On a tip from Pat, at seven thirty this evening, Alan and I pile into a pulmonia and tell the driver – “Dolphina’s por favor …”
We are taken, for fifty pesos, to distant communication towers rising into the sky to the south of us. During the daytime these towers are unlit and stick up like red toothpicks waiting for a green olive. During the night their flashing red lights serve notice to drunk ship captains that land and rough rocks are waiting if they don’t leave women alone at their helms.
We don’t know where the dolphins are but you have to trust your driver in a foreign country. Our driver is a short man with glasses and a military haircut. We round the south side of a rock fist, partially hiding the towers, and see dolphins illuminated on the Malecon.
“When you go back?,” our taxi driver asks.
“Un hora.”
“I pick you up.”
The dolphins are spectacular with lights and jets of colored water sprayed the length of the pool. Mexican families are posing for pictures and street vendors are cooking by the roadside. A kid dressed in a clown outfit entertains a loud attentive crowd by the dolphin fountain. His shoes are ten sizes too big and he wears a little green bowler hat that goes with the bold colors of his green outfit. The audience laughs at his chatter and that is his claim to fame. If you can’t hold your audience you have to get another line of work.
Seeing another crowd forming, we walk towards a tall rock by the ocean’s edge and watch a young man walking on top of a fence railing .
An English speaking Mexican promoter jumps on a wall in front of us and introduces his friends – cliff divers traveling to Acapulco.
While he promotes, a second tiny diver ascends stairs to the top of the rock, takes the single torch from his friend already there and lights another for his left hand. He then walks on the fence railing using both torches to guide his way. He creeps to the edge of the railing, stops and balances himself, then finally jumps out into space, holding his two arms out with a torch in each hand.
He disappears into the dark water, out of our sight. We look for him to surface but don’t see him as the crowd disperses when the dive is over.
The next time we see this performer, he is wrapped in a towel on the street asking for donations from a busload of gringos.
True to his word, our taxi driver is waiting for us when we start looking for him.
Divers and dolphins, on the same night, is two for the price of one and a reliable taxi driver, in Mexico, is almost an oxymoron.
Back in the 1950’s, after WW2, most people headed home to raise families.
Men were tired of shooting bullets and women were tired of making them. Instead of killing humanity the focus became re-populating humanity. An era of big bands was coming to a halt and an age of rock and roll, beat poetry, and abstract expressionist art was coming into its own. Jazz, an American art form, was in ascendance and its emphasis on rhythm, dissonance and drugs were a premonition of things to come.
Jack Kerouac, one of the beat generation’s shining stars, made a trip down to Mazatlan in the 50’s in an old bus, camped, and immortalized this place as one stop in his epic rollicking novel “On the Road.”
On a wall, by The Shrimp Bucket, is a plaque placed by the Mazatlan Historical Society to commemorate the exact point in place and time where the bard stopped roaming, drank beer, hung out with the locals, and dreamed of the proletariat overcoming. He looked for pleasure and put his stories down in long winding sentences where he only stopped writing to take a breath. His novel was new for its day but old in concept. He was the hero of his own epic Homeric poem. He was a tumbleweed travelling to new ports with his only home the inside of his bus or a bedroll spread out in some flophouse. His friends were fragile poets traumatized by war, big business, and moral restrictions.
Sitting in The Shrimp Bucket, you can look at a little hill that must have made Jack nostalgic for San Francisco. Even if you can’t agree with Kerouac’s self destroying lifestyle, you can understand why he was here, by the water, drinking beer with limes, almost naked bodies dancing in the surf and fishermen spinning stories of great marlin battles.
Kerouac would have turned sentimental at the marlin story telling but Hemingway, if here, would have relished each twist of the hooks.
Kerouac was beautiful in his willingness to edit nothing.
.Hemingway was beautiful in his willingness to cut everything to its heart.
They are both masters of prose storytelling.
I would have loved to be drinking at the next table to them, at the Shrimp Bucket on any starry Mexican night,listening to them talk poetry.
The early bird gets the worm, and, the early fisherman gets the fish.
One of the activities popular around Salto, according to TripAdvisor, is Dorado fishing.
One of the guides that receives the best write ups is Gianni Juncal, who speaks English and maybe writes it too.
All the reviews I’m seeing on my computer praise the Captain, who, reviewers say, works hard to give everyone a chance to catch fish. That is all you can do with fishing. Fish bite when they feel like it and they just don’t care about you standing all day in a boat showing them what you think they will like.
The best fishing grounds on the Rio Uruguay are up north, towards a huge hydroelectric dam that provides over 80% of Uruguay’s electricity. These world class fishing grounds also reach into Argentina which means special permits to wet a hook are needed to fish there. Gianni refers to La Zona in his E-mail reply to my fishing inquiry.
Because I leave Salto tomorrow, I send a declining thank you e mail back to the Captain.
The only way this fishing trip would have happened is if I had shown foresight and arranged it before I got to Uruguay.
Planning has never been one of my strong suits so I compensate by spending inordinate amounts of time and energy pondering things that have already happened and writing prose about it.
An opportunity that gets away is never as bad as an opportunity seized that doesn’t get its own write up.
This morning, I walk down Calle Uruguay, all the way to the Rio Uruguay.
This river separates Argentina and Uruguay. Though it isn’t the Mississippi or the Nile, or the Amazon, it meets the rock test. If a body of water is so big you can’t throw a rock across it, it becomes a river. The rivers, long ago, were the original freeways and big paddle wheels moving up and down the Mississippi are still romantic. Mark Twain, as great a writer as he is, looked fondly back on his days as a riverboat captain as some of his happiest.
