Part of Isabel’s legend is that she never missed a party.Ī few days after the New Year’s Eve party she went off on vacation to another part of Mexico where, in a freak accident, she fell and broke a couple of ribs that punctured her vital organs. We might have seen her at the Yacht Club on New Year’s Eve (had we not stayed home and, tired from travel, gone to bed early), where doubtless she enjoyed the celebration. We missed seeing her this year, though we were in the habit of walking up to the Casa Isabel to pay our respects shortly after arriving. Isabel was a student of the ancient culture of the Huichol, and she helped to preserve it by buying and selling their intricate and colorful art to galleries and at exhibitions in the United States, Canada and Europe.

Her Casa Isabel, which included, apart from her own palapa, a number of rental casitas, served as a retreat for winter vacationers, as well as a place to stay for her friends among the Huichol, natives of the mountains of central Mexico, when they came down to Yelapa to sell their beaded artwork or hold a sacred ceremony. Isabel Jordan was an American woman who had lived here since 1971 and was felt to embody the lively spirit of this tropical paradise by her fellow expatriates. Which thought reminds me of the end of the life, in January, of Yelapa’s great representative of its gringo community, and how “the rest” of one’s life can suddenly be very brief indeed. I must more or less follow his diet, he said, for the rest of my life.

Such periodic indulgences seemed to do me no harm, but I had to admit that old age had caught up with me, alas, and my intestines were tired, as the good doctor had informed me. I started by enjoying a cup of coffee again - one only - with breakfast (helped me go!), and I graduated from there to having a drink now and then, usually a beer at Mimi’s or the at Yacht Club, and occasionally treated myself to a flan at the Pollo Bollo or the avocado pie at Tacos y Mas. Then gradually I began cheating a little. Through January and most of February I kept strictly to the doctor’s diet. My wife April joined me in taking the liver cleanse each morning, as well as a dose of the scorpion. In addition, he prescribed a “liver cleanse” of the juice of three limes mixed with three teaspoons of olive oil each morning on an empty stomach, followed by three teaspoons before each meal of what he called “the scorpion,” a blended mixture of an entire glass of lime juice, seven cloves of garlic, a large red onion, and seven tablespoons of olive oil. And indeed I have gotten better - my diseased intestines are working again and I have my old energy back - after seeing a young Mexican iridologist and naturopathic doctor early in January in Vallarta who, after studying the photographs he took of my eyes, told me to avoid carbohydrates (including, except for small, occasional portions, even beans and rice, formerly one of our staples), stop enjoying those guilty pleasures I’ve long indulged in (sweets, alcohol, coffee), and put me on a strict diet of vegetables (mainly raw) and protein (mainly fish, a little chicken, no red meat). I went down this year sick with colitis, gambling that I’d get better in Yelapa’s muy tranquilo atmosphere. There were noticeably fewer tourists in Vallarta when we arrived at the end of last year the bank on Insurrentes, for instance, where we use the ATM and ask for change afterwards, was virtually empty, whereas in other years one had to stand in a long line before reaching a teller. We got back to find, as we'd hoped, that spring had started in the West Kootenays. We arrived this time on New Year’s Eve, after flying into Vallarta on the 30th, and were in Yelapa until April 7th, when we flew back to Spokane, where we'd left our car, to spend the night there before driving to our home on Laird Creek outside Nelson, B.C. The people who make that drive are mainly fliers who come down in trucks or SUVs with their paragliders one sees these birdmen (and birdwomen) almost every day, soaring in the updrafts above the beach with the buzzards. This was our fifth winter in Yelapa, the still pleasantly offbeat Mexican village some twenty miles south of Puerto Vallarta that, unless one has a vehicle and chooses to drive the twisting, dusty jungle road down from El Tuito to where it ends on the ridge above Yelapa, can only be reached by boat.

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