This song is about the juxtaposition of the primitive and modern in places like Cancun. It’s also about how things that seem so solid and permanent may not last. It chronicles a long ago visit to the Mayan Ruins at Chichen-Itza.

Laura and I went to Chichen-itza on our honeymoon, on a very hot day in the Yucatan. Back in those days you could still climb the pyramid and I managed to convince her that you simply had to see the view from the top. Unfortunately, she is afraid of heights. The climb up was not that big a deal, but once at the top, she looked down and declared that I had to get a helicopter to rescue her or the marriage was over. Of course, no helicopter materialized and she managed to calm down. At least on one side of the pyramid, there was a chain running down the side. I managed to convince her to climb down backwards holding on to the chain and not look down, advice that is echoed in the song.

After I played the song in front of people for the first time (very recently) I made some minor changes to the lyrics, but also one major change. The second line of the chorus was originally, “chants and symbols pour over me like rain.” I woke in the middle of the night and thought that “Hieroglyphs pour over me like rain,” would actually be closer to what I had been trying to express in the first place. That led me to think that I could change that same line in the final chorus to “advertising pours over me like rain” and at the same time change the next line to “riding up the elevator” instead of “climbing up the pyramid” to match the modern context of the final verse. This also has the effect of making the song less worshipful of the past. The Mayan civilization disappeared at least in part because they destroyed their environment, just as we are doing. And those hieroglyphs? Weren’t they really a form of advertising or branding, since they were largely used to record the victories and achievements of the rulers? We aren’t so much different after all.

I was also thinking recently about the line “what will remain of this in a thousand years.” All I could definitively come up with was plastics and nuclear waste. The way things are going, we might not be here to see what’s left.