K-noa: Night and Day

"Todo bien?"

"Claaaro, to' bien."  Hang-loose sign, bro nod, peace sign, salute, slap five and knuckles.  So the greeting goes.  All good?  Definitely.  Off to the beach, or course it's all good.  

What could be bad in Canoa?

Well, It could rain a little.  It might be windy making the surf choppy, or the wind could be coming off the ocean making the waves too humongous for you.  It could be "chilly."  But we're from Vermont, and the Pacific is always warm -- that's like the briar patch for us -- our kids swim in the North Atlantic in August, until their lips turn blue, which usually takes about 30 seconds.  But in Canoa, you could get sand in your pants.  A rash on your chest from surfing.  A restaurant might be out of strawberries for your smoothie, so you go with raspberry.  In Canoa, there isn't much to worry about for the average tourist.  

But Canoa is a working town, too.  Tourism does not seem to have eclipsed fishing, at least not yet.  Not like it has in other Ecuadorian fishing towns like Montanita.  A couple dozen panga boats line the beach, mingling with the shade tents you can rent for the day for 3 or 5 bucks.  Every day, through high season and low, the fisherman come down the hill bringing their outboard motors and nets on three-wheeled bikes.  Regardless of where the tide is, they head out in the morning and come back one at a time, from the late afternoon through dusk.  

Rolling the boats down into the tide must be relatively easy.  To get them back up the beach requires five or six people to push.  The dudes come flying into the breaks, right between the surfers and the swimmers, gunning it all the way to the beach, where at the last second the driver cuts it, tips the motor forward hauling it out of the water, prop still spinning.  In the meantime, another guy has jumped out of the boat and is in the process of turning the nose into the surf.  It takes a wave or two to complete the one-eighty, and by then, all two or three guys are out of the boat.  One of them has gone up to drag the rollers back down.  Or they've called ahead and a young boy from the family, who's presumably too young yet to man a boat, is dragging them down.   Or he's kicking them, one at a time, rolling them with the bottom of his foot.

But first they've got to get the nets wrapped up into huge bundles, often carried two at a time slung on a pole, their weight bending the bamboo.  Then comes the motor, where one guy shoulders it and makes a run for the high tide line where the three-wheeler is waiting, and hopefully a partner since he can't lower the motor himself -- it takes two people to drop it, lean it against the trike or another boat 'til they're ready to head up.  

Once they've got the gear up on the beach and out of the way of the tide, they start cleaning fish.  By this time, there's often a group gathered around the boat haggling for the catch, restaurant owners and regular people too.  Usually there is a swirl of frigatebirds signaling the arrival of the catch.  If you're wondering where to buy some fish, just look for the frigatebirds.

Sometimes they'll bring the boat up before unloading the fish.  Either way, the boat has got to come up every day, just as it's got to go down.  Using two ten-inch diameter logs, usually fixed with ropes tied into grooves at one end for dragging, the boat is rolled up the beach.   At low tide, the beach is relatively flat.  A couple guys weight the bow of the boat (pointed into the surf), and someone sneaks the roller under the stern.  Then they roll it forward to the balance point, where the second log is brought around and slid under the stern, the first having rolled under the bow.  Then the leapfrog begins.  Roll beach-ward to the balance point, bring the back log around to the front and put it under the stern while the pushers weight the bow.  Roll forward, and repeat.  Finally, they hit the softer sand, where the rollers are best put on a couple of sticks of bamboo, to give the logs some lift on the soft beach sand.  Here, the beach is the steepest, and passersby often stop to help push the boat up the last steep pitch -- heave, rest, back roller to front, heave… until the boat, facing the sea, is safely above the high tide line and ready for tomorrow morning's work.

If you help push a boat up on the beach, you get free fish.  I only helped a couple of times, and neither time did I ask for fish, mainly because we can afford to pay for seafood.  Like a lot of Ecuador, there is a stark contrast between rich tourists and work-a-day people living, literally in this case, hand-to-mouth.  We met a beer vendor named Giovanni, who makes a quarter a beer, sells a case a day.  On bad days (overcast, no tourists, few sales) he helps push boats ashore before walking off with a bag-full of small fish to feed his family of eight.  Giovanni and I are the same age, and it hits me that we could so easily find ourselves in different situations.  Tourists, at least a lot of us, are wealthy by virtue of the fact that we are here, by virtue of the fact that every dollar we saved in the US is three or four in Ecuador.  The fact that we have round-trip tickets and will be returning to our work, homes, schools, etc.  Even most "poor" gringo backpackers have parents at home to bail them out if something happens, have $400 backpacks, $100 shoes, those colored water bottles no one here understands; even if they're on a tight budget, it's temporary -- we're headed back to the US to continue consuming a disproportionate amount of the world's resources.

