This story appeared in the Home magazine of the Sunday Los Angeles Times on February 26,1967. In the same issue was “A Man’s Best Friend Is His Hog,” an excerpt from Hunter S. Thompson’s new book, Hell’s Angels.
The idea was to get something sturdy and fairly reliable for a drive down the Baja California peninsula. Something cheap, too, expendable. Something you wouldn’t mind banging up, or even abandoning if it came to that. The best thing is a jeep or a Scout or some other four-wheel-drive vehicle but for a one-shot trip a standard pickup truck is good enough.
I found what I was looking for on a Santa Monica car lot. It was a rat-colored 1952 half-ton Studebaker pickup. Just the thing. It had character and looked eager to please. It had big tires too, snappy 9.00/15 Cadillac whitewalls, a bonus in appearance, traction and height. There was a black diamond painted on the tailgate.
A crew-cut salesman spotted me and came over and said a man and his wife from Big Bear sure were interested in that truck and they were expected in momentarily. He looked at his watch. I got in the cab and turned the wheel and messed around with the pedals.
“It’s got overdrive and 40 pounds of oil pressure,” he said. “I didn’t believe that oil pressure myself at first. Both those spotlights work.”
I couldn’t find the starter.
“It’s under the clutch,” he said.
It wouldn’t start.
“We’ll have to get that battery charged up for you,” he said. “Kids come around at night and turn those spotlights on.” He called for a boy to bring over a booster battery. “I believe if you drive this little truck you’ll buy it. And I’ll tell you something else. You’re going to be happy with your gas mileage. Surprised. You’ve got your little Champion Six going for you and then your overdrive cutting in at about 35.”
* * *
We got it started and I drove it around town. The clutch chattered a little and the shock absorbers were busted but there seemed to be no serious organic ailments. He had $495 on the windshield and we closed out at $375. That still sounds like too much but even now, after what happened, I’m not kicking about the price. It was in the back of my mind that I could sell that piece of iron for about $600 in Mexico. Pay for the trip. I did feel bad about getting in ahead of the Big Bear folks. They must have had an accident or a death in the family as they did not show.
I bought two new tires and put shocks on the truck and had it serviced and tuned up, new plugs and everything, and altogether sank another $50 in it. Then for $20 more I joined the Automobile Club of Southern California so I could get a big map of Baja and a detailed driver’s log. This is a fine map (although it doesn’t show elevation), and the log is good too, but I believe the best mile-by-mile guide for the Baja run is the Lower California Guidebook by Peter Gerhard and Howard E. Gulick (the Arthur H. Clark Co., Glendale, California).
* * *
I didn’t know this fact at the time because it’s hard to get any straight, first-hand dope about Baja in Los Angeles. A woman at the Mexican Government Tourist Office gave me a turista card, said the road was very bad and sent me to the Auto Club for any further information. A girl there gave me the map and log and her best wishes, but no, she didn’t know how I could get in touch with anybody who had made the drive. People I knew said, “Why don’t you fly down like Eisenhower?” and “Did they ever find those people that were lost down there?”
At the Mayan temple that is the Los Angeles Public Library I read the works of such veteran Baja desert rats as Erle Stanley Gardner and Joseph Wood Krutch. I pored over the Auto Club map and log, which carries a list of exactly 100 items of equipment to be taken on the drive—things like spare axles and leaf springs and a short-wave radio. And a calendar. Probably so you can note the passing seasons while you’re trying to change an axle down there on the Vizcaino Desert. “Confound this list!” I exclaimed, after calculating the expense, and went out and bought a few things you would take on an ordinary camping trip, plus some gasoline cans and water cans. (A small roll of baling wire was the lifesaver.)
I am not a hunter or a fisherman or an adventurer, nor do I have any particular affection for Mexico or the beauties of the desert, but I do like maps and I had long been curious about that empty brown peninsula. It snakes down through almost 10 degrees of latitude from Tijuana to the Tropic of Cancer. It is 800 miles long (more than 1,000 by road) and ranges in width from 150 miles at its bulging midriff to about 30 miles at the Bay of La Paz.
People live there of course, and by choice, but then people will live anywhere, even in New York City and Presidio County, Texas. The 800,000 inhabitants of Baja are not enough to clutter up the landscape. Most of them are concentrated in and around the northern border towns of Mexicali, the capital (200,000), and Tijuana (250,000), with a sprinkling of farmers and fishermen and billy goat ranchers and cattlemen scattered all down the line.
The Spaniards first saw Baja in 1533 when an expedition sent out by Cortez sailed into the Bay of La Paz. A number of abortive attempts were made to colonize the place but no Europeans were hardy enough to stick it out until the Jesuits came in 1697. The Indians then living there (estimates of their number range from 12,000 to 70,000) were possibly the most primitive of any in the New World. They slept naked on the ground and wandered aimlessly about eating worms and roots and the lice from one another’s hair. When the Jesuits came they found “not a hut, nor an earthen jar, nor an instrument of metal, nor a piece of cloth.”
* * *
In 1768 Fra Junipero Serra and his Franciscans replaced the Jesuits, who had fallen from favor in Madrid, and the Franciscans in turn were replaced by the Dominicans in 1773, with Serra going on to bigger things as a missionary to the upper desert of Alta California, now a fruited plain governed by Ronald Reagan.
