The Girl of the Sea of Cortez Read Free

hair had been bleached to a light brown, just as Paloma’s own long auburn hair had been bleached nearly blond by salt and sun. Indio said something now and threw the fish at Manolo, who picked up another fish by its tail and whacked Indio on the head with it.
    Yowling and cursing, the fishermen flung fish at one another.Most missed their targets and landed in the water, to float there belly up.
    To Paloma, striding down the hill, the fight was nauseating, the waste obscene. It offended something deep inside her to see dead animals treated as if they had never been live beings.
    She bent over and picked up a rock and called out, “Hey!” The three in the skiff looked up. “If you have to throw things at each other, throw these.” And she cocked her arm and threw the rock as hard as she could, hoping it would strike the skiff and knock a hole in it. But the rock flew wide and plopped in the water, and Jo responded by laughing and ticking his thumbnail off his front teeth and pointing at her—the coarsest, most insulting, and most contemptuous gesture he could make.
    Paloma turned away.
    Her father had explained the problem to her many times, during those early days when she had first complained about the young men who fished without care, taking everything and wasting much. “The sea, this sea, is too rich,” he had said. “It has too much life.”
    She had not understood.
    “If fish were in short supply here, fishermen might fish with care, in self-defense, for fear of killing off their livelihood. But here,” Papa said, “nature seems to be showing off, proving to us how rich it can be. There is so much here, people see no reason to be careful. One day they will, but by then it may be too late. For now, it is all there to take.”
    Paloma had loved the sea since the time of her earliest memories. Her father, Jobim, had recognized the affinity between his first-born child and the sea, and had determined to nourish it. When she was a baby, he had bathed her in the seaand taught her to float, and then to swim, and to fear few living things but to respect them all.
    And he had captivated her with his descriptions of the things that made their sea, the Sea of Cortez, unique.
    The Sea of Cortez itself, he said, existed because of an ancient accident. Ages and ages ago, the peninsula known as Baja California had been part of the Mexican mainland. Then, at some point in prehistory, the plates that fit together to make the earth’s surface had realigned themselves and caused what must have been the most spectacular earthquake of all time.
    “You know how you take an old, ratty shirt and tear it up the back to make rags?” Jobim had said. “That’s what happened to Mexico. It split along its main seam, the San Andreas Fault. And when the seam split there was a big space, and the Pacific Ocean rushed in, and a new sea was born.”
    The sea had had no name then, of course. Jobim read to her from a book that said it was not until 1536 that the sea was named for the Spanish explorer Hernando Cortez, who discovered Lower California and the sea that separated it from the Mexican mainland.
    “Isn’t that funny?” he had said. “Doesn’t that make you laugh?”
    “What?” Paloma wanted very much to share the laugh, but she didn’t understand. “What’s funny?”
    “That they say some Spaniard discovered this place. Your ancestors were here, living and farming and fishing, when the Spaniards were still living in caves and eating bugs. All Cortez did was kill people and go on his way.” Papa shook his head. “And for that they named the sea after him.”
    One book even credited Cortez with naming all of California. According to the story, as they cruised north along thewest coast of the American continent, the Spaniards suffered badly from the heat. At one point, Cortez was supposed to have remarked, in Latin, to one of his officers that he found the region to be stinking hot, as hot ( calidus ) as a furnace (