Walking down Uruguay Street is an easy walk and when you come upon the river you are surprised there are so few craft on it. There is a new pier that lets me walk out over the river. A lady walking her dog takes a few snapshots this morning but no one else, but us, is on the pier. A ferry chugs past taking people to Argentina – those who have their papers in order.
I spy a fisherman docking his small boat on the river bank and hold up my phone to ask permission to take his photo.
He stands up in his boat, lifts two huge catfish he has caught and gives me a thumbs up. People here are so friendly you wish some of it could be spread around the world. His catfish are so big I can see their whiskers from the bridge I’m standing on.
“Go catch some more,” I shout across the river to him.
He doesn’t understand English, but he knows what I am saying.
Big fish give you bragging rights.
One of them is worth more than ten little ones, even if they don’t taste half as good.
I haven’t been to Greek islands but they must be similar to this place.
Following the Rambla past the port, past expensive homes, you reach the end of the Punta Del Este peninsula. At the end is a parking lot with exercise equipment, two mermaids, a flagpole with a Uruguayan flag flying, and an old man standing perilously close to incoming waves as he tries to fish rough waters while a friend watches.
These two mermaids are made from a concrete mix but they have been damaged. The tail of one has been severed from her body. There are limbs missing from both .
The statues look alive from a distance and you have to watch to make sure they aren’t moving to realize they are just sculptures. You can walk up to them and that is their problem. It doesn’t take much alcohol for someone to get carried away and vent frustration on two Goddesses who can’t fight back because a workman has anchored their tails in concrete.
The two old men fishing are being bold. Wind is kicking up waves and the one who is fishing is very close to being caught in one and becoming whisked out to sea.
At the end of land, I look for Neptune to rise out of the water with his seaweed fouled trident and demand to know what offerings I am making.
I haven’t been to Greek islands but it is easy to see how they came to have Gods and Goddesses.
There are forces in this universe we don’t control.
Building temples and worshiping God’s is not a bad precaution.
This young man cleans shellfish he harvested earlier this morning.
The shellfish are on the bottom of the bay and he uses a net to bring them up, a net weighted heavy that he casts out by hand, lets sink to the bottom, then wrestles up and into his small boat with shellfish captured in it.
He cleans his catch in a homemade sifter made from two by fours with a screen mesh nailed to the underside. On the concrete steps this morning he pours sea water over his catch and moves shells around in the bottom of the sifter with his hand to make mud stuck to the shellfish dissolve. It takes him three different pours before he scoops clean shells out of his sifter and puts them into a five gallon plastic paint bucket to sell to his customers.
While he works, seals swim to the edge of the walkway and bark. They are begging, but getting no response, from either of us, they take a breath of air and disappear back into their murky water.
There are plenty of steps one has to go through to get shellfish from the sea onto your plate.
These shell fish will end up on a local restaurant menu, part of a lunch special for visitors wearing diamond earrings and Rolex watches.
For some people, time and money mean the same thing and you don’t want to waste either.
The sun is barely awake.
After a hotel continental breakfast, it is time for me to hit the road.
The beaches on this marina side of the peninsula are non existent. The shores here are lined with rocks that create tide pools where multi-colored birds are hunting critters caught in the shallow water. Some of the docked boats are big, sleek, expensive and geared up for long ocean voyages. Others are less well taken care of and are used for transport, fishing, or other work by working class owners. It is early, but, on a few yachts, deck hands are bustling about while their Captain is below deck nursing his hangover with a bloody Mary.
Near the biggest pier in the city, fishermen lock their cars in a big parking lot and line up to board charter fishing trips.
The fishing grounds here are, according to multiple guidebooks, some of the best in the world.
Walking wears better than fishing this morning.
My experience with fishing is that it is hard to get the smell of cut bait off your fingers and you don’t always come home with fish.
All the fishermen I pass are smiling though, leaving terra firma for a peaceful ocean with nothing but sky, blue deep waters, a pole and tackle box, and great hopes.
.
One evening, as the sun is falling, it makes sense to stroll down to the water’s edge, follow a concrete pier that juts into the water like the end of a fishing pole left discarded by a disgruntled fisherman.
The pier is edged with giant stones and this is where fishermen and fisherwomen stand and cast out bait to try their luck.
There is a slight wind, the sky is clear, and the water of the Rio de la Plata is light brown. You cast as far as your heavy weight, heavy line, a twelve foot pole and open faced reel will let you go. There are cars parked with open trunks as men unload tackle boxes, plastic bags of bait shrimp, coolers with beer and soft drinks. At the very tip of the pier, young men crawl over rocks to cast out where it is deepest. The water is deep here and, not far away, cargo ships come into port to unload containers full of a cities needs.
Walking the course way, one sees poles bend and fishermen keep lines taut as they turn their reels, shorten line, and beach their pescado. When the hooked fish gets close to the rocks, it is lifted into the air and swung, like cargo , further up onto the rocks where it is pinned with work boots and then put on a stringer or into a plastic bag, or cut up for bait. The fish are mostly light skinned catfish. They have two long whiskers, broad mouths, and the soft looking white belly of bottom feeders.
Several of us strollers go all the way to the pier’s end and sit, feel the wind and watch the sun drop.
Colors appear on the city that make it seem less harsh. After a half hour, it is time to head home and leave anglers to their mission. They won’t be out long. They either catch their fill and pack up early, or get bored and go home.
Fishing is where rubber tires meet the road, where hopes and dreams meet hooks and sinkers.
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