Torrid, rocky, thorny, maddening, it was a desperate love affair—and filled with snakes and scorpions too—when I met Mexico’s Baja peninsula in the 1980s.
It began with a phone call from Michael Nesmith. Nesmith was one of the creators of MTV. He’s a musician and songwriter; a movie, TV, and record producer; a successful businessman and a philanthropist. But such is the careless nature of fame that he’s still best known as a Monkee—the tall one in the knit hat, the one who could actually play his instrument. Contrary to normal rock star eschatology, Michael saved his money and invested it sensibly. At least he invested some of it sensibly. He also bought an off-road race truck and raced it.
Michael called to see if I’d like to come along with his race team on the 1983 Baja 1000. He was using the race to promote a movie he’d just produced called Timerider. (Motocross competitor accidentally gets sent back in time to the Wild West. Ignore Leonard Maltin’s review in Movie and Video Guide, it’s a perfectly good flick.) I guess Nesmith’s thinking was that when Timerider got projected on bedsheets in the dirt piazzas of the mission towns in Baja California the audience would be presold and that, plus the readership of Car and Driver (which will watch anything on wheels), would guarantee an international hit.
The Baja is that long turkey wattle hanging off the Pacific chin of North America. It is a thousand-mile drive from Tijuana on the border to Cabo San Lucas at the tip. There’s only one paved road, and not taking it is the point of the Baja 1000.
The Baja is mountains, lava fields, arid barrens, sand flats, cactus forests, and leviathan rock piles. It contains the most precipitous precipices, the most desiccated deserts, and the least inhabited uninhabitable terrain between Tierra del Fuego and Nome. And a quarter of a century ago Cabo San Lucas had not yet brought forth its eructation of luxury resorts, so there wasn’t even any topless starlet trash at the end of the journey.
The Baja 1000 was, in those days, run right through the middle of what, these days, is doubtless a UN World Heritage Biodiversity Site of endangered habitat necessary for the sustainability of threatened plant (with vicious prickers) and (poisonous) animal (that bites) species. You started in the streets of Ensenada, just south of Tijuana, and ended in the streets of La Paz, north of Cabo. In between were dry washes and cattle trails at best, except for the roads through occasional villages where the campesinos threw empty beer cans at you.
The race was conducted under the auspices of a somewhat catch-as-catch-can sanctioning body called Southern California Off-Road Enterprises, or SCORE. There were twenty-four competition classes including motorcycles, trucks, three-wheeled all-terrain vehicles (Remember those? So lethal that motorcycle companies, sworn purveyors of lethality, quit making them.), and cars ranging from stock VW bugs to unlimited single-seat dune buggies that looked like something in which a Wookie would cruise the drive-in.
Michael Nesmith was running in Class 8, defined by SCORE as “full-sized two-wheel-drive utility vehicles.” Michael had a ’79 Chevy short-bed step-side pickup—named “Timerider”—with a 350 big-block V-8. It was heavily modified, so much so that it was able to do things that TV truck commercials show trucks doing.
We took Timerider on a shakedown run in the high desert near Edwards Air Force Base outside LA. The exterior of the Chevy looked tame enough, like the big-wheel boonie wagons that, in the ’80s, every Sam and his girlfriend Dixie was turning hairy-side-to-the-sky on weekends across America.
It went differently, however—like a rocket goat. We popped down into a ditch and Jupiterean g-forces squashed me to oompa loompa proportions. Then we went through a series of road corrugations or whoop-dee-doos. The little ones were like Larry Bird dribbling my eyeballs. The big ones put my liver in my mouth. After that we did a carrier-deck landing, a roller-coaster turn, an inside-a-U-boat depth charge attack movie scene, and something that caused a view of rocks coming toward the windshield as if in a video game played by Paleolithic teen man.
Until I’d strapped myself into the codriver’s seat, I hadn’t known whether Nesmith was really any good at this or just fooling around. In a minute I wished he was just fooling around. A skillful driver can beat the crap out of a passenger in an off-road race vehicle better than he can do it with a baseball bat.
“The trouble with this truck,” Nesmith said, driving off the lip of a ditch at a hundred miles an hour, “is … OOF … it’s so good it makes you feel invincible.”
