Faery Tale (3 page)

More important, what has happened to the magic we were surrounded by as children? The loss of our magic, our innocence, is the worst sort of emotional deforestation. My biggest fear is that if we continue to stifle this loss, half the people on the planet will forget what their forest even looked like in the first place.

The more I thought about it, the more I wondered where our modern culture has left faeries today. If they were ever “here,” where did they go, and why did they leave us? As I began looking closer, I found that faeries still had a huge following—believers—all over the world. Perhaps these believers would be able to help
me
believe once more. Perhaps, with their help, I could even find a faery, sit it down for some nectar or something, and ask, “Where did we all go wrong?” The heaviness I'd felt on my heart began to lighten.

And my adventure was just about to begin.

—EDAIN MCCOY,
A WITCH'S GUIDE TO FAERY FOLK

 

 

 

 

I
WAS sitting on a plane bound for Cancún, Mexico, my mind a fluttering mess.

Soon
, I thought,
we could all be dead
.

If we all died, the chain of blame would regretfully run back to my poor friend Raven, who'd organized this trip. When she asked if I would be interested in going south of Playa del Carmen to participate in a week of yoga and meditation with a group of women, my sense of adventure kicked in and I couldn't say no.

But even more than time to bliss out on the beach, I had faeries on my mind. In doing some research I'd discovered there was a type of faery rumored to live in the ancient temples of Mexico—essentially “cousins” to the Celtic faeries or trolls—called Los Aluxes (pronounced al-oosh-us). I told myself this could be an interesting experiment. I'd do a little poking around while there, and if I found there was something
to
this faery nonsense, I'd go for it: try to make a formal, once-in-a-lifetime adventure of this faery search. Mexico could be a great place to begin. After all, if I could find evidence of faeries in Mexico, the least likely of places, couldn't I find them anywhere? I decided to leave the fate of my adventure up to the locals. Perhaps I'd find someone who could help lift the shroud of mystery that surrounded these strange little creatures.

I leaned back in my seat, hoping to relax, but the memory was too fresh. No sooner had I closed my eyes than I was transported back to the worst plane ride of my life. For one shockingly painful moment I was there all over again, on a flight from JFK in New York City to Ithaca, New York.

Outside it was dreary midwinter, and the tarmac was spotted with piles of black New York City slush. I had quietly asked the stewardess if I might move to sit by myself in an empty row. I couldn't stand to be near another human being, and despite how hard I was trying, I couldn't get my body to stop shaking—it was coming from the inside out. It was exactly one week before my father's sixty-sixth birthday, and instead of heading home to surprise him, I was going home to bury him.

I took a deep breath and managed to rein in the memory, along with the tears that threatened to slip out from underneath my dark sunglasses. Tilting my seat back and reclosing my eyes, I tried to get some rest.

“Are we there yet!?” I yelled to be heard over the rushing air coming in from the windows. We'd been driving in the old Volvo for nearly seven hours. In the midsummer heat, my skinny eight-year-old legs were glued firmly to the vinyl seat. My bangs were sticking to my forehead. We had to be getting close. I could almost smell the salt air of the New Jersey shore.

“I swear to God. You girls ask me that one more time and we will pull. This. Car. Right. Over,” my mother warned. My mom was suitably scary, but Kirsten and I shrugged. We were death-defying in our excitement.

“We'll be there soon enough, Sig,” said my father. With one hairy, tanned hand guiding the wheel, he glanced at me in the rearview. Our eyes met and he flashed a grin, giving me a quick eyebrow raise above his aviators.

The moment we arrived at the rental house, we threw down our bags, changed into our swimsuits, and raced to the beach. Sleek in her black swimsuit, my mother settled onto the blanket as Kirsten, Dad, and I ran toward the water. In his navy blue Speedo my dad reminded me of James Bond, embarking on a secret mission into the midnight waters of the Caribbean. He used to be a frogman in the Navy, and even though he preferred to discuss books and philosophy, I guess they thought he was really good at what he did—the Navy SEALs tried to recruit him after he completed his officer certification training. He liked to tell Kirsten and me how it seemed like a great idea at the time. He was just about to accept, to become a real Navy SEAL, when he saw one of his buddies back from SEALs training. His nose was broken, Dad told us, spread all over his face. He said thanks, but no thanks.

I marveled at the look of my bare feet on real sand as we edged into the surf. Standing side by side with Kirsten, our toes greeted the water and it was freezing cold. I closed my eyes for a second to listen to the crashing of the waves against the shore, wanting this moment to last forever. I watched my father as he waded in, and in a moment he was gone, only to resurface several yards away with a loud “Whoop!” and a sputtering of water.

“Come on, girls! The water's beautiful!”

We glanced at each other warily, our arms and legs now covered with goose bumps in the cool afternoon breeze. Suddenly a swim didn't feel like the best idea.

“Dad! It's freezing!” Kirsten shouted.

“Yeah, it's too coooold!” I whined. He waded back over to us, taking a solid beating from a large wall of water in the process. As he leaned in close I could see his eyes were red from opening them underwater.

