In the Mirror Maze

Most of my childhood friends loved Disneyland. I did, too. But I preferred Pacific Ocean Park, a 26-acre playland built on a pier that stretched out into the cobalt sea. You bought your ticket --scarcely a few dollars compared to Disney's whopping entry fees--at the booth beneath a statuary of serpents and crusted seahorses, then entered through Neptune's Kingdom and took an elevator down into the depths of the tank that held giant octopi and sharks. You could descend in a leaky diving bell--thrust down into the sea by a piston engine--where you viewed a kelp forest and frolicking seals.

Sinbad's Flying Carpet soared on tracks through mysterious Baghdad with palaces encrusted in jewels, and an aerial skyway took you out over the ocean some 75 feet over the waves where you could gaze breathlessly across the expanse of coastline from Venice to Santa Monica, or you could ride the back of the Sea Serpent coaster, spinning dangerously close to the edge of the pier. It all had a grittiness, wrought with imperfectly functioning thrill rides that struggled against rust in the salty air. Add the aroma of saltwater taffy and spun sugar--the grains of sand that blew every way you turned--and it suited me fine compared with the perfect, goyishe sterility of Disney. And when you were done with all the rides and shows, you could head for the changing room and race down to the beach in your suit.

There were live shows in a tank, where dolphins arched wildly into the air in a blast of white spray. Or you could beat yourself senseless on the Sea Ram bumper cars. Matt loved the Whirl Pool, a wooden centrifuge that spun madly as the floor dropped out and the g-forces pinned your body to the wall. It only made me seasick for the entire day.

I loved Davy Jones Locker, a fun house with shifting walls, sudden slides, a moving sidewalk, and mirrors that made you look 15 feet tall or 10 feet wide. But my favorite attraction was the Mirror Maze, a convoluted house of glass that, once you entered, you could spend as much as a half an hour trying to thread your way back out to the world. You walked into small cubes, framed on three sides with mirrors, with only a single door leading out. To hold your hand in front of you was to cheat. Instead, you took your best guess and walked forward, often smacking yourself senseless against the glass.

There were times where I was frustrated to tears--and a bloody nose-- giving up and threading my way to freedom with my hands outstretched to prevent further injury. Since those days, I have seen halls of mirrors in traveling carnivals, but none were as large and complicated as P.O.P.'s. None had the distracting, dizzying lights that lent a sense of spaciousness and multiplied like a field of supernovas against the glass. Once inside, you banged endlessly against your likenesses, trapped in a world of a thousand yous!

Alas, in 1966 the park began to lose money and the rides fell into greater disrepair. By the following fall, it was closed forever. And today, the pier itself has broken up and descended in pieces beneath the sea. Davy Jones' Locker, the Flying Carpet, Neptune's Kingdom--gone the way of Atlantis.

However, I still have unlimited access to the Mirror Maze if I court despair. For many years I was trapped, banging into the image of myself wherever I turned, too proud to put out my hand for help, groping for the distant light that leads out to the salt-sea air, the sand between my toes, all that candy for the asking.

Down in Mexico

There were only two others that early morning on the clanking bus from Puerto Escondido: a young Mexican poet and his traveling companion, an auto mechanic from Mexico City. They were engrossed in talk about the government. I was heading south along the Oaxacan coast, seeking refuge from the deep Alaskan winter.

We were rolling along a sparse stretch of road near Pochutla when the poet suddenly switched over into English to ask if I wanted to visit a peaceful beach where one could stay "cheaply and in silence if you want to." He said the accommodations would be Spartan by my overblown American standards, but after my short experience in Puerto Escondido where rowdy Americans packed the beaches with their blaring stereos and hucksters walked about with chintzy wares, I was more than willing to try another standard.

From where the bus deposited us along the highway, we hiked along a four-mile stretch of dirt road, beyond a failed and deserted resort hotel and through a dark grove of banana trees to a breath-taking crescent of beach where huts jutted from beneath the foliage.

The poet led us to the northernmost cliff of the crescent. This was Shambala, a hammocks-only retreat run by an American woman who had fled to Mexico in the 1960s to escape what she saw as a war-torn culture with crumbling spiritual values. I learned later that it had been a rough transit for Gloria, who lost her husband and then her daughter to the unpredictable currents that lurked just outside the safety of the cove. Yet there she was, a smile played out across her face as she welcomed us and directed us to a string of hammocks that faced out into the mild southern wind.

The poet had been right. After a few days, I was baked clean by the sun, and I sat by night under a waxing January moon and thought nothing of the gloomy winter that I had abandoned. I met travelers from Europe, Australia, and South America -- wanderers who had shunned the glittery and obnoxious resorts in favor of simple pleasure. We used pit toilets and washed in the morning at the community well -- not for everyone, I suppose.

I learned that the nearby resort hotel had failed because of the dangerous rip tides and the absence of gift shops and discotheques. There seemed to be a curse as well: the beach had been named Zípolite, “Bay of the Damned,” I was told. A huge sea-mount rose from the waves from which, apparently, Spanish conquistadors had thrown hundreds of non-reforming Indians into the sea. I was not sure how much of the story was simply folklore, but it seemed to explain the vengeful tides which had borne off Gloria’s family members.

During the second week I joined the poet, his mechanic friend, and an Italian traveler in a hike over the northern bluffs. It was a rough mule track, but we found a narrow lagoon just beneath an overhang, and the water was heavenly. After we had swum and sunned ourselves for several hours, we spotted a slight man in gray slacks and a fedora, who sat alone with a book on the outcrop of rock above us.

I invited him down, but he replied in pleasant, broken English that he preferred to be alone. An odd bird.

And at twilight, when he joined us for coffee on the cliffs of Shambala he offered little in conversation that would change my impression of him. The poet and mechanic were engaged in a cup-slamming round of backgammon, so the Italian man and I wandered up the beach in search of the barracuda fisherman who had been cooking dinners of the catch of the day, black beans, and tortillas.

After dessert, we were lounging in the sand under the full moon when the man in the fedora came up and, after polite conversation, he declared himself a Shaman, interested only in our welfare. The Italian man rolled his eyes.

Quite uninvited, the Shaman touched him gingerly on the neck.

“Your muscles are tight like steel, he said. "With grief.”

The Italian man bristled, “It’s my rheumatism -- the cold water of the lagoon.”

“Not so,” said the Shaman. “It is from the loss of a woman, named . . . Isabella. In Murano…. In Italy.”

The Italian man slouched in the sand and began to weep. He shuddered for a little while and then he seemed at peace. We did not speak again for the rest of our time there.

That moment, under the fat Oaxacan moon, I was certain that there was no way on earth that I was going to let that Shaman lay a hand on me. But in those blurry years, I was terrified of self-knowledge.