James Grippando - A King's ransom

It was just the two of us and a pilot in an old and noisy single-engine Cessna. We flew slightly north and then east, directly into the rising sun. For ninety minutes an endless green forest unfolded below us, rugged in places, rolling elsewhere. Low-hanging clouds curled around the mountains, misty wisps of white that created the illusion of snow-filled valleys. Blue lakes and crystal rivers glistened with the first streaks of daylight.

And then I saw the ocean. Old, almost primitive-looking fishing boats bobbed peacefully on undulating seas of midnight blue. A narrow ribbon of sand stretched for miles to the north and south, not a soul in sight, not a footprint anywhere. It was practically virgin beach, the famous Mosquito Coast- La Mosquitia .

“Our country is very beautiful, no?” Maria shouted over the whining engine.

I nodded and smiled to myself, realizing finally why my father had come.

Ten minutes later we landed. After the picturesque views from above, it was like falling out of bed in the middle of a tropical dream. Maria had neglected to mention the lack of a runway. Heavy rains had washed out the major part of the airstrip. I didn’t ask how that made landing in a field any safer. Once on the ground, Maria and I hopped a ride in the back of a banana truck, bounced our way down a muddy trail, and jumped off at the edge of town.

Puerto Cabezas was the largest city on Nicaragua’s eastern shore, the largest for hundreds of miles along the entire Mosquito Coast. Buildings were old, some made of blocks and some of wood, nearly all in need of paint and basic repairs. Some of the roads were cobblestone, as in Managua, but we’d found a rutted street that was under heavy construction. Within minutes I was exhausted, the mud pulling at my boots like quicksand. Puddles were like land mines, in the sense that it was impossible to tell which one might actually be a flooded storm sewer with no grate. One careless step and I could have disappeared from the face of the earth, no one to rescue me. It was a sleepy place, especially on a Sunday morning, which added to the very palpable sense of isolation. The city was geographically remote, bordered on the east by the Atlantic Ocean and separated from the rest of the country by mountains, coastal plains, and the largest remaining rain forest in Central America. Culturally it was distinct, no shadows of Sandino and Che Guevara, so omnipresent in the west. This area was home to some seventy thousand Miskitos, the largest remaining group of indigenas, a proud and somewhat autonomous people.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“We need a boat.”

Ankle-deep in mud, I thought she was exaggerating only slightly. As we continued down the hill and toward the dock, however, I realized that what she meant was a boat to take us offshore.

The dirt road to the ocean was lined with shacks and grounded fishing boats that had been washed ashore some years earlier by Hurricane Mitch. The boats looked abandoned, but the laundry line and the naked little kids playing out back made me realize that they’d been converted into homes. The path grew narrower as we neared the water, and finally we broke through the thicket onto the beach.

The sounds impressed me most. The gentle waves lapped the shore in a rhythmic, soothing whisper. Seagulls cawed overhead. The warm breeze was barely strong enough to have kept a sail from luffing, yet I could see it moving across the water, little ripples on the surface. My father had taught me how to do that, to see the wind when others couldn’t.

“He wants three bucks.”

Maria’s voice snapped my daydream. “What?”

“He’ll take us where we want to go for three bucks.”

A shirtless old man was standing beside his little wooden boat, ready to go. I dug the bills out of my money belt and gave them to Maria. Wherever we were going, a few bucks seemed reasonable.

On the thirteenth pull the small outboard started. We headed straight east for about ten minutes, then veered north toward an eighty-foot fishing boat. From a hundred yards away I could see the rows of extra scuba tanks on deck. I’d never seen them in action, but nearly all my life I’d heard my father’s stories about the famous Miskito divers. For thousands of years sea turtles had been their favorite target. A lone diver would swim alongside the turtle, rope it, and then hold on for a rapid descent to the deep, risking digits as he clamped the turtle’s mouth shut with his bare hand and forced it to surface. If the diver could hold on long enough, an entire Indian village had food for a week. Sea turtles were a protected species nowadays, but the fishing companies had tapped in to those same skills for the harvest of lobsters.

The old man killed his little engine, and my ears stopped humming. The waves were bigger this far out, and the small boat rocked a good bit now that we were adrift.

“Is that a Rey’s Seafood boat?” I asked.

“No. But it’s just like the ones we use.”

I saw only a few people on deck. “Divers are all down, I guess?”

“Yeah. This is where the money is. Probably about twenty-five of them scooping up lobster.”

“They don’t use any traps at all?”

“Some. But mostly it’s just send the divers down and stuff lobsters in a bag. They are all over the place out here.”

“Must be quite a haul.”

“Sure it is. These divers are Miskitos. They’re experts. Each one will bring up about forty-five pounds of whole lobster a day.”

I watched the waves, not sure what the point of this journey was. “So is this what you brought me to see?”

Her eyes were fixed on the dinghy a hundred yards away. A diver suddenly broke the surface and clung to the side. She handed me a pair of binoculars and said, “ That is what I brought you to see.”

I trained the binoculars on the diver. He looked exhausted, half drowned, his skin turning a strange shade of blue as he coughed up seawater. A frantic crewman finally dragged him into the dinghy.

“Looks like he ran out of air.”

“Of course he did. They don’t use gauges.”

I did a double take. “That’s crazy. How long do they stay down?”

“They come up and down as they think they need it. Some are better than others at figuring out how long is too long.”

“With no gauges? They could drown, get the bends.”

“Some of them do.”

Her voice had an ominous tone. I lowered the binoculars, looked her in the eye. “So this is what Lindsey saw?”

“Plenty of people have seen it. Lindsey was going to write a story about it.”

“How did she find out about it?”

“Senor Cruz. I told you, she was using him.”

“Isn’t that a kick in the teeth? Some young American girl sweet-talks him into exposing the Achilles’ heel of the industry, then dumps him and runs off to her typewriter for her first coup ever as a wannabe journalist.”

“That’s Lindsey.”

“He couldn’t have been too happy about that.”

“A lot of people weren’t happy.”

“My father included, I imagine. Which probably made the story all the more attractive to her.”

I looked again toward that diver lying in the boat, still coughing and trying to recover. Something wasn’t adding up. My father, the man I knew, was the last guy on earth who’d exploit these Indians.

“Did my father know about this?”

“You probably should talk to Lindsey about that.”

“That’s the whole point. I don’t know where she is.”

“I told you, people don’t want this story told. She’s in hiding.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I helped her find a place to hide.”

“You know where Lindsey is?”

She nodded.

“Can you tell me how to find her?”