Bahia Coyote and
Baja California Sur

I like the idea of being where I am now, in a place where roosters are crooning about, and people are selling used hack-saws and post-hole diggers and air-compressors. Actually, I am beneath that place, at the bank of the clammy-green Rio Mulegé, in the reedy section where most of the water is stagnant and swampy.

A thousand majestic date palms tower above me, the bamboo and the reeds. Twelve vultures, bold suckers, are eyeing me and two-stepping their way closer, hoping I leave. They intend to finish off that five-foot moray eel whose carcass has floated as far from the Sea of Cortez as the river could take it, before having its eyes pulled like strings by these unfortunate and hideous birds.

Twenty minutes past sundown, I am to meet Brother Hans and Father in downtown Mulegé, in the Mexican state of Baja California Sur, for Thanksgiving dinner. Right now, they are paddling up this river from the mouth at the Sea of Cortez. We came to Mulegé because it is a rare desert oasis: an incident of Spanish missionaries spitting their spanish date seeds along the riverbanks of a vast estuary three hundred years ago, making of it all a shadowy place between the badlands.

John Steinbeck passed up Mulegé because it was rumored to be malarial. Most others passed it up because it was Mexico's infamous no-walls jail where prisoners were allowed to roam the streets until the bell tolled at sundown. Today, Americans still pass up Mulegé because 'what's there?', and Mexicans' because the only economy is the pleasing of a few geritol-expats, a squid-packing facility, and agriculture and ranching which faces a 10 year drought.

I am not entirely sure why Father and Brother have opted to join me, but I trust their real reasons for traveling 1,727 miles into and out of the southern peninsular state of Baja California Sur have more to do with their mutual interest in Peter Benchley's The Girl of the Sea of Cortez than the idea of long days on the road, and damp nights in roadside tents. "We all read that book," father said. "He wrote it after Jaws because of people's response to the movie."

While we salute each other with the tip of margarita glasses, an older lady across the restaurant taps a hair-dyed-red biker on the shoulder. She says, "I didn't recognize you with your clothes on." Her husband leans over and says, "Honey, wrong table," The two, in a Daiquiri stupor, cause an uproar of laughter from the biker's table. "They're over there," her husband says, pointing to our table.

The lady leans over Brother Hans and says, "I didn't recognize you with your clothes on!" We had surprised Mrs. Carlisle near the mouth of the canyon of El Trinidad when Brother Hans opted to swim across the narrows rather than take the foot-path along the ledge. She had been watching birds, which I found to be appropriate, since she had the expressions of a birdwatcher: bookish glasses, and an eternal look of spryness and elderly spunk.

Father, curious about what these American's are doing here, asks, "How long do you spend in Mulegé?" Husband Carlisle says, "Most of el winter. Then go up to visit our kids for a few weeks, then Returno!" Mr. Carlisle was talking crazy talk, ignoring our laughs and pondering Baja. The subject of Mrs. Carlisle brought up Salvador, who led us into Canon La Trinidad. Guides can be a pain, but there are cases where it is illegal to operate without one, and with good reason. Canon La Trinidad hosts Northern Mexico's most famous cave painting, and a good number of Cochimi petroglyphs. Like Mexico's northern neighbor, Indian graffiti is kept well-protected from spray-paint and vandalism.

Salvador, the first in Mulegé to lead people into La Trinidad, learned Indian medicine from his grandmother. He stopped his truck in the desert flats between Mulegé and the mountains, explaining the mostly lost medicine of his heritage. "This one," he says, running his fingers through the creosote, "is used as deodorant. Put it in your boots so they don't smell." We walked past a fifty-foot cardon cactus. "The pulpa is an antibiotic, but this one," he says, finding a candelia, "is a great laxative. They use this one at the Rancheros for party jokes."

Most years the canyon is a struggle, because much of it requires swimming, but the broken dams and the drought made walking between the steep red cliffs a casual affair.

The stones at the canyon's exit seemed intentionally placed, and father asked about a petroglyth, "what was it for?" "This was a marking to other Indians. These people were semi-nomadic. These markings told the other people what was in the canyon, if it was a good place to be, if they were welcome there." We passed a diamond cholla, which hosts the longest spines of any of the painful cholla. "The roadrunner uses this one to trap snakes. When they are sleeping, he makes a cage around the snake, and then he can kill him because the snake will not leave."

At the site of the Trinidad deer, Salvador explained the history of the Cochimi, the role of Cortez and the missionaries, and how the Indians 'disappeared.' "Did the Indians make tequila?" I asked. "No, that was the Spanish." The Tiquila tribe is attributed as the inventors of mescal, the rough-hewn ancestor of tequila. It was Jose Cuervo who refined the process into tequila - a specification of region and agave type.

