“She likes details,” Bruce Cooper says of his wife.
Their gallery, in a rented shop on main street in Caye Caulker, presents her art. She paints and he runs the business end of their collaboration.
“We sell original art, prints, and small stocking stuffers, ” Bruce tells me as we talk about New Orleans, the proliferation of guest houses on this island, the fact that his business is for sale due to aggressive web marketing by competing worldwide tourist destinations.
“We are losing 3% of our visitors a year,” he tells me. “I have been working since I was seven years old. I want to retire and go fishing.”
Bruce walks with a swollen foot brought on by diabetes.
I slip my purchase into my cargo pants as he makes a sale to a lady that has already bought two prints earlier in the day.
Selling art in a wood shack in the Caribbean sea, with a breeze rustling simple curtains hung on shuttered windows, seems better than cooking your brains out on a boat in bumpy water with a plastic bag full of stinking cut bait waiting to go on your hooks.
Art and business can co-exist.
It looks to me like Bruce’s work is as close to fishing as he is going to get in this lifetime.
There is no lack of bars in San Pedro Town.
They come and go like tourists. Some are successful over the long run and others collapse under their own weight.
The Legend’s location is good, out in the countryside with an unimpeded view of the barrier reef at the end of a long sandy path.
The new restaurant is going to feature barbecue and Kristi wants a clean bar, a bar ladies can feel safe, a bar without riffraff, a bar with bottom lines and profits. There will be live music and Special’s nights. Residents on the north side, many of whom don’t like to go to the south side, have already got a buzz going.
Whether the town will support another watering hole is up to the drinking Gods, but Kristi has a plan, money, and drive.
Working in the kitchen, we don’t even have to turn on fans to get good ventilation.
The trade winds spin the blades for free.
Painting in Belize today is just a lark. When you have worked with your hands for a living, it is hard to stay away from a construction project, even when you are just a volunteer.
Real estate is booming in San Pedro Town.
Jack says, ” if you own real estate and aren’t keeping it rented you are doing something wrong.”
Chez Caribe is his old wood and concrete two story house. He lives upstairs and rents six small units downstairs, and, if the price is right, his place upstairs. Chez Caribe looks like it should be in a Tennessee Williams play and is shaded by towering coconut trees that drop coconuts with a thud.
Old timers here have seen the town population rise by twenty five percent a year but the total of local residents is only ten thousand. Most of the wealth is brought here by pirates from the north ; bankers, salesmen, investors, double dippers, retirees, businessmen, gold diggers, treasure hunters,divers, real estate developers and land men, con artists, ex-pats.
Tennessee Williams would have found some of his characters here but this place is not conflicted enough for his vision. A closer read for this truth would be Carl Hiasson or Jimmy Buffett where hedonism doesn’t come with a guilty conscience.
I am staying behind door number 4 – the Chez Tortuga Suite. Airbnb is a business model that lets people turn their own house into income and use space that would otherwise be wasted.
It is nice afternoons to lounge on the front porch and wait for coconuts to drop, but you need insect repellent. I felt a mosquito land on my calf yesterday and once he filled up he could barely get back into the air.
If coconuts hit you on the head they will part your hair.
Living in paradise comes with costs.
I haven’t seen many thumbs out in San Pedro Town.
There are a few people moving in the rain but most of those out this morning are laborers pedaling bicycles to work,tourists driving special golf carts, and taxi’s running people to the airport from resorts and fancy lodgings.
I want to catch a ride back to town, from the middle of nowhere, and a young man in a cart stops and asks if I want a ride.
” I’m Scott. ”
” I’m Roberto. ”
On the ride he tells me he used to be a tour guide but works for the local Department of Fisheries and has the day off. His wife works in town and he recommends Elvie’s Kitchen as a good place for local food. If I need a golf cart he can get me one for $60.00 U.S. per day and If I need a piece of land, his father in law has some for sale way out north, almost as far as you can go. Last time he went to Nicaragua he was stopped for having tattoos and had to explain he was on a Christian mission and say his prayers to stay out of jail.
It is a welcome ride and my feet thank me.
When Roberto drops me off at the gas station, a quarter block from my front door, I slip him twenty bucks.
” Take your wife to dinner, ” I suggest.
” I’ll give it to my daughter, ” he decides.
On an island with ten thousand permanent residents the chances are good you will run into everybody at least once a year whether you try to avoid them or not.
Favors, anywhere, are easy to do and not easily forgotten.
This morning, on a walk to the Sir Barry Bowen Bridge that separates north from south Ambergris Caye, I am still in San Pedro Town and take shelter in a bus stand because rain is moving in with dark clouds behind it.
San Pedro Town is in the center of Ambergris Caye in the Caribbean Sea, south of Mexico and east of Guatamala.
As you walk south, away from town, you run into Mahogany Bay Village, an upper end real estate development with a hotel option, custom townhouses, and a three stage development plan starting in the low two hundred thousand U.S. dollar range. As you cross the bridge north you run into the Akbol Yoga Retreat, and further along the road, Captain Morgan’s Casino and Resort.
The land, either north or south from San Pedro Town, is not much higher than the sea. Running parallel to the main paved roads is marshland, lagoons, scrubby trees and tangled roots.
Standing in the shelter with me, three children adjust their trash bag raincoats and talk. The biggest of the three is an older sister who directs her siblings like her mother taught her to do.
Guatemala, to the west, is even poorer than Belize, and Nicaragua is even poorer than Guatemala. The chances these girls will become pregnant and have three kids before they are 21 are large.
As the morning rain abates, the girls leave the bus stand and walk back towards town. I wait for the rain to really stop, not in any hurry.
