The Pacific

As a lover of beaches, I was happy to make the drive to Puerto San Jose last week with our guests, Mark and Angie. The currents there are reported to be dangerous, and the sands black.

Puerto San Jose was a filthy beach town with little of interest, just thin crowded streets, bikes, faces, signs, tons of shop and restaurant signs. The hotels along the shore were unkept, cheap. The air was heavy and hot. We talked ourselves into a one-year membership at Aquamagic, the kind of water park that would go under fast in the U.S., but for Guatemala, it was a little paradise. Huge slides, wave pool, pool bar, pirate boat. We ate pizza on the sand under a black mesh canopy. I drank a cold Gallo in a white can at the pool bar. Mallory and I hit all four slides four hundred times. Mark and I swam in the huge black surf. We got a little banged up, got flipped over and thrown. I was reminded of the poet Marina Tsvetaeva’s description of waves as “all composition and muscle.” Tsvetaeva was comparing waves to lyric poetry in this case, its rhythms, etc. And I was comparing the waves at Puerto San Jose to other waves of other beaches of my life. Beaches, like waves, like poetry, must be approached, entered, touched. I like Whitman’s line:

     Throwing myself on the sand, confronting the waves…



From the shore, on a postcard, from the air, they are pretty, but they do not come alive until we throw ourselves into them. This is something like what Mark and I did. And I realized how much I love, have always loved, doing it.

The same water—a different wave.
What matters is that it is a wave.
What matters is that the wave will return.
What matters is that it will always return different.
What matters most of all: however different the returning wave,
     It will always return as a wave of the sea.

(Marina Tsvetaeva, from “Poets with History and Poets without History”)


(Cristian Diego with rake)


(Favorite photo of the week: Mark “Cookie” Miklautsch in the zone)