American forces seized Baja and held it throughout the Mexican War, but the treaty negotiators at Guadalupe Hidalgo gave it back to Mexico in a fit of indifference. Five years later, in 1853, a 29-year-old Tennessee filibustero named William Walker sailed into La Paz with 45 men, captured the town and the governor without firing a shot and proclaimed “the Republic of Lower California.” The central government of Mexico did not offer much resistance, but the United States, then trying to swing the Gadsden Purchase, disapproved of Walker’s adventure and forced him to abandon his new republic after seven months by blocking shipments of men and supplies. (Walker later became president of Nicaragua. In 1860 he was executed by a firing squad in Honduras.)
This then was the place that Andy Davis and I set out for last July 15 [1966—Ed.] in the gray truck that we had come to call, in our humorous way, “the Diamondback Rattler.” Andy is a friend from college days at State U., a fellow Arkie exiled in California and a pretty fair hand with a crescent wrench. He got clear to go right at the last minute, and a good thing too.
* * *
We entered the freeway off Sunset in Los Angeles at 6:30 a.m. hoping to beat the rush-hour traffic, since I had no U.S. insurance on the truck. (I did have Mexican liability insurance. Not having it can lead to trouble, like jail.) The freeway was busy even at that hour but we were aggressive, if slow, and held our own. We hadn’t quite got to City Hall when the front wheels started shimmying. A sudden, terrible vision appeared of Andy’s wife driving out to pick us up at about the Disneyland exit. Then we found that the shimmy started at 48 m.p.h. and went away at 56 m.p.h., so we were okay as long as we kept the speed above the critical point.
We had about 600 pounds of gear in the back, the heavy stuff being four 5-gallon cans of gasoline, three 5-gallon cans of water, three 1-gallon water bags, one 2-gallon can of motor oil and a sack of spuds. The tires were aired up hard and tight and there was not much sag. At San Diego we bought some ice and piddled around, then crossed the border at Tijuana and drove through town resisting shouts on all sides from auto upholsterers and hawkers of religious statuary.
The road is paved for about 140 miles south of Tijuana and it is a pretty drive in the mountains and coastal stretches around Ensenada. This is a port city of about 35,000 people and the last town of any size before jumping off into the interior. We had a mechanic there check the shimmy and he said the trouble was a warped wheel. If we drove 3,000 kilometers at 50 m.p.h. the vibration would cause the front end utterly to collapse. He seemed sure of those exact figures. We could have put the spare on but for some reason we didn’t do anything.
A few miles south of Ensenada there is a roadside stop where a uniformed officer checks tourist cards. The card is all that is necessary for driving in Baja. In mainland Mexico a turista windshield sticker is required, and a much closer check is kept on vehicles. Some idlers were hanging around the guard shack and when it became known that our destination was La Paz, one of them divined my plan and said the truck ought to bring about $750 down there. Wasn’t that illegal, bringing a vehicle into Mexico and selling it? This got a big laugh from everyone except the officer.
We stopped for the day not far from Ensenada on a high bluff called Punta Banda overlooking the sea. Beautiful prospect. The two-burner gasoline stove worked okay and we had bacon and eggs and potatoes cut up with the peelings left on and fried with onions. The bargain Japanese canteen cups were a mistake. The metal was some Oriental alloy that had the property of staying 38 degrees hotter than the coffee therein. Fried your lips.
July 16. Odometer read 247 miles from Los Angeles. A cold white fog blew in during the night. Hated to get out of those sleeping bags. We couldn’t see the sea. We had a leisurely breakfast of eggs and corned beef hash and were on the road at 8 a.m. This pace didn’t last long. We told ourselves we were not going to rush, but before the day was out we were leaning forward on the seat just trying to get miles behind us. At a store called El Palomar we gassed up. The Rattler was getting 17 miles per gallon. Also bought some 2-inch Rocket Boy firecrackers from Macao. (“Light Fuse. Retire Quickly.”) Some surfers from San Diego stopped by in a Volkswagen truck and asked if we had a firing pin for a .22 pistol. Sorry.
We left the pavement at Arroyo Seco and the gravel surface wasn’t too bad for the first 15 miles or so, then it got murderous. The road was built up about 3 feet above the desert floor and drainage had made corduroy of it. We drove the ditches mostly where it was not so rough, although much dustier. Red dust. Several times we had to stop when it enveloped us. We picked up a hitch-hiker named Miguel. He refused to understand my Spanish even after I had treated him to a pack of Dentyne. A lug nut worked loose and rattled like crazy in the hub cap. Put it back on and discovered five others loose.
It was siesta time at San Quintin Bay but we woke up the owner of a little resort there and bought two cans of beer. We drove around the bay and ran into some more surfers. They were in a Volkswagen car and a Nissan Patrol, a kind of Japanese jeep, and had driven down from La Jolla. The Nissan owner, a four-wheel-drive snob, said they were turning back here, and intimated that we would be wise to do the same with our clunker. We showed them our tailgate.
We had hoped to make El Rosario that day but at 7 p.m. we gave up and pulled over near a rocky beach for the night. The desert—sand, cactus—runs to the very edge of the sea here. You expect a fall line and a marginal strip of something or other, but the desert simply stops and the water begins. For miles up and down the coast big breakers were crashing. There was nothing else to see. We built a fire of driftwood and had a big feed—bacon, potatoes and two cans of black-eyed peas. We had passed up lunch, and continued to do so. It would waste valuable driving time. The surf here was violent and as it retreated through the rocks it made a weird grinding noise that kept us awake for some time.
July 17. Mile 401. Off at 7 a.m. in a mighty burst of Studebaker power. Too much; the vacuum hose to the windshield wiper popped loose. Got it back on, then saw that one of the arms from the little motor had fallen off. Could have fixed it easily with a piece of wire but kept putting it off. Mañana. We had used the wipers to clear dust away.
* * *
El Rosario has 400 people and a green jail, and the weekly bus going south turns around here. Ditto the telephone line and mail service. We stopped for gasoline and children stood in doorways to watch us. South of town we saw our first Auto Club road sign. The American club posted the entire route with metal signs a few years ago, but few are left and most of those have been shot up so as to be unreadable. Probably by Americans as it does not seem likely that Mexicans would waste expensive .38 and .45 cartridges on such mean foolishness. Mean because it’s so easy to get off the main road—Mexico 1—even with a good map and a compass and a close mileage check.
We met two big trucks hauling slabs of marble or onyx and pulled over out of the ruts to let them by. They stopped to pass the time of day, as is the custom, and we had our question ready.
“El camino a San Agustin es malo?”
A gringo-sounding Mexican at the wheel said, “Yeah, it’s malo as far as you’re going.”
We kept foolishly asking that question, hoping someone, even if he was lying, would say the road got a little better. It got very hot that day but we had no way of knowing the temperature since our thermometer was no good. It would register 50 degrees one minute and 130 the next. At mid-afternoon the needle in the amp meter stopped moving. We pulled up short thinking the fan belt had broken. It was okay but the distributor wires were loose and the screws that held the top on the voltage regulator had shaken out. The top was just hanging on. Andy messed around with things and eventually got some movement out of the needle and wired the top back on.
We started climbing a range of burnt red mountains on a roadbed of sharp rocks. On the harder pulls—some stretches appeared to be 45 degrees—the engine began to miss and sputter. Too hot? Water in the gasoline? Bad points? The spark plugs were new. By getting running starts we rammed that poor old truck up and over each crest. The Cadillac tires never bargained for this but they held up.
On the downgrade the engine smoothed out and it was running like a sewing machine when we reached San Agustin. This was a forlorn hut right out on the desert with a windmill, not moving, and seven or eight guys sitting around drinking tepid Modelo beer from a kerosene refrigerator. One played a guitar and sang. We got some water for the radiator out of their storage tank. The water is no good to drink, they said.
A cloud of dust in the distance drew closer and soon an air-conditioned Jeep Wagoneer pulled in bearing a San Diego dentist, his wife and eight-year-old son. “La Paz or Bust,” said a little sign on the window. “We’re going all the way to Cabo San Lucas,” said the boy, which news the Mexicans received with equanimity. The dentist said he too had had trouble with things shaking loose, and had had one flat. When driving in sand, he said, he let some air out of his tires for better flotation. He had a spark plug device that used engine compression to pump them back up. Nifty.
A few miles below San Agustin we saw our first palm tree, in a low wash where there was some underground water near the surface. There was a house nearby in some shade, and a very hospitable woman who let us draw some water from her well. “Es muy bueno,” she said, and she was right, it was sweet, cool water. Such ground water as exists in Baja is often brackish or alkaline to the taste. We drove on and began to look for a place to stop but this was flat desert with no natural features that would make one place better than another so we finally just stopped. In 11 hours driving we had made 98 miles.
* * *
After supper we broke the code of the desert by needlessly hacking open a barrel cactus. The hide was thick and bristly and it took about five minutes with a sharp machete to get to the middle. Bulletin: There’s no water in those things. Not in this one anyway, just a damp core that could have done little more than infuriate a thirsty man. It was too hot that night to get inside the sleeping bags so we lay on top of them under the wide and starry sky. Then some bats came around and I zipped up and sweated. Andy’s concern was for snakes. We never saw one.
July 18. Mile 499. Corned beef hash with Tabasco for breakfast. We had other things but Andy kept wanting to eat that stuff, going on about what a hearty dish it was. The next settlement down the line was Punta Prieta, once a gold mining center, now a handful of huts on either side of a dry wash. The gasoline man was David Ramirez. He siphoned it out of a 55-gallon drum and we filtered it through a chamois skin. We told him about the sputtering and he removed the points from the distributor and filed them with an emery cloth. Still no good. He took off the carburetor and cleaned it. Not much better but we decided to press on for Santa Rosalillita, of the three L’s, a fishing camp on the coast. You don’t have that trapped feeling on blue water. Ramirez had worked on the truck for about two hours but said there was no charge. Maybe a pack of cigarettes. We gave him some smokes and had to force money on him.
On the way to the coast we saw a lot of ground squirrels, or anyway some kind of speedy rodents with tucked-up white tails, and hundreds of quail, the gray kind with crested heads. And a sand-colored bobcat, who stopped in the road for a moment to see what was coming, then fled. The Rattler choked and popped on the hills but made it in.
