The Most Extraordinary

In a tienda by the side of the Santa Bárbara dam, a family serves the best fish in the world. They catch it the very same day and bring it up the slope to their small house, where they fry some whole and some in filets. It tastes best with a little lime and salt and salsa valentina.

When we go to Santa Bárbara, we leave early in the morning. We pile into the back of a rusty red pick-up truck borrowed from a friend of my uncle’s, with buckets for my grandmother to sit on, and shawls to protect us against the morning chill, and we start the long drive through the mountains.

One would expect the drive to be tedious, with Osito, my youngest cousin, constantly asking “Are we there yet?” and someone getting motion sickness, but on the contrary, it doesn’t last enough. The mountains in this part of Mexico are beautiful, green, green, and not the dull greens to which we are so accustomed, but greens so dense and lively that they hardly seem real. We hobble along in the ancient truck on rocky, twisting paths through fields of maize, through pastureland, through trees close enough to touch. Occasionally we pass someone driving sad-eyed cows. Occasionally we pass by a village, with a picturesque school and brightly-painted houses tucked into the folds of the hills. The land brims with a kind of inner glow, perfect in its loveliness, appearing enchanted with a spell all too easily broken.

We get to Santa Bárbara and walk around the dam. You can still see the church steeple of the village sunk down into its mystery. After the walk, we go for fish. We stuff ourselves, some of my cousins eating as many fish as their age. This fish is delicious, worth the overfull feeling and inability to move afterwards. Para bajar la comida, to make the fish sit more comfortably in our bellies, we take another walk after we eat. Then we go home.

There is a reason this is the best fish in the world, and it’s not just because of cooking ingredients. It’s because it was caught by a family warm as noon, who needed nothing more than tin cans and string to catch it; because of the village deep in the dam; because of a boy driving the cows and because of an elderly pick-up truck; because of the green of the mountains; because of a day spent with family. What is truly important in an experience, or a day, or a person, or even a single glance, is not always what is evident at the first glimpse: most often, one must look for a while, look beyond what is immediately apparent, to find what is most precious.