Adventures of a Sun Seeker: Under the Broiler

Dear readers in the north,

How much might you resent me if I talk about the midday heat and sun being "too much"? I CAME here for heat and sun. What an ungrateful traitor I am. But... there is too much sun. I need to write about it.

All the words for heat and sun are trite and useless to carry the meaning I aim to convey. "Roasting", "hotter than hell". Unremitting. Inescapable. Merciless. It's like riding your bike in an oven. These still don't get at how powerful it is.

Before 9am the sun is low enough that there are little islands of shade on the road's surface. You ride from island to island and it's almost not too hot and still bearable. But after that time the shade islands have disintegrated, and unless you happen to be on a very tree-ful road (this is rare), you are completely exposed to the sun.

The sun flays my skin, the heat clings to my back, my neck pulsates pink. It's in the nineties with high humidity, and with the effort of propelling a bicycle it's like working out in a sauna. Sometimes I have to consciously tell myself to inhale and exhale it's so intense.

Shade breaks are essential, if I can find a tall enough tree or a building. But then leaving any shade I can manage to find is like stepping off a cliff. My body does not want to go there. But I make it anyway because this is how I get around.

Riding west 50 miles along the upper coast today was a particularly flogging day of sun. Basically no shade to be had. Just low scrub dotted with post-card perfect palm trees, or mangroves, and set back from the road were countless unhelpful vacation homes. And I was out later than usual because I had gone to the Mayan ruins of Xcambo (delightfully under-visited and very tidy and restored). The palm trees crackled in the hot wind with glimpses of the sea beyond.

It's 11am, the official Heat Of the Day. 19 more kilometers says a lone road sign. That's only 10. And then 9 more. I can do 10, and then 9, right. The little overheating engine that could.

This may be hard to explain to you all in the clammy greyness up north, and to my past self who left there, and to my future self who returns back there, but in midday sun my Single Greatest Desire is to be removed out from under her.

And I know a week from now I would wish to be back under this broiler. It's like contrasting a person who is dehydrated with one who is drowning.

When you're this baked your butt doesn't hurt, you're not hungry, and your left hand hasn't gone numb. It's amazing how the broadcast signal of sun slam will silence all other discomforts.

My first shade break of desperate necessity was outside an Alcoholics Anonymous house with a tall tree at the road. It was one of the few scraps of shade left on the road, a dappling. I sat sprawled on the pavement and ate a carrot and drank some water, kept company by the music coming from the AA house on this otherwise empty road.

My second shade break was an ice cream sandwich and a Gatorade in a tienda with a single fan. I stood in front of the fan guiltily and ate the rapidly melting sandwich, and marveled that I had just purchased a bottle of Gatorade. Yuck. What was I turning into? A shard of ice fell from the bag a boy had pulled from the tienda's freezer. I fetched it off the floor and held it to my wrists till it scooted away again like a bar of soap. I applied more sunscreen to my red pulsing pores.

On the last few kilometers I was seeing a mirage of shade up ahead. I remembered how I had channeled a speedboat on that deluge water day, at the beginning of this trip last century. Could I become a solar panel? Sun powered? Could I preserve some of those rays for March in Ithaca? What a tragedy that it doesn't quite work like that.

An arrival at a hotel (goodness how a roof does wonders!) after hours like this is just the most victorious experience. And a shower. And a bed under the shade of that wonderful roof.

Then after lying down for a delicious while, I go around town eating the best things I've ever eaten. I am just amazed and delighted how I can go from wiped to energetic again, after rest, food, and shade. And then a night of sleep and I'm just raring to eat that bag of beans for 5:15am breakfast and go bake myself again.

For all the exhaustion and toasting of the midday riding, the earliest morning hours are truly heavenly. The pastel sunrise colors on the clouds. Birds. I relish those ravishing few hours. This morning what made me sit higher on my bicycle seat and crow "Eee!" were flamingos, pelicans flapping heavily overhead, the reddish pink sand of the mangroves in the endless lagoons, and the swash of sunrise coloring everything peach. I was riding with a benevolent tailwind: for I had fought bitterly that very wind on this very road just yesterday, while cramming Emergency Backup Cookies into my veins, and now it was the gift that Past Me had given Current Me.