Manuel is a local man, somewhere between forty and seventy years old I’d peg it at, and has the market on selling lobster and fish to the cruisers in Los Gatos. We talked to him on the beach last night after eating our lunner already and told him we didn’t need anything. A couple of hours later he swang back through and stopped to ask me if I had any dinghy gas I could spare. I had a bit more than a gallon for him, which he thanked me profusely for, and then we talked for a few minutes more.

When he told me he lived over in Timbabiche I recounted for him my experience last year of getting stung by a stingray on that beach. He cringed and howled in pain just thinking about it, which gave me some satisfaction—I wasn’t just being a puss after all. We shook hands goodbye and I couldn’t help but notice that his hands were two big calluses—rough valleys of skin that didn’t resemble any other hand I’d ever shaken. These were the hands of a man who has fished his whole life, pulling in nets, getting stuck with hooks, coral, and fish bones, or sliced open on barnacles as he peeked below rocky ledges looking for the telltale tentacles of a lobster. Man do I have it easy.

This morning he roared up as we made our way to the beach. He wanted to give us lobster as payment for the gas. If there is one food that would be utterly wasted on this family it is fresh caught lobster. Instead we accepted a fish, I shook his big lump of hand again, and we said adios.