The Pearl

That’s a pearl. A real one, straight from the sea.

While waiting around for something else to happen during a film shoot in Mexico, we chatted with a father and a son who dive for snails in the Sea of Cortez. The teenaged son showed us a beautiful conch shell – not unlike the one my grandparents had in their beach-themed bathroom, which we’d put to our ear and listen to the sound – but this one still had the snail inside.

Once brought ashore, shells like these get placed in boiling water. The snails are then extracted using a metal tool designed for the job. As I understand it, a certain amount of elbow grease is required.

Diving for snails is how this family makes a living. It’s extremely dangerous work. If the sharks don’t get you, there’s always the threat of vertigo.

But it’s work. It’s hard but it’s dignified.

And maybe, just maybe, if you do it long enough, someday you’ll find a pearl, of all things, lodged in the gooey stuff inside one of the millions of conch and mussel and oyster shells you constantly load into your fiberglass outboard motorboat.

And yeah, this whole time I’ve been thinking about John Steinbeck and that ominous novella you and I read in school about a guy in a Mexican village – just across the Sea of Cortez from here – who finds a pearl that is large and life-changing.