There was rejoicing in the fishing camp. The supply truck from Tijuana had arrived just ahead of us. It was a week late and the fishermen—there were some 30 or 40—were out of gasoline and cigarettes and down to short rations. Now the smoking lamp was lit and a blue haze hung about. A young abalone diver named Chito was the mechanic of this lash-up and he was under our hood in a flash filing the points, resetting the timing and blowing through the gas line. A solemn little shirtless boy held Chito’s cigarette while he worked, between drags. He held it still and was careful not to get his thumb and finger on the mouth part. Chito declared that the spring was bad in the spark advance. He found a similar one, cut it for length and put it in. That didn’t do it either. Chito gave up. Must be the puntas, he said.
* * *
What to do? There was an old 1-ton Studebaker truck in camp that might have some usable points in it but the owner was gone and would not be back for a day or two. Pete, the skipper of a launch, said he would be going to Ensenada in about a week and we could ride up on the boat with him, get the points and come back with him. Thanksgiving in La Paz. Or we could try to make it down the coast to Guerrero Negro where there was a big salt works and probably some repair facilities. Scammon’s Lagoon was down that way too, where the California gray whale breeds and calves. We didn’t want to miss that. This seemed the best course.
We had to cross a deep gully getting out of the camp and it took about 20 running starts before we finally got up the other side, to loud cheers from the pescadores. (Let me say emphatically that the Champion Six, power-wise, was equal to any grade we met with; it was just that the firing system was on the blink.) Another young diver named Adam Garcia hitched a ride with us. His family lived down the coast.
About two miles from camp we hit some deep sand and in getting out of it we let the engine stall and die. Now it wouldn’t even start. Well, that was it. Garcia asked if we wanted to sell the truck. No, not quite yet. He continued on by foot. It was growing dark. After some cussing and some recriminations we decided we would walk back to the camp in the morning and see about the points in the derelict truck. Sufficient unto the day was the evil thereof. But was it the points? So many hands, including our own, had been in that distributor. Maybe the coil. A cold wind was blowing from the sea and we took all the gear out of the back of the truck and slept in there under the tarp.
July 19. Mile 597. Just before setting off on the hike we had a last-minute go at the starter. The engine caught the first time. Hurrah for the bonnie blue flag! We loaded quickly and took off once more for Guerrero Negro. In about a half-hour we came to the Garcia fishing camp on a wide sandy beach. The main business here was catching cahuamas, big sea turtles, for canning. Garcia was surprised to see us. He rounded up a brother or a cousin who was something of a mecanico.
They found an old, rusty, six-volt coil in a shed and Andy went to work with them on the Rattler while I had coffee with Garica’s mother, who spoke very good English. “You’ll be okay when you get to Guerrero,” she said. “They have everything there.” We sat at a table in her dark kitchen, earth floor. A timid teenage girl poured the coffee and two men stood in the doorway blocking the light. I sat there like a boob for some time smoking and drinking their coffee before it occurred to me to offer the cigarettes. Nobody asked for one, and they had been out of smokes for 10 days, I learned.
Señora Garcia said the market for canned turtle meat was not so good. Did I think the people in the States would like it? It added a nice touch to many different dishes. I said it might go over in Southern California, which came out like—those nuts will buy anything—although I don’t think she took it that way. I hope not.
The change of coils was an improvement, temporary at least, and Andy got the voltage regulator perking again. The points in it had been sticking too. We left the Garcias some stuff and struck out once more for Guerrero.
* * *
Almost immediately we got lost trying to thread our way through a maze of ruts down the coast. We kept bearing right, seaward, which was a good plan except that it didn’t work. Twice we had to double back; one road led to a deserted beach and stopped, and another took us into some impassably deep sand. The spare tire fell off but we didn’t know it for a while, with all the other noise, until the spare carrier started dragging and making a terrific racket. We wired the carrier back up under the bed and backtracked again until, very luckily, we found the tire.
Soon we were traveling inland, southeast, you couldn’t fool the compass, but there was no way to get off that road. At Rancho Mezquital a couple of cowboys in leather chaps told us we had left the coastal road far behind but that we could still reach Guerrero by taking a certain right turn down the way. Good. Now we were out on the Vizcaino Desert, driving and driving and not getting anywhere. The road was not so bad here, smooth sand ruts. We rode up high on the sides to keep from dragging center.
This was no open desert but a thickly growing forest of cardon and cirio. The cardon cactus, with its right-angle traffic cop limbs, is like the giant saguaro of Arizona, although there is said to be some small difference. The cirio (candle) looks like a big, gray, bristly carrot growing upside down, with a yellow flower on top. It grows in Baja and in one spot in Sonora and no place else on earth. Naturalist Joseph Wood Krutch calls it the boojum tree.
We came to a village and an old man there said it was El Arco. This could not be because El Arco was way below Guerrero, almost 50 miles, and we got out the map and showed the old timer how he was wrong. He insisted that he knew the name of his home town. Again we had missed the cutoff. It was not in the cards for us to see the fabled Guerrero or Scammon’s Lagoon.
The store in El Arco was out of gasoline. This village, too, was once a gold mining center, with more than a thousand workers, but the mines closed after a long strike and perhaps 100 people live there now. All of them were indoors on this day except for two little girls who were wiping the dust off the storekeeper’s Chevrolet pickup. He gave us a pan of water to wash up with, and offered $10 for the radio that was slung under the dash in the Rattler. I said okay and he and a pal went to work. Those two should enter a Motorola removal derby. They had it out in about a minute, antenna and all. Parked beside the store was the dustiest 1965 Ford Mustang in the world. The foolhardy owner was taking it to La Paz and got this far before busting up the radiator. He had hitched a ride back to Tijuana to get a new radiator, the store-keeper said, and was now gone two weeks.
We camped that night south of El Arco beside the biggest cactus we had ever seen, a cardon with 12 spires, nine of them 30 to 40 feet high.
* * *
July 20. Mile 792. Up at 5:15, before sunrise, some quick hash and coffee, then onward across the Vizcaino. The road was rocky, something like a dry creek bed, and we soon lost high gear—that is, we couldn’t shift into high. We drove in second much of the time anyway but this was a nuisance. At 11:30 a.m. we reached San Ignacio, which is a true, classic oasis. You come over a hill after hours of desert driving and there it is below, two limpid ponds fed by springs, a large grove of date palms and a shady little town square. Some 900 people live there. On the square is a whitewashed stone church that has walls 4-feet thick. It was built by the Dominicans in 1786.
We asked around and located a garage. It was run by one Frank Fischer, an elderly gent who said he had been in Baja since 1910, when, as an engineer on a German freighter, he had jumped ship in Santa Rosalia. “It was the second mate,” he said. “I didn’t like the S.B.”
He called in the house for his son, a man about 40, and set him to work on the Rattler while he, the elder Fischer, told us a few things. He had been to the United States once, in San Diego, in 1917, but had found no reason since to return. American and Mexican beer did not compare with European beer because the water in the Western Hemisphere has saltpeter in it. Mexicans did not know how to fix roads. He looked over our 9mm. pistol. “German?” No, Spanish. He handed it back. “Then it’s no good.” The United States had been wrong everywhere since 1945 and was decidedly wrong in Vietnam.
“The U.S.A. is no good splitting these countries up,” he said. “Germany, Korea, Vietnam. All those boys getting killed are poor boys, they are not rich men’s boys.”
We agreed that the draft was not fair.
“Look at goddam L.B.J. Johnson,” he said. “His sons are not over there.”
We said we didn’t know the President had any sons.
“He has two sons hidden there on the ranch. He’s keeping them out of the war.”
* * *
He said he kept abreast of these things from a German newspaper he subscribed to. We argued with him a little about Vietnam, then decided to let it ride, remembering the Mojo proverb—man with faltering ’52 Studebaker not wise to antagonize mecanico in middle of Baja. (And yet the Mojos—squat, hairless, loyal—were foolish in many ways and the tribe was no more.) The young Fischer said a small flange had fallen off the gearshift column. He fixed it and put a new spring in the voltage regulator. That, he said, would correct our electrical trouble. Could be, but Mexican mechanics seemed to be spring happy. The charge was only $4. Did they want pesos or dollars? “Dollars,” said the old man.
At a roadside stop called the Oasis we bought all the gasoline in stock, about 12 gallons, and had a shower and a change of clothes. We were filthy. The owner of the place had magazine pictures of John F. Kennedy and Lopez Mateos [president of Mexico 1958–64—Ed.] tacked up all over the walls. As I was shaking the dust out of a shirt he said, “Mucha tierra,” then asked what tierra was in Ingles. He had a tablet in which he entered English words that came in handy with the gringos passing through.
“Tierra es dirt.”
“Dort?”
“No, dirt.”
“Si, dort.”
“Dirt!”
“Dort!”
“Okay.”
On the road again, high gear working, amp meter showing charge. Below an extinct volcano called Las Tres Virgenes we ran into a road-block. A 2-ton grocery truck coming north on the one-way shelf road had a flat, right rear, and the driver and his partner were repairing it there with a cold patch. They had no spare. The truck was built for dual wheels but like most big trucks in Baja this one was running with single wheels because of the narrow ruts.
A ’58 Ford car going South had tried to drive around the truck but had slipped sideways down the hill and bogged in the sand. So now everything was blocked. Another car, a ’58 Mercury and two pickups were also ahead of us. The cars and pickups were all together, a convoy from Tijuana to La Paz. When Mexicans deliver cars down the peninsula they usually travel in a pack, with a truck or two along to carry gasoline and other gear. It would be hard to make it with a loaded car, the clearance would be so low.
The repair took about two hours and a good part of the time was spent pumping up that big 9.00/20 12-ply tire. The driver had the stamina of a horse. He wore an Afrika Korps cap and had a bandanna tied around his forehead. Andy pitched in and helped pump while the convoy drivers and I sat in the skimpy shade of mesquite bush and passed around a water bag and smoked Domino cigarettes. It must have been 120 out in the sun.
Late that afternoon we reached the Sea of Cortes, or, as current maps insist on calling it, the Gulf of California. No cold blue Pacific breakers crashing here. The water was green and very salty and warm, almost 80 degrees, and still as a lake. A slight lapping along the black gravel beach was the only movement. It is not always like that, we were told. Treacherous winds come up often on the Gulf, and from time to time a big blow called a chubasco.
* * *
We breezed into Santa Rosalia (pop. 5,361) on a strip of blacktop at 40 and 50 m.p.h., just flying. The shimmy was gone. This is the first real town you hit after leaving Ensenada and we cruised around a while taking in the sights—the new police building, a pastel blue church made of galvanized iron. Santa Rosalia is a copper town; the mines are nearby and the smelting and shipping is done here. A French company used to run it (they brought that odd church over in sections) but it has been a Mexican operation since the early 1950s.
