23

After almost three weeks of weaving in and out of rocky arroyos, Dulce was done.

She stopped at the top of a deep embankment twenty feet above an arroyo and refused to go further. No amount of coaxing or threatening or pleading would get her to budge. I now understood where the saying “as stubborn as a mule” had come from.

Unperturbed, Agustín tied one end of rope onto his saddle and the other around Dulce’s neck and dragged her down into the arroyo. Agustín was willing to drag her all the way to San Ignacio, but Dulce figured Agustín was more stubborn than she was and finally started walking again. I walked alongside her most of the afternoon.

About four o’clock, we saw a vaquero on a mule coming across the desert toward us.

Agustín recognized him. “Es Chico Arce.”

Vaquero Gertrudis “Chico” Arce of Rancho San Luis would take me to San Ignacio and perhaps further. We made our hellos, and then Agustín was anxious to turn around and start back to Rancho Santa Cruz before nightfall.

Chico explained that we were close to his rancho, Rancho San Luis, and could stay the night, but we were only two hours from San Ignacio. Though it would be after sunset and dark by the time we got to San Ignacio, perhaps it would be worth it?

I was exhausted and hungry and leery of riding a mule in the desert after dark, but the thought of a warm bed and hot food was too tempting. I reluctantly agreed to ride to San Ignacio.

It was a bad decision.

It was not a couple of hours’ ride to San Ignacio. Maybe for Chico riding alone. But with a pack mule and me, it was much slower. It became a five-hour ride in the dark in the desert. There was no moon. The night sky was overcast; there was not even starlight. We were in the desert, surrounded by cactus and thorns, and it was pitch-black. I couldn’t see.

Chico said there was a shortcut through the desert to San Ignacio and took off galloping on his mule, pulling Ratón behind him. Dulce and I followed nervously. A short while later, I was hit across the face by a mesquite branch and felt warm blood trickle down my cheek. I was terrified. Riding through cactus and mesquite during the day when you can see is terrifying; at night, when you cannot see, it is horrific.

Where was Chico? I couldn’t hear his mule or the jingle of his spurs.

“Chico!” I cried out.

Nothing.

“Chico, I can’t do this. This is not good.” I was beginning to whine. I hated that.

I thought back to the dark days of fighting cancer. Don’t whine, I would scold myself. Cry or scream if you have to, but don’t whine. Whining can quickly lead to self-pity and self-victimization and passivity, which make things worse, not better.

In a crisis it is necessary to be constantly aware of what is happening and to get a grip before things get out of control. Do something! With cancer, when you start vomiting, figure out how to stop it or slow it down. When diarrhea is like a rushing river, figure out how to keep from getting dehydrated. In chemotherapy, don’t just sit there and let your dry mouth develop blisters and sores. Do something!

It is not safe to ride a mule through desert cactus at night, so stop. Don’t do it!

My voice became firm and resolute. “Chico, I am not doing this.”

I stopped, unwilling to ride further.

I soon heard Chico; he took Dulce’s reins and slowly led us through the cactus. We came to a dirt road. From there it was another three hours of riding on the dark road to get to San Ignacio.

I had been walking and riding a mule through desert hell for almost twelve hours. I was exhausted, hungry, and riding against a freezing north wind. I started shivering and knew I had to calm myself to get through this. I couldn’t allow myself to give in to hypothermia, hyperventilation, or hyperanxiety.

A year ago, when I discovered cancer had returned in my left lung, I was sitting in the lobby at Stanford Cancer Center, waiting to meet with my doctors to discuss what to do. I felt despondent.

My friend Joyce Blue Summers, a mission walker, shared a short, affirmative prayer that transformed my life. It was three simple words.

“Edie, relax and say, ‘All is well,’” Joyce suggested. “And all will be well,” she promised. I tried it. I closed my eyes, took a deep inhale, and let the breath out slowly. “All is well.” I felt peace and a sense of well-being.

Riding Dulce through the dark desert, I could hear Joyce’s reassuring voice: “Just say, ‘All is well,’ and all will be well!”

“All is well,” I whispered.

I carried on a silent conversation with myself. “I am doing exactly what I want to do. I am exactly where I want to be. I am wrapped in the arms of God and am utterly, completely safe.”

Slowly, I began to feel at peace. I would never be here again. I would never again experience being on a mule at night in the thick of desert, in complete darkness. No moon, no stars, no light. No seeing. Just feeling—just being.

I started humming the tune of the old gospel song. It is well, it is well with my soul.

