By The Campfire

June 20, 2008

Friday, Cozumel, Mexico, a long day in port. Most people go to Senor Frog’s down in town or the ½ Senor Frog’s next to the new docking pier. Hurricane Wilma crushed the place in 2005, including folding the docks into accordions and stripping buildings from the beach, leaving concrete supports and rectangled ruins like rotten teeth in the sand.

Some people spend their last vacation dollars at the duty free liquor stores in the little shopping village built close to the dock especially for the cruise ships. Later in the day, we are going swimming with dolphins. Right now we are taking a cab downtown to see what this place is really like. Jewelry stores, souvenirs, and more liquor establishments greet us as we walk the town. Then we hear a commotion to our right in an open market.

“Shakira!” Shakira!”

I look around as young men move towards my daughter, pointing and grinning. Older men are yelling the same thing. Several women whisper it under their breath and point.

“Shakira!”

It is a little weird.

“Shakira!” “Shakira!” “Shakira!”

Now it’s downright disturbing. As they follow us, it is obvious that they think she is the hyper-popular Hispanic singer/dancer. Things are turning a bit intense, so we start walking faster as the town seems to think Shakira is on the island.

Last night, on the ship’s deck, she and I are fighting to hold our stomachs in check and now we’re running through the streets of Cozumel trying to avoid off duty, duty-free liquor salesmen and cheap jewelry and souvenir hawkers.

We hail a cab and get back to port in time to catch another cab back towards town, but we stop short and go to a place to swim with dolphins. Some of the dolphins are 30-something years old. I don’t know how long they have been in captivity but as I rub their silky skin, I wonder how much Bob Marley music they had heard in the oceans when they were free back in the day.

The guide tells us not to kick the dolphins in the genitals – generally a good rule in life, I have found. Most animals don’t like it and it tends to make humans upset as well, so I refrain from kicking. I also learn that if you rub briskly about 8 inches behind a dolphin’s blowhole, they will whistle. A friend of mine said it had a similar effect on him, but I didn’t ask for details. Like genital-kicking, I like to avoid blow-hole-whistling as much as I can as well.

It doesn’t take long to realize that dolphins are smart and strong and have a sense of humor. After a couple of hours with the sea mammals, I think they are probably smarter than 90% of the people I know and much easier to get along with. Dolphins generally – as far as I could tell from my brief encounter – don’t have politics, prejudices or agendas beyond doing whatever moronic trick they have to do to get a fish and avoid, of course, being kicked in the groin. They are always smiling, too. That makes them seem nicer than they actually may be.

Truth is, I think they may be fooling us completely. Dolphins could be making fun of us with those clicking sounds for all I know. They may hate us all with the passion of banana republic revolutionary. Their smiles may be a wicked ploy to lull us into complacency while they steal buckets of fish, slum around the pool and tail kick us in the genitals.

“Click, click click, thuuuuuuu, click, derrrr.” They talk back and forth and cut odd glances towards us. I can almost hear them bitching.

“Come on, pal. I will upchoke a bucket of chum if I have to drag one more lard-ass human through this pool. Look at this guy, here. Geez.”

I am old enough to remember the 1960’s TV show “Flipper.” Flipper was a legless Lassie who saved people every week. Flipper single-handedly turned dolphins into superstars on par with The Monkees.

Flipper is the reason people think sharks are afraid of dolphins – a bit of truth and a lot of myth surround this legend that started at the Miami Seaquarium in the 1950’s. Dolphins will attack sharks (butting it in the tender gills) that are not known to attack dolphins but they won’t attack a bull shark, which will attack a dolphin (probably kicking it in the gennies). So dolphins are smart enough to know which sharks will turn the other cheek and which sharks won’t.

After we do the dolphin encounter, we go back to the boat and watch drunks stumble through security and run the sprint of shame down the long pier, trying to make the ship before it leaves. Hundreds of people are watching from their balconies, yelling at a young man who clearly needs a rope to guide him along his unstable path.

“Run, Forest, run!” they yell.

He does, as best as a man can run with a belly full of tequila and a head filled with twisted snakes.

The shops are closing on shore and the restaurants are stacking their tables and chairs until the next ship docks. We pull into open sea. The band on the deck plays reggae again. “Shakira” is safe in her cabin.

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