He said, "The Indians had their own thing. They had the mushrooms and the peyote."

Later, when Hans asked about the geometric shapes of the fish, the whales and the painting that looked like an anteater, Salvador said, "Nobody knows. Maybe it was they were crazy on peyote or mushrooms. " This one," he said, pointing to a drawing of an odd-looking man waving his hands in the air, "is cardon-man. We don't know but we think they had a myth about the cactus coming alive at night. "Mexican boogie-man," Brother Hans said.

We drew in on a narrow, sandy closure in the canyon. I heard that sound I knew from movies, "pi-tah-pi-tah-pi-tah."

"Rattlesnake," I said.
"Rattlesnake!" Father and Salvador closed in.
"You want me to catch him?" Salvador said.

"No," I said, thinking this is why I don't like guides, because they think they have to act like a guide.

He picked a stick off the ground and jutted it in from the snake. It fanged the stick, and Salvador lifted it off the ground, letting it wrap around the stick. "Now you can really see this snake," he said, passing the hissing serpent around our faces. 'Probably tastes like chicken,' Vance would have said. Or turkey.

This turkey dinner wasn't the first time we spent surrounded by Americans. When we arrived in the town of Mulegé several days before, we opted for a cantina which was hosting a fund-raising event for Mision Santa Rosalia de Mulegé, the local Mission and cultural center of town, which was in obvious disrepair. The restaurant owner had said, "Tonight is special night for the patrons of Mulegé. You can join them with a special Mexican meal, or have our normal menu." We opted to eat with the patrons.

Dinner was served, and speeches were in order. We looked over the display of sewn ornaments of baby Jesus' and handwritten scrolls, and a dessert plate without any desserts. And at the sight of the winnings, we decided to drive off, to the southern edge of Bahia Conception. We ended up at the southern end of Bahia Concepcion's coast, crossing a muddy road to the mangroves, where we set camp, played Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited, and finished a bottle of Hornitos.

It was a good time to untie Sonora, and explore the mangrove shallows. I put on my headlamp, and shoved off into the dark. Mangroves hold a special place in my heart; their awkwardness, their housing of strange creatures. Like the shady place beneath a banyan, or a David Grisman Quintet ditty, they are tangled, confusing, subtle and hip. At closer inspection, the mangroves are cities in miniature; one-way streets of fish, and crabs, and reddish egrets bobbing their heads - the yellowish interplay of light in the leaves is Brooklyn's flickering neon.

What in light-muddled night assumes an eerie bioluminescence, is in complete darkness, magic. Hans and I understood little about the flagellate plankton that glow bright green when slightly agitated as a way of scaring predators. But days later, when we settled our campsite at a palapa in Bahia Coyote, we rolled our kayaks off the sand, out into the quiet Cortez, and north, to Isla Piedra, and on its Eastern shores.

Where there was no light in a clouded sky, we saw our way by the 'cities' of plankton bursting green as they hit the rocks, the shoreline, the bottom of the sea. When a cloud of green burst six feet wide on the sea-floor, it meant we had startled a ray, and when a dozen zigzags shot into the air, we had propelled a squadroon of ballyhoo into flight.

One jumped into Hans' lap.
"I got a fish in my boat!"

Plankton, which means 'wanderer' or 'drifter' in greek, actually refers to any plant or animal which is at the mercy of the flow of the tide. A fish with weak fins, as a jellyfish, as the microscopic animals and plants which make up the variety of plankton-types, we are at the mercy of the dark, and the light of these microscopic wanderers.

We drift along the edge of an island we cannot see. It is a Hayao Miyazaki world, undescribable on film or television. The speed of a fish in panic is impossible to see correctly in daylight, even for scuba divers, who lack a top-side perspective. When something bigger than a ballyhoo comes trailing along the coast, its tail of green light extends four feet behind it, and when it's startled, its destiny into the deep is only put in quotations by a streaming biolume.

Bahia Coyote is a bay within a bay within the Sea of Cortez. Within this bay are several islands, all of them are quite distinct from the one we are circling now. Brother and I opted to visit the lot of them. We double-dry-bagged utility ropes, carabiners, snorkeling equipment, water bottles, a few stashes of food, camera equipment and life jackets into the dry-holds of the kayaks.

