There are changes happening in this small community, like anywhere I suppose. Some are troubling and some hold tremendous promise. In the context of what’s happening in the world at large (wars, famine, genocide, etc.), the changes in Pontal de Coruripe wouldn’t seem to amount to much. Another small town loses some of the things it once held dear. The old people remember. You see the nostalgia in their eyes, a peculiar mixture of joy and sadness when they recall old friends, simpler times. The young don’t know, or maybe don’t care about, how things have changed since the old days, or about what’s been lost. They humor their elders in the stories they tell, but the reality is this: they have their own very real concerns, and the past may not always be one of them.

But then there are changes with broader resonance, changes we should all pay attention to. My thoughts keep returning to one particular issue the village is wrestling with: the proposed construction of a massive shipyard right in the bay of Coruripe where oil tankers would be built. Many people are afraid to talk openly about it, as threats (both direct and indirect) have likely been made by the local government of Coruripe and/or the developer against anyone who openly organizes or speaks out against the project. That said, everyone is talking about it…everyone has something to say.

The proposed site for the shipyard is on a 6 square kilometer swathe of protected mangrove forest and marshland where the Coruripe River meets the Atlantic. In a very real sense, these marshes are the cradle of the sea…as scores of fish, shrimp and crabs use them to spawn and replenish their numbers. If the shipyard were to be built, it would without doubt decimate the local fish population…moreso than commercial fishing already has. (Environmental impact studies tend to get overlooked here when major industrial interests are at stake.) It would also impact the village’s modest tourism industry, and in general alter whatever balance or modicum of sustainability the local economy currently enjoys.

The young people, who desperately need jobs, seem to support the shipyard project. They see a solution to high unemployment, few opportunities for advancement and, sadly, the end game of a long string of broken promises and dreams. The older people, with all the perspective of age, see it differently. Yes, the shipyard may bring jobs in the short term. But at what long term cost? What would happen to all the fish? To the village’s 500 fishermen? And, more to the point, to the very soul of the place?

Only time will tell.

Allison and I will no doubt continue to talk about these issues…and figure out how to deal with them in the various incarnations of our project on Pontal. In the meantime, we marvel at the complexity of such a seemingly simple and small place, the tensions that make life rich, wonderful and also hard.

Of course, it has taken us the better part of 8 days to piece together this story of how fish moves daily from the Atlantic waters off the coast of Northeast Brazil through the streets and homes of this small community and then, at least in part, out to the world beyond. Yesterday, as Barron reported, we saw a very different side of Pontal…the so-called “fabrica de gelo” (or ice factory) where shrimp are shelled and deep-frozen for international export. We learned from a 67-year-old fisherman named “Luis Larsey,” with whom we conducted a 30-minute interview this morning, that very little of the shrimp being processed at the fabrica de gelo comes from the fishermen in Pontal. Instead, it seems the factory buys most of its shrimp from other states within Brazil, only to transport it back to those very same regions for export. So for now at least, two worlds exist side by side here — the medium-scale boat and net fishing culture of Pontal and the industrialized system of the fabrica.

But, I lose my main thread. For, these last twenty-four hours have, above all, taught us that “estoria” (storytelling) is much more important than “historia” for understanding the past, present, and future of this place to which we have returned….returned with the relatively modest goal of developing a documentary project about the fishermen of a community far from home. Many of the stories we have heard over and over, in different forms and with different protagonists, are stories of outsiders who have come to study Pontal but, in the process, have become “a gente de a gente” (literally, person of the people.) For example, we have heard often the tale of an American anthropologist named “Shephard” who came to Pontal in the 1960s to study the then impoverished fishing village, a story that makes me realize how deep the spirit of hospitality runs here. While Shephard came to Pontal as a social scientist– to observe the daily life of work and food procurement here –he left as a member of the community, having taught Larsey’s mother the artesenal craft that is today a major source of income for families in Pontal.

And we too now feel this same sense of community in this place where so many people have opened their front porches and homes to us, have helped us improve our portuguese, have offered us gifts to take back when we leave. As I wrote in my first post at the beginning of this week, Pontal now feels like a kind of second home for us. And so, I will always be grateful for these 10 days that we will have spent here — staying put, far from home.

For now, I leave you with a kind of visual diary of our past 24-hours in Pontal….