Is “vincible” a word? I was feeling that. Easterner that I am, I’d worn a pair of cowboy boots into the desert. I thought that was what you were supposed to wear. But the stupid boot heels were banging up and down and sliding around on the steel floor.
“You need rubber-soled shoes,” Michael said. You also need a jock strap. The testicles in my boxer shorts were whapping against the Recaro seat like little bowling balls being dropped out fourth-story windows. And every time we went airborne the shoulder harness gave me emergency cardiac defibulation. I had to give the harness the slip and try to ride it out with the lap belt over bladder muscles I developed going to college in a state with 3.2 beer.
All the same there was a smile across my face as big as Jimmy Carter’s—a raccoon-eating-shit-out-of-a-wire-brush smile. Michael plopped the truck down on the El Mirage dry lake and stood on it—100, 120, 130 mph across the expanse of dead-level clay, racing toward ever-receding mountains through a featureless space so vast all sense of movement was lost.
God on a drunk couldn’t find something more fun to do. Except drive it Himself. Michael let me do that without my even asking. And then I got a surprise. This hot dog, hypertuned, race-ready dynamo was more civilized than a Chrysler Imperial. Power steering, lock-proof brakes, and automatic transmission—Timerider had none of the limited, balky, quirk-ridden feel of a racer. The engine was smooth, timed, and cam-supplied for a broad range of power. You wouldn’t hesitate to drive it from Des Moines to visit your sister in Orlando. Though you might wish for side windows. Nesmith did. He was too busy to run the whole SCORE circuit but, he said, “If I raced full-time, I’d air-condition the thing. I really would.” For additional pleasure, Timerider had NASCAR mufflers that made such a pretty noise it was like having a happy tomcat stuck in each ear.
Being a passenger was an unbelievably bone-yanking experience, but when I was driving what I couldn’t believe was the small effect that came from the giant holes and foolishnesses that I hit. Blasting down an arroyo-creased, sand-plastered, boulder-lumped Mojave trail, rocks and ruts and looming road tumors just disappeared into the enormous shock travel. I skipped from tip to top of humps and ridges, the gentle rise of well-calculated spring rates bringing me level and steady after every dip. The truck punched over or through everything I aimed it at, with no loss of power, traction, or control.
My technique left something—in fact, everything—to be desired. It was necessary to keep the left foot on the brake to mash the suspension down for cornering (much the same as the “trail braking” taught at the race car driving school where I’d done so well—on paper). I kept forgetting. I also kept forgetting Timerider was an automatic, and I hit the wide brake pedal with jabs from my left foot several times while shifting. I also had to use the brake pedal (on purpose) in the whoop-dee-doos to keep the truck’s polar momentum from building in a way that would cause an end-o after the third or fourth whoop. I didn’t know how to do that either. But the truck was too good to make me look stupid. Well, except for when I hit the brake pedal while shifting. I did look stupid then.
Shakedown was an unqualified success. Timerider went for a final tweaking, first to the shop of Mike Burke, who built the engine and would codrive the second leg of the 1000 with championship motorcycle racer Keith Crisco. Then Timerider went to Bruce Eikelberger, who made the chassis and would codrive the first leg with Nesmith.
Burke had been a member of the legendary Checkers motorcycle club. In the early 1960s the Checkers—membership limited to twenty-five tough-ass sons of bitches—were the pioneers of American off-road racing. (And of cheating at it, or so their rivals said.) But you can’t cheat death, and the Checkers set some death-defying times through the southern California deserts on great, ungainly Triumph bikes.
Eikelberger was a veteran of off-road racing in several competition classes, with 186 top three finishes to his credit. He and Burke had taken exquisite pains with Timerider. Every weld was like a row of dimes. Every bolt showed a dozen threads above its nut. Every edge of metal was filed smooth as a Gucci belt buckle and painted more carefully than a thing in the Louvre.
