From Texas to Arizona
In the US around Yuma AZ and west I saw some amazing scenes....
Huge RV parks....
Dunes covered