Sixty-five million years ago, an enormous meteorite struck what is now the Yucatan peninsula. The non-avian dinosaurs were wiped out by the aftereffects, and the course of our planet’s history, forever altered. The impact left a colossal crater, and for a variety of geological reasons, the edges of the crater are today pockmarked with sinkholes – or, as the Mayans called them, cenotes. (The word translates, helpfully, as “hole filled with water.”) No trip to Yucatan is complete without trips to several cenotes.
Monday, March 25, 2024
This is our first of three days of touring about this remarkable corner of Mexico; this is also the first trip abroad Eira, and I have taken with the children in nearly nine years.
The cenote of Yaal Utzil sits thirty miles south of the Yucatan state capital in Mérida. Raul, our tour guide, tells us that in Mayan, Yaal Utzil means “good son.” My good son is not quite twelve, and at this moment, he stands sixty feet above the water, at the edge of the cenote. The four of us have climbed down the rickety staircase that leads to this deep fresh pool, and we have swum and floated on our backs and marveled at the pleasures of this refreshing oasis, but David has climbed the stairs again, to the diving platform at the top.
“You can do it,” yells Heloise from the water. “I’ll swim right to you when you go in.”
Older sisters are, as a rule, good assessors of risk. They are generally more reliable in this regard than fathers. Heloise has decided that she has no intention of leaping twenty meters herself, and she offers the plausible excuse that her bikini top is almost certain to come off if she attempts to do so. She thinks David can do it. The good son thought he could too, at first, but now is not so sure.
Raul, who waits at the top in the shade while his clients gambol and splash, walks up to David, tells him gently that it’s not required to jump. “You can change your mind,” he says; “I’ve never done it myself.” That seems only to encourage my boy, who repeats his intention, steps closer to the edge, looks down again.
The view before you leap.
Raul retreats. There is no rush, as far as he’s concerned. He will tell us later he’s seen grown men take up to an hour to decide. (The women who do leap, he adds, rarely hesitate more than a moment.)
A Mexican tourist, a man about my age, climbs the stairs from the cenote’s water, and stands beside David. His English is excellent, and he offers instruction. “When you leap, first pull your legs up to your chest and windmill your arms. Then, right before you hit the water, straighten out and put your hands at your sides.” The man instructs David to watch, and my son steps back as the fellow executes a textbook descent into the water.
David steps to the edge again, leans forward, puts his hands on his knees.
“You can do it,” I shout from the water, “But you don’t have to.”
The longer he waits, I worry, the greater the cost of standing down. I worry that he will decide not to leap, and we will reassure him that we are not disappointed, and he has nothing to be ashamed about, but later that day -- and indeed for the rest of the trip -- he will be haunted by what he will feel he ought to have done. It is pure projection. I assume that at his age, I would have lacked the courage, and then regretted it bitterly for weeks.
It is, I fear, a damning judgment on me as a father that I am most worried about how to help him save face.
It is my former wife’s turn to climb from the pool to the top. As she goes, she shouts to our son, “If you want your father to jump with you, he will.” (Eira is also wearing a bikini top and shares her daughter’s excuse.) She also knows perfectly well that my son is still at the age where he will follow his father into nearly anything. Eira has known me for nearly thirty years, since we were 27 and 19. She is quite aware that I don’t want to jump, but that if called upon by her and by our children, I will. My fourth of five ex-wives knows that I am an anxious man, but when absolutely necessary, just brave enough.
(Eira and I saw Steven Spielberg’s Munich in the theater nearly twenty years ago. She elbowed me in the ribs when Ciarán Hinds told Eric Bana, “You can do any terrifying thing you are asked to do, but you have to do it running. You think you can outrun your fears, your doubts. The only thing that really scares you is stillness.”)
For the amusement of the Mexican family with whom we are sharing the waters of Yaal Utzil, I pretend to be annoyed by my ex’s offer. I am not annoyed, but I am unnerved. Still, if that’s what it will take…
I yell what I must yell, deploying a cowardly subjunctive. “Son, if you need me to, I’ll jump with you.”
David shakes his head vigorously. He continues to study the water. His mother reaches his side. She offers to count him down from ten, and does, but when she hits one, David leans forward, then steps back. His hands fly to his face.
We humans have spent a very long time evolving to step back from precipices. There’s a reason theologians and poets use the metaphor of a leap to describe our most difficult and defining decisions. It is not an easy thing to step into the air, clad only in one’s new swim trunks, and fall five, perhaps six stories.
Eira is a wise mother. She doesn’t hug our boy, doesn’t guide him away. She senses what we all sense, that he wants to go, that he is desperate to go, and the longer this takes, the more difficult it will be to go and the harder it will be if he doesn’t.
“You know you’re going to do it. Just get it over with!”
That’s Heloise. If you don’t know her, or don’t know big sisters, you’d hear only exasperation in her shout. I hear the wisdom too – she knows her brother, and she knows what he will do, and she would like him to hurry up for all our sakes.
I am not sure yet. It hangs in the balance. “Do you want me to jump with you?” I yell again.
David shakes his head. Eira starts to speak to him again, and the twenty meters are too great a distance for me to hear, but I decide that she’s giving him some visualization technique. She is probably telling him that he has already jumped in every way that matters, and he is already safe, and if he closes his eyes, he can see himself exulting. It is accomplished, she will tell him. All you have to do is go, and you see that it is so.
David inches forward until his toes are off the platform. He motions, clearing his sister and me a little further away, pushing us to the sides of the cenote. It is only then, when he waves that hand impatiently, that I know what his mother and sister already know.
He is going to jump.
I start to cry as soon as I know it, and a second later, David is in the air, flailing and tucking as instructed, his body taking so long to fall so very far. He straightens his legs just before he hits the water but cannot quite get both hands to his sides. Cheers erupt, his head pops clear, and within three seconds, he is in my arms. Heloise is with us an instant later, hugging her brother and then, when she sees my eyes, laughing.
“Of course you made dad cry.”
We climb out. Later, David will proudly display the red welt on the underside of his right arm, a bruised wing he could not tuck in in time, a splendid temporary trophy. In the car back to the hotel in Mérida, Raul will tell us that our boy is now a Mayan princeling. The rest of us tell him he will never forget what it took to leap.
“You are not the same boy you were when you woke up this morning,” I say.
The good son nods. “Dad, would you really have jumped with me?”
“Yes,” I say, confident that it is true. “But I am so very, very, very glad you didn’t need me to.”
The boy beams. “I got you, pops. Don’t worry.”
🥹
Well, made me cry, too. How wonderful and startling when our children surpass us. We fear but it turns out we didn’t need to.