Timerider’s stock bodywork enclosed a custom chassis more sophisticated than a Grand National car’s. SCORE rules required that the original frame be kept and that no material be removed. Therefore, in order to make something that wouldn’t bend in the middle like a sucker ace in a game of three-card monte, it had been necessary to weave a system of strut and brace metal tubing over, under, and through the original frame. This had to increase strength, create a roll cage and shock towers, and yet not add weight while also shifting the weight that was not being added to the rear wheels—a neat trick. The real element of genius in this frame tubing, however, was its joints. The major component connections were made with bolts, not welds, and they were cushioned with polyurethane pads that allowed the entire truck to flex, bend, absorb energy, and spring back into shape. Eikelberger was one of the geniuses who created these joints, which were what gave Timerider its mellowness when driven across stray cattle-sized rocks.
Timerider’s design was sophisticated but, unlike most modern car technology, it was comprehensible to the likes of me, who can’t fix a can of tuna. There were no black boxes, no triple gerbil exercise wheel turbos, none of the stuff that can’t be understood without having a desktop computer monitor on your lap as you race. “Simplicity is the sharpest trick,” Eikelberger said. He told me about someone running a VW-powered dune buggy in the Baja 1000, who blew up halfway to La Paz, flagged down a Mexican family, bought the engine out of their Bug, bolted it in, and won his class.
From what I could tell about our fellow off-road racers in Ensenada, they were crazy. But it wasn’t the hardships of Baja racing or the brushes with death that had driven them nuts. It was the logistics. Timerider’s crew alone nearly filled a motel. There were people and vehicles, car parts and cans of race gas spilling out of windows, and the number of beer coolers, burritos, and bottles of Lomotil pills needed to keep this act together was legion.
I made a list of the bigger things that were required for Timerider’s Baja run: the race truck itself, its trailer, a GMC crew cab to pull it, a forty-four-foot travel trailer, a Blazer to pull that, a used utility company lineman’s truck and another trailer, both filled with pit-stop supplies, a Baja Bug and two dirt bikes for scouting duty, an Econoline van, a Mitsubishi 4WD pickup, a single-engine Cessna 210, and a twin-engine Cessna 411.
We still ran short of vehicles. Eikelberger had to rent another pickup in LA. In those days (or these days either) most rental companies wouldn’t let you take their renters to Mexico. Eikelberger said he was headed to Lake Tahoe. “But will it run on cheap Mexican gas?” he asked. “Just in case I run into any for sale in that neck of the woods?”
In addition to all that, a Baja 1000 effort had to have a whole other race machine, a prerunner. This was supposed to be almost as good as the real thing in order to try the course ahead of time at about 80 percent speed. Nesmith was using his retired Class 8 race truck, a mid-’70s Ford with another of Burke’s engines in it, a 351 Windsor.
All told, the Timerider team had eighteen wheeled and winged vehicles and people beyond counting in Ensenada. To be a Baja racer you need courage, endurance, and more friends than Bill Clinton and Facebook combined, and in 1983 neither of those last two had been invented. Plus these friends had to be willing to work for beer, refried beans, and motel rooms with suspect bedsheets.
* * *
The second-leg drivers, Crisco and Burke, were already in the southern Baja, having spent the previous three days checking the course, sleeping in the prerunner, and heating up cans of food by sticking them in the air cleaner and running the truck around until the Beanie Weenies were warm.
In Ensenada Nesmith and Eikelberger were making last-minute checks on Timerider while Michael’s wife, Katherine, and Bruce’s wife, Anne, were doing quartermaster duty.
The travel trailer had been hauled to San Ignacio, a little oasis town that was the crew-change point for the race. San Ignacio is a puddle of palms in an empty volcanic landscape, about equidistant between Ensenada and La Paz, north-south, and between the Sea of Cortés and the Pacific, east-west.
A fellow named Al Alcorn, who’d been instrumental in developing Pong, would ferry parts down the Baja in his Cessna 210. Accompanying Alcorn was Dr. Victor Lopez, who had the Lomotil and an ability to speak Spanish. The Cessna 411 would take mechanics and wives from Ensenada to San Ignacio and on to La Paz.
Then there was the matter of the nine pits and their pit crews scattered along the thousand-mile route, many in places visited by English-speaking people only during International Geophysical Years and the Baja race. The organization and crewing of the pits were of a complexity beyond my powers of understanding or expression.
The race would start when the sun came up. And Timerider would, we hoped, reach San Ignacio by midnight. When that happened Nesmith would fly to La Paz and an exhausted Eikelberger would get out of the race truck and into the prerunner with me. The prerunner would now have become the chase vehicle.
While Crisco and Burke bounced through the wilderness, Eikelberger and I would drive like hell on the Baja’s sole highway (fittingly named Route 1) east to Santa Rosalia on the Sea of Cortés and south to Mulegé, then along the Bahia de la Conception until we picked up a back road across the ominously ycelpt Sierra de la Giganta west to the checkpoint at La Purisima. We hoped to get there before Timerider did. If everything was going well—a ridiculous “if”—we’d follow Timerider on the course itself, a sand track south to Villa Insurgentes, located about three-quarters of the way down the Baja. Then the racer would return to the trackless wastes, and Eikelberger and I would reintercept Route 1 and continue 145 miles to La Paz.
Before any of that could happen, though, Timerider had to make it to San Ignacio. I would drive the rented pickup carrying spare parts southeast out of Ensenada on a semi-paved road. I would drive at the rental rate of speed—much faster than a truck I personally owned could go. I hoped to beat Nesmith and Eikelberger to the first pit stop in the Sierra de Juárez highlands, then to the second pit stop in the Sea of Cortés resort town of San Felipe.
If the spare parts weren’t needed, Alcorn and Dr. Lopez would pick up myself, a drive shaft, a master cylinder, a power steering unit, half a dozen universal joints, and a milk crate full of odds and ends. We’d make a cramped and overweight flight in the Cessna 210, from San Felipe’s dirt strip to a dry lake near another pit stop in El Crucero on the straggled neck of northern Baja. Then, if we lived, we’d continue on to San Ignacio.
* * *
In Ensenada the forty-five motorcycle entries buzzed away at first light, making the soundtrack for an Excedrin commercial. Four-wheeled vehicles were scheduled to start one hour after the last bike was out of the gate. The course followed a dry wash to Piedras Gordas, a town so small it turned out not to exist. I waited until the bikes were gone and drove to Piedras Gordas—or, rather, to where Piedras Gordas was supposed to be. As far as I could tell, with my bar Spanish, Piedras Gordas meant “fat feet,” or maybe, more appropriately to Baja racing, it meant “heavy foot.” [Piedras Gordas translates as “big rocks”—ed.] I was there early enough to see Timerider go by. Nesmith was driving conservatively, at the back of the pack.
I then went down the pavement, so called, to the number one pit at Valle de Trinidad. Off to my left I could see the bikes kicking up rooster tails of dirt. It was open country there, notched with half-lush valleys and with no visible habitations. Yet locals came out of nowhere and stood patiently along the course.
Timerider came through, in midpack now. The only problem seemed to be radio communication. Timerider could send but not receive.
I had to drive at eighty to beat Timerider to San Felipe. A federale in a patrol car gave me a cheery wave. I headed east across a featureless plain until white salt marshes rose on the horizon. This was the delta of the Colorado River, where it empties into the Sea of Cortés. The marshes stretched for fifteen miles to the water, blank and glaring, an empty movie screen across the skyline, my first hint of the Baja’s eeriness.
I came into town, scattering spectators, burros, etc., looking frantically for the pits. Timerider, to judge by Eikelberger’s wild radio calls, was having the same problem. They’d had a flat and were running behind most of Class 8. But two early leaders had already blown up, and there was plenty of yardage left for recovery. Timerider’s spare had had something wrong with it. The pit crew put on a new wheel. Alcorn, Dr. Lopez, and I packed the spare parts into the Cessna.
Alcorn flew along the east coast of the Baja, parallel to the race course. We could see trucks and bikes struggling along the cliffs south of San Felipe, but turbulence kept us from getting low enough to pick out Timerider.
At Bahia Gonzaga we headed inland, over the Sierra de Calamajue. There was an almost embarrassing expanse of naked geography. The world looked newly made, not painted or decorated or ready to be occupied by people. I felt creeps of fear and isolation not helped by crackling radio transmissions from the El Crucero pits. Winds were gusting over forty miles per hour on the dry lake. Alcorn located a little airstrip twenty miles to the south at Punta Prieta and put the plane down through skittering buffets.