On an island, you quickly come to the end of the road no matter which direction you go or how fast you travel.
How many kids can’t change their future because no one tells them what their future will be if they don’t change?
Not far from Clarendon, Texas is the homestead and ranch headquarters of Charles Goodnight, a pioneer Texas rancher.
In the mid to late 1800’s, he controlled a ranch of over a million acres, had 180 cowboys on his payroll, and was an industry by himself. He was a tough man who lived to be 93, fought Indians and had Indians as long time friends. He experimented with crossbreeding buffalo and Texas longhorns and was responsible, with help from his wife Molly, for saving the short hair buffalo from extinction. He entertained Presidents and panhandlers alike in his dining room and, as a cowboy employee once said , ” when he told you to do something he expected it to be done. ”
His house is on the National Register of Historic Places and was restored with private funds, grants, and donations.
On a small horned couch in the upstairs master bedroom is an open Bible with a pair of reading glasses holding his place in Psalms.
There are temptations and lines to be drawn in accumulating a million acres of land and running men and cattle.
Mr. Goodnight was reputed to be a gruff, stern, no nonsense kind of man. Yet, he was also reputed to be kind and generous with his time, his money and attention to those who wanted to work hard and learn. If he liked you he would do most anything to help you rise on your merits.
My brother Alan tells a story of our Aunt Roberta, my father’s sister, who lived in Clarendon where an old Mr. Goodnight had his city house and spent the last few years of his life. She and a girlfriend used to play jacks on the sidewalk in front of his home and she remembered a nurse coming out with a plate of cookies and telling them they could come anytime to play.
Stern and gruff as he is in his photos and paintings, the man that sent out cookies to two little girls had a heart of gold.
1990 was one of the last years Toyota made these mini-motor homes.
This little baby has a 6 cylinder 3.0 EFI engine, gets sixteen miles per gallon depending on terrain and weather and road conditions. She has air conditioning, a refrigerator that runs on electric or propane, propane heat, a small bathroom and shower, a kitchen sink and counter, microwave, a dining room table and a couch. You sleep in an overhead bed over the truck engine and there is cabinet space for the few things you take with you.
Research shows Gypsies have long been in America and the gypsy soul is a part of our American experience. There is an entire culture of retired middle class couples who move back and forth across the United States living in two hundred thousand dollar diesel pushers staying in National Parks and State campgrounds. There are disabled vets and singles who live in recreational vehicles and park at a different Wal-Mart each evening to stay one step ahead of homelessness.
Living life as a RV snail has advantages because you can drive away from your problems with a turn of an ignition key.
A gypsy soul is hard to get rid of when you were born with it.
Music is a tougher taskmaster than writing, but not by much.
Laid on the bed is a 1940’s Conn ” Naked Lady ” Alto Saxophone.
Her sound is sweet, her lacquer finish is imperfect and worn, her response is excellent.
This horn was bought at Baum’s Music Store in Albuquerque and cost two thousand dollars. You read about famous violins that are hundreds of years old but are still coveted. This model was used by Charlie Parker and it is hard to question ” Bird’s” musical talent and taste even if his personal life still raises eyebrows.
Autumn will be here soon and leaves will fall from swaying branches. The leaves will tumble in space and then, before they hit the ground, will be sent back upwards by gusts of wind.
Playing a good chorus of ” Autumn Leaves “, with no music, out of your own head, is worth working for.
Music comes from places of dreams.
Casa Esperanza is a non profit that provides temporary housing to families whose members are undergoing medical treatment in Albuquerque.
As a part of fundraising they run a car auction of donated vehicles. On Friday, the first of each month, you look at rolling stock, start engines, check doors and windows, look for oil leaks and body damage, check fluids. On Saturday you register, get a bidders number, and follow the auctioneer down a slippery slippery slope.
This Saturday there are fifty bidders and sightseers who move from one car to another as the auction unfolds. Some cars go too cheap, some too expensive. Some of these clunkers have been parked in garages as elderly drivers used them only to go to church. Some are to the point that fixing costs more than keeping. Some have been in wrecks. Some have salvage titles. There are stories behind these vehicles as flamboyant as the stories behind their owners.
The auction is over by noon and successful buyers take their papers to the office, pay fees, and make a white knuckle drive home.
Crazy Ron buys a Cadillac Deville that drives like a charm till it gets a mile from his house. The engine light comes on and the car shuts down from overheating.
” It drives great, ” he tells me at the curb in front of his house the next day.
Auctions are a place where buyers bid against buyers.
It is a spectacle, but buyer beware. Casa Esperanza doesn’t guarantee vehicles.
They move them out.
Cars go until they don’t go. They are traded when they start to cost more than they are worth.
My Prius, an experiment in high tech, is gone.
When electronic systems start to malfunction you have to step back and decide how much you like the idea of forty five miles per gallon in town. Adding the cost of maintenance and repairs, it makes sense to step down to an old fashioned gas engine that gets thirty miles a gallon but can be repaired and maintained by most mechanics with wrenches and good diagnostic instruments.
My Yaris has a fancy name but it is just an inexpensive compact car. Loosely named after a Greek Goddess of grace, Charis, this little transportation car is more down to Earth than it’s name implies. With its modest price, it is never going to be mistaken for luxury. A four banger with automatic transmission, it has good styling, a big trunk, a cracked windshield that is part of an” as is ” sale, four doors and a mediocre sound system.
Our car relationships can be tenuous.
Not marrying or sleeping with our cars gives them a very short shelf life.
People tolerate performance issues with spouses much longer than their vehicles.
Me and my Yaris are doing okay thus far.
If cars could trade us in I would really start to worry.
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