I was hungry, exhausted, and freezing, but—remarkably—happy.

We finally saw lights and arrived in San Ignacio after ten o’clock. Trudi was in San Ignacio to pick up Dulce and Ratón for her tour group. Chico and I rode to a rancho where the mules would stay the night. I said a sad good-bye to Dulce and even Ratón; I’d grown quite fond of the cantankerous little mule. Trudi picked us up and took me to a hotel. She had leftovers from dinner in the truck—a small piece of fish and half-eaten chile relleno—and gave them to me.

I checked into my hotel room. I was literally worn ragged and filthy. I hadn’t had a bath in two weeks, and had washed my face once at Rancho Sebastián. I was too exhausted to even take a shower. The leftover food looked delicious. The only thing I had eaten since the pork fat beans at breakfast was a bean burrito. I didn’t have a spoon or fork in the hotel room, but I was so starved I ate with my fingers, shoving food in my mouth in a couple of handfuls. I felt wonderful, eating the food with my fingers as fast as I could, exhausted, laughing at myself, and falling into bed filthy. Having a real bed with real sheets felt so wonderful.

“All is well,” I whispered before falling into a deep, dark sleep.

I planned to sleep late, but a loud knock on my door woke me early. It was Trudi.

“Edie, you have a problem. The old El Camino Real goes through an area where there are cave paintings, and you don’t have a permit.” She was worried.

I had no idea what Trudi was talking about. She soon explained that all tourists going into a protected area of Sierra de San Francisco where there are cave paintings must get a permit from the Department of History and Anthropology, known as INAH, in La Paz. In addition, someone working for INAH must accompany tourists through the area. The rule was to protect the cave paintings from vandals and miscreants. I was neither, but INAH didn’t know that.

Trudi was nervous. She could lose her license to run a small tour-guiding business if she broke the law. Trudi had rented me two mules, which made her liable for my conduct and responsible for applying for permits. She had gotten an angry call from a very upset woman named Lucera who worked for INAH in La Paz, demanding that I immediately stop my walk and go through proper procedures to obtain a permit. It could take weeks or months to get a permit.

I listened in disbelief as Trudi explained the predicament.

“You may not be allowed to go further.” Trudi was serious. “Lucera is fuming and demanding that we call her immediately. No one loves the cave paintings more than Lucera, and she is determined to protect them. I am a tour operator and should know better, but you aren’t in a tour group. I guess I messed up.”

Two people worked for INAH in a small office in the old Jesuit wine cellar of Mission San Ignacio. I quickly got dressed, and we drove over to the mission for a conference call with Lucera.

When Trudi and I arrived, the INAH employees began filling out a pile of forms and making copies of my passport and travel documents. One of the men, Jesús, was very polite and spoke excellent English. Trudi told him about my mission walks, that I was walking the old El Camino Real, and assured him I was trustworthy and had no interest in cave paintings.

Finally, Lucera called on the office speakerphone. For half an hour she scolded Trudi. She was speaking loudly enough for everyone in the wine cellar and down in the arroyo to hear. I understood enough Spanish to know she was refusing to let me go further. Trudi was soft-spoken and hardly said a word other than to profusely apologize for our bad behavior and promise to never do it again. After thirty minutes of venting, Lucera calmed down and said that she might allow me in the protected area, but she had to approve my vaquero, and one of her INAH employees had to accompany me.

Chico Arce was sitting quietly in the INAH office with us. After exchanging a few words with Jesús, Chico suggested that he be approved as the vaquero. Everyone loved Chico. He played the accordion and sang locally, and always had a smile.

Trudi was stunned when Lucera agreed.

Soon it was determined who from INAH would accompany Chico and me, and then Trudi and I went to lunch to celebrate.

“Edie, I just witnessed a miracle,” Trudi said as we sat down, the smells of delicious food making my belly rumble. She had never known Lucera to give an inch. “These cave paintings are as precious to her as children, and I should have informed her earlier. Believe me, I will never do that again!”

I was starved. Really. My belt had five notches. In Loreto, I fastened the second notch. I was now on the fifth and last belt notch, and my torn and dirty cargo pants were almost falling off. I ordered three plates of food: huevos rancheros, carne asada with rice and beans, and a large plate of grilled vegetables. I ate it all and was still hungry.

Then it was time to do some shopping. “This is your last chance to buy supplies for four hundred miles,” Trudi warned. I needed sunglasses, fleece clothing, flash memory for my Olympus camera, medicine for my cholla-infected legs and arms—and a lot more Neosporin.

Afterward, I walked to Mission San Ignacio de Kadakaamán and spent several hours marveling at the beautiful old mission.

Though I didn’t know it at the time, Junípero Serra had also arrived in San Ignacio in the dark, at 3:00 a.m., after riding through the desert all night. Riding through the desert in the dark of night, he, too, must have cloaked his fear in the mantle of God’s protection.

It was Father Serra’s first trip to Mission San Ignacio, more than two hundred miles from Loreto. He had not been this far north. The stone church was under construction when he arrived, and it would be another twenty years before it was completed. He saw only walls without a roof.

José Rotea, the Jesuit missionary who examined the giant-size fossilized skeleton, only had time to build the church walls before the Spanish king expelled the Jesuits in 1767. None of the Jesuits were told why. Rotea was native-born in Mexico, but the king banished him to Europe and into misery. A missionary expelled with Rotea wrote of his anguish, “He was not even told whether the construction of the church or something else was responsible for his banishment.”¹

Rotea and the other Jesuit missionaries had fallen victim to a power struggle between king and church being played out six thousand miles away in Madrid, Spain. Lies circulated in the royal Spanish court that the missionaries had amassed a fortune in gold, silver, and pearls; lived like kings; and were becoming too powerful.

In 1767, the king ordered the missionaries arrested, imprisoned, and exiled. The general sent to arrest them cried and asked for forgiveness when he found the impoverished missionaries living in “a sandy waste sown with thorns and thistles.”²

The arrested missionaries must have cried, too, in the darkness: “Dear Lord, why hast thou forsaken me?”

The Jesuits were among the most educated and hardy young men of Europe. They were the entrepreneurs of their generation, possessing amazing skill and superhuman courage. Each man was a self-taught explorer, adventurer, and mapmaker, builder and craftsman, farmer, rancher and vintner, weaver and tailor, teacher and preacher.

I felt the missionaries’ suffering. I felt their hurt. I felt their despair. Every day on the mission trail, I paid humble homage to their sacrifice, especially when I arrived at a mission, stood in ruins molded with their hands from sand and rock, and marveled at what they had created. Each day I walked on trails made holy with their toil and tears, and each day I gave thanks to the God of Abraham and his Son, Jesus Christ, whom they had given up their lives to serve.

Chico arrived the next morning riding a chocolate-brown macho mule named Gato (cat). He had a smaller mula for me named Voya. It was love at first sight.

Voya was an iridescent light auburn color, and her color matched perfectly with the copper-hued lava rock of Sierra de San Francisco, as if God had used the same color palette for both.

Chico didn’t have a pack mule. He arranged with a local vaquero to deliver a burro. I had finally figured out the difference between a burro and a mule and could even tell them apart, sometimes. A burro is a full-blood donkey, usually small, with a mouth full of really large teeth that, next to their hind legs, is their most feared weapon. A mule is half horse and half donkey and usually more handsome and well-mannered. Of course, there were exceptions, like Ratón, whose genes weighed heavy on the donkey side. Vaqueros dislike burros, and the feeling is mutual. Mules hate them too. Burros are inherently wild and untamable and will escape at the first opportunity—even heavily loaded with supplies—and disappear into the wild. Wild burros were a common sight in remote places along the old mission trail. They delighted in sneaking up behind us, biting our pack mule on the rump, and causing a wild commotion.

Half an hour up El Camino Real, we met the vaquero, Gerardo Valensuela, walking alongside a motley brown burro and dark horse. Neither animal was tethered, and both followed closely to his side like obedient children. Gerardo had the kind eyes of a saint and a gentle smile. He asked if he could pray for me. He took my hand, closed his eyes, and said a prayer. It was very beautiful and touched my heart. The warmth of the prayer stayed with me for days.

The burro behaved until Gerardo was out of sight. This was my first encounter with a burro. I soon understood why vaqueros hate them. Chico tethered the burro tightly to his mule, but it was a constant struggle to control him. He would kick both hind legs up at the same time, rising on his forefeet with butt in the air, and kick his hind legs into Voya’s nose. My poor mula was kicked half a dozen times, and terrorized, by a burro half her size.

For twenty miles we rode across a plain scattered with massive piles of lava, through forests of giant cardon and barrel cactus, and across mountain cuestas and arroyos the missionaries had named Satancio, Lucifer, and El Infernio, hellish places from which there seemed to be no escape.

