NIGHTTIME IN THE POOL.(travel in Central America, and swimming in a murky pool in Mexico)

Student days, summer in the Tropics. We were four: me and my wife, my wife's sister, Linda, and Linda's husband, Scottie. For a month, we had been travelling in Belize and Guatemala, having taken the bus from Belize City through Belmopan and up across the hills to Tikal, where we wandered the ruins and gawked at the wildlife. Coatimundis, howler monkeys, agouti pacas, a black leathery armadillo no bigger than my foot--I was so excited that I got lost in the jungle and blundered into a Mayan village where neither English nor Spanish held any currency, and I had to rely on sign language before I was able to discover the ruins all over again. So what if I wore a fine fur of malarial mosquitoes at all times? So what if my intestinal tract had been so thoroughly scoured I couldn't hold down even a grain of rice? There was Lomotil. And there was rum (twenty-five cents a shot for Bacardi in Belize City; fifteen for the local product, distributed in bottles gone opaque from a thousand rinsings).

In Flores, on Lago Peten Itza, we were offered beds in the straw of a stable, and I spent one night in a cot on the veranda of a hotel in a dark mass of undifferentiated strangers while the patrons of the bar edged past me to use the facilities. Then it was back on the bus and up over the hills and down again to Belize City, with its dead dogs and open sewers and the residuum of decay. Fun. All fun. Every minute of it. Did it matter that the hotel, one of the cheapest in town, was situated just across from the insane asylum, where day and night the inmates pressed their faces against the iron bars and moaned and shook and shouted unintelligibly? Or that Scottie and I suffered sun poisoning as a result of snorkeling off Caye Caulker (and staggered through the streets on legs so swollen that people stopped us to ask what drugs we were on and could they possibly acquire some for themselves)? Not a whit. This was a vacation and vacations were fun.

Still, we were long-haired, ragged, dirty, hungry, and as wrung out with experience as four old gym towels. We were looking forward to going north, to Mexico, where we would spring for a real hotel and a little luxury by way of compensation for all the rough--but illuminating--living we'd been doing. The bus moved slowly, fitfully, an antique thing of cobbled parts, the road beneath it a broad, humped plain of dirt hemmed in by trees. I no longer recall how we passed the time--hunched over dissolving paperbacks, I suspect, suffering gastric distress and awaiting the outcome. We made one pit stop--there was a store, a thatched shack that served as the ladies' lavatory, a profound and immense tree that served as the men's--and then we passed through Orange Walk, Caledonia, and Corozal, the vision of Mexico glowing in our minds. It was night when we arrived at the border. Ahead of us lay Chetumal, in Quintana Roo, a place that shimmered with light, a place where there was electricity, where there were taxis, paved roads, restaurants, hotels; behind us was the jungle, black and implacable.

I should point out that my ...