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

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 14-JUN-04

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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

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...

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