Custodio

Marta, the Fletcher's cook and housekeeper at Custodio. Photo by David Lansing.

It’s a nice drive to Custodio. For half an hour or so you slowly wind your way through the jungle, usually crawling along in a conga line of traffic led by a shuttering old truck or a heavily-laden bus bound for Guadalajara or Tepic, until you get to San Pancho where the road opens up and you pass by dozens and dozens of fruit stands selling coconuts and papayas and star fruit and even dried shrimp.

At Las Veras you turn inland and drive for about half an hour over narrow country roads passing farmers on bicycles or horses. Always there are a few tractors on the road making things interesting. Eventually you come into Zacualpan, a sleepy little town that may hold the record for the most number of speedbumps on the road. Turn left at the church, pass by the paleta stands and the women grilling chicken along the side of the road, through Ixtapa, down the cobbled road towards Plantanitos and its many thatched beach restaurants, and up the hill to Punta El Custodio.

When I arrived at Casa Corona del Mar, the Fletcher’s home on the bluff overlooking the ocean, no one was around except for Marta, their cook and housekeeper. I love Marta. She has taken me in to her kitchen to show me how to make tortillas from scratch and let me play sous-chef as she made her wonderful chicken mole. And even though I usually only see her once a year or so, she always remembers me. So here I was, standing outside the Fletcher’s house by the fountain, looking in through the open kitchen window at Marta who was working at the sink, and she looked up, surprised to see me, and immediately welcomed me with her warm smile.

It was good to be back in Custodio.

On the road to Custodio. Photo by David Lansing.

I’m not in Bucerias any more. I’ve fled. Up the coast to the house of my friends, Chris and Malin Fletcher, in Custodio. They’d invited me up last week and I had responded with an e-mail explaining I couldn’t come because my electricity didn’t work and then I had this flood, and Chris sent me a text saying, “Just come up. We have a cold beer waiting for you.”

So I did. But only after I’d spent four hours early Saturday morning draining the lake in my house. The first thing I did was throw down every beach towel I had. Which was really useless. It was like tossing a few Kleenex in a bathtub hoping that will soak up the water. All it did was leave me with seven or eight soaking beach towels weighing 50 pounds each that were impossible to wring dry. I heaped them in a pile on my patio. Then I grabbed a large sponge and a pail. But that was pretty worthless as well. Eventually what I decided to do was to take a wide broom and start pushing the water forward through the living room and out to the patio where there was a drain.

This took hours of work. But it was effective. Eventually I was able to get the bulk of the water out the door leaving me with just a shallow pond everywhere. At which point I went back to the sponge routine, sponging up water from the entryway, then the bathroom, the kitchen, the dining room, the living room, and out to the patio. Bonus: My floors looked really clean at this point. The third step was to get a dozen bath towels and mop up the remaining wet spots. Then just let the ceiling fans and the dry air remove the rest of the moisture. By nine, I was done.

I sent Miss Vicky an e-mail asking her if she knew a refrigerator repair man. She e-mailed me back to offer to come over and help me clean up (I was finished at that point) and said the fridge guy would be here first thing Monday morning. In the meantime, I again had no water. And no desire to sit around my condo worrying all weekend. So I got in the car and headed through the jungle to Custodio.