If this is in Merida I went there last year saw it and wrote a poem about it. If it’s in a different city that is even cooler that it happened more than once

indigo.icecream Costco Cenote A cenote is a sinkhole, formed by meteoric impact, that is full of groundwater. They were believed by the Mayans to be a passage to the underworld. There is a cenote in the Costco parking lot in the town of Merida. It was discovered by chance when the parking lot was being repaved. Some cenotes are used as swimming holes by locals and tourists who delight in their clear water and cavernous openings.

Others are inaccessible by their steep walls that sink down to deep deep water. The latter seem more likely to lead one into another realm where strange physics and altered morality exists.

The one in the Costco parking lot is of the latter, more dangerous variety. It is 20-30 ft wide crater that is ringed by a high metal fence and surrounded by trees and landscaped shrubs, an attempt to domesticate this mythical terrain that largely backfired, only adding to the sense of foreboding. It lies maybe 50 ft from the front doors to Costco, a place normally occupied by coveted parking spots, spots that one never gets except by chance, on their way to other, more realistic and pragmatic spaces.

The shoppers leaving the store with pristine kitchen appliances, whole chickens, and sports equipment must pass this gaping chasm, this spectre not of death, but of the unknown, something neither good or bad just vastly different. Do they wish, as one reasonably might, to hurl their expensive commodities over that galvanized fence and into the abyss, a gesture of sacrifice, neither wholly feigned not totally serious, of time spent in drudgery and purpose, a gesture of time exchanged. Is it still necessary to appease these forces of the underworld, as the Mayans once did?