Photos of our new home (Pousada de Eleiana & Paulo), Our fast friend Jose Valereio and the kids of the capoeira / art project, ‘Zito” and Quiterria, Zito’s sister Neli, and Luis Larsey!

Right now we’re taking advantage of the bad weather to catch up on some writing and planning for our final 2-3 days of the trip. I think we were both skeptical when we got here that we’d need the full 9 days to do everything we needed to do for our various projects related to Pontal. It’s such a small place. But now that we’re well past the midway point, we’re actually having to make a fairly precise schedule to ensure we cover all crucial bases (for instance, interviewing the president of the local association of fishermen).

It looks like the rain is letting up so I’ll sign off for now. In the meantime, here are some shots of the Bee Gees…

We will have more to report later today, along with a smattering of photos and (if our internet connection proves worthy) video footage. For now I leave you with my favorite memory from yesterday…When Nela, standing on the beach explaining the process of that gigantic net that had it’s maiden voyage yesterday (about which Barron says more below), told me that there are now fisherwomen in Pontal. In her words, “eu sou uma pescadora!”

If I had to compress the past 5 days into a single post, which I guess I do, a handful of things would stand out. On Monday I spent the day out at sea (from 4 in the morning until 3 in the afternoon) on a commercial fishing boat with 3 fishermen. The experience of being on the boat was much as I remember it from 2008, although the seas weren’t nearly as rough this time and the trip was three hours shorter. Aside from getting to know the fisherman and getting good photo coverage of the work on the boat, perhaps the most singular thing about the day was getting treated to a homecooked (or rather, boatcooked) meal prepared by the captain, Deda. As the day began, Deda deftly butchered a chicken on the deck of the boat and in an aluminum pot stewed it with vegetables, garlic, onion and spices. In another, he put dried beans, rice and vegetables. With both pots simmering over a low flame, the men returned to their work for the next 4 hours and in the late morning, after the first catch had been pulled in, dumped on the deck and sorted into baskets and piles, they paused for a repast. Because I’d expressed my taste for shellfish, Deda quickly prepared a special portion of shellfish for me from the day’s first catch: giant shrimp sauteed in the same mixture used to stew the chicken and a pot of steamed crabs and spiny lobsters. Amid the hard work of fishing, the moment was strangely and wonderfully domestic…four men squatting on the deck of a small fishing boat hunched over bowls of rice, beans, chicken and shellfish…like a seafaring episode of Bonanza but with better food. I’ll also remember my long conversations with Deda about the life of the Pontal fisherman.

Another highlight was walking out into the campo to visit the captain of the boat I photographed in 2008, whose name is Zito. Last week he broke his leg on the boat while hauling out a net and it appears that his immediate future as a fisherman is uncertain. I brought him prints and a small book from our time together. Today I met his sister Nela (also a fisherwoman) and she told me that yesterday Zito invited friends and family over to his house to see the book I made him and that he was quite proud. That felt all right.

Finally, today Allison and I happened to be walking around the harbor when we discovered that the village was about to inaugurate an enormous new net used for shore fishing (meaning it’s not dragged from a boat out at sea…it’s used in the harbor and is so big it requires about 50 people to get it into the water and pull it back onto shore). It was part fishing expedition, part celebration, as dozens of women from the village (and some men) waded out waist-deep into the harbor and in a staggering 1/8-mile arc of net hauled in hundreds of fish that were divided among the revelers. That too was all right.

Other than that I’ve been very pleased with how the photographic work is going. For hours a day I’ve been wandering up and down the beaches talking to fishermen, who generously give their time, knowledge and wit, and hammering this idea of a project into a tangible thing that hopefully will communicate something of the uniqueness of this place.

In an email to friends and family this past weekend, Barron reflected that our return to Pontal, and to the Pousada da Ada, has been somewhat bittersweet. Ada has been embroiled for the last year in a trying sale of the inn she has run for 25 years (a place where travelers from around the globe have come to find refuge around her table and in her lush, overgrown garden), but from which she now wants to retire. More about Ada and the story of her life’s work here, later. To return to my thread, I have been thinking all day—during the long hours that Barron was out at sea with three fishermen photographing them and their work (and, as I imagine he will relay in detail, eating delicacies from their catch prepared especially for him on the boat)—about his email from Saturday evening, where he wrote that our return here reminds us that you can never really go “home” and find the place of your daydreams.

