medical treatment for our youngest, who was sixteen at the time. Everything would work out in a best-case-imaginable scenario, and we’d be back home in Montana before the start of the second semester of Solvei’s junior year. But, starting a few weeks into this four-month Seattle sojourn, after we’d somehow settled into a new routine of hospital, hotel and Airbnb stays and clinic appointments, we’d sometimes refer to our situation there as a seriously twisted travel tale or a dance through hell. Eventually my daughter and I would find a simple means of temporary escape from this hell via the massages I’d administer to her head (bald from chemo by this point) using my mostly rehabbed right hand. During one of these massage sessions, after I’d pointed out that it was a medical first – this dual therapy for the chemo blues and an injured hand – Solvei, her sense of humor never diminished even through all of this, pointed out that while I’d gotten a trip to Mexico out of my injury, she “got this” in Seattle. 

Unlike “Medication” it took me a while (and a solo writing retreat on an island north of Seattle) to figure out how to write about this Seattle experience. But this being the most horrifying, difficult and ultimately beautiful thing we’d been through, I wanted to somehow describe it, mainly for personal reasons but also to provide one answer to the question anyone who hasn’t gone through something similar is bound to ask: How does a family get through a thing like that? I don’t think that the writing that came from this experience is going to become Caption Adventure newsletter material, so what I’m trying to figure out how to say here is aimed at making the point that life is nuts right out of the box whether or not one spices it up with wilderness adventures and off-beat vacations.

And here we are in this unintentionally quirky newsletter, having roundabouted toward this: While Always Something is a collection of true stories from the outdoors, spanning three decades and presented more or less chronologically, it is altogether a story of friendship, 21st century fatherhood and mutual support; of adventure on the surface of an awe-inspiring planet in major peril and of perseverance, somehow getting through it all. It’s a call for keeping our eyes peeled for all of the heartbreaking beauty and for maintaining a sense of humor, because we have to laugh and cry, if only because nothing else on the planet can.

If you’ve already scrolled beyond this point, it’s too late to warn you about the pic of a very ugly hand slightly below. If I were into paywalls, maybe I’d post an “after” pic of the hand behind one, but if you’re curious you’ll just have to imagine a normal, fully functional hand. Thanks again for your interest. Feel free to subscribe if you haven’t and to share with folks who’d enjoy some Caption Adventure.

Day 2

A cloud shadow slides along the shoreline from right to left. In its wake hundreds of spikes of suddenly born again sunlight dance ecstatic on the water. When I squint, the spikes become minnows gyrating on their tail fins, a welcome sideshow in a circus of thoughts. The eyes close and the sound of surf tumbles back in. A half million miles of shoreline worldwide, and what is the sound of one ocean lapping? The ultraviolet rays inch onto my swollen fingers, two of which are Frankenstitched and slowly re-incorporating since contact with a humming saw blade that also clipped my ability to focus.

I sit here post-trauma, an almost digitally disintegrated self under repair, making way for all remedies that subconscious triage or a change of scenery might gurney into the light. I retract the poor appendage along the glass table top into a cross of shade, the shadow of a wooden post and a beam holding up the purlins. The plastic splint and protective sleeve are set aside for now, next to a glass containing three melting ice cubes. I move the glass aside and use my left hand to flatten the palm of the right hand onto the cool ring of condensation on the table because the nerves, rebuilt tendons and glued knuckles are largely incommunicado and out of service. Elsewhere on the body, a warm percolation of tequila in the capillaries meets an ocean breeze on the skin.

Cindy’s bare feet pad across the living room tiles. She pauses in the open doorway, just over my shoulder.

“Napping?”

“No, not really. Sort of meditating. A new way that just came to me.”

“Nice.”

She tells me she just reserved our spots with Jungle Buggy for tomorrow, a half-day, four-wheeler excursion into the forest and a swim in a cenote off the beaten path.

“Sounds perfect.”

With only one good hand I’m also letting go of other controls, such as trip planning, and on the rough jungle roads I won’t be able to steer. I elevate the right hand and call shotgun.

