On Your Own

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It´s a warm morning with a cool light breeze. My island, I call it mine because it is in my view, drifts in ocean haze yet. A white blot on the horizon, a cruise ship departing on its endless rounds, full of paid for a good time people. I was down there yesterday, on the beach that is out front here. Next to the harbor and its breakwaters is a little strip of beach land that the fishermen are taking over, just right above the hightide line. Sand and rocks and small cliffs behind. Sometimes it becomes apparent that land has no owner holding it totally legally and that gives the edge to move in on it and make it yours. This will be the fourth jump I have seen on property on the ocean front. All these places are where a boat can be launched in good weather. The first, Puerto Nuevo started out like this one here twenty years ago, a few shacks pieced together and being lived in and worked from. Puerto Nuevo is now rows of streets with seafood restaurants two stories high, one after the other, souvenier stalls and liquor stores. (what more does a tourist need?) As I sat on the cliffs above these little shacks started here, watching a fisherman mend his nets I am struck by the freeness of his life. This shack is wood washed in and brought in, a couple car hoods, various tarps and plastics, dirt floors and carved out dirt steps leading to it. The kitchen is outside and has a place for a wood fire and a refrigerator grate to cook on. He has two homemade stools and a chair without a back around it. If he can hold onto this property perhaps someday he can get papers for it, if not it is his for now, free of charge. It’s a life that’s been there time on end, fishing, just like his ancesotrs. Living form the land. His movements are so practiced, his space so well used, so inventive. I could smell the fish he was cooking. I know that type, he would have invited my husband and I to eat gladly if we would let him. Perhaps next time, and I will bring some tortillas or bread for it, maybe some beer to wash it down. It is a wonderful thought, to just pick a spot, take it and use it and make a living from it. A country that allows the poor a place and a way to make it is a good thing. Some countries the gap is so wide the poor must just stay where they are at. No way out. I have seen the poor get free land and make it into something and sell it, buy more, and go from there. Some have got very rich this way, using their wits and starting at the bottom. Tonight as the sun sets I will go back down there, to watch the progress and see what the catch of the day is. I think it might be one of those pinkish grey sunsets, slowing fading into the ocean, the colors all subtle and soft blending in with the lapping of the waves. The ocean has been calm.