“You've just got to regulate the thermostat, girls. Take a little water, and get your wrists and the back of your neck wet . . .” He demonstrated, making splashing himself look like the most appealing endeavor in the world. “
Wooh
! Now you try it.”

We squatted clumsily, sticking our wrists under the water. But it was no use. Surely this water was subzero. Eventually, after much deliberation, just as we sensed he was about to abandon us, his patience run dry, we decided to dunk under at the count of three. We dunked, and as I came up, I was hit full-force in the face by an incoming wave. Water rushed into my nose and mouth and I was swept off my feet. Tossed like a doll, I somersaulted over and over. I couldn't tell which way was up and my lungs were burning. I panicked. Soon my mouth would open without my permission, just to get some air. But as I began to spasm and choke, I felt a grip on my arm so tight it hurt, jerking me up through the water, and I surfaced, frantic and coughing. My eyes and nose were stinging. When I looked, I could see we were still out on the water, past the breaking point of the waves. My father's strong hands were buoying me, and Kirsten was looking on, wide-eyed.

“You're okay, huh, puppy?”

The water plastered his dark hair to his head, and he looked at me intently, assessing any potential damage—emotional or otherwise—brought by this, my first near-drowning experience. I could feel my face crumble. I burst into tears.

“I wanna go in! I wanna go to the blanket!” I wailed, snot bubbling from my nose.

“Okay, okay, okay,” he sighed. I knew I had let him down. I knew he wanted me to be tough. It was our first swim of vacation and I ruined it. But I wanted my mom. My throat and nose burned from the salt water. I'd had enough.

He gestured and I climbed onto his back, wrapping my arms and legs around him like a petrified monkey. Kicking his legs smoothly, he reached the point where the waves were crashing and I reached around his neck to plug my nose, just in case. But we moved effortlessly through them, me hanging tight, his feet planting firmly in the sand. Up on the blanket my mother wrapped me in a towel and poured us ice-cold lemonade iced tea from a battered thermos. We sat quietly, the four of us. I wanted to tell my dad thank you, or I'm sorry. I turned, but his eyes were lost—he was seated, still as a Tibetan monk, gazing fixedly out over the ocean.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we are now beginning our descent into Cancún.” Jolted awake, I looked out the window to see crystal blue water dappled with the shadows cast from a few hovering clouds. As we moved inward over the continent, nothing but miles and miles of dark green jungle met the eye, cut here and there by stretches of sandy roads that dead-ended like an afterthought in the middle of the brush.

It was a straight shot down Highway 307 from the tourist trap that is Cancún to the New Age tourist trap that is Tulum. As we tumbled with our yoga mats and luggage into a waiting van, I felt a little nervous. Mexico had been the last place I'd expected to discover a cultural belief in faeries. But everything had seemed to come together with an odd synchronicity.

Out of curiosity I'd just begun reading up on faery lore from various countries. I was astonished to learn that from Japan to New Zealand, nearly every culture in the world believed in one type of faery or another. In Russia there were rumors of
Domoviyr
—male earth faeries that lived side by side with humans in their homes. Or the
Rusalki
—lovely female water faeries found in the shallow pools of Russia's forests. Polish folklore told of
Poleviks
, magical creatures that aided in the growing and harvesting of agriculture. Of course England, Scotland, and Ireland were just roiling in faery tales. The strongest lore came from Ireland and its famous ancient historical account,
The Book of Invasions
, which described a race of magical beings called the Tuatha Dé Danann, who legend told were among the original conquerors of Ireland. It struck me as interesting, because I'd read elsewhere that the phrase
Tuatha Dé Danann
was now synonymous with
faeries
in modern Ireland. And I found that in Mexico, there were stories of encounters with Los Aluxes, or “the little people.”

The trouble was, searching for stories about Los Aluxes and actually
encountering
one were two very different things. How did one go about “finding” a faery anyway? Local wisdom dictated that Aluxes were traditionally spotted in the temples of the ancient Mayans; and that if you encountered one, you'd recognize it because they look like small children, or sometimes like little gnomes. But let me just say: if I were to encounter a gnomelike “otherworldly being” while rooting around in an ancient Mexican temple, I would absolutely freak out and run screaming into the Mexican jungle, jaguars and poisonous snakes be damned.

This might be a good time to come clean: I am actually petrified of the paranormal. I'm convinced the second-floor hallway of my apartment building is haunted. Why else would I get a creepy, forbidding feeling when I round the second flight of stairs on my way to work
every single morning
? When my cat stares off into a corner of the bedroom I can instantly feel the hair on the back of my neck begin to rise. I don't like Ouija boards, séances, or cemeteries. I have no desire to see dead people, get touched by the hand of God, or attend a taped session of
Crossing Over with John Edward
.Yet here I was headed to Tulum, Mexico, to meditate—or
something
—in the ancient temples of the Mayans. I didn't have a plan. I just knew that I had to go.