Day 3

Cindy is poorly disguised as a desert nomad in wind blown blonde hair and ski goggles, a bandana over her nose and mouth and a thin shawl billowing from her freckled shoulders as she gooses the side by side four-wheeler through the dust and deep dips of the jungle track. We're staying alert for wild animals, but at high noon they all must be hunkered in shade. Guide Rosaria leads the way on a three-wheeler. Quinn tails us with Sol riding shotgun. Guide Cris takes up the rear. We are loud and fast. It hasn’t rained lately, so all of the fun mud puddles so ravely reviewed on TripAdvisor have dried up, and the goggles are mainly for the dust and to keep our eyes from watering at high speed.

The ranch is an indigenous cooperative. Every so often a small concrete or stone statue appears in the understory just off the road. No sign of buildings, pastures or livestock. The bedrock is ancient limestone seabed, and I wonder if the soil is very rich. I make a mental note to Google a satellite image of the area and look for homesteads carved out of vast lowland jungle. The statues that eat our dust denote ownership and/or ward off unwelcome spirits; I can’t recall exactly what Cris said about them just a few minutes ago even though it’s these details that animate a place when no wildlife appears. After about twenty minutes and multiple lefts and rights, we regroup and turn around at a nondescript spot in the road and head for the cenote. I wonder out loud whether the circuitous route is to keep the way to the pool a secret, but Cindy can’t hear me over the seductive poppity-pop of the engine.

We park at the end of a spur track and head downhill along a walking path. When the trail drops over a low ledge, Cris directs our attention to a shallow cave under the ledge. He tells us that jaguars ambush their prey, mainly deer and turkeys, from such hiding spots along game trails all over the Yucatan. The trail curves to the left, and a natural limestone bandshell sheltering a blue and quiet cenote at the bottom of the hill comes into view, three-quarters of the pool in shadow and the rest of it in mottled jungle light. Cris says we have it to ourselves for forty-five minutes, so no hurry, and let’s be careful on the slippery rocks along the edge. A submerged shelf of rock next to a small wooden platform makes a good spot for getting in.

If there’s a perfect place to test a waterproof wound protector this is it. Cindy and the kids toe the water then jump in while I deal with the cast bag, which I bought at the last minute at a pharmacy in Missoula and pre-tested in the kitchen sink in the apartment this morning. Now, between my eagerness for immersion and my uncertainty about the swimworthiness of the cast bag, my heart rate is up. A watertight seam runs along the length and hand end of the bag, and a wide elastic band at the other end fits snugly around my bicep. Cindy bought two new snorkeling masks for this trip, and Solvei comes over dripping wet and hands me one of the masks, excited for me to see what she’s already seen.

My right hand is now less dexterous than a lobster claw, so the mask suctions askew and too tight on my face. Solvei loosens the strap and straightens the mask, and I step down onto the ledge, crouch, lean forward and push off. Frog kicks and a couple of left-handed breast-strokes get me to the middle of the pool. The cast bag, now somehow inflated, buoys my arm on the surface. I turn onto my side and raise the arm to inspect it. The appendage is blurry through the plastic but looks and feels dry. (Absolutely no swimming, my physical therapist had said, but she too had been tentatively planning a not quite post-COVID Mexico vacation, and some of our conversations took on a conspiratory tone.)

Facedown, I float skydiver style, arms outstretched and bent at the elbows. With the right arm semi-obediently afloat, I couldn’t dive if I wanted to, but even from the surface the submerged limestone blocks that were once part of the roof of the cave shimmer in sufficient detail twenty feet below. I swim to the back of the cave and steady myself along the rough wall with my left hand while looking down the steep face. Despite the strangeness of this possibly mystical jungle element, the place has a calming effect that is enhanced by how well it tolerates our presence. The silence we’ve broken doesn’t seem to mind. Small waves lapping at limestone echo, as does female laughter. I roll onto my back and hear Cindy say that Dad’s never going to want to leave. It feels good to be understood […]

Cris swims over and tells me he’s been learning how to free dive. I watch him descend unhurried and feet-first to the bottom. He comes up with a fistful of what looks like pieces of a shattered rock, which he places on a small ledge just out of the water. Shards of terra cotta pottery, probably centuries old, the remnants of an accident or ritual or a garbage run, now suddenly sit in a small puddle in diffused light. After all this time at rest on the bottom of the pool, the artifacts sort of seem to blink. I consider handling one of them, wondering if that would be okay, but Cris brushes them off the ledge. I watch them spiral down toward crevasses in the bottom of the pool. 