Punta Prieta was as much in the middle of nowhere as anywhere could get. It sat on the level valley bottom of a vanished river. Machete peaks encircled the flats, shimmering in the heat. The ground was as hard and bare as tarmac so that the airstrip was distinguishable only because no cactus grew there, no horrible humanoid cholla cactus or bizarre boojum trees that rise to a point, straight up fifty feet or more without a leaf or branch.
We had just deplaned on this stage set for Don Juan in Hell when soldiers, M-16s pointed at our bellies, appeared from concealment in flora too sparse to conceal them and surrounded us. Dr. Lopez had a long, grave discussion with their lieutenant, who looked sixteen. The soldiers lowered their guns and trudged back into oblivion. “He says they do this every time a plane lands,” said Dr. Lopez. Perhaps it was part of the freshly launched war on drugs. But which side were the soldiers on?
The pit crew came and got the parts and we flew south.
In San Ignacio that night Crisco and Burke were ready to take the Timerider wheel. All they were missing was Timerider. Generators were running and lights shone on crowds of townspeople as we gathered around SCORE’s static-filled ham radio receiver. There was no report of Timerider passing through El Crucero. On the other hand, there was no report of Timerider not passing through El Crucero. The ham radio network was sketchy. We went out to dinner at a place on the edge of town. It was a typical adobe house except it lacked a roof. Rain comes only every several years here. We were served a delicious yellowfin tuna in white wine sauce.
Meanwhile, in the race truck, everything had been going to hell. Nesmith and Eikelberger hadn’t had time to prerun all of the race course. They hadn’t bothered with the very first part, figuring there was only one way out of Ensenada. Not true. They’d just entered the dry wash when they took a wrong turn into the cactus. When I saw Timerider at Piedras Gordas, Nesmith wasn’t at the back of the pack because he was driving conservatively. He was at the back of the pack because he’d gotten lost. Then he was further slowed in the pine forest at the top of the Juárez mountains because some of the locals—getting into the spirit of the race, perhaps—had felled trees across the road.
Between the Sierra Juárez and San Felipe, coming down a sandy wash into Diablo dry lake, Timerider had slipped sideways and stabbed a rear tire on a rock. The truck had different-sized wheels front and back. Fronts were what usually blew and, being smaller, they’d fit either end. So the truck carried only front spares. But when Eikelberger and Nesmith had started to fix the flat they’d discovered that their front wheel center holes had been mis-drilled by a fraction of an inch. Neither spare would slide all the way in over the rear axle spline. They’d bolted the wheel on as best they could and driven the fifteen-mile high-speed run across Diablo with their heads going like bobble dolls.
When they’d gotten a good wheel at the pit in San Felipe, they’d taken off at top speed, and so had Alcorn, Dr. Lopez, and I with their truck parts. But we stayed gone. Timerider went four or five miles down the coast road, headed into a curve doing about 120, and came up with no brakes. Nesmith did some very fancy Soap Box Derby driving and coasted Timerider to a safe stop. A can of brake fluid was poured in. That lasted forty feet. They had to turn around and creep back to the San Felipe pits. By then the spare master cylinder was in the air, halfway to El Crucero.
Eikelberger managed to adapt a salvaged Jeep brake cylinder to the Chevy, but by the time he finished Timerider was an hour and a half off pace.
From San Felipe to Gonzaga Bay, the course went over a set of mountains called Tres Hermanas, or Three Sisters, known as the three ugliest sisters in Mexico. It’s only a sixteen-mile stretch across the mountains proper, but it took Timerider an hour and a half to negotiate it. The road was steep and apparently had been graded by titans using basketball hoops as gravel screens. The only way through was to get on the accelerator until you “make it up or break it up.”
Because of the time lost to brake failure, all the little cars—the Class 11 VWs and Class 6 two-wheel-drive production cars and anemic Class 7 mini-pickups—were in the Three Sisters before Timerider. The road was littered with parts and pieces of them and some whole ones too, helplessly stuck. Nesmith and Eikelberger got caught in back of a huge Swede in a stalled Saab. The Swede refused to reverse out of the way and was too big to argue with. And when they got out to give him a push, he yelled, “Not dere! Dot’s fiberglass! Yu’ll break it if you push it dere, yah!”
