Thrown Under the Omnibus, page 91
We towed the Scrambler over the now less attractive rocks and gullies to Mike’s.
Mike’s Sky Ranch sat in a large valley by a small stream that contained its own species of trout. Wonderful cooking smells came from the sprawl of white adobe buildings. The sun went down between mountains as if into rifle sights and threw a violet cast across the sky. In the last moments of light Kathryn and Elena were delighted by the lambent, darting turns of hundreds of birds suddenly a-flight.
Michael took me aside. He said, “Those are bats.”
On Thursday Michael pinched the radiator tubes shut as well as he could. I straightened the fan blade on a rock. There was supposed to be a man with a soldering iron thirty miles away in Valle de Trinidad. He wasn’t there. We now had to drive either eighty miles northwest to Ensenada and have the radiator boil from mountain grades or drive eighty miles southeast to San Felipe and have the radiator boil from desert heat. Kathryn and Elena thought we’d be better off in Ensenada. “They have more jewelry stores there.”
The Ensenada radiator shop fixed the Scrambler in ten minutes and charged us eight dollars. You could get anything fixed in the Baja, which was good because everything broke there.
That night we stayed at a new hotel on the Pacific coast at San Quintin. Beach dunes had already destroyed the landscaping.
Below San Quintin Route 1 turned inland and there was a sudden change in scenery. Mesas and granite mountains were replaced by boat-sized sandstone boulders. Wind erosion had ground and drilled these into scary caricatures. The scruffy Sonoran desert foliage gave way to unearthly growths. There were dense spreads of cardón cactus, something like the saguaros in Arizona but more anthropomorphic and much larger. Flocks of vultures perched in the cactus. Sometimes five acres of cardón would have a carrion bird on every arm. There were also forests of boojum—more properly, cirio. The tall, unbranched trees looked like air carrots from Mars. Scattered in the cirio and cardón were copalquins, or elephant trees, whose fat spare-leafed limbs make agonized prehensile shapes. Every child has imagined such a thing outside his bedroom window on a windy night.
Barriers of isolating geography, weather, and seas have turned the Baja into a set of biological atolls. There are hundreds of plants and animals that live nowhere else. More than eighty species of cactus are endemic to the Baja. Cirio trees are found only within a 125-mile radius. The Baja has flowers pollinated not by insects but by bats, and bats that eat fish instead of insects. Isla Santa Catalina in the Sea of Cortés has a rattlesnake species with no rattles. And on Isla Espiritu Santo a race of black jackrabbits has developed. The black fur does not provide protective coloration, much less comfort in the sun. The mutation seems entirely pointless.
Our awe of nature was dulled, however, by garbage all over the place. And the shapely rocks were spray-painted with political party symbols, advertisements, and messages of love. Nature was at its worst here and man wasn’t much good either.
There were also, everywhere in the Baja, wrecked cars, hundreds of them, mostly upside down and burned. One guidebook tried to pass these off gaily: “Don’t be bugged by those wrecked vehicles here and there along the highway—they’re just jalopies abandoned by road construction workers.” We stopped for lunch at a little landing strip called Santa Ines. A collection of crashed airplanes was piled behind the cantina.
After 180 miles of living and dead grotesques, Route 1 curved back toward the Pacific and ran along empty beaches through land that looked like the land around Los Angeles would if vanity plates were fatal and bulldozers were free. The beaches end at the town of Guerrero Negro next to Scammon’s Lagoon, the largest of several Baja inlets where all the world’s gray whales mate and calve. Whaling ships discovered the 1agoon in 1857 and hunted it until grays were thought to be extinct.
Guerrero Negro also had an enormous sea salt harvesting operation. There have been many attempts to get something out of the Baja. The first expedition in 1533 was sent by Cortés to gather pearls at La Paz. The captain was murdered by the pilot, and the pilot was murdered by the Indians. Cortés tried again in 1535. Pearls were found but the pearl divers starved. Agricultural settlements failed in 1603, 1636, 1649, and 1685. Silver mines have been sunk in a hundred places, also mines for gold and lead. In 1868 J. Ross Browne, a reporter for Harper’s Magazine, wrote that no mine had yet repaid its investment. In 1866 an American land company received a grant of eighteen million acres from the Mexican government and colonization was attempted. The colonists left. There have been onyx quarries at El Marmol, a French copper concession at Santa Rosalia, an attempt to breed pearl oysters on Isla Espiritu Santo, et cetera. They’re all gone.
