Dancing Naked at the Edge of Dawn by Kris Radish Page A

woman driving the Jeep is so stunningly beautiful and sure of herself, I can barely focus. When she showed up with her long legs and tanned skin and perfectly bent baseball hat in front of the resort at six A.M. just as the clouds on the ocean lifted and the sun began to filter through the trees by the swimming pool, I wanted to slap myself because I felt as if I were in a movie.
    She is our guide-friend, local jungle expert and woman of the world. She has come to take us on an adventure to see the doggies and God knows what else. She is a friend of a friend of a friend of Elizabeth's, and the fact that she has beautiful blond hair, legs that are longer than the entire length of my body and this aura of confidence has me spinning. I want to be just like this woman when I grow up. I will have to take up weight lifting, grow out my hair, move to a foreign land—anything seems possible when I watch her move, anything.
    “Welcome to my world,” she said as her way of introduction, and then she grabbed half of our bags in one arm and we were flying before I could close my mouth.
    Linda, Elizabeth tells me as we walk toward the Jeep, is an archaeologist who came to Mexico to help unearth the unbelievably important ruins at Coba, an area of shallow lakes covered by decades of jungle growth that includes an amazing twenty thousand acres of an ancient civilization that we are about to enter as part of the doggie search. When the Mexican government cut off funding for major archaeological projects in sites such as Coba, Linda was unable to leave because she had fallen in love with the land, the lakes, the sky—apparently every ounce of the peninsula. Now she hires herself out as a guide, sometime digger, a friend to searching women as she waits for the skies to open so she can find more hidden treasures.
    Call us “the Barking Females”—women in search of dogs. There are sleeping bags, a tent, bundles of water and food wrapped in tarps in the Jeep. I am certain that we will run into Thelma and Louise around the next hairpin turn and I pray to any living thing who will listen that I might not just be ready, but worthy as hell.
    Miles and miles from the resort, where there were wonderful things like flush toilets and ice cubes and food prepared for you while you sat on the beach, we turn right and are instantly enveloped inside trees unlike any that I have ever seen. They are a tangled mass of green leaves and roots so thick that it becomes darker with each mile. Occasionally there is a break in the darkness and a slice of light pushes out in the dirt road where someone tried to claim a patch of ground. Because my Life List has been put on hold most of my dull life—okay, all of my life—I have never been to a place where people have to scratch the ground to clear a space to live. I have thought about those people from time to time, but to see a small hole in the horizon and scattered pieces of lumber, piles of garbage and a trail leading off to the next village—it changes everything.
    I am an educated woman. I have studied and planned and read more books than the average person, but now I realize quickly that I have missed more than a world of experiences. Something harsh and angry rises up in me when I realize this true fact. It is one thing to live, but it is another thing to
really
live. Why have I been so afraid? Where did my wires get crossed?
    We bounce along and I glance back to see Elizabeth lost in her own thoughts, and I suddenly remember the days in high school when I had such brilliant but silent dreams. I kept pages and pages of notes, most of which I wrote down during classes that I considered way too boring for my attention, and my notes were filled with a passion that seems to have gotten lost in all the days and nights of my life that have piled so high I have not been able to breathe.
    Once, Mark Cotrel read my pages of notes. Mark was a pompous jackass of a boy who was blessed with a body and face that made