Viewing the Bay

Viewing the Bay (III)

“So my husband and I went up north to the tenth floor and we entered our room and the glass doors in the far wall were open and the filmy white curtains were fluttering and we stepped through them, out onto the balcony, and there was a wonderful view, the sharp ocean horizon, Banderas Bay a jade green out far, and to the left was the curve of the shore, the hotels all nestled there and also the distant city with its red-tiled roofs and palms and the mountains rising behind, thick with trees. It was very nice. I had seen but I did not look at the band of brown water, maybe seventy-five meters wide, stretching along the beach. I supposed it was the tide-drifted water from the mountain river I’d seen coming in, water full of mud and leaves from the jungle. Sort of romantic, if you think about it, the jungle hugging our shore. But of course my husband’s eyes went straight for this stain on the bay and he didn’t see any romance in it. He just shook his head.” —from “The American Couple” by Robert Olen Butler‘s A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain