Mexican Therapy

A Slowed Pace
On our last evening, Brent and I visited a fisherman in his shanty on the beach. We had seen him as we made landfall and wanted to make sure we could share his beach for the night. For a few pesos, he happily sold us a couple of beautiful fish—a sierra and a mackerel. As he prepared them for us, he told us of the problems he was having with sea lions robbing his nets and tearing them to shreds. Back at camp, we made a salsa with fresh chilies, tomato, onion and some herbs. After frying the fish in a little olive oil, we wrapped the whole lot up in burritos and ate them on the beach, sipping the last of our tequila as the light drained from the sky.

The warm wind that had pushed us along all day had died, and the low surf crashed lazily onto our little beach in the still evening air. The sky gradually filled with stars, and the bushes were alive with chirping crickets. Just then I realized that I had found what I had sought here. We’d come a long way in the time allocated, but more important, the journey had allowed us to shed the chaotic load that so often accompanies our working lives. Away from project deadlines, help-desk calls and the constant interruptions of our daily routines, we had shouldered out the chaos by the rhythm of tides and waves.

Steinbeck experienced a similar thing here: “The matters of great importance we had left were not important. There must be an infective quality in these things. We had lost the virus, or it had been eaten by the antibodies of quiet. Our pace had slowed greatly; the hundred thousand small reactions of our daily world were reduced to very few.”

Even now, I occasionally think of that cactus spine in my foot. I like to imagine it was a kind of inoculación de Baja—a vaccination against the stress that, left untreated, can result in the sudden short flights of mobile phones.

Malcolm Gunn lives in Wellington, New Zealand, where he is a computer systems manager. His kayaking ventures have taken him to Tierra del Fuego, Alaska, Mexico, Queensland and most of New Zealand’s remote coastline. His recipe for a great trip is a mix of good mates, good coffee and a durable sense of humor. He is a regular contributor to Sea Kayaker and several other outdoors publications. Malcolm can be contacted at: malcolm@malcolmgunn.com