If anyone minds this in Canoa, they don't say so.  At least not that I heard in the three and a half weeks we lived there.  Of course, we're a different sort of fish.  But like the rest of Ecuador, there are plenty of Ecuadorian tourists patronizing the beach, especially wealthier quiteños who fill the town on weekends.  So goes the pulse of the town: Monday through Thursday, business as usual, handsfull of backpackers and surfers and fisherman enjoy a lot of space on the beach; by Friday, the Quito tour busses and streams of cars arrive, the hostels fill, and the palapa bars, dozens of which line the beach pulsing with awful techno-cumbia music, competing it seems with volume to lure patrons into their wall-less establishments.

But Canoa has a dark side as well.  One morning Kerry had gone out for some milk, and there were crowds of people outside the local public health clinic.  There was a young man lying in the back of a pickup truck, presumably shot in the face.  Townspeople gathered to gawk; the immediate family huddled, hoping for the impossible; surfers in their own clique chatted, uncharacteristically serious.  The bomberos showed up in their emergency vehicle, hopped out of the truck with a backboard, hustling over to the pickup where they took a look at the prospective patient.  One guy shaking his head, one glance at the young man was enough to confirm the obvious.  They headed back to their truck, much slower than their arrival.  He was a lost cause.  

In contrast to the shock and grief of most of the townspeople, two men next to their motorbike glared at the crowd, one talking angrily into his cell phone.  Suddenly, the phone-guy came forward, shoving his way through people roughly, still talking into his device.  Observing the man in critical condition, he seemed satisfied, pushed his way roughly back to his bike, and the two zoomed off.

"Those were the killers," said our landlord, Mr. Fabio two days later.  "Mafia."  The generic, looming presence of organized crime.   Emissaries of death.  The kid did not live, and the rumors swirled for the next couple of days.   There was a theft, it was revenge, and so on.  But Mr. Fabio made it simple: it was a hit.  No need to imagine the motives; there are only one or two possibilities.  

Signs also warn people to stay off the beach at night.  It's not safe, especially for women.  Rape is a big problem in Canoa, and the victims are almost always gringas, sometimes lured onto the beach by one of the many surfer dudes.  He might ask a girl if she wants to smoke a joint, and when they arrive on the beach, a few of his buddies are waiting.  This is not to say that all surfer dudes are rapists, but a few are.   And everyone there seems to know it.  If you are a single backpacking woman, you can expect some aggressive attention from some of these guys, and if it's consensual, then more power to you.  We saw some of the same dudes in January with new, different backpacking girlfriends in May.  Who knows how many there were in between.  

But if there is sexual violence, there isn't much follow-up from the police who -- as it's invariably a tourist since no Canoan woman would ever go out late -- will blame the victim.  "What was she thinking going out on the beach like that, with that guy, at that time?  She must have wanted it."  If there were violence perpetrated against a local woman, vigilante justice would rule.  In nearby San Vicente, two robbers shot a guy in cold blood because they knew he had a lot of money.  Next day, half the town saw them stoned, hung, and burned.  From what I hear, the police don't mind this kind of justice at all since they turn a blind eye and no investigation follows such an event.  

For itinerant travelers though, there is no such reaction.  The Peace Corps has apparently declared Canoa too dangerous for its young volunteers.  I ran into one guy at a bar, a gringo tourist who'd obviously been beat up.  He'd heard a girl scream, gone out to help, fortunately giving her a chance to run off.  But her escape left the frustrated would-be molesters to take their aggression out on him.  

To most of this, we remained blissfully oblivious, a family in an apartment in a well-protected, well-sealed hotel who went to bed by nine.  We were never threatened.  To us, Canoa was sleepy, tranquilo -- a paradise for our children who had the run of the beach all day long.  We met many wonderful people, both locals and travelers, gringos, Europeans, and Canoans.  We were made to feel at home in our little rented compound, and our kids played with the hotel owners' kids.  

Like many places, Canoa has two distinct cultures: the day culture and the night culture.  Unlike many places, night and day overlap quite a bit.  I don't mind a little nightlife now and then, but now that I'm old(er), I keep it pretty mellow.  Clearly as a family, we inhabit the day and are oblivious to much of the night-life.  And that is fine by us.   We learned to surf.  We played in the waves.  We ate awesome food.  We made friends.  We slowed down to the rhythm of the days, defined by the pulse of the tide.   "Todo bien?" is as much an affirmation as it is a question.  And for us at least, it was.