Floating face-up again, it’s easy to picture the limestone dome when it was whole, extending out and down to the forested slope, then, after millennia of erosion of porous rock by groundwater, collapse. Whether this was all at once or in sections at a time, Cris can’t say. Even before jungle buggies and family vacations, people might have been coming here to gather water and escape the heat. I imagine being present when a chunk of the roof broke loose in a puff of chalky dust and cannonballed into the pool. If I’d been a Mayan priest I might have posted apprentices here just at the chance of putting eyes on such a portentous event and to note the sequence of echoes fading, dust clearing and water becoming still. But that’s just me. I could spend the rest of the afternoon here, alternating between warm sunbeams and cool waters.

Later on Day 3

After a convivial Jamaican jerked chicken dinner at tiny Rocka’s in old Playa, we walk over to La Quinta Avenida to take in the nighttime tourist vibe. As soon as we emerge from Calle 26 onto La Avenida, a teenage boy, who must have seen us coming, greets us from the middle of the intersection.

“Hey, familia!” he says.

We look over our shoulders then back at the boy, who now palms his chest.

“It’s Jose, from hotel reception!” he says.

Caught off guard, we take the bait. “Hey! Oh yeah! Jose! Como esta?”

We stop just short of hugs, and Jose jabs a thumb over his shoulder toward some stalls, where he says his uncle has the best collection of something or other on the avenue.

“Come see us later,” Jose says. “I’ll introduce you.”

“We will!”

Walking away it dawns on us all at once that our resort really has no reception, nor have any of us spoken to staff other than the young woman at the desk and a few waiters. We wonder if Jose meant to say restaurant, but all of the waiters there are grown men. We laugh out loud, looking over our shoulders for Jose, who must be off somewhere laughing with his cousins.

We fall in step with the pedestrian crowd, the tone now set for our stroll down La Avenida, where several times per block vendors will call our attention to trinkets and cheap wares, sunglasses, bracelets for ankles and wrists, painted shells. The hawkers’ pitches intercept our path and pique our empathy, but the eyes of the few with whom my own eyes make contact seem to say, Whatever, these words that fail nine out of ten times must come out nonetheless. Faces young and old tell the story of another long day at work, while the eyes of fellow tourists gleam, reflecting the bright signs and lights of La Avenida. When I feel compelled to acknowledge a sales pitch with a quick wave and a No, gracias, the gesture is returned with a half smile that says, It’s okay. Don’t bother. I’m just a pale blurr in the crowd. We’re all masked against COVID, there’s no breeze, and my hand is sweating and swollen from being sheathed in plastic and down at my side, overdue for air, elevation and ice. We turn around after a few blocks and a couple of purchases and rewalk the gauntlet. I make eye contact with a man in a red, white and blue striped polo standing in the middle of a cross street, just off the intersection. He has an aire of authority, and maybe he’s the owner of a stable of trinket stalls. I wonder if he’s Jose’s uncle but then remember that the kid was conning us. The man breaks off his conversation with the guy standing next to him to yell something about the girl walking in front of me, who is fair skinned and strawberry blond, not quite sixteen years old, my daughter. I tell myself to ignore the guy, and that whatever’s been said was probably just some gringo heckling for the benefit of the crowd, but I find myself turning to face him from thirty feet away.

My heckler looks all around, smiling, then shouts that I better buy a ring for the girl’s finger.

“Mi hija?” I say incredulously.

His smile brightens, and he juts his chin toward Sol, who has kept on walking.

“Better keep her close then,” he says.

I’m at a loss. The heckler glances at my splint and nylon sleeve and, after I start to walk away, says that I should try to control my anger.

I just shake my head.

He shouts, “The glass wins every time, amigo!”

I look over my shoulder, and he raises his arm, taps the back of his wrist, then mimes throwing a punch, presumably through a window. He nods and flashes a thumbs up.

In the heat and humidity of the moment, I fail to recall the word for table saw or the first person past tense of cortar (to cut) or the obvious fact that this man understands English. So I resort to playing it cool while catching up to my family and wondering how the guy comes up with such clever shit on the spot. I chalk it up to tools of the trade, management credentials, time on one’s hands and keeping up morale. I resist taking it personally. It’s been a good day for this gringo and his family. The sweet and smokey taste of Rocka’s is still on my tongue, and back at the apartment Cindy and I and our temporarily legally aged son will follow up the Red Stripe lagers with margaritas while I elevate, microflex and then ice. I bet Solvei can find something on Netflix we can all agree on.