It was five-thirty in the morning, and I could have been foaming at the mouth, because the sea was already beginning to stew winds funneled from the northern-exit of Bahia Conception. The three miles to Isla Guapa lent itself to high enough winds that most of the time, I could hardly see Brother Hans as his boat dipped under the white caps. When he did rise, he was grinning. Certainly, he felt that same sense of being free as I did. In a small boat in a big sea, you have a lot of places to go, without any traffic signs or traffic to keep you in order.

Isla Guapa, which unlike the other islands in the bay, is not protected against the open Bahia Conception, and without this protection, its black rocks are bare - no vegetation, nothing living except the pelicanos who paint it white. This gives it somewhat of an ominous look, given there is no shoreline.

We bend around the back-side of Isla Guapa, where we are protected from wind, and find a nook to lodge our boats against. Wading along its southern coast, Hans finds a series of concave lipped-ledges. He says, "Follow me," hoisting himself onto the ledge and bouldering out of site.

"This is great for learning how to climb, because if you fall, you just fall into the water."

Hans teaches to replace fear with reason and calm. "See that foothold, it looks sketchy but its not. Now place your weight outward and grab along that ledge."

I did this with some hesitant success, and after one fall into the sea, I followed Brother Hans around the bend. "This is where we climb up," he said. I followed him. For a climber, this short boulder-effort is a walk-in-the-park, for me I see plenty of jagged rocks below my feet.

"One of the things about climbing," he said, is that climbing up is much easier than climbing down. You first." "No way, can't do it," I said.
"Of course you can."
"What if I just climbed a little lower."
"Not safe."
When I jumped off a rock into the sea in an abandoned island in Mexico, I knew why we came here, and why Hans made me jump. He followed with a splash and said, "Hey, we're in Mexico!"

It is remarkable, how, despite the relative obscurity of a place - Isla Guapa, home of the blue-footed booby and endangered osprey - man-glass appears anywhere, even here. It is shameful, but representative of Northern Mexico in general, where trash is everywhere, anywhere you go. Relative cleanliness is deceptive; because trash is mostly just visual environmentalism. We have our white-trash throwing their Pabst's on the roadside. The Mexicans have their Mexican-trash throwing their Dos-Equis in the ditches.

Whether or not someone is there to clean it all up or not, the Sea of Cortez is still being raped, and the Colorado River a dying river, despite how many clean-up crews are working their shores. Most of environmentalism is obtuse at best from the vantage of home, but travel objectifies it; makes the smallness of the world apparent; the influence of man clear, and the purpose of it all in bold-type. To see something with your own eyes is to understand something in a way that no book or painting can imagine, no photograph can cover, no song can turn alive.

Carl Sagan once wrote of discovery, "When you make the finding yourself - even if you're the last person on Earth to see the light - you'll never forget it." Those television sportsmen do it because they are still in love with man's basic desire for sport: to run, to challenge oneself, to compete and to hurdle oneself into the air. This thought startles me, as Brother Hans and I leave Isla Guapa for Isla Bargo - sport is man's closest tie to nature. In our modern world, it is our only common tie to it. It is impossible to love sport, and not love the idea of conservation.

The wedge-shaped Isla Bargo is rich in plant and bird life, and like many of the others, hosts a giant osprey nest at its helm. On the southern edge, where days before we had snorkeled along the shore with Father - triggerfish, skates, a pufferfish, surgeon generals and all sorts of damsels - we were now just paddling along its cliffs, looking up and looking for anything nesting above us.

As we did this we pondered the flat islet-peak, and decided to paddle around to the northern white-sandy shore. Up to a peak of the straggly sour pitaya, the pink-flowered Pitayita, the barrel-shaped Biznaga and even the columnar old man's cactus, which features a grayish-white 'head of hair.' At the broad flat midsection of the island's peak, there are several stands of chain link cholla and a few cardon cactuses.

The green of a cactus is much brighter than the green of trees - almost lime - and against the white sand of Isla Bargo, there is an elegance to this place; the elegance of simple lines and broad strokes. From this view of the entire bay, the canyons, the mountains behind them, the open sea beyond the bay, the dolphins in the deep, we stood there in silence. It means much more to drive to a place than to fly it, I thought.

I remembered the girl from the office a few days before: She leaned over my desk and said, "So, gonna be roughin' it in Mexico, huh?"

"Roughing it is when a golfer loses his balls."
"I just don't know how you can be outside where it's so dirty."
"Kim," I said. "See those vents up there?"
"Yes."

"That's circulated air from all those other departments. Can you imagine the kinds of diseases they have in accounting. Their perversities and sicknesses? You don't know where they were last night, and you're breathing their air."

"Well."

"You know that dust is 80% human wastes? Indoors is sick. Cities breed disease. You should get out sometime. Fresh air."