1:09 p.m. - 2023-06-09
Ixchel
“Where the sun rises on the Mayan world” is one of the tourist-slogans used to promote this little island in MX and, given that it was (along with Cozumel) one of the easternmost outposts of that storied empire, this is geographically correct. Not that they ever built a city here or anything, the Mayans. Just a temple dedicated to the fertility goddess Ixchel and a candle-powered lighthouse to guide rafts and canoes full of hopeful young women venturing over with offerings to the deity. Ixchel is also the name of the lovely air conditioned hotel on the beach where I stay.
She's incorporated into their logo, Ixchel. A smooth and serene face resting in profile against a full moon. And while it makes sense from a marketing perspective to conflate her identity with the young, fertile Mayan moon goddess, the Mayans were well aware that childbirth was a grittier prospect than conception...and it wasn't the image of some mystic gift-shop princess that they carved on their altars to Ixchel, but that of a wizened old midwife with jaguar ears.
The ruins of the lighthouse still stand on the southern tip of the island, covered in colored bits of string and ribbon left by contemporary lady-pilgrims keen to find themselves in a family way. It's wild to imagine an ancient night-crossing by raft towards that once-flickering beacon...to try to appreciate the sublime anxiety induced by the weight of unconditional religious belief compounded by the very-real dangers of a turbulent sea. This was on my mind as I made my sunrise run down the seawall today...
~ ~ ~
I lace-up and am out of the room each morning before 6AM, and within a quarter-mile I'm sweating. Profusely. By the time I get back to the hotel I'll need to wring out my shirt and headband. The ghosts of yesterday's booze having been exorcised in increasingly violent stages; from clammy sheen to persistent drip to an abject and relentless breach of cutaneous flood-gates. It's wild, catharsis-wise. A secular self-ablution.
There's a few locals out every morning, perched on the seawall to watch the sun rise on the/their Mayan world. A coffee klatch of abualas in flowered house-dresses near the beach, two hippie couples further down, tattooed and dreadlocked. Yesterday a group of 12 or so kids in sexy beach-disco outfits were there, having come, I presume, from the sexy beach-disco...tired from dancing but unwilling to go home yet? Or maybe still high on ecstasy, which does make for a memorable sunrise. This morning found one poor fellow (who, judging from his white collared shirt, may have been a waiter that missed last night's ferry home) asleep on the concrete with his backpack for a pillow.
But aside from these few sunrise-compañeros (and Isla's roving gangs of taco-cats of course, always up early, checking out the spicy-fresh trash bags for what's good before the garbageman makes his rounds) I run in solitude. The iguanas have yet to stir from wherever they spend the night to assume their preferred basking spots and, as for the ubiquitous prehistoric ever-hovering Frigate Birds? I strongly suspect they sleep aloft. The town proper won't ease itself awake for two more hours. Yesterday's unsold souvenirs will be tediously unpacked and re-arrayed in open stalls, coffee will be brewed and jugos-squeezed-fresco as tables are dragged onto Av Hidalgo and breakfasts both American and Mexican are prepped.
It will seem impossibly humid and warm to a first-time visitor at this point, but one's definition of the impossible, in that regard, will expand in the hours to come. As the glorious fury and the punishing (yet appealing, apparently) weight of the sun leans like a bully on this tiny corner of the Mayan world. Any semblance of the serene and sleepy village I jogged through this morning will be lost by then; consumed by a riotous press of pleasure-seeking humanity. By a sweat-wave of touristy excess that won't recede until today's sun is but a memory; by a frenzied tide in which I too will swim.
