If you could go back in time about 500 years and walk up the shoreline of the
Estero Padre Ramos (on Nicaragua's Pacific Shore) you would meet someone like
don Carlos.  A slightly built man whose layers of tight muscle are stretched
taut over a wiry frame, Carlos is laconic and polite, thoughtful and austere.
His hand on the tiller of a 25 horsepower Yamaha outboard he carried down to
the shore on his bronzed shoulder, he carries us out into the estuary and up
the tributaries that carry fresh water down into the mangroves and the wetlands
that make up one of Nicaragua's most gorgeous corners.  Indigenous traits
feature strongly in his features, from the sharp black hair to the high
cheekbones.  He chooses his words carefully, feels strongly about the estuary,
which has been his home since his childhood, and his family's home for many
generations before that.

"There's good fishing up in that area," he gestures with one hand, "but there
are 'gators too.  We found one as long as this boat  --  about 8 feet  --
including his tail.  Guess he likes the small birds."  If there are other good
fishing spots, Carlos doesn't mention them, but it's not because we are
competition for his family, who has lived off the sea for generations, it's
because there is no need to say it.  His gaze wanders out to the mouth of the
estuary, where sea surf pounds on the labrynth of shifting sandbars that
delimit the edge of the Pacific.  "That's where we found the drowning victims,"
he remembers.  A fisherman by trade, drownings are part of the seascape, but
these were different, illicit Peruvians bound for California and the
undocumented labor pool.  Their boat capsized in the surf at night, and all of
them  --  about a dozen  --  drowned.

The Estuary is gorgeous, rife with egrets and herons and lots of birds too fast
or too small to positively identify.  We saw a hawk drawing lazy circles over
the mangroves, and the tracks of pipers in the dark volcanic sand that made up
a dozen small islets in the south.  The mangroves are particularly inhospitable
for humans  --  one of very few landscapes that have much hope of resisting
human encroachment  --  and within their snarled roots and branches, so
frequently indistinguishable from each other, an unparalleled range of wildlife
live their quiet existences under the twin shadows of Volcán Cosigüina and
Volcán San Cristobal.  The landscape has a primeval look to it, but it is
intensely alive in all aspects.

Don Carlos and his kin are as much a part of the landscape as the mangroves
are.  He knows the water like the back of his hand, goes out to sea in small
boats to catch fish he know by their indigenous names, like Guirango instead of
Pargo Rojo (red snapper), returns home to a simple home he built himself on the
shoreline, his Salvadoran wife, and his four little girls.  His wife's
nationality is almost inconsequential this close to the border, and he and his
family travel back and forth between both countries placidly, as if the only
thing that separated one from the other was the Gulf of Fonseca, not politics.
Five hundred years ago, he would've been right.

Tourism offers a hopeful alternative source of income to people like don Carlos
as Nicaragua grows and the economy strengthens.  The estero is a fragile
ecosystem that can only withstand the increased pressure of the burgeoning
Nicaraguan population to a certain point.  You can overfish an estuary as
easily as you can overfish the oceans.  In the meantime, Don Carlos will
continue to live his days as he always has, and every one of them will make
sense to him.