Mexico Soul presents a condensed version of Where the Sky is Born, my travel memoir on buying land, building a house and opening a bookstore. Check archives for previously posted chapters.
Just when it seemed things could get no worse with our latent Mexican time land deal, Mother Nature stepped in to remind us how insignificant our plans were and how much further out of control the situation could become. Enter Hurricane Gilberto, September 14, 1988, a class-five storm named hurricane of the century. Now what?
I called Alejandro, our project manager and realtor all rolled into one. Karla, his girlfriend, answered the phone in their San Francisco office.
“What happened to your Puerto Morelos beach house?” I asked.
“We don’t know yet,” she said. “We’re on pins and needles waiting to hear but all electricity and phone lines are out. We’re hoping the sea wall has protected the house.”
A picture of the sea wall flashed into my head. More an afterthought, it was no more than three rocks in height, stacked Mayan style, one on top of the other. Very little if any concrete had been used and it was more form than function.
There’s always divine intervention, I thought. Maybe Guadalupe, patron saint of Mexico, worker of miracles, had stepped in and saved the house from the deluge.
It was a tense few days before any news was out regarding the hurricane’s damage. And when it came, it was horrific. Hurricane Gilberto had been classified as a five, topping the Safir-Simpson rating scale with winds over 200 miles an hour.
When reports did come, they were devastating. Cancun was flattened. Tourists had been herded into city hotels for protection, away from the sea. The airport was still closed. All major roads in the state were out of commission and nothing could get through. Water was in short supply and food reserves were dwindling. Cancun was totally inaccessible, one large disaster area. Getting fresh information about the ravaged region was impossible.
Karla called a few days later. “Bad news. Alejandro’s house is gone, totally destroyed. It blew away . . . into the sea, into the jungle. It’s gone and now we have to return rental money we were holding for tourists who’d reserved the house for high season. I don’t know when we’ll be able to repay them. We’ve already used that money for the new land project.”
Nothing like a setback to a setback. I was speechless. My mouth couldn’t even begin to form a response. And my mind? My mind was scrambled. Paul and I watched The Weather Channel non-stop, hoping to catch news about hurricane damage.
Puerto Morelos had been point zero
As information filtered out, we heard Puerto Morelos, the charming fishing village where Alejandro built his stylish beach house, had been point zero. Rumors said nothing was left standing on the beach—it was ravished and looked like an atom bomb had been detonated. News reports eventually confirmed that Cancun’s Hotel Zone was demolished and it would take years to rebuild.
I thought of the cynical joke my friend repeated when things went amiss: “How do you make God laugh?” Answer: “Tell him your plans.”
We were in shock but we knew our concerns were nothing compared to what Alejandro was going through. This could be sayonara for his Mexico project.
We waited for things to calm down and a month later I called his office. Ever-present Karla answered.
“Things are difficult,” she told me. “We’re busy returning rental money on the beach house.”
“What a process,” I sympathized. “How’s Alejandro?”
“Oh, he’s doing okay. He plans to go to Mexico next month to see how bad it is. Jorge told us the winds were so strong that the palm trees look as if they were burned in a forest fire. Wind damage at those levels creates a burn effect.”
“The palm trees look as if they were burned in a forest fire”
I hadn’t thought about the trees, or now the lack of them. Depression set in all over again as I realized those delicate coco palms were gone. They were as much a part of the beach as the sand and the water.
Although hurricanes constantly ravaged the Caribbean coast every fall, because Cancun was a new city, there was no research to substantiate the frequency of major storms. Storm tracks had been recorded as early as 1515, passing over Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and the Dominican Republic, but Quintana Roo, home to Cancun, did not become Mexico’s 31st state until 1974.
“What happened to Puerto Morelos?”
“Everything on the beach is gone—”
“Everything on the beach is gone. A few houses across the road may have survived but mostly, it’s totally destroyed.”
Puerto Morelos was just beginning to gain its sea legs. The town had a fresh coat of paint, businesses were renovating. A few new restaurants had sprung up. Puerto Morelos was poised and ready for its close-up.
