Maya Repair Palapas Roof Damage
When we arrived for breakfast at the Lol He Beach Club resaurant, where we usually have our morning meal in Akumal, I noticed that there was a three-foot hole in the top of the huge paplapas roof that covers this seaside restaurant.
Shortly after we finished our meal, while we sipped on coffees and discussed the day’s itinerary, our waiter asked us to move to a table in another section of the restaurant. He said the hole in the top of the palapas roof had occurred overnight. It looked as if the wind had ripped off a palm frond and hurled it into the roof to rip open the hole.
A number of Maya men, dressed in overalls, arrived with pipes and put together scaffolding that reached up to the roof. Two men climbed to the top, another dragged in a bunch of palm leaf fronds and attached them to a yellow rope the men on top of the scaffolding threw down to him.
I felt delighted to watch and record the repair of the hole in the palapas roof. Watching the men climb the scaffolding brought back to me my years as a photojournalist at NASA when I, too, climbed scaffolding, but, in my case, for the purpose of photographing aircraft below.
With the wind blowing so fiercely off the ocean, I was reminded of one experience on the top of a “cherry picker” when the head of NASA Langley’s Photo Lab and I photographed our fleet of experimental aircraft below. We were so high above the ground to get all of the planes that the truck below us looked like a child’s toy.
At the top of the “cherry picker” the wind made it sway back and forth. I felt afraid but did not want to show it because weakness can be jeered at among the rough and ready photographers. Fortunately, the head of Photo Lab was a kind man.
We stood side by side in the basket on top of the “cherry picker’s” tall arm.
I asked him, “Do you mind if I put my little finger over yours?” He knew I was afraid as the basket swayed this way and that.
“It’s OK, Carol,” he said, “and I won’t tell anyone.”
Bless that man!
Our photos looked great and were published (in my case as the press photographer) and used in scientists’ paper (in his case) the way they should be.
Today, I thought how these Maya men were the descendents of the men who made the pyramids. They are also the same men who have built the huge hotels in Cancun. They are unafraid of heights.
As John say, “The men have incredible balance!”
They climbed up and down the scaffolding in wind off the ocean that made the tarps along the restaurant walls billow so stronly that earlier, little children eating breakfast at a nearby table, had bounced off the billowing tarps.
In the past, I have seen construction workers at night lit by a single incandescent light lounging in hammocks a number of stories up in a building they are constructing and had wished that I would have photographed them.
Today, I got my chance.
Carol Chapman
Copyright (c) 2009 Carol Chapman