When they got the Swede out of the way they ran up behind a stuck Class 7, and while pushing it uphill they got stuck themselves. When they tried to back down they were blocked by a stalled Blazer. “Just go ahead and back into the goddamned thing,” said the Blazer’s purple-faced, Blazer-kicking driver. They did and bounced and got some speed up and made it over. Then Eikelberger looked back and saw that Timerider’s bed was rippling in a manner more like a waterbed than a pickup bed.
The tubular cage that formed the shock mounts for four of the six rear shocks had begun to break up. Shock absorbers were prodding the truck bed from beneath. Timerider made it the rest of the way over the Three Sisters with only two shocks locating the rear axle, and these at an almost horizontal angle. Also, when they’d reached the top of the third sister, the water gauge was at 280 degrees and the transmission temperature was over three hundred degrees.
Eikelberger found an unused set of shock mounts on the frame, left over from some previous rear suspension experiment. He added another set of shock absorbers, but these too were almost horizontal. The loose and flexing suspension cage was beginning to tear the back end of the truck apart. They bungeed and cabled and wired Timerider’s aft until it looked like the victim of a drunk spider the size of an elk.
By then, Nesmith said later, they’d gone “from race face to finish face.” But tangled-in-a-ball-of-twine-Timerider worked surprisingly well through the valleys southwest to El Crucero. So Nesmith sped up and a seam opened in the oil cooler.
The pit crew at El Crucero rerouted the oil lines and threw away the oil cooler. Fifty miles later there was a flat stretch that looked easy on the suspension. Nesmith pushed the accelerator again and the oil pressure went to zero. When they opened the hood there was oil everywhere. A new length of braided steel hose had split. To replace the hose the oil pump had to be removed. Solid walls of cactus blocked both sides of the narrow path. The only thing to do was to push Timerider into this thicket. Eikelberger lay on his back and pulled the pump and hoses. He was still sleeping on his stomach weeks later.
Timerider’s flashlight was missing too. Eikelberger did the work by braille with help from just a faint glow of headlights reflecting on the needled plant life.
And yet Timerider was still fast. Nesmith and Eikelberger went, at nearly full speed, down the Pacific coast above Scammon’s Lagoon, where the gray whales breed each winter. (Not that they stopped to watch.) If they could make San Ignacio by two-thirty A.M., they’d still be in the running for maybe second or maybe third place in their class. Then they hit the silt beds.
A silt bed looks like a dry lake but is actually an accumulation of clay dust that’s one, two, or even three feet deep. Huge ruts lurked beneath that dust. The only way across the silt beds was to go like hell and hope like heaven. This didn’t work. Timerider got high-centered. Eikelberger and Nesmith spent an hour shoveling dust and piling brush under the rear wheels. In that hour they went thirty feet. They got to San Ignacio at four A.M.
We had begun to worry. SCORE’s ham radio communications went from bad to none. Nobody knew where anybody’s car was. The generator kept going out. Every time the lights came back on I noted that the large crowd of not entirely sober Mexicans had closed in tighter. They weren’t hostile, but whenever a car came into the pits the crowd rushed to help, scattering parts and tools everywhere. A Mexican entry arrived to popular acclaim. But he had a broken frame member. While the driver’s back was turned several onlookers grabbed welding equipment and came to the aid of their countryman, sending showers of sparks over the cans of race gas.
Rumors began circulating in the pits. Everyone was lost. Everyone was in La Paz already. There’d been a terrible accident. There’d been a riot. There’d been a huge explosion at Villa Insurgentes. (Actually a ham operator had bumped his radio antenna into a high-tension wire, burning himself on the leg and knocking himself off the top of a truck.) The best rumor was about Mark Thatcher, the British prime minister’s son, who was driving a Class 3 4WD Dodge pickup. We heard he’d been kidnapped by political terrorists. In fact, though no kid, he was napped—asleep in the back of a Lincoln Continental behind the San Ignacio pits after having been stuck in Tres Hermanas like everybody else.