At the Hotel Central we had fried shrimps, caught that afternoon, and a salad, paying no heed to guidebooks warnings against eating fresh vegetables in Baja. A truck driver from Tijuana who was a little tight on beer joined us. He was on his way home from La Paz. We struck him as a couple of good sports, he said, and he believed he would turn his truck around and go to La Paz with us.
“I know many beautiful ladies in La Paz,” he said. “Many.” He elaborated. Two pals came and dragged him back to the truck. You can take the boy out of Tijuana but can you take the Tijuana out of the boy?
A young married couple from Santa Monica named Bob and Judy (Dick and Jane had just left) were also stopping at the Central. They had sailed down the Gulf in an 18-foot catamaran. Or rather they had sailed as far as the Bay of Luis Gonzaga, about 300 miles up the coast, where the fiber-glass cat had cracked up on some rocks. They hitched a ride in the rest of the way with their cat loaded on top of a truck carrying 1,000 gallons of lard. It took five days; the truck had six flats and broke an axle. But they made it. Things have a way of working out in Baja. Santa Rosalia was the nearest place they could get fiber-glass repairs.
Crime fans will remember Billy Cook, the desperado with the bad eye and the tattoo “Hard Luck” on his knuckles who murdered six people in 1951, including an entire family, and movie fans will remember the Edmund O’Brien film, “The Hitch-hiker,” about Billy’s auto flight down the desert with two hostages, but who remembers that right here near the Central was where Billy was tracked down and nailed by Tijuana Police Chief Kraus Morales? That evening we sat outside and listened to the local mariachi band. Bob and Judy had been planning to sail around the tip of the peninsula and back up the Pacific coast. They were making a film of the journey. But now maybe they would sell the cat in La Paz if they could get a good price. Bob said I might get as much as $1,000 for the truck there. The band played until well after midnight.
July 21. Mile 919. Up early and down the street to the Tokio Cafe for Spam and eggs. A big gringo in a cowboy hat who looked and sounded like Lee Marvin, the actor, flagged us over to his table. He said his name was Jim Smith and he lived in San Ignacio.
“I saw you guys there yesterday at Fischer’s,” he said. “I didn’t stop because I don’t get along with the old man. I guess he told you all that crap about jumping ship.”
* * *
We said he had, whereupon Smith gave us his version of the Mexican advent of Frank Fischer. Without prejudice, it was even harder to believe. I won’t repeat it, just as Sherlock Holmes would not tell about his case concerning the Giant Rat of Sumatra. (He said the world was not ready for it.)
Smith said he had been in Baja on and off since 1953. He had been a cop in Lubbock, Texas where he missed capturing Billy Cook by minutes, and in Los Angeles, where a motorcycle accident had banged him up and provided him with a pension, which he didn’t think was big enough. Now at 35 he was “guide, hunter, pilot, boat skipper, writer and freeloader.” He had ridden the length of Baja on muleback, a five-month trip, and it had once taken him six weeks to deliver a truck to La Paz; he had to replace the engine and differential on the way.
He said he was related to President Johnson (“I’m kin to half the folks in Texas”) and then went on to attack him with great passion, exceeding even Frank Fischer on this score. But from a different angle.
“That’s why I’m down here, to get away from that crap. I’m making my last stand here. You know what they’re trying to do now? Boy, the Great Society. They’re trying to send some of those Peace Corps punks down to Ignacio for training. Well, you can take the word back, Shriver better not send any of those[img]beatnik[img]s around my place or somebody is liable to get his head blown off.”
Song: I Left My Head in San Ignacio. Smith said his first wife had remarried, a man named John Smith, and that he, Jim Smith, was now engaged to a wealthy, 31-year-old Mexican widow. (“They got this priest checking up on me.”) He expressed contempt for most writers about Baja (he likes Antonio de Fierro Blanco’s novel, The Journey of the Flame) and for all dudes and tourists, but he likes to talk, too, so he has to make do with what comes along.
* * *
We all went down to the waterfront (where there was a rusty, half-sunken ship) and watched Bob work on his catamaran. It was blue and looked sturdy enough. There was no shelter on it except for what shade the sail provided. Judy, a pretty blonde, was a game girl. We got a mechanic there to check out the Rattler. He wore his cap sideways like Cantinflas, not for any antic effect, as he was very gloomy, but for some practical reason of his own. He put on a new voltage regulator. It didn’t do much good but, like hypochondriacs, we no longer expected results, we just wanted attention.
Smith said Mexican mechanics were ingenious. He said one down below La Paz had managed to break an anvil. How much did he think the truck would bring? “You might get $500,” he said. “Studebaker parts are hard to get. They like Chevys.” Smith himself had a Volks camper and renovated weapons carrier with high clearance. “You could sling a cat under that baby,” he said.
The guidebooks dismiss Santa Rosalia as a boring mill town but we hated to leave. Down the line we ran into some long stretches of deep sand and drove across them as fast as we could, using some principle of momentum I don’t fully understand—as though you could catch the sand napping. We got stuck a couple of times but rocked free without too much trouble. With four-wheel drive these places would be a breeze.
