May 28, 2016

Plenty of Time.

Radu is learning how to filet a fish, a Pargo rojo (Pacific Red Snapper). We met Antonio, the sheriff of this small village, when he secured our dinghy on the beach the tide had broken loose and was about to float away. They started talking in rom-span-glish. He showed us the fish market right at the beach, where under a tin roof fishermen brought today their scallops to sell. A distinguished older man with a small white mustache and white rubber boots tended to a large green iron scale propped up on a concrete slap weighing the catch of fisher men. Another man, gray haired with a baseball cap and a large full mustache, kept count and wrote things into a book.

Antonio got a bucket with seawater, sharpened his knife on a stone and started scraping away the fish scales and he kept washing off the knife by dipping it into the bucket. The fishermen from the fish market brought over a plate ceviche of scallops with lime and hot sauce. Simply delicious.

At first glance this village is poor. The men start work early, at sunrise they take their small fishing boats with large outboard motors to either fish or work at the power plant across the bay. The roads are unpaved. The cars are old, as suited for a Mad Max movie as for the rocky roads of this remote spot at the edge of the large wetland rim of Bahia Magdalena. Two little girls and a boy were playing with a go-cart, romping down an incline they fell off the cart into the dust. The houses are painted in bright colors, are small with two or three rooms and most houses have verandas in front with roofs made out of palm fronts. Electricity is made at night with a large and loud generator for the whole village. The generator sounds like a mining truck and goes on ’till late into the night.

A fisherman coming back from the sea late morning, he pulls his boat onto the beach singing. A wife greets another fisherman and inspects his catch. I am siting with Samba on lounge chairs in front of a restaurant, which will maybe open in one hour or two.

Time seemed to stand still between Antonio and Radu filleting the fish, fishermen weighing their catch and Samba trying to catch flies. Time expanded and let me breathe. One thing this simple life has plenty of is time. And if it is time we value, this village is not poor at all.