Just an Ordinary Day in San Pedro

By JUDY WAYTIUK

The Lagoon restaurant is jammed, its airy, retro- deco interior sodden with muggy heat. Norman Gosney, owner, is in the kitchen frantically grilling snapper. Mrs. Norman Gosney, who lifts weights and whose sinewy torso shows it, waits tables. A girlfriend visiting from New York clears dirty dishes. Tonight, everybody's pitching in.

Norman's cook went to the mainland to deal with a family crisis. Norman's waitress called in sick. Mrs. Norman scribbles for one patron the maple-syrup salad dressing recipe she got from another friend, before the Gosneys moved to Ambergris Caye. She wouldn't have believed the dressing would fit local ingredients-- mostly cabbage and carrots.

But it does, and so do the Gosneys, his British-born accent blurred by New York twang, hers pure American. Like the other ex-pats, they're changing the face of San Pedro. And the locals aren't sure how to take it. Estella Worthington, local girl, runs Estel's Dine-By-the-Sea. Estel serves breakfast and lunch, leaving night work to others. The Lagoon has polished floors; Estel rakes the sand under her wood-plank tables. Norman Gosney has put a tongue- in-cheek "Valet Parking" sign outside the Lagoon. At Estel's, husband Charlie, sleepy, barefoot and rumpled, muses over the CD player on an old sideboard perched precariously in the sand. Once a salesman who played in a band, Charlie, another American, spied Estel's soft eyes across a room in a Florida club one night, and fell for her. She took awhile to convince, but eventually they ended up together, back on Ambergris Caye, living above the sand-floored diner.

Estel's niece, Zoby, hustles Belikin beer, onion rings, and fried fish from kitchen to tourists. Charlie regards himself as the public relations department.

Estel, whose dark eyes are still soft, has a small frown etched on her brow. It could be from squinting into the sun, but it could be the pain. She's favoring a bad ankle. Ambergris Caye's fast track to resort status has its share of sleeping policemen, for which you slow down or lose an axle. Sunset Bob slowed to full stop at the Sunset Bar, on the roof of the Casablanca Hotel, which Norman Gosney also runs above his restaurant. Bob has been up here for three nights running to watch the sun go down. He drove his ten-year-old white Caddy down through the Midwestern U.S., then Mexico, into the Belizean rainforest looking for a shaman. Bob has some sort of lung disease, but he won't say what it is. The shaman made him feel better. In any case, his Caddy is parked at the Belize City airport, and he's running an ad in a paper to sell it. If the Caddy sells, he might call that an omen and stay here. Sunday morning, you find him on the pay phone beside the Tropic Air terminal at the airstrip, trying to reach Plymouth, Indiana.

Bob is one of the footloose. Others have put down roots: Bruce and Victoria Collins, with their Jeep Frankenstein. Once California realtors, they came to squeeze in a rushed four-day holiday. They went home, sold up, and came back. They run the San Pedro Sun newspaper, one of whose columnists, another ex-pat, also plays guitar and sings around town, and sometimes begs the tourists to stop asking for "Margaritaville" again.

Saturday mornings, the Collinses have brunch at Fido's Courtyard overlooking the sea. This morning, the American who moments ago owned Fido's stands at the bar beside the two Americans who just bought it. All three are in celebratory mode, unaware of the children splashing in the shallows a few feet away. The kids, with the strong features and mahogany skin of the Maya, noisily scrub conch shells they'll try to sell later to tourists.

The Collinses just brought Frankenstein back from bodywork on the mainland. They had to explain that in their paper, after the town fathers banned the import of more cars. There are too many on the island now. Silent electric golf carts and bicycles get muscled aside on the sand roads by monoxide- belching North American monsters.

Local yellow dogs can't even doze in the middle of Front Street these days: carts, bikes and pedestrians go round, but San Pedro pups can't depend on cars to swerve for them.

Norman Eiley always sidesteps the dogs. Born and raised here, he was a fisherman until the co-op came in and there wasn't enough fish to share out. He went building houses, but on the side, he was putting together his boat, the Southern Beauty. It took a few years.

The boat was his way back to the sea, not to fish, but to carry tourists. Sturdy, with glass bottom, she has a side door for clumsy snorkelers, and a heavy wooden shade cover. She's thick-waisted and stubby, and wallows alongside the fiberglass cigarette boats sporting canvas tops, but Norman Eiley is proud of her, and of his teenage son, Francis. Francis goes with Norman on the boat, to guard the precious live reef from souvenir-hungry fools. As the ex-pats crowd into San Pedro waving development schemes and condo plans, the locals flee in their skiffs, to make livings carrying tourists to fish, swim, or go to Caye Caulker or the mainland. San Pedro's long jetties are crowded with these boats in the evenings.

Norman Eiley strolls the warm sand along Front Street, nodding pleasantly to the tourists. Charlie and Estel are locking up the restaurant, on their way to a charity fund-raiser at the Lion's Club. Their door has stuck again, swollen from salt air. Norman Gosney's cook is back from the mainland.

Norman leans against the Lagoon's porch post with the menu stapled to it. He says he may move on in a few years. He becomes bored quickly, and moves around often. Norman Eiley, on the other hand, isn't going anywhere. The Southern Beauty, tethered until morning, slumbers in the moonlight. Francis is off partying at one of the loud bars at the north end of town. Eiley's gentle smile seems just a little wistful.

//Judy Waytiuk is a long-time writer and journalist who spends much of the cold Canadian winter in the Caribbean.//

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