Cactus pierced our legs, but the sides of the mules must have been thicker than bull leather, because they plowed straight through it and gave it no mind. A ferocious wind blew across the plain. Gato and Voya walked slowly and hesitantly over the sliding lava rock, and Chico struggled to keep them moving. When my hat flew off, the lava rock was too sharp to dismount and get it. Chico bent over in the saddle and used the tip of his machete to pick it up.

At sunset we arrived at Rancho El Carricito, home of Norma and Rafael López, Chico’s relatives.

Norma’s house was immaculate, which is almost impossible in the desert. She was a stout, strong woman, like my mother. I watched as Norma labored to wash eight huge buckets of dirt-drenched farm clothes, and it brought back memories of my youth.

When electricity came to rural Oklahoma in the mid-1950s, one of the first things Mama did with her egg money was make a down payment on an electric wringer washer. Before her electric washer, washday was the hardest and longest day of the week: it required her to heat water in a large bucket, pour the scalding water into the washtub, and use a scrub board and hand wringer to wash. Mama never cared much for electric clothes dryers, preferring instead to hang clothes on the clothesline to let them dry in the sun. Our clothes always smelled fresh and deep clean. Mama said the clean smell came from the sun’s ultraviolet rays acting as an antiseptic. To this day, I can close my eyes and hear the lulling, meditative sound of clothes flapping gently on the clothesline, and Mama humming gospel softly underneath her breath.

I imagine that’s what heaven must sound like.

That night, I slept in a dark concrete shed in the back of Norma’s ranch house next to the clothesline and fell asleep to the rhythmic sound of clothes drying in the desert wind, and dreamed of Mama.

Chico and I followed Arroyo Santa María, where there was less cactus and lava rock. There were long stretches of hard-packed sand with fewer rocks, and I walked about ten miles.

When I wasn’t walking, Chico and I ambled slowly along on Gato and Voya, in no hurry.

“The mules need a rest after yesterday,” Chico advised in Spanish. I didn’t speak much Spanish but was beginning to understand what was said.

Chico was a lovely young man in his thirties. He sang. He whistled. He hugged the burro after yelling at him.

I had given him a thousand pesos for food in San Ignacio, and he’d bought three dozen bean burritos, fresh melon, six cans of tuna, and a saddlebag full of Snickers candy bars. Two or three times a day, he reached behind Gato into his saddlebag. He unwrapped one Snickers bar at a time. He tore it in two, reached over Gato and Voya, and handed me the smaller piece. He flashed a big smile full of mischief and fun, hoping that I wouldn’t notice and not caring if I did. His smile revealed a gold front tooth.

We arrived at the famous missionary water hole of Rosarito in the late afternoon. Chico took the animals down an embankment to water before spreading his bedroll on bare ground under a leafless palo verde tree that looked dead in the dim light of sunset. He was careful to avoid the vicious thorns that hung down ready to tear open an ear or lip.

A man on a mule rode into camp. His name was Patricio Ojeda. He was a friend of Chico’s—though everyone is a friend of Chico’s. He had ridden four hours from Santa Marta. He worked for INAH and accompanied tourists to see the cave paintings, and Lucera had sent him to ride with us, to make sure we didn’t go near the caves.

Government jobs in Baja must pay well. Nothing on him, or his mule, looked worn. His saddle and harness were polished, and his saddle blankets looked new. A shotgun in a polished leather sheath was attached to his saddle, as was a machete. Patricio wore a snow-white hat and a clean white shirt, and his leather chaparejos were thinner and stylishly cut. His silver spurs glistened in the light of the campfire. Chico eyed everything with his characteristic smile, but his eyes were not as bright. He was younger than Patricio, but he was worn. Patricio was new.

Patricio set up his clean-looking bedroll on the other side of Chico’s palo verde tree, and I heard them talking around the campfire until late into the night.

Unable to sleep, I lay awake in my tent, writing in my journal and reflecting on the walk.

The mission walk mirrored life. When young, we focus on the trail, on our objectives—our jobs, education, buying a home. We realize no one cares where we’ve been; they just care where we are going. At midlife, our focus becomes the people in our lives, the blessings and heartache others bring to us; people come and people go, even people we love. Sometimes we have to move others out for us to move on, and that is painful. As we grow old, life is about the journey. We reflect on the journey of our life and what has been gained, what has been lost, and what remains; of those who have come before us; of what we will leave behind.

Life can be bittersweet, even brutal; nonetheless, it is a beautiful gift, and the long mission walk was allowing me to unwrap it slowly, one soul-felt step at a time.