Day 4

In a hot and dusty parking lot near the ruins of Tulum, I’m behind the wheel of the Hyundai we rented from a company called Isis.

Scrolling through notes on my phone with my left thumb and using the edge of the plastic splint to turn pages of the Lonely Planet guidebook, I'm looking for directions to a cenote and nearby restaurant that are, if I remember correctly, somewhere between here and our resort. My attention is scattered among the multi-media, and the impatience is building around me. The climate in the Hyundai, which sat in the sun for two hours while we toured the ruins, is hair-dryer-in-a-Hefty-bag, but I’m worried that if we hit the road heading north without a plan, our momentum will carry us all the way to the apartment and another meal at the resort’s restaurant, which in my head I’ve starting calling Cafe Simpatico Bastante (Nice Enough Cafe, I think). Some deep breaths now as I remember my goal to cultivate a tropical stoic disposition, a Hydrocodone outlook without the pills. 

Just north of Tulum, we exit the highway and drive along a narrow dirt road between mangrove forest on the left and beachfront homes and boutique hotels on the right. The parking lot for Cenote Casa comes up on the left, and we drive slowly past the alluring blue-green water that comes almost all the way up to the road. The Casa Maya hotel comes up on the right. We park, ascend a set of stairs, walk past a small bar with veranda seating then through a covered courtyard with a pool leading to the beach. A man approaching from behind asks if we need help, and I ask about the restaurant, where it is and whether it’s casual, gesturing toward my t-shirt and bathing suit. “Of course,” he says with a chuckle. Behind him, Quinn and Solvei have distanced themselves from this engagement with a stranger, who now steps aside and gestures back toward the restaurant, where Cindy already stands waiting for us.

The restaurant is the little cantina we walked past on the way in, a half-dozen heavy wooden tables, colorful tiles, painted stucco and concrete, the four-stool bar on one end, the narrow road below the stout railing on the other. A mother and her adult daughter paying their bill are the only other patrons. Drinks and dishes arrive quickly, and I glance at my phone; still an hour before the cenote closes.

We drive to the cenote and pay the entrance fee at the hut then head back to the car to gather our gear from the trunk.

A man from across the road comes over and collects a parking fee, and Cindy and the kids go on ahead while I put the cast bag over the arm and hand. The possibly unofficial lot attendant rejoins his compadre on the opposite roadside, where the two stand looking at me. I smooth a wrinkle in the bicep band then raise the bagged arm and give a thumbs up with my good hand. The men smile and nod." Lo que sea necesario," I’d like to think we’re all three thinking: Whatever it takes.

The best spot from which to get in the water is a few feet from the road. The cenote continues underground, beneath the road and on its way to the beach, which isn’t far away, making this a good spot for scuba diving, according to my research. The crowd now is thin, and even from out of the water we can spot fish swimming among the roots of the mangroves that envelope the long, narrow waterway, which is maybe ten feet deep. With masks and snorkels in place, we swim away from the road, against a gentle, ocean-bound current, heading upstream and deeper into the mangrove forest. We veer toward the roots whenever we spot young fish sheltering among them.

After a few minutes, Q and S peel off and head back to chill in the wide pool near the road. Cindy and I spot bigger fish in the depths and direct each other’s attention to them by pointing in earnest until we realize that there are fish everywhere. We stop pointing and just swim, each according to our whim. Every minute or so I lift my face and check our progress against the current. About fifty yards ahead, there’s a bend that is my duty to round. For every curiosity satisfied another stands ready to refuel the compulsion, but snorkeling is an immersive act that returns a lot of bang for the buck, so I’m already content, and the only thing propelling me onward despite some left-arm fatigue and the fact that I’m now solo is knowing that, once I stop swimming, the current will have me back where we started in no time. I’m looking forward to that easy drift and will want it to last as long as possible.

I arrive at the bend, lift my face out of the water and note with some relief that the mangrove corridor ahead looks much the same as behind. Solely for the sake of including this bend in my return drift, I swim beyond it for another twenty yards then quit the one-armed breaststroke and float with the flow, back toward mi familia, the Isismobile, the resort pool and restaurant (open late every night).