Coconut Water

Marcus is cool.  Island cool.  He carries himself with a certain grace most men cannot afford.  He speaks in an easy and unhurried tone and always knows exactly what he is going to say before he says it.

Marcus is a swimming pool contractor by trade and he also performs maintenance on the pool at our rented house.  He stopped by the other morning to check on our pool—this just as Larry and Bill were putting the pool skimmer back together, having discovered the circulating line intentionally blocked with a plastic bag.   Larry, only a few minutes earlier, had cleaned a developing ring of grime from around the pool’s waterline.

“I’ve already scrubbed the ring from around the pool,” Larry teased Marcus.

Marcus smiled.  “Thank you.  Thank you so much.”

Larry and Bill then asked him about the skimmer.  They asked specifically if the circulation pipe was intentionally blocked.

“Yes, yes,” Marcus said.  “Some of the island contractors are not so good.  They put in all of the fill around the pool all at once instead of one foot at a time and compacting.”  He held his hand and measured an invisible foot in the air.  “This is what happened here.  A pipe is broken underground.  The earth settled and broke the line.  If we allow the water to circulate all the time, the water from the pool leaks out.”

Pretty soon, we more or less surrounded Marcus.  Everyone had a question and Marcus seemed to know answers:

How do you build the docks using PVC pipe driven into the sand?  What creature builds the mounds in the sand on the floor of the ocean off are dock?  When is the best time to see bioluminescence in the water?  How do you know if a coconut in the tree is ripe?

“When the coconut is big, it is ripe,” said Marcus, “And the water in the coconut is the only good water.  Only coconut water is pure.  If you drink the water from the coconut it will clean your heart.  Only coconut water will do this.” He paused for a spell to let this sink in to all of us.  “Let me get my machete from the truck.  I will show you.”

Marcus knocked a pair of large green coconuts from one of the trees on our beach with the extended handle of his pool skimming net.  He then walked out to his truck, retrieved his machete and returned to the beach.  “We will drink the coconut water.  You will see.”

We all stood watching as Marcus whacked open the end of the coconut with his machete, exposing a fairly small mouth.  He handed the coconut to Larry. “Drink from the coconut.”

Larry took a drink and then passed the coconut on so each of us could take a drink.

“This will clear your heart.  This is the only water to do so.”

Larry passed the coconut on.  Each of us took a drink so we could have a clean island heart.

Whether we have clean hearts or not…I don’t know.  I liked the taste. 

And Marcus is cool, that much is certain.

Marcus retrieving a coconut

Whacking open a coconut

Larry drinking fresh coconut water

—Mitchell Hegman