French Fries on the Playa de Cortes

9 December 2006
Besford

The road from Hermosillo to Kino eventually thinned out after Buck Ibarra’s place. Buck was some sort of renegade, part Basque, part Indian and pretty much wholly a rascal. With half a dozen kids from an equal number of mothers, several happily residing together out there in his compound of huts and rusted travel trailers, he was just another of Dad’s curious friends. Many of them had criminal records – some pretty serious. I can vaguely recall that it wasn’t long after we first moved to Sonora that Dad became friends with a gringo staying out at one lonely ranch (God knows how Dad ever met these guys – he’d frequently just show up at dinner time, trailing some shy 'down and outer' who’d fascinate me and slightly disgust my Mom; every one had an interest in mining, many were genuine prospectors of the burro persuasion, for some adventure had become a habit they couldn't break; I never figured out whether they were souls lost or souls with purpose and direction, marching to their own rhythm). This fellow at the ranch, I think it was called Escondido ('hidden' – pretty appropriate, huh?) had already been out there the best part of 7 years when we arrived, never once having travelled the 20 miles or so into town. It was only after the statue of limitations had well and truly expired that he ventured into the city – I'm sure that one of his first stops had to be one of the bars that made up the front rooms of the houses in the ‘Zona’. Even at six I knew the Zona, one afternoon I'd dropped in and had a soda pop with the proprietress of one of the nicer houses but, that’s a story for another time.

Until they began to irrigate the backlands between the river valleys and coast in the 1960’s, the space between Hermosillo, the capital on the river, and Kino, a beach settlement on the Sea of Cortes, didn’t appear to have much to offer man or animal. There were a few scampering desert mammals, Gila monsters, plenty of snakes and some coyotes but not much else. In summer it got so hot so quickly that the trip was only healthy if you left around 7 AM to get there and started back around 6 or 7 PM.

The beach at Kino was very white and very big. The water was clear but you didn’t swim unless you could spot the fins of porpoises in the Bay. The Sea of Cortes has as many tiburones ('sharks') as anywhere in the world. You were only sure that it was safe to swim with the porpoises, otherwise it was build a sand castle.

At one end of the beach there was a point called Black Rock (imaginatively named because of it’s dominant colour) and some ex-fisherman ran a café there. Most of the place was actually jammed back into a cave that had been carved out by thousands of years of waves. You'd give the proprietor whatever fish you’d caught and he’d clean and fry them. His beer was cold (said my Dad) but to me the key thing was that he made papas fritas (‘chips’ or French fries) like I'd never had. He didn’t peel the potatoes, just cut them into wedges and tossed them into a pan swimming in pork fat! There they'd float until they turned a perfect golden brown, flecked with black. Wow! Strange that in the 1950’s, fat wasn’t so bad for you as it is now.

Dad was a hobbyist fisherman – he loved it. He could fish equally in a lake, a stream or the ocean; he even knew how to tie trout flies. Mom fished to keep him company. I mostly played on the rocks or the beach, the only fascination I found in fish was watching them jerk spasmodically as their lives drained away when they were tossed onto the rock. When Dad pulled one in, he would remove his hook and then bang the fish on the head with the blunt end of his pocket knife. When Dad was too far to take care of whatever she'd caught, Mom would just toss the fish onto the rocks, she was too squeamish to bop them. I'd then watch them struggle for breath. Most died in what must have been terrible agony but some managed to bounce themselves back into the sea, determined never to pick at anything dangling at the end of a line, no matter how appetising it looked. Before you go condemning me for my morbid voyeurism, remember that this was the 1950’s. We weren’t as sensitive then and I was only 5 or 6 so I’m not sure that I truly understood what I was watching.

In that decade, I believe that not only weren't we as sensitive as we are now, I’m pretty convinced the fish didn't have much feeling either. Whatever future punishment I let myself in for by witnessing these scenes, though, the memory of the papas fritas is still with me today, half a century later!