Mulege was the next settlement and it looked like something out of Central America, with its little river, date palms and thatched roofs. There are several expensive resort hotels here to accommodate American fishermen who fly down in their own planes. The place also seemed to mark the end of the hospitality belt. Behind us we had met with nothing but a ready generosity; now when we asked directions we got grudging, mumbled answers. The same with the Yanks, no more wilderness camaraderie. We had supper that night at one of the hotels, La Serenidad, and our table was next to one at which two American couples were sitting. An uncomfortable hush prevailed. Nobody spoke to anybody. Maybe we just wanted them to ask about our trip.
* * *
It was the off-season and there were no other guests. The manager said 42 planes had come in on Memorial Day. His big problem, he said, was getting good help and supplies. “For days now I have been out of Cointreau.” Roughing it at La Serenidad. We left and did some night driving for the first time, and played around with the spotlights. But we couldn’t distinguish the little potholes from the big ones, the axle busters, because of headlight shadows, and we gave it up after a while. My air mat had blown away and I folded up the tarp and used it for a pad. We heard a coyote yipping and howling that night but he was not close by.
July 22. Mile 985. Up at 5:30 anticipating the drive on the ledge of terror above the Bay of Conception. An American in Santa Rosalia had described it in fearful terms. “All I can say is, don’t look down,” he said. This was misleading. It was a one-way shelf road above the water and if we had met another vehicle it would have been inconvenient, but there was plenty of room for anything short of a Greyhound bus. The water in the bay was so clear that we could see big fish lolling around from 200 feet up on the cliff. There were good white beaches along here too, and lots of pelicans.
We stopped for a swim with the mask and snorkel and tried out our Hawaiian sling. This was a fish spear (really a frog gig) with a loop of rubber wired to the end of the handle. When you grasp the handle up near the business end you have a cocked missile. Catamaran Bob told us how to make it. We got two gray fish about as big as your hand and grazed some bigger ones, fat groupers, but before we had mastered the use of the thing we had broken three of the four tines on rocks. The fish were plentiful and multi-colored. It was like swimming in an aquarium. The pelicans had better luck. They dive-bombed all around us with heavy splashes and scored almost every time.
After leaving the bay the road got worse and worse and the terrain took on a sinister aspect. Big volcanic slabs of rusty brown rock we had not seen before. It was the hottest day so far. Andy started belching, more than seemed necessary, and blamed it on the heat. I said that didn’t make any sense. He said it made as much sense as my wearing that stupid cow-boy hat all the time. Then there was a dispute about who was responsible for the chocolate mess in the glove compartment. Leaving those Hydrox cookies loose in there. Over the door there was a strip of metal that pulled out about four hairs every time you put your head against it. It had been a small joke; now we beat on it with fists and wrenches. We were having trouble again shifting into high gear and we argued about whose was the better shifting action—his double-clutching maneuver with a brief pause in neutral, or my fast jamming move.
He must have been right because I was driving when it went completely out of whack, just limp. It wouldn’t shift into anything. We stopped and investigated. There were four empty bolt holes on the shift column. We walked back down the road almost a mile looking for we didn’t know what, found nothing and came back.
The silence there—after the hot engine had stopped contracting and popping—was total. No birds, no insect noises, no wind, nothing. All you could hear was the blood humming in your ears. Andy checked the column closer and decided there was no piece missing, only the bolts. He ran wire through the four holes joining whatever parts they were together, then crawled underneath with a 10-inch Crescent wrench and tightened up some boss nut that held the entire truck together. He knew his stuff; we had gears again.
Not far from there in a dry wash we came upon the carcass of a pony, dried, perfectly preserved, as in a museum. It was standing upright, or rather hanging. Someone had taken thick strands of hair from his mane and tail and tied them to the branches of a mesquite tree. Whether before or after death we could not tell.
* * *
Soon we were climbing a range called Sierra de la Giganta. The road goes right over the top and on the steep switchbacks the engine started missing again. At each new level we stopped to regroup and plan the running start for the next stretch. Sometimes there was a choice of roads, a short steep one or a long, not-so-steep one. The way we were gunning the truck in low it’s a wonder we didn’t throw a rod. On one long grade near the very top going about 3 m.p.h. in low, engine shrieking, the Rattler coughed and misfired completely and we were almost in a dead stall when Andy bailed out and began to push. If he hadn’t I believe the truck would still be there. The reduced load and added thrust of one manpower just got us over.
That afternoon we descended into a deep canyon and entered Comondu, a strange place indeed. It is an oasis of springs and date palms on a narrow canyon floor, bounded by towering cliffs. Hidden, isolated, it is the Shangrai-La of Baja. About 700 people live there and they have the power to cloud men’s minds. At least I find no entry for the place in our notebook, except for arrival and departure times. Of course we were already loopy from the heat.
Just before sundown we hit gravel. It was a head-rattling washboard road but nonetheless gravel, two lanes wide, the work of some official road gang up from La Paz. Andy scented victory. He took the wheel and drove like a madman, jaw set, eyes hooded. We bounced and skittered all over the road at speeds approaching 35 m.p.h. and such was the racket that we didn’t talk again—we couldn’t—until 11 p.m. when we reached the pavement and I finally got him to stop. I was glad I didn’t have to use the pistol. We flaked out in the ditch, spent.
* * *
July 23. Mile 1,170. A long pull at the water bag, no hash, and off at 7 a.m. The pavement was good and a little after 9:00, at mile 1,268, we rolled into La Paz. We were very proud of the Rattler.
