There is a thing known as car nut logic. It’s misnamed insofar as ratiocination is implied. But having your brain on “auto” is a dominant mode of thought for many American men and for no few American women, although not for the two American women who accompanied me and Michael Nesmith on one more Baja adventure in 1984.
The Baja was a bad place to race and a worse place to test sport sedans. Therefore, Michael and I reasoned, it would be a swell place for a romantic getaway. Michael invited his then-wife Kathryn and I invited my then-girlfriend Elena to go on an “off-road road trip.” We would take two four-wheel-drive vehicles down the Baja, for fun, attempting to avoid all pavement while camping out along the way. I’m not blaming the Baja for Michael’s divorce or my breakup. But …
I talked the then extant American Motors Corporation (I’m not blaming the Baja …) into loaning us a pair of their products—a newly introduced SUV model, the Cherokee, and a CJ with a pickup bed, the Scrambler.
We took these to Michael’s race garage in LA. We (by “we” I mean Michael and his mechanics) reinforced the suspensions, bolted in extra spares, fitted the Cherokee with a safari-style roof rack and an electric winch, and wired each Jeep with a set of four auxiliary lights. When the lights were switched on they lit the garage like a Los Alamos A-bomb test.
Mexico has only one brand of gasoline, Pemex, owned by the government. Quality and supply are the same as they would be if the U.S. Post Office was also the gas station. We installed thirty-gallon gas tanks, added backup fuel filters, and packed a case of octane booster.
We also packed oil, coolant, extra radiator hoses and fan belts, a tow strap, jumper cables, fire extinguishers, several sets of wrenches, a shovel, and an air compressor; plus tents, sleeping bags, coolers, twenty gallons of American water, a camp stove, dried food, a compass, two-way radios, piles of maps and guidebooks, and four snake-bite kits.
In retrospect this strikes me as three snake-bite kits too many. I mean, once I’ve had to use one snake-bite kit I’m out of there. Hello medevac, good-bye me. On the other hand there was no medevac in the Baja. While you’re treating yourself with the first snake-bite kit, I guess the same snake could sneak up and bite you three more times. Even so, for the sake of our love lives, Michael and I would have been better off replacing a couple of the snake-bite kits with a pair of small blue boxes from Tiffany & Co.
Larger gifts from Tiffany wouldn’t have fit. The Jeeps were so full that we had to leave a lot of things behind, but only the things we’d be needing. It took us from morning until late afternoon to pack the Jeeps with the other things. On the first day of our journey we made it to Huntington Beach.
On the second day, Tuesday May 8, we entered Mexico at Tecate and took Route 2 east along the border to the Mesa del Pinal, the pine forests on the western slope of the Juárez mountains. Here we turned off the road. Forty miles south was Laguna Hanson, the Baja’s only lake.
We were lost two hundred yards from the pavement. Lumber is scarce in Baja, and Mesa del Pinal is webbed with woodcutters’ roads. Once a way is cleared in the desert it stays clear. The woodcutters’ roads overlaid four centuries of cattle trails, mining cuts, Indian paths, and missionary pack routes—all still open to passage, mainly by us. We’d left the compass behind.
Still, it was a beautiful afternoon, sun lighting up the stands of trees, air redolent with incense cedar, piñon pine, sage, and gasoline. I stopped the Scrambler. Gas was pouring out of our custom-fitted tank. A little nest of vent tubes designed to meet some U.S. air pollution regulation had come undone. We would dribble gas the rest of the trip.
Michael got under the car. Elena walked off to photograph the scenery. These uplands look inviting, like Devonshire pastures, but the flapjack-shaped nopal cactus has tiny spines that must be removed by depilatory waxing. Cholla cactus spines are large, barbed, and nearly unextractable. And cholla branches detach so easily they’re said to throw themselves at people. Elena was back in a minute.
We kept driving around in the pines. The sun was setting. We got out all our maps. No two agreed on anything. “Laguna Hanson,” I read aloud from one of the guidebooks, “is named for an American ranch manager who was murdered there.”
We got back in the Jeeps and Elena confessed she’d never spent a night outdoors. I looked over and saw her knuckles gleaming white on the grab handle. I explained that there was nothing to worry about. We had enough food and water to spend weeks lost in the piney woods. Furthermore, Elena had been born in Havana. “You speak the local lingo,” I said.
“Are we going to die?” she asked.
We couldn’t find any place to pitch camp except the dry washes. These are poor campsites because livestock wander up and down them all night except during flash floods. A stake bed truck passed by full of drunk and yelling ranch hands. “You see,” I told Elena, “we’re not that far from civilization. What are they yelling?”
“You don’t want to know,” she said.
We found the highway again about eleven P.M. We’d penetrated maybe twenty miles into the wilderness.
