A young child snapped a picture of a crocodile yesterday afternoon on the beach in Guoines with her mother’s phone, while her mother swam in the tidepools, completely unaware. The young girl composed the shot carefully – even remembering to drill down and activate the large-animal-in-sunlight-filter – and gazed for some time into the screen before clicking.
She talked about the croc – and the backpack – all the way back to Sendero, but it went straight past her mother, who, in truth, was already at the Sendero bar, sipping a glass of well-deserved, post-whole-day-with-child wine, her mood increasingly softened by Sendero’s vaguely colonial, East African design with its unhindered, flowing spaces and open lines of sight to children and potential lovers alike.
“A backpack, mommy. The crocodile had a backpack on.”
When Nosara Lately received this photo – sent in by a Sendero staff member who befriended the child while mommy’s barstool was swung the other way – our journalistic spidey-senses began to tingle. We had heard of at least five separate crocodile attacks on dogs in the tidal river south of Baker during the previous two weeks – when one every six months is more the norm. Local realtors have quietly requested us not to run this photo, fearing its effects on pre-sales at Become Guiones – the new luxury project going in where South Guiones once was. One realtor pulled us aside at Café de Paris yesterday, saying, “Do you have to run the photo? I have two children at Del Mar…” As he said this, he pulled his shirt up, showing a long scar across the side of his abdomen. We knew what it was.
Every realtor in town knew that this bombshell photo was about to drop. But none of them knew about the backpack.
Needing some ethical advice, we went by to speak with Andres Gonzales at IBL, feared local attorney and widely regarded as the most ethical man in Guiones. He leaned back in his chair, pondering the question. “You have a responsibility to the community, not to stoke fear. You have a responsibility to the child, who bravely took the photo. You have a responsibility to your journalistic mission. And you might have a responsibility to Super Nosara. That really looks like one of their backpacks.”
He was right. It was a knockoff version of a pink Dora the Explorer backpack, exactly like the one sold by Super Nosara. We had seen it ourselves while searching for a George Foreman Grill on the second floor.
“The questions don’t stop there,” said Andreas, warming to the topic. “What was in the backpack? Why is the croc moving towards Super Nosara, and not away? How does a six-year-old know how to find the large-animal-in-bright-sunlight filter on an iPhone? Who did the mother meet at the bar? How exactly did Sendero land on that flowing, open East African aesthetic?”
Andres usually does not get this way until late in the day, when the late afternoon light and cognac fill his leather-bound office. But the Large Journalistic Question was now clear: what was in the backpack?
On our way out the door, we ran into local drone photo guy José Orozco Sequeira, who has hired Andres to file suit against the state of Texas – having lost three of his mini-drones in the last week alone over Become Nosara to either paranormal forces (not normally liable for such things) or the Texas National Guard (definitely liable, very deep pockets). José grabbed us, saying, hey man, you are not gonna believe what happened yesterday. I was flying my drone over South Guiones, getting shots for Become Guiones. And man, I’m tellin’ ya, man, I saw guys in camo crawling on their stomachs along the river. Ten or twelve of them. The guard, man. The guard.
Crocodiles with backpacks. Sendero MILF’s . Drones plunging into Become Nosara. Texas National Guard special ops, crawling through the jungle.
There was a disturbance in the Force.
