Introduction

The Story
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A Few Personal Stories
Francis
Faith
Anne
Silva

Once Upon a Time ... on a Beach in Mexico

By Michael Mountain

The ruins at Xtul, Mexico, 1966

It was a picture-perfect full-moon night in August of 1966. A calm, glittering ocean. A pristine beach on Mexico's Yucatan coast. Silence but for the sound of gentle waves lapping at the shore a few yards away.

"Close your eyes," said Faith. "And relax. Let what comes come. Now begin the meditation."

Easier said than done! We were not feeling quite as calm as the scene that surrounded us. We'd arrived in the middle of nowhere, were running out of money, and really didn't want to go back to England with our tail between our legs, having thumbed our nose at family and friends and told them that we didn't think much of their society and were going off in search of paradise.

I was 20 years old, an Oxford University dropout. I'd been expected to round out a proper British education and join Granada Television, one of the family businesses. Instead, I'd managed to annoy my whole family to the point of being disinherited, and had joined a group of fascinating new friends who were all dropping out of their established lives, too, to follow their dream.

We weren't the only people doing that. The whole establishment was under attack by the Sixties generation. All across Britain, hundreds of thousands of people were marching in Ban-the-Bomb demonstrations. Others were just quietly terrified that the world was going to blow itself up. At London's famous Speaker's Corner, a new wave of preachers proclaimed the coming End of the World. Government scandals were erupting. In Europe, students were rioting. And while the Beatles had become the latest phenomenon in the United States, they were being eclipsed by the much harder-edged Rolling Stones back home.

For many young people, "alternate lifestyles" were the order of the day. Much of that translated into sex and drugs. We were looking for a better way of life, too. We knew that sex and drugs were not the way. But we didn't yet know what was. We only knew we had to get out of London.

So we'd pooled our resources, flown to the Bahamas, taken jobs there for a few months to earn more money, and then gone to Mexico City. Some of us were talking of going to the land of the Incas, others favored the Yucatan, and there were a couple of votes for the Amazon Rainforest. The Yucatan was closest, and most practical. So two of us headed for Merida, with the others to follow in a few days.

Paul Eckhoff had done a tour of duty in the British army, and was now an architect in his late twenties, who designed prisons. (This would come in handy, 20 years later, for dog compounds!) I was completely confident we'd find our Shangri La in a couple of days. Others were not so sure. Paul, they hoped, would at least keep us on track and make sure I didn't end up simply getting lost and having to be rescued from some deep jungle!

Three days later, the two of us had arrived in the tiny fishing hamlet of Sisal, which consisted of a couple of dozen small white houses, a jetty, and a dirt road from Merida, which brought a twice-weekly bus that exchanged fish for supplies.

When the rest of the group arrived, we had nothing to show them except a small house we'd rented. At least it had a kitchen, a bathroom, and a room to store the baggage. I tried to explain the situation to everyone, but there really wasn't anything to explain. We'd reached the end of the road, literally. We didn't have enough money to go back to Mexico City and start over. We had just enough to get back to London. A couple of people had already decided to do that.

For the rest of us, Faith Maloney had a suggestion. Faith had left art school to join the expedition. She came from an Irish background, and was fascinated by all manner of subjects spiritual and metaphysical. She'd attended meditation classes in London, and people often commented on her "healing touch." In another age, I thought, she might have been a catholic saint.

So it was her suggestion that we sit in a circle and hold a meditation. What did we have to lose?

Next page: Circle on the Beach