The Juárez range had climbed gradually from the Pacific, but to the east the descent was immediate. The road peeled down a giant bluff in frenetic switchbacks. There were no shoulders on the highway. Cliffs rose without preamble from one edge of the asphalt and dropped like ruined stockbrokers from the other. Guardrails were few and there were no dents in them, just large holes punched straight through. The only traffic at midnight was enormous diesel trucks doing eighteen-wheel drifts through the turns at seventy miles an hour or, worse, going ten miles an hour in both lanes with their lights out. Clusters of memorial crosses decorated every curve. Sweat greased my palms. My knees shook. I looked at Elena. She lived in New York. Apparently she equated being back on pavement with urban security. Lulled by the familiar noise of honking horns and squealing brakes, she was asleep.
We reached flat land at Mexicali and drove into a fog of chemical spray and fertilizer stink rising from the irrigation canals. We rushed across the border and checked into an American motel.
We were ashamed of ourselves in the morning and returned to Mexico immediately, driving south on the San Felipe road into the delta of the Colorado River. For years Mexico had been arguing with the United States about Colorado water rights. During the Carter administration a treaty had been signed and the United States agreed to divert less of the Colorado’s flow. But the Mexican government hadn’t completed its channel dredging operations in time. The land Mexico was eager to irrigate was now under four feet of water.
Farther south was El Desierto de los Chinos, the desert of the Chinamen, where nothing grew at all. To the east was the wide salt flat, as eerie as it had been when I’d seen it on the way to San Felipe a year before. To the west was sand as bright as the salt, rising to shining hills that merged with brilliant sky, which arched back to the salt’s glare until the whole landscape pinwheeled. The temperature was 120 degrees.
About 1900 a group of Chinese immigrants set out across this desert, hoping to find work in the United States. They paid a Mexican guide $100 to lead them. He said he knew where the water holes were. Halfway between San Felipe and the delta the guide admitted he didn’t. They all died, including the Mexican. (Leaving us to wonder how we know the story.)
At El Chinero, where the bodies were buried, we turned west up the San Matias pass, which divided the Sierra Juárez from the Sierra San Pedro Mártir, the highest range in the Baja. Six thousand feet up in these peaks, a hundred miles from any city, and separated from the road by twenty miles of crag and gorge was a hacienda with a dirt air strip and guest rooms: Mike’s Sky Ranch.
Michael and I had been eager to get into bad terrain. We were anxious to try our expensive car modifications. The handcrafted dual-front shock-absorber mounts on the Cherokee came loose immediately. Then there was an ugly noise from the Scrambler. I stopped. Water was pouring out of the radiator. One fan blade had bent double and sliced an arc out of the radiator core.
In the Baja 1000 race they attribute such accidents to a special gremlin, the Baja Monster. They say the Baja Monster makes things go wrong no one ever heard of going wrong before. I’d certainly never seen this happen to a fan blade. Actually, like most remote places, the Baja was supposed to have a monster. Tibet had the Yeti. The Rockies had Sasquatch. And the monster reported by early travelers in Baja was, rather sadly, Zorillo the rabid skunk.
We towed the Scrambler over the now less attractive rocks and gullies to Mike’s.
Mike’s Sky Ranch sat in the 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, hundreds of birds flew out. Kathryn and Elena were delighted by their lambent, darting turns. Michael took me aside. “Those are bats,” he said.
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. Once again, as on the drive to San Isidro, 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, un-branched 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 under the bed.
Rough weather, rougher geography, and protecting 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 jack rabbits 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. It was abandoned, its windows broken, the sculpture 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 midpeninsula 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 storms had corrugated whole miles of it. All the oil seals on the 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 wrecking clatter of predetonation 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 a little short 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 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 eye strain. “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 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. Baja California was geography with a sense of humor. And geography always has the last laugh. 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 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 matrons who washed themselves in urine.
It takes imagination to travel in a land like this. First you must imagine there’s a reason to go there. Then you must imagine there’s a reason to stay. Our disbelief had come unsuspended. Michael got on the phone and began hectoring the switchboard operator with hopelessly polite guidebook phrases. It took an hour to get the hotel’s one long-distance line.
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 new 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 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 Ángeles 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 only found 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 seem 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 Ángeles 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.
It was four in the afternoon when we got the radiator back. Bored and half drunk, we drove a dozen miles out the cutoff and went south on a road into wide broken valleys full of Cardón. “Road,” in such cases, meant just a place someone else had taken a vehicle. And brought it back, we hoped.
It took us two hours to go twenty-one miles to the ruins of the Mission San Borja. The mission was founded in 1759 to serve the spiritual needs of three thousand Indians. It was named “Saint Borgia” because that appalling family’s contributions to the Jesuits financed it. By the time the granite church was complete in 1801 only four hundred Indians were left alive. The settlement was abandoned seventeen years later.
The ruins were not ruins at all. The church stood with huge futility almost perfectly preserved. The nave, at least thirty feet high and maybe seventy feet long, was roofed by an arch built without mortar from oval streambed rocks. Someone had put a color magazine illustration of the Virgin of Guadalupe on the dusty altar.