For a moment the memory of Mexico overwhelmed me. I took a deep breath and sighed. I felt incredible sadness. I felt sorry for Alejandro, for Puerto Morelos—sorry for everyone. Then it hit me. What about our plans? Until I heard the news firsthand, I hadn’t believed it would be such a disaster. I’d been in denial, hoping luck would come into play.
“It sounds like a desperate situation,” I said. “Please tell Alejandro how deeply sorry we are to hear this. I’ll call in a month and see how it’s going.”
In January we saw Alejandro in San Francisco and heard a firsthand account of Gilberto’s wrath.
“Cancun is in a tailspin. They’ve lost the entire season although a few hotels in the hotel zone made repairs to get through this year. Some are offering discounts to lure tourists,” Alejandro told us, rubbing his forehead. I noticed his hair was beginning to gray around the temples and knew this catastrophe had taken a toll.
“But you have to imagine what the city looks like. There’s rubble everywhere—huge blocks of concrete and pieces of rebar lying in the streets, houses torn in half. The foliage is gone, destroyed by the wind. There’s no wildlife—the windburn destroyed their food sources.
“Near Puerto Juarez and Punta Sam, the Isla ports, large boats approaching ship size were pushed from the water onto land by the surge and haven’t been removed. You can’t imagine the amount of damage.”
“And Puerto Morelos?” I asked, eager for news from the front.
“Puerto Morelos . . . As you know it was coming along, hoping to attract more tourists this year. Well, everything on the beach is gone or badly damaged. The only hotel south of Cancun with any luck was Hotel Lafitte, near the land. They had insurance and hired hundreds of workers to rebuild. They’re hoping to re-open for Christmas. Almost every other business there is in turmoil or on hold.”
We were shell-shocked but we weren’t clueless. We knew this meant another indefinite delay. How much bad luck could befall this one guy? He was neck and neck with the original Job as far as I could tell. Of course the subject had to be broached about the unspeakable—our sadly maligned project. I’d already established myself as a sparing partner and thought I might as well step into the ring. My years as a sales rep in Silicon Valley had given me a thick skin.
I braced myself and ventured, “I hope this doesn’t sound unreasonable to ask but do you have any idea how this will affect the land project?” I let the words slip out as gently as possible before the fireworks.
“Jeanine, you can’t expect me to worry about the land now when I have renters to re-pay since my house was destroyed,” Alejandro snarled, his voice rising with, I assumed, his blood pressure. He gave me a withering look.
I felt I’d just been awakened from a dream. No, a nightmare. I was in a dimly lit elevator descending all the way down to the bottom floor of some unknown place. I heard a subdued bell announce the floor’s arrival. The doors opened with a soft swoosh and before me, there were flames everywhere, an inferno.
As only dreams can do in their own inherent way, I knew I could not stay in that elevator. But then, how could I leave it and step into the fiery blaze? My mind searched madly for an escape. It came to me in an instant. To free myself from this situation I had to fly . . . fly above those flames to safety.
And that is precisely what I did. We were on a Mexicana flight to Cancun one month later.
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Backstory—Puerto Morelos sits within 100 miles of four major pyramid sites: Chichen Itza, Coba, Tulum and Ek Balam. By living in close proximity to this Maya wonderland we pyramid hopped on our days off from Alma Libre Libros, the bookstore we founded in 1997. Owning a bookstore made it easy to order every possible book I could find on the Maya and their culture, the pyramids, the archeologists who dug at these sites and the scholars who wrote about them, not to mention meeting archeologists, tour guides, and local Maya who popped into the store. I became a self-taught Mayaphile and eventually website publishers, Mexican newspapers and magazines, even guidebooks asked me to write for them about the Maya and Mexico. I’ll never stop being enthralled by the culture and history and glad there’s always new news emerging for me to report on right here in Mexico Soul. Please share this post if you know others interested in the Maya. Thank you!
These storms are no joke and it's always the locals who are hit hardest. In all my years in Jamaica I somehow managed to avoid all hurricanes but not all tropical storms. Having been through a couple tropical storms made me NEVER want to experience a hurricane.
This post brought to mind when my mom flew to Mississippi after Katrina to help demo homes. Her stories and photos were heart wrenching to say the very least.
What a story this is—onward and upward!