Text and photos by Robert Adams//
AL PIERCE is an electrical engineer who holds several U.S. patents, takes award-winning arts and travel photos and designs and builds furniture.
EVELYN JACKSON is a former management consultant who also is an accomplished painter and yoga enthusiast.
Together they share a love of scuba diving that brought them together in an online chat room and eventually led them to be married under water.
Scuba diving is also what brought them originally to Yucatan in 2010. After leaving the Seattle bio-tech firm that he co-founded, Pierce moved with Jackson to Xcalak, Quintana Roo, a diving paradise on the Caribbean coast near the Belize border.
But the couple felt isolated and weren’t able to secure a permit for the house they hoped to build. Also Hurricane Dean led them to rethink their plans to settle permanently in Xcalak. So they moved to Merida, where they had visited and knew a few people.
“In Xcalak, there is nothing to do besides dive,” said Jackson in a recent interview at the couple’s spacious home in Merida’s Centro. “In Merida, you can shop at Costco, go to the symphony, there’s just so much to do….”
Pierce said he enjoys the authentic Mexican experience of living in Merida, contrasting it with resort towns like Cancun or “Anglicized” San Miguel de Allende.
“Merida is also a good spot from which to explore other countries in Latin America, like Cuba, Guatemala, Honduras, and the rest of Mexico,” he said while soothing one of the couple’s two large dogs made a bit uncomfortable by a visitor’s presence.
Several of Pierce’s photos that have been included in various editions of the annual book Best of Photography were taken in Chiapas and Guatemala since the couple moved to Merida.
Pierce still keeps active as an engineer and currently is working on several projects, including a sonar system to monitor water levels in fountains and storage tanks.
“I spent my career solving problems. You don’t just stop doing that when you retire,” he observed.
“He’s a real Rennaissance man, he’s my Einstein,” Jackson added.
Together, the couple have restored their 120-year-old Centro home that for about 50 years served as a popular cantina. The project, which consumed 18 months of full-time work with local contractors, preserved 25-feet-high first-floor ceilings and added a second floor to the structure, which had been abandoned for about 20 years.
Their home, in which many of Pierce’s photos are prominently displayed, is regularly featured on tours of outstanding renovations conducted by Merida English Library.
Pierce and Jackson enjoy their new lives in Merida and consider the White City home, having sold their previous residence in the U.S. While they travel widely – they had just returned from six weeks in Australia and New Zealand when interviewed in early May – they always come back to Merida.
“We really like Merida, it’s our home now,” Jackson said. “For awhile we kept our place in the U.S. but we found we never went back, so we sold it.”
Still, both wish for improvements in certain aspects of Merida life, including loud late-night bar music, unmaintained sidewalks and lingering trash on streets. Pierce believes higher taxes and stricter zoning laws could easily resolve these issues.
“We could pay 10-times higher taxes, and they’d still be low compared to the U.S.,” Pierce observed.
While scuba diving brought Jackson and Pierce to the Yucatan, Merida’s quality of life has led them to stay. And their impressive home renovation and other projects are adding to that very quality of life.
–Robert Adams
