por Marisella Veiga
EVERGLADES City, Florida – I had the perfect meal in a perfect setting and it wasn’t at a Cuban restaurant in Miami, where I had spent several days.
That’s where I get my soul food — eating with family and friends, speaking Spanish and learning more about the Latin American cultures in that vibrant city.
Yet this heavenly meal is native to coastal areas of southeastern United States: fresh fillet of grouper, blackened, a slice of lemon on top of it. The sides were simple, coleslaw salad with a garnish of sliced tomatoes, Vidalia onion rings and a lettuce leaf. Fresh fish is manna. And for $7.95 a plate, it was a gift given to me during my recent week in the wilderness.
I was in a fishing village in the 10,000 Islands on Florida’s southwest coast.
“The 10,000 Islands are a magical place,” said my friend Jorge Lara, one of my former English students. He is now a firefighter in Collier County and has been an avid fisherman for years.
“Sometimes, when I’m out fishing near the Gulf, out past Hog Key, if I stand on the bow of the boat and catch the wind just right, well, I feel at peace.”
“That’s transcendence,” I said. “It’s a taste of what’s coming for us in heaven.”
And transcendence — a perfect peace — is what I found seated at a picnic table, one of many in the dockside dining area of the City Seafood, a restaurant and retail market. All the tables in this informal establishment overlook the Barron River.
Ceiling fans spun. Small airboats from a nearby concession buzzed by with their tourists. Country music played. The potted desert roses were in full bloom. Lola, the owner’s three-month-old Pug was in her playpen, waiting for customers to come by and lift her into their arms.
Richard Wahrenberger owns City Seafood. He bought the property in 1985, then established the restaurant in 1999. Wahrenberger began fishing for stone crabs when he saw a few traps wash up on the beach where he lived on Treasure Island, near St. Petersburg.
He copied the trap’s design and made six of them. Eventually the number grew to 6,000. He also ran boats to fish for grouper, snapper and sometimes swordfish.
Eventually, because he liked to cook and had a discerning palate, he learned to run a restaurant.
Fresh fish, cold beer, dockside dining, a kind and capable host, I can list the elements contributing to those moments of transcendence at City Seafood. But if I cast a wider net, the area’s historic cultural ties to Cuba should be mentioned.
Apparently, Cuban fishermen set up fishing ranchos in these islands starting in the 1600s and ending in the 1850s.
They came for the abundant mullet, which they salted as the Spanish and Portuguese had done with cod. The catch was sold in Havana, as fish was in demand during the Lenten season.
Tim England, who manages the Museum of the Everglades, and David Southall, curator of Education at the Collier County Museum in Naples, were the two who took the time to teach me more of my own people’s history.
By doing so, they made me feel more at home in this little village.
It’s a place where, for centuries, Cubans and Native Americans and African Americans and Europeans have been living and fishing and eating meals in the open air under the big skies of the Everglades. No wonder I feel at peace and at home. Hispanic Link.
(Marisella Veiga, of St. Augustine, Fla., is an essayist and writing instructor. Email: mveiga@bellsouth.net) Hispanic Link News Service @2009.
