FEATURE

Mexican Therapy
Text and photos by Malcolm Gunn

“One thing had impressed us deeply on this little voyage: the great world dropped away very quickly.”
—John Steinbeck, The Log from the Sea of Cortez

It’s funny how things happen in slow motion once they become irreversible, like falling off your bike or knocking over a glass of red wine onto a white tablecloth. This is especially so when the event that starts to unfold in painstaking detail is something that you know you’ll regret later—the result of some ill-considered act that will return to haunt you. Like throwing my mobile phone across the office because it had just cut out in the same infuriating way that it had done ever since I bought it.

A mobile phone in flight is not especially graceful—just a piece of low-altitude space junk, really. My office is small too, so that it hardly completed a single spin before its flight was arrested by the arm of a chair. The hard, unyielding, cold steel arm of a chair that’s as unaccommodating of flying mobile phones as my own temperament is of disobedient ones. Somehow during its flight, I’d had time to wonder if it would survive. I almost hoped that it would. Almost. And then it became so many pieces that any hope I had imploded as the infernal thing did the opposite on that chair arm. For a moment, it continued its flight, but in different directions, and it bounced and scattered like the contents of a bag of peanuts dropped from a balcony.

Then life resumed its normal pace. As I gathered the shattered pieces from the carpet, I asked myself—did I just lose control, or was that a reasonable act of retribution? Either way, one thing was certain—it was time to go sea kayaking.

I sent an email telling my friends and associates that my mobile phone was no longer operational. Then I opened my drawer, took out a small folder, unfolded the airline ticket inside and glanced at the list of stops on my itinerary—Wellington, Auckland, Los Angeles, Loreto—and then the date. I had only four more days to go.