Here was an enormous monument to blindness and folly, built with the lucre of swine and causing the death of thousands of people. Yet there was a feeling of sanctity to the place. Maybe God likes a good joke too. I crossed myself and put a couple hundred pesos under a devotional candle.
The sun went down. We raced the cars back to the Bay of LA, sliding sideways into the cactus and getting airborne over piles of rocks. Our ten headlights lit a pantheon dome of roiled silt above the desert floor.
At our motel they’d prepared an enormous meal, sea bass so large that it was cut into porterhouse steaks. All the food in Baja was splendid. The local lobsters were split and grilled slowly over mesquite fires. Delicate flour tortillas and fresh goat cheese were made into quesadillas. There was no refrigeration so everything was exactly fresh (or obviously otherwise). Chickens were, of course, free range and necessarily organic. Steaks were lean, from grass-fed cattle, but well flavored, especially when served ranchero style with peppers so hot they made your nose run and the top of your head itch. And the AstroTurf colored, odorous sea turtle turned out to be—one might say—endangerously good.
We sat with the motel owner after dinner and had too much to drink. That afternoon out on the long sand spit closing the mouth of the cove there’d been hundreds of shark heads—blue sharks, sand sharks, hammerheads. I asked the proprietor about this. “The local boys cut the sharks up,” he said, “and sell them to tourists as scallops. You can always tell the fake scallops. They are so big and perfectly round.”
We tried for the Calamajué River again in the morning. This river bottom may be the best road in Mexico—a crown of natural crushed gravel on a level base of sand. The canyon walls cut through six hundred million years of freshman geology. There were cliffs of igneous and metamorphic rock, sandstone escarpments, walls of conglomerate, towers of ocean sediment, and upended fields of slate in fracture patterns.
About ten miles from the mouth of the river we turned north to climb over a nameless mountain into Gonzaga Bay. The track here had been graded once and made a fairly good road except it was the wrong one. We were lost for hours, but we didn’t mind. We saw two bighorn sheep right beside us by the road, looking indeed like sheep yet in such unsheepish postures, grand as elk and silly as a hamster fight. The correct road was lousy, but we didn’t mind about that either. In most places the road was sand with shards of slate embedded like broken bottles on top of a wall. We blew out two of the Scrambler’s tires. In other places the road was almost impassable. Alongside one of the most difficult stretches was a 1949 Cadillac coupe, charred and lying on its roof, a Baja version of the frozen leopard in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.”
Gonzaga was a blue eclipse on a beach of moonlight-colored sand ruffed with mangroves. A few American sport fishermen had ramshackle casas on the shore. There was no telephone, no mail, and all the water had to be carried in. There was one electric generator hooked to two lightbulbs and the beer cooler. And there was no street in front of the houses, just a landing strip a bit too short for safety.
At the little beach shack restaurant, Alfonsina’s, they served us abalone. The restaurant owner unmounted one of the Scrambler’s huge, rigid tires with the handle of a lug wrench and the blunt side of a hatchet. Then he patched the tire with an old air mattress repair kit. We slept on the beach just above the high-tide line. The sand was so soft, the air so benign that we needed neither cushions nor blankets.
At sunrise we drove along the coast, up the famously difficult Tres Hermanas road. The going was steep to the limits of adhesion and too narrow for the bodywork, some of which we lost. What seemed to be boulders in the road was, in fact, the roadbed. There were places in these big, loose stones where to lift from the accelerator would be to slide backward, fall over the side, and die.
Randy Salmont took the Scrambler and Michael drove the Cherokee. It took them four and a half hours to go sixteen miles. They picked their way over things neither Jeep had the clearance to pass. This took an exact sense of where each wheel was. The tires had to be carefully put on top of the largest rocks. At some point the Cherokee’s undercarriage rolled one stone up atop another and the transmission casing was rammed into the chassis. The drive line’s slip shaft was pulled halfway out of the transmission but there was nothing to do except go on, with the gearbox whacking against the floor. The ascents were granite but the downward slopes were slate, cereal box–shaped rocks that made a sound like driving across dinner plates. The temptation was to hit the brakes, but the motor needed to be left in gear to keep any control over the half-accidental slide.
Fear improves the weather. We’d finished the last downhill grade before we realized it was one hundred degrees. Ten feet from us, under a shelf of rock, sat a yellow coyote. He was watching us carefully, but he wasn’t going to be spooked away from the only shade in miles. We looked under the cars. It was as if someone had gotten down in the arc welder’s trench and gone at them with a sledgehammer from below. Mighty dents appeared in floorboards, oil pans, and gas tanks. Fluids dripped from everything. Edges of fresh-torn metal glittered in the shadows.
But there was nothing tough ahead of us, just fifty miles of good sand road into San Felipe, then 130 miles of pavement to the United States, to working telephones, superhighways, real gasoline, clean drinking water, and successful business enterprises—an orderly, serious, law-abiding society with air-conditioning. The Jeeps would get us back in three hours.
“Let’s flip them upside down,” Michael said, “and burn them.”