Prone to nostalgia, I find this truth a hard one to accept. It’s perhaps the reason why, as travelers, we rarely return to the places that have most moved and excited us, however forcefully on a first visit we proclaim intentions of returning. And yet, I am grateful for this return—grateful for these ten days that, here, where time slows and opens up, will feel no doubt like many more. Of course, it has taken the better part of three days to leave the pace of our lives at home and begin to inhabit the rhythm of Northeast Brazil…where people flow in and out of one another’s homes, where work and leisure are tightly interwoven (even on the fishing boats), where the afternoon siesta from 12 to 3 is nothing short of a sacred rite.

Even as I write this, sitting at Ada’s square wooden table with the warm Atlantic breeze flowing from the alley that runs in front of the pousada through open windows across my hands and out the back open doors into the covered veranda and garden beyond, people pass in and out, stopping to shoot the breeze (an expression made richer in meaning here). For Pontal is a place where people rise early but retreat at midday. It is a place where the front stoops and covered porches are communal spaces for women to sit in the late afternoon, gossiping (“fazendo fofoca”) and making the handcrafts for which Pontal is known.

[Excuse any break in my cadence here…I was abruptly interrupted from writing by a 3-inch flying roach, matched only by the 8-inch moth that hangs from the ceiling above my head for its grotesque tropical-induced size.]

To pick up the thread once more….I’m learning from Pontal, this time around, a sense of moving with care and without hurry through a day. And I’m learning that community happens in those spaces of time when one leaves labor behind and in those places neither public nor private where we open the door for our closest friend (who Brazilians call “o amigo grande”) but also for the stranger passing by. It is the generosity and unfettered openness to the traveler passing through, or staying on for a while, that I had remembered most fondly about Pontal and that I am coming to appreciate as the thing I most wish we could bring back with us from Brazil.

Yesterday was Sunday, a day of rest and celebration (“festa”) in Northeast Brazil. We spent the afternoon, with Ada as our guide and translator, conducting our first interviews for the article we will write on our return and that will feed into Barron’s exhibitions on the fisherman and community of Pontal. We began with women in town (“as mulheres”), who spend Sunday afternoons taking a break from their work of making artisanal handicraft (about which we’ll have more to relay soon). You can picture Ada and I squatting at the curb in front of one house, where a mother and daughter and their neighbor sat in chairs talking to us about the history and present life of Pontal’s handicraft, while Barron moved noiselessly behind us taking photos. With our audio and video recorders “rolling,” the women told us about their work, the markets where they sell the handicraft and the ways this practice has changed (the relative ease with which younger women now are able to make a living from selling their crafts to tourists here and farther afield). They laughed in unison when we asked “what do you talk about during the afternoons that you work on the craft….” And laughed even harder as they, all at once, described their gossip about the town. They debated the origins of the handicraft, which it seems an anthropologist visiting the area decades ago taught to the town matriarch as a way for the women in the community to earn a living during a period when fishing was hard-going and many men were without work. And they shared their reasons for working independently from one of the several “associacoes” (or collectives of handicraft work) in Pontal, explaining that the freedom to work from home and to set the terms of selling their goods was worth a lot.

From this free-flowing inaugural interview, we wandered down the cobblestone alley, following Ada to the front porch of a lone woman who was sitting in the late afternoon sun watching a group of children play raucously in the street (now our good pals, as you can see from the picture below). The woman, an elegant and sharp-witted person of 71, is known in Pontal not for her handicraft but her restaurant, which closed many years ago. Her name is Nazaré da Silva (da Silva and dos Santos, I learned from Ada, are the last names of most families in Pontal, because it was here that escaped slaves and then, later, recently freed slaves settled centuries ago and, having fled the Portuguese in southern Brazil, shed also the names they had been given). With Nazaré, I felt an immediate bond. Our questions about her handicraft and the role of the women’s artisan work in the life of the town were not particularly interesting to her—she waved them away with her hands. Smiling at us in delight, she asked to tell us, instead, about her past as a chef and restaurant owner…a period of her life about which she still dreams.

Our interview with Nazaré ended with her offer to cook for Barron and me this week. And so, we hope to report back on an afternoon or evening spent in Nazaré’s kitchen. A story in its own right, I think. For now, I’ll sign off with Nazaré’s closing thought yesterday. For her, as for us, cooking for others is a form of art and labor of love.