Yelapa opens its piers, beaches and palapa doors to
visitors year round. The surge occurs between November and April; the weather
is perfect, the skies are clear and total tropical immersion is just a
margarita away. As summer takes root in May, the surge diminishes to a trickle not
unlike the town waterfall, and locals settle in for what we ironically call
“the dry” season. The May/June time frame offers a dramatic reminder that our
tourist-based economy, like our environment, is fragile. All but a handful of
restaurants batten their hatches and the village retreats to survival mode.
July ushers in the winding down of the academic year. Several
graduations require planning. Countless family parties demand organizing, purchasing
and scheduling. The last activity, scheduling, is the most rigorous as it would
be unforgivable to schedule your event at the same moment as another. No doubt,
somewhere on a living room wall in Yelapa is a pert diagram which tracks all
such happenings. By the Friday punctuating mid-July, the party pandemonium
ceases. Parents and god-parents sigh in relief.
Mexican parents’ vacations, like those elsewhere in the
world, are determined/defined by their children’s holidays from school. For the
ensuing six weeks, the bulk of our visitors will be Mexican families. Their
stay involves but a few days or a weekend and back they trek. They populate the
main beach, drink beer from imported coolers and spend relatively little money.
A trickle continues from across the border, or even the border beyond, but they
are few.
There is yet another genre of visitor who ventures to
Yelapa. Allow me to digress. It is a fact that each one of the four founding family
elders was born into a family which bore between nine and eleven siblings. That
generation replicated the family size into which they had grown. The following
generation tended to downsize by roughly fifty percent but remained sizable
none the less. Now, where is all this Mexican genealogical math going? It is
intended to enhance your understanding of the feeling of community existent in
our village. Without stretching too far, one quickly extrapolates that virtually
everyone is related, even distantly, to everyone else. As family members departed
Yelapa for the allure of the big city or just to flee, they continued to
procreate. The resulting point of all this is that those family members, along
with their broods, return throughout the summer. The children are easy to spot
as they are attired in bright new shirts, shorts, and shoes. I call them “the
city cousins.” They speak more rapidly, and appear uncomfortable at the lack of
street lights or designated crossing zones. There is a discernible absence of
their previously ever-accompanying parent. Approaching motos (quads) startle
them and cause them to run away. Their hosts, the local kin, “country cousins”
are initially entertained by these foreign antics but will over time share the
requisite survival skills. Hornos and barbeques dormant for months are scoured
and reactivated. A plethora of cooking aromas arise throughout the village. It
is a time for celebrating the family. Perhaps the following Monday or sometime
mid-week, the visiting parents all manage to slip away silently and
unceremoniously. You see where this is headed, right?
All the progeny stay for another
two weeks or so. Let me convey the scope. I live at ground zero for the largest
family clan in Yelapa. As I write, there are at least five “country cousins”
engaged with a like number of “city cousins.” The game of choice appears to be
chase. They chase the chickens in the yard across the path. They chase the garobos
which venture out of the numerous rock piles. They chase a pair of squirrels
which dart overhead from branch to branch. When nothing else moves, and
generally as a last resort, they chase each other. All the while squealing with
joy, shadowed by barking dogs and accented by nervous chickens cackling and
roosters crowing. It is a cacophony which repeats itself perhaps in a hundred
village households each day. It assaults my definition of tranquility. But
alas, I remain, on occasion, a stranger in what is, on occasion, a strange
land.
Commercial
Break
Call Memo for this week’s special 322 146 5064 (cell).
May I suggest you call earlier versus later? If I have to walk down to the
playita in the middle of the day, the special tends to get less special. You
know what I mean? Happy paddling.
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