Soft as Fontenelle, the Feathers and the Thread, My Crane Wife

Today, still unable to surf, I explored El Paredon. It's set on a spit in the Pacific Ocean. Although it can be reached overland, almost all traffic is by boat.

It's a tiny town, which takes no more than five minutes to traverse. There aren’t any cars there, so all the roads are sand and everyone goes barefoot. It has a single store, which sells soft drinks, junk food and little else. Most people fish, or work in Sipcate. Pigs and dogs run wild between the thatch-roofed houses. All of the women were congregated on porches, cooking, washing, mending at chatting outside to avoid the heat indoors. When the men weren’t out fishing they all gathered around the watertower. They would hang their nets from the tower to mend them by hand, a tedious and impressive task. After school, the town’s children played a pick-up futbol game with the French boys who were staying at the camp with me.

I asked a boat owner if I could hire him to take me down the canal, to see the cranes that nest in the mangrove swamp. He agreed to take me, as long as I helped him with his fishing first. Now, this seems a little silly to me. This man wants me to sit in his tiny, tippy little boat and throw easily tangled nets overboard, possibly endangering his livelihood? But I agreed. Then he didn't actually let me do any fishing, thank goodness. He may have been teasing, but it was hard to tell.

Instead, we puttered up the Chiquimulilla channel. Then, he turned of the engine, and paddled the boat into the mangrove swamp. There was an amazing variety of flora and fauna, but the fellow only knew the names of a few things, and I certainly couldn’t translate them into English. (With the exception of turtles. There were a ton of turtles!) There were also beautiful water lilies and bromeliads growing among the mangrove roots. There were tons of birds, which after a little investigation, I think were cranes, heron, cormorants and kingfishers. These white cranes were by far the most spectacular. They would fly low over the water, and then in an instant they would dive down and grab fish from just under the surface. They would catch them in their beaks horizontally, but then they would flip the fish vertically and catch them so that they could swallow them. I wish I could do that!

For dinner I had to settle for fish straight from the ocean that the camp barbecued for us and a coconut I convinced a kid to get out of a tree for me. Not such a bad life, really.