We
forget it is twice the length of Florida; twelve hundred miles of road
through an intense history that changed the world, forever. I never read
Steinbeck. I wasn't one for the classics - they had been read so many
times before. And in travel, I was hoping for that new book that was yet
undiscovered. In New York, I would tend to not know where I was going,
rather than jet for Times Square. And here, in Baja, I was seeking a book
still cracking at the seam with newness. A place known only by those who
walked its streets. And newness in account is approachable in Baja, this
unwanted place tamed neither by Mexico or America, industry or tourism.
I
didn't require adventure, and had little desire for the true unknown or
original. What I wanted was discovery. To know something I had not known
before, nor had I expected to find. Because in travel, discovery isn't
cutting the mescal and peering into its fibrous tissues, it is learning
about oneself, about recovering memory and about carving out future. And
that is why, this time, neither Vance nor I had any interest in stopping
in Tijuana.
We
stopped in Ensenada, a dirty rat-hole, to stock up on vegetables and beer.
We took to the eastern side of the city; the side where the cruise-ships
are thoroughly out-of-view, where we paid a man to watch the truck while
we picked tomatoes, serranos, white onions and avocados. "It says here
that they cannot sell beer," Vance said. "We'll get it somewhere else,"
I said. But there would be no beer, not further inland, nor down the road
through red-dirt vineyards, and along valleys of cactus farmers and under
quiet, green and pleasant valleys. The tamales, sold in a bare shack out
of a plastic bag, by three men, were tasty, but 'Cerveza?', 'No Cerveza!'
"But Why?" "Presidente!"
 |
When
we arrived in San Quentin, we also found that 'Presidente' was not letting
the beer out of the fridge, so we continued on, south, and past a two-legged
dog, dragging its way along the pavement, sweating in the sun and looking
up every so often to see if anything would change. Blinding light cursed
this unwanted place; the outskirts of San Quentin. The houses were like
toys, unadorned and block-like. Few bothered to plant vegetables or tend
their lot. And the rest left their garbage free to fly in the wind; catching
on the creosote and affixing the land with the sickness of a place that
had given up.
We
continued on, south along the Pacific, and when the plastic bags and beer
bottles gave way to a spare barrel cactus or desert scrub, and gentle
dunes cast into the sea, I felt oddly at home.
Somewhere
north of the quiet town of El Rosario, in the middle of nowhere, we turned
off the road and onto a beaten gravel path to a rugged sandstone coastline;
mountains, hills and cliffs and the Pacific's pounding surf.
Under
our feet was a giant hole in the earth. The sea had cut an underground
cave and settled here: a stretch of beach underneath the earth. Four seals
were in the water. One had no head. Sharks. Somehow, this hole led to
the sea, and we wanted to find out, but, "paddling in there is too dangerous.
Lets put that out of our minds right now."