La Paz (Pop. 34,000) is situated on a pale green bay, and oddly, for a Gulf-side town, faces west. For 400 years it was one of the world’s great pearl fisheries but there has not been much pearling in recent years. The locals say their Japanese competitors put “something” in their water before World War II and ruined the oyster beds. The town now caters largely to Americans who fly down to catch marlin and sailfish and such. (The richer anglers go to Punta Palmilla, down on the Cape, where there is an exclusive luxury hotel suitable for high-level, right-wing plotting.) In La Paz there is a pretty drive along the bay called El Malecon. The bay is shallow but there is a channel that permits sizeable ships to come in and tie up at a T-head pier. A big new ferry shuttles back and forth to Mazatlan on the mainland.
We checked in at the Perla Hotel and had breakfast in the outdoor café. Our hands were swollen from gripping the wheel. Fat fingers. Nobody from the local paper came around to interview us, but we were joined for coffee by a thin American lad from San Francisco named Gregory. He wore a Bob Dylan cap and sported a ban-the-bomb button and one with Huelga! (Strike!) on it.
He said he had been there two months working at the John F. Kennedy Bi-lingual Library. But the library business was a drag and the fish cannery workers were afraid to organize and he was anxious to go home and get back in the vineyards with the National Farm Workers’ Association. He said he didn’t know Jim Smith.
“The thing is, nobody reads books here,” he said. “You just sit there all day. All they read is schlock stuff like the Police Gazette and Bugs Bunny and those photo-novels.”
Andy and I discussed going fishing. Or skin-diving. Or maybe driving down to the Cape, to the very tip of Baja. We still had half a roll of wire left. But a tropical lassitude had set in and we didn’t want to do anything.
That night we ate at one of the fancier hotels, Los Cocos, in a grove of coconut palms on the bay. The dining area was outdoors, paper lanterns and all. Aeronaves pilots frolicked in the pool with stewardesses. A good many Americans were there, all of whom seemed to be talking fishing except us and two men in the bar who were still mad about Truman firing MacArthur. One said, “You can have Nimitz. MacArthur won that war. He was the finest soldier that ever put a foot in a boot.”
Later we went to a nitery outside town called Ranchita, sharing a cab with a talkative sport from Las Vegas and his silent, unhappy girl-friend. They had flown down that afternoon. “I didn’t realize it was so far,” he said. “I thought we’d never get here.” We let that one slide, with difficulty.
* * *
The Ranchita had colored lights and a cornet player with a sharp Latin attack but everybody seemed to be down in the dumps. Surely they weren’t all worrying about Mac. Then a tall drunk fell on the dance floor, right on his chin, and this brought what Franklin W. Dixon, author of the Hardy Boys books, would have called whoops of laughter. Jim Smith had told us he once had a difference of opinion in the Ranchita with “Duke Morrison.” Who? “Duke Morrison. You know him as John Wayne.” He said he didn’t come off badly either.
July 24. Andy had to get back to Los Angeles and he caught the morning plane. I stuck around to see about the Rattler. A customs agent said yes, he understood I wasn’t trying to profiteer, and yes, vehicles were needed there, but the law was the law. It would not be possible to sell the truck. Then I would give it away, perhaps to an orphanage. Was there one in town? Yes, but that too was prohibited, unless the arrangement was handled through customs.
Word got around that the truck was for sale. For the next two days prospective buyers came to my table at the Perla where I sat drinking coffee and reading the Warren Report amidst a swarm of small, barefooted Chiclets salesmen. But I couldn’t close a deal the way I had worked it out. On the third day a cab driver came over. His card identified him as Abrahan Wong V., Taxi No. 17 (English Spoken). I couldn’t figure out the name; was there a country club anywhere in the world that would accept this man? I told him the truck had overdrive and 40 pounds of oil pressure. Both spotlights worked. It had used only one quart of oil on the drive from L.A., which was true.
Yes, yes, he could see, the truck was bonita. He had once owned a Studebaker Commander himself. Very good car. He had broken his arm and nose in it. He showed me the place on his nose. How much was I asking?
How much would he give? He thought for a minute and said $300. I said okay. Like a fool, too fast. He smelled a rat and started backing off.
“Have you got tlikslik?”
“What?”
“Tlikslik. Tlikslik.” He mimed a piece of paper.
The pink slip, the title. I said “no” because I had only recently bought the truck myself but I had the temporary thing and the bill of sale. It was clear.
“Must have tlikslik,” said Abrahan Wong V.
That afternoon I made a deal with the owner of a sport fishing boat. I would sell him everything on the truck—gas cans, water cans, a 3-ton jack, crowder peas, Mazola, two spare tires—the lot—for $200, and give him the truck free, if he could get an okay from customs. Done, he said. Except. Wait a minute. He was a little strapped right now. He would give me $100 now and mail the other $100 later. Oh, but he would send it very soon. All but weeping, I let the Rattler go for five $20 bills.
On the $51.25 flight back to Los Angeles they served a good baked chicken lunch. A man across the aisle asked if I had been down on the Cape and I said no. “You missed the best part,” he said. The peninsula looked more barren and forbidding from the air than at truck level, and if I had flown it first I’m not sure I would have gone overland. Jim Smith said a woman in San Francisco once told him she was planning to make the Baja run, and what should she do for preparation? He told her to pack a lunch.