On the outskirts of Guerrero Negro, where the twenty-eighth parallel divides the Mexican states of Baja California and Baja California Sur, was an immense gawky steel constructivist sculpture of a landing eagle. There was a museum at the base with rows of flagpoles and a large amphitheater. All this was built to commemorate the opening of Route 1 in 1973. The museum was abandoned, its windows broken, the sculpture was rusty, and sand filled the arena seats. An osprey and his mate had made a nest in the broken road sign beside the steel eagle.
Inland at mid-peninsula the country changed again, turning to fields of black lava. Tres Virgenes, three perfect volcanic cones, rose in the eastern distance. We traveled eighty miles in this unrelieved scene, then crested a hill and were confronted by the startling tropical luxury of San Ignacia. The oasis occupied a theatrical cleft in the rocks. A lagoon filled the bottom, surrounded by magnificent date palms. Thatch-roofed houses with thick flower gardens were set among the trees. Behind them pale blue and pink adobe buildings faced a broad plaza sheltered by giant Indian laurels. San Ignacio was heaven with bugs.
A colonial baroque mission church filled one side of the plaza. The walls were four feet thick, built from lava rubble, and carefully plastered and painted to imitate dressed stone. The mammoth gilt wood altar and huge murky paintings of Ignatius of Loyola were imported from Spain. Crude local carvings of angel faces decorated the vault above.
The mission was founded in 1728, one of thirty-three missions built by Jesuits, Franciscans, and Dominicans to convert the Baja Indians. The Indians’ language had no words for “marriage” or “honesty.” They went around naked and did not know how to make pots, weave cloth, or build a hut. They ate insects and lizards and anything else. If a particularly good thing to eat was discovered, they would tie a string around it, swallow the morsel, pull it back up, and pass it to the next person.
In June, when pitahaya cactus fruit were ripe, the Indians gorged themselves, stopping only for naps and to fornicate with everyone, regardless of family ties. During pitahaya season the tribe defecated on large flat rocks so the undigested fruit seeds could be picked out and ground into flour. Father Francisco Maria Piccolo, who in 1716 was the first European to visit San Ignacio, was given some bread baked from this flour. He ate it before discovering its source and was the target of jokes from his fellow missionaries for the rest of his life.
The Indians were not interested in Christianity. It took heroic efforts to gather them into irrigated settlements, introduce them to agriculture and other benefits of civilization, and give them the blessed sacraments. But the missionaries did it. The Indians promptly died. Between the founding of the first Baja mission in 1697 and the expulsion of the Jesuit order from Spanish territories in 1767, the Indian population—with its utter lack of immunity to European, or even New World, diseases—decreased from 50,000 to 7,000. In 1984 only a couple hundred were left near Mexicali.
On the morning of Saturday, May 12, we left San Ignacio by the back way, driving up to the most spectacular view of the oasis, which is from the dump. Then we went across the remaining volcanic highlands to Santa Rosalia, the old French mining concession by the Sea of Cortés. On the town square was a sheet iron church designed by Gustave Eiffel. It was created for the 1889 Universal Exposition in Paris as an example of a “manufactured building.” It won second prize and was shipped to Baja by mistake.
Twenty miles south, on the lip of Bahia Concepción, was Rio Mulegé, one of the few Baja rivers that reaches the sea. Mulegé canyon was filled with palms and mangroves backed by naked hills. Man-o’-war birds, whose shape in flight mimicked a pterodactyl’s, hung on the thermals. The effect was a museum diorama of the Mesozoic era blown up to horrifying size. The beauty, like so much of Baja’s beauty, was hard to bear, a physical assault. It was a relief to look down the highway and see litter and more burned-out, overturned cars.
Under the cliffs along the Bahia Concepción the surf was police-flasher blue. The bay was twenty-five miles long and five miles wide and didn’t have a single home on its shores. At the foot of the escarpments, though, if your car would make it, there are campsites on small parabolas of beach.