Finally, at three A.M., an entrant came in with the news that Timerider was sitting just off the road forty miles north, where the course crossed Route 1. One of the pit crewmen and I got in the preracer and went, at ninety, up the highway. It wasn’t Timerider sitting just off the road. It was more of our own crew in the Baja Bug, looking for Timerider too.
We got the preracer back to San Ignacio moments before the busted-looking Nesmith and Eikelberger and their busted truck arrived.
Eikelberger leaped out and grabbed the arc welder. He didn’t have the right welding rods or any reinforcing material. It was a freestyle welding spree and anything hanging loose got a bead on it.
“We’re going to get fifty miles down the road, and it’s going to break,” said Burke.
“No, it won’t,” said Nesmith, “everything’s broken already.”
About four-thirty in the morning, Crisco and Burke took off.
Eikelberger and I waited for an hour to make sure Timerider didn’t come gimping back. Then we left to try to beat the truck to the checkpoint in La Purisima.
Out of San Ignacio the race course turned west to the tidal marshes along the Pacific, then down the coast for 150 miles. The only way Eikelberger and I could catch Timerider was to turn east, and then south on Route 1 and take the supposedly decent dirt road back across the peninsula. After five hundred miles and twenty-four hours of natural and mechanical agony, Eikelberger insisted on driving the pre-runner himself.
We headed out of San Ignacio at 115 mph, cows all over the place. I swear Mexican cattle come out like chickens to gravel along the roadside in the early morning. We missed every Bossy and drove toward the biggest, reddest sunrise ever. We’d liberated some race gas from the pits and the Windsor was singing like a whiskey-throated Mormon Tabernacle Choir—down through the mountain passes above Santa Rosalia and by the palm jungles of Mulegé and along the cliffs above Bahia Conception.
The road west to La Purisima, when we found it, was nothing but a wander of dog tracks. Our only means of navigation was to keep the sun at our backs as we headed into the awesome (and not always in a good way) Baja interior.
In forty miles I saw a dozen things that would be national monuments, federal parks, or huge tourist attractions if they existed in the States—nameless buttes the size of Manhattan with sheer pink cliff faces as high as the Chrysler Building, whole Mount Shastas made up of loose boulders the size of houses, a cactus forest with the cactus growing thick as lawn grass and big as bridge abutments, and places where the land itself seemed to have been incarnated in horrid life-forms by the forces of wind erosion. What there was of road bumbled through this, two-thirds wide enough for our truck. One door scraped against a topless rock wall while the other door opened on a bottomless abyss. Eikelberger never took his foot off the gas. “We went through some of this easy stuff on the way to San Felipe,” he said.
We went down into a grove of cactus. On top of every plant for hundreds of yards around was a vulture, five hundred vultures at the very least. We went up into highlands deserted by all of life, plant and animal alike. If there is a Valley of the Shadow of Death (which would be where the vultures were) then these are the hills that cast it into shade.
We came upon a gravel road up there, well maintained but steep and treacherous. We descended on it into what seemed to be a giant quarry until we came around a curve and almost drowned in a lake. Palm trees were waving on its banks. Amid the palms was a village with an ancient mission church at its center. All around were pin-neat grass huts with thatched roofs. Each had a vegetable garden, a woven-stick corral full of fat pigs, and a yard where plump cows wandered and sleek goats strained at tethers.
People waved as we skidded through their town. They were smiling and healthy-looking and wore clean, white clothes. We drove past a great aqueduct built from hand-hewn stone and appearing to date back to the conquistadores if not before. This was San Isidro. I meant to go live there forever. But before I got around to it the village was gone, and we were up another hill and back in the rocks with no living thing visible for miles in any direction.
When we arrived at the checkpoint in La Purisima, we found that Crisco and Burke had been and gone an hour before. We thought they must be doing okay.
They weren’t. About forty-five miles out of San Ignacio Crisco launched Timerider into a set of steep downhill switchbacks and the brakes failed again. Timerider slipped over the berm and slid sideways down a forty-five-degree incline, riding on the rocker panel and the tire sidewalls for hundreds of yards, nearly rolling every second. But they were back on the course when they got to the bottom. They pried open a crushed exhaust pipe, pulled the fenders away from the tires, and poured some fluid in the ex-Jeep master cylinder.
