Looking for Lucia in Puerto Vallarta and Yelapa, Mexico

Palm trees, pelicans, and Golden Age movie stars — and Hurricane Lidia — on the sixth stop of my Lucia Berlin research trip

Hello, friends —

Big welcome to everyone who’s subscribed since my letters from Alaska, Texas, Mexico, Chile, New Mexico and New York! If you’d like to read more about my forthcoming biography of Lucia Berlin for Farrar, Straus & Giroux, check out my previous posts here. And apologies for the delay with this one: I was pretty shaken by Hurricane Lidia — which is nothing compared to what Nayarit and Jalisco residents have been through.

The sixth stop on my literary road trip was really two stops: the seaside town of Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, and then the village of Yelapa, which you can only reach by boat. Lucia set her story ‘Evening in Paradise’ in Vallarta in 1963, when Richard Burton, Ava Garden and Elizabeth Taylor were in town for the filming of The Night of the Iguana, and the wonderful ‘La Barca de la Ilusión’ takes place in Yelapa, in one of the open-sided ‘palapa’ homes typical of the region.

Here I am in Yelapa, standing where Lucia’s sons used to bathe and fish in the lagoon, outside their palapa, in the mid-1960s.

First Impression

I adored Vallarta. Like so many of Lucia’s homes, it’s surrounded by mountains, but it’s also set on the magnificent Bahía de Banderas, which when I arrived was full of fishing boats, sailboats, kayaks and canoes. A few days later, of course, all the moorings had emptied out as Hurricane Lidia approached — more on that below.

Here I am, writing on the ‘malecón’, the boardwalk, on my first day.

Best Discovery

I’d planned to spend two days in Vallarta and three in Yelapa — but with a Category Four hurricane on the horizon, all the water taxis were cancelled, and locals advised me that it would be safer to stay in town.

I finally made it to Yelapa the day before my flight back to the States, when the seas had calmed enough for boats to start running again. On our way down the coast, I was thrilled by the soaring views of the rainforest, and by the fact that — against all the odds — I was actually going to make it to a place that had been so important to Lucia, and to her writing.

Following a hand-made map from Lucia’s lovely son David Berlin, and guided by very generous Yelapa resident and poet Kelley Chesley (my new friend!), I found the site of Lucia and Buddy’s palapa, which has now been replaced by a luxury resort.

The setting hasn’t changed, though. The lagoon is still there, and the beach and the bay, and the flowers and birds, and the lawn Lucia planted sixty years ago. Here’s how she describes the setting in ‘La Barca de la Ilusión’.

High mountains surrounded the bay, so there were no roads into Yelapa. Horse trails through the jungle to Tuito, to Chacala, hours away. […] The river changed all year long. Sometimes deep and green, sometimes just a stream. Sometimes, depending on the tides, the beach would close up and the river turned into a lagoon. This was the best time, with blue herons and egrets.

There are still no roads in Yelapa, and no cars.

Worst Discovery

The most difficult thing about this phase of my journey was, of course, Hurricane Lidia, the fourth-strongest landfalling Pacific storm in history.

It hit in the evening of my second full day in Vallarta, October 11th, with winds at 220 kilometres per hour. By late afternoon, the rain had flooded the streets around my hostel. I sat in my room, on my bed, watching the palm trees careen wildly outside my window, and searchlights swim across the pale buildings and the hills. There were scraping sounds on the terracotta roof, and metallic clangs in the courtyard below, and lots of sirens, and people calling out to each other through the darkness. We lost electricity, and then phone signal, and then running water, and I felt very alone.

When I woke up at dawn, I found Vallarta strewn with trees and telephone poles and tangled electricity wires. Walls and roofs had blown down and crushed cars and market stalls. The mosaics in Lazaro Cardenas Park had exploded onto the ground. I have no words for it, really, but I took photos, which you can see here.

If you can, please donate to Vallarta Food Bank, which provides free meals and clean water to the many displaced people across the region as they work to rebuild their homes and businesses. Two weeks after the storm, electricity is finally back on in both Vallarta and Yelapa, but there is a huge amount of work left to do. I was really frightened during the storm — but then I left the country. For Jalisco and Nayarit locals, hurricane damage isn’t something you can simply fly away from.

Last Impression

This letter is already too long, so I’ll just say that, despite the hurricane, I loved Vallarta enough to have already booked a return trip. It’s beautiful, and I feel incredibly lucky to have met such brave, warm, resilient people there. They saw me through the storm, and their kindness and community spirit moved me deeply, and taught me so much.

Final Thought

I’ll never forget the thrill of that water taxi down the coast to Yelapa. Here’s what it sounded like.

I’ll follow up shortly with an account of my next stop on this literary road trip in search of Lucia — the San Francisco Bay Area. In the meantime, thank you so much for following my journey, and for keeping me company through the hurricane. It really helped to know that you were all out there, cheering me on.

Actually, I’ll give the last word to Kelley’s dog Luna, who is the best. Here she is, outside Kelley’s gorgeous palapa.

Nina

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