The water was the temperature of love. The breeze was the temperature of beer. Two kids in a dinghy sold us a kilo of big, perfectly round scallops—the best scallops I’ve ever tasted. The sun lit the cliff tops purple. Cormorants dove in formation. Pelicans skimmed the tide. It was a moment to justify the whole trip. And a moment was how long it lasted, followed by biting gnats, a soaking dew, and me kicking over the camp stove and setting fire to the beach towels.
Quests and challenges never seem to have a middle until you’re in it. Everyone likes to address a challenge. Everyone likes to return from a quest. But the middle is another matter. We were tired, filthy, brilliantly sunburned, and queasy from the constant jolting ride and smell of gasoline. Elena had to be on a plane to New York via Mexico City on Monday, leaving no one to translate. The Baja highway was coming up in chunks from heat and traffic, and, during the previous two years, winter rainstorms had corrugated whole miles of it. All the oil seals on our cars were weeping, every screw and bolt seemed to be working free, and our gear had shaken loose and was rattling maniacally. No amount of octane booster could help the Pemex gasoline, and each hill climb was accompanied by a racking clatter of pre-detonation in the engines.
A little after dawn on Sunday we stopped in Loreto where the Baja’s first mission was built. Hanging in the church were excellent, astonishing seventeenth-century paintings of the disciples, the style just shy of El Greco’s. They were pulling from their frames and the canvas was rotting beneath the oil. Elena could find out nothing about them. “They are just anonymous,” a shopkeeper told her. “There’s supposed to be a Michelangelo under one. But we haven’t scraped the paint off yet.”
We drove two hours to a mountain oasis to see cave paintings, but they had been defaced. No one knows who did the cave paintings either. The Indians told the Spanish they were done by giants.
Back on the highway we climbed the terrible face of the Sierra de la Giganta, the mountains named for those artists, and drove 350 miles to La Paz through an unrelenting span of yuccas and bare grit.
Government and business had been working hard to make La Paz a famous resort though the town has no excuse for existence. Even the oysters John Steinbeck wrote about in The Pearl have died off. We checked into the new, big concrete hotel. It seemed to have been jolted too. All the fittings were broken, the carpet was coming untacked, and there were holes in the bedclothes. On the mirror over the bathroom sinks were insincere-looking decals that read “agua potable.”
Elena began to get sick at the airport. Kathryn and I were sick an hour later. I looked out my room window and saw the hotel’s sewage treatment plant in the same enclosure and nearly indistinguishable from the water purification equipment.
We managed to go out to dinner that night. The special was endangered, Mexican government–protected sea turtle. Sea turtle steaks are the color of those school chalkboards that are supposed to ease eyestrain. “It is like beef,” the waiter said, “but with a different smell.”
We were sicker yet on Tuesday. La Paz was hosting an International Rotary Club convention. Vendors were out in herds on the paseo maritimo along the harbor. Taped mariachi music barked from loudspeakers. La Paz was filling with Americans complaining that the town wasn’t authentic enough. We tried to leave.
Three blocks from the hotel Kathryn called me on the radio. “There’s something wrong with our car.” I asked her if it was engine trouble. “I don’t know that much about automobiles,” she said. “It’s hopping up and down.” I looked in the rearview mirror. The Cherokee was hopping up and down.
The front axle assembly where we’d attached our double shock-absorber modification had disintegrated. The nearest Cherokee axle was in San Diego. We bobbed slowly back to the hotel.
We’d set out to travel in places uninhabited and nearly unexplored, to see land unchanged since the first Europeans saw it, to tread where even aboriginal man had barely trod. And we’d wound up with diarrhea at a third-rate luxury hotel in the middle of a Rotary Club convention. It would take a Lear jet, a twin-engine Cessna, two race drivers, six Mexican welders, and the American Motors corporate public relations department to get us home.
An early missionary, Father Juan de Ugarte, once preached to the natives in Loreto on the agonies of hell. His congregation began to laugh. Father Ugarte asked them what was funny, and an old Indian replied, “There must be no lack of firewood in hell. So hell is a better land than this. We would be wise to go there.”
It was Baja that was first called “California.” The name was a joke. Califia was an Amazon queen in Las Sergas de Esplandián, a romance popular in Spain when Mexico was being conquered. California, the island Califia ruled, was “at the right hand of the Indies very close to that part of terrestrial paradise and inhabited by women without a single man among them.” Baja too was thought to be an island and Spanish sailors named it “California” after encountering Indian women who washed themselves in urine.
American Motors sent Clay Bintz, fleet manager for its West Coast PR office, to the Orange County airport with two new shock absorbers. The Lear jet owned by Michael’s company, Pacific Arts, picked up Clay and Randy Salmont, Michael’s race truck codriver, and brought them to La Paz that night.
By nine the next morning Clay had found a man with an arc welder who worked under a tin-roofed ramada in a back alley. Clay held up the shock absorbers and began to mime. Then he stooped and drew pictures in the dirt. The welder and his five assistants clustered around. One peeked under the Cherokee. “Ay, que fucked!” he said. Michael and Kathryn and I went off to find beer and some bathrooms.
The welding crew pushed the Cherokee over a trench. By noon they’d built a new suspension out of scrap metal. An English-speaking neighbor told me, “You found the best welder. There is nothing he cannot repair.” The neighbor inspected the discarded custom shocks. “However,” he said, “much trouble in life comes from fixing things that are not broken.”
Clay and Randy drove us to the airport. The two of them would try to nurse the Jeeps back to the States on Route 1. The Lear was fueled, gleaming, and ready on the crumbly tarmac. Kathryn scampered on board and Michael and I were about to follow. Michael stared wistfully into the desert. “I bet these cars won’t make it,” he said. He was wavering. He was chickening out on chickening out. “Especially if we went up the Gulf side and into San Felipe on the really bad roads.”
Then Barry Connelly, the jet pilot, volunteered to return and fly air support, as he’d done for Michael’s ‘83 Baja 1000 effort. “Just in case you die out there,” Barry said. Kathryn stayed on the plane.
If the Cherokee was going to break we wanted it to break as soon as possible. Michael and I drove it hard out of La Paz on Route 1, slamming into ruts and holes and pounding our heads on the roof liner. Clay and Randy followed in the Scrambler. We made it to Loreto in six hours.
The next morning Barry flew back in Michael’s Cessna 411 and landed at Bahia de Los Angeles on the Sea of Cortés coast. The rest of us drove another three hundred miles up the highway past Guerrero Negro, then turned east into the wormy rocks and cirio forests on a forty-mile cutoff to the bay.
Bahia de Los Angeles was a perfectly sheltered blonde sand cove about five miles across. Jagged arroyos radiated from it like a circle of dog mouths—bloodred granite pointed with veins of white quartz. This had been the site of a failed silver mine, a dead Indian tribe, and a massive resort development that never happened. There was a small motel there, some houses, and a shack of a gas station. The road built for the resort had come apart so badly that in places we got off and drove through the desert beside it.
The motel was all right. It was too hot to mind the cold showers and we found only one scorpion in the rooms.
Before dawn on Friday we headed back out the cutoff. We planned to take Route 1 north a few miles then get off-road northeast along the Calamajué riverbed. We thought we could reach another cove, Bahia San Luis Gonzaga, by nightfall. Barry would stand by until noon and then fly over our dust trail.
Clay and I took the Scrambler. The ruts and pavement gashes seemed to have grown in the night. The thing to do was to go fast, get “on top” so the Jeep’s wheels would hit the far side of the holes before they had time to drop in. At sixty, if you have the nerve, this works on all but the biggest holes. And it was a very big hole we hit. We were tossed out against our shoulder harnesses, dropped back into our seats, and bounced up into the roof. Then there was an ugly noise. Water was pouring out of the radiator again. The same fan blade had bent the same way and cut a second arc through the radiator core.
We pushed and coasted the boiling Scrambler back to Bahia de Los Angeles and woke Barry. He and Clay loaded the radiator into the Cessna and flew three hundred miles to Ensenada, to the same radiator shop. The shop owner had a good laugh, they said. Randy and Michael and I went down to the beach and drank.