Another forty miles or so and they got a flat, using up their only remaining spare. They borrowed some likely looking wheels from a DNF at a place I can find on no map called Ejido Candejo. And seeing that they couldn’t stop very well anyway they decided to go full-speed to Villa Insurgentes.
There’s a rug-flat coastal plain bordering the Pacific from La Purisima eighty miles south to Insurgentes. The road is deep sand and perfectly straight. Eikelberger gave me the wheel of the prerunner and showed me the technique for deep sand driving. You put your foot in it and go like stink. This, you’ll recall, is the same technique used for steep rocky trails and for silt beds and, as far as I can tell, for every other eventuality that Baja racers encounter.
The Mexican highway department had put culverts under this sand road, one every three hundred meters, to keep the road from washing out. The road washed out anyway, leaving each culvert two feet high athwart the road. The ride to Villa Insurgentes was like having four-hundred-horsepower hiccups. We knocked the top off the toolbox and wrenches went flying. We cracked a shock mount and we broke a gas tank strap.
On Timerider they had busted the whole rear suspension cage repair and, at Villa Insurgentes, they’d had to weld it together again. By the time Eikelberger and I arrived, Timerider was gone again.
Crisco and Burke were out on the beach in the penultimate leg of the race, with 170 miles left to La Paz. We took Route 1, filled with Mexican gas now and pinging like a sheet metal harpsichord. We had to stop every thirty miles and pour toluene in the tank to jack the octane. But the prerunner managed a hundred miles per hour just the same.
We got to La Paz about noon. Nesmith et al had arrived that morning in the Cessna 411. Crisco and Burke, however, had halted at the last pit stop—just before the course turned east toward La Paz—and found Timerider’s rear suspension had come apart for the third time. There was nothing left to weld. They jury-rigged the back end with more bungee cords and a nylon strap come-along and kept moving. High tides forced them up into a cactus patch where they got two flats. Timerider was out of tires once more. The truck quit—out of gas. It was a long walk to get any, and when they came back and opened the gas cap the tank was full. A loose strut had been rubbing against the fuel filter, had worn a hole in it, and the engine (and apparently the gas gauge) was sucking air.
Burke bypassed the fuel filter. They drove on. But a few miles later a float stuck in one of the carburetor bowls. Burke put a screwdriver blade against the carb and whacked the screwdriver handle with a rock, meaning to jar the float loose but driving the screwdriver right through the bowl instead. Fortunately it was the bowl for the four-barrel’s secondaries and he was able to seal these with duct tape and run on the primary barrels. But as Crisco opened the door to get behind the wheel he stepped into a big cactus apple that lodged in the center of his forehead.
There is no way to touch a cactus apple without embedding its barbed thorns in your flesh. And it was tangled in Crisco’s hair as well. Burke had to give him a haircut with a pair of tin snips and remove the cactus apple with pliers.
Crisco and Burke finally nursed Timerider across the finish line at three-thirty in the afternoon. Elapsed time: 31 hours, 5 minutes, and 57 seconds.
They won. That is, as far as I was concerned, they won. Technically they were fifth in their class and more than thirteen and a half hours off the overall winning time, which was set on a 500cc motorcycle. But from what I’d seen there was only one opponent in the Baja 1000 and that was the Baja, and if you beat that you won.
Motor racing in the 1980s had come to mean watching a skinny Frenchman in a bathtub full of gasoline run two hundred miles an hour straight at a wall to see if his airfoils worked. So I couldn’t say enough good about the Baja 1000. It harkened back to an era when skill, ingenuity, friends, cooperation, guts, and riding mechanics meant more than sponsorship by a jeans company. I’d had as much fun as I’d had at the NASCAR race, in a more tiring, scary, and less hungover way. I stood convinced that the Baja 1000 was flat-out the best kind of racing on earth.
The only thing I couldn’t understand was why anyone would do it. “Well,” Nesmith said, “I like the big trucks and I like the people. But there’s something else. I don’t know if you’ll know what I’m talking about. But I grew up poor in west Texas. There wasn’t much to do. Sometimes one kid would say to another, ‘Come on over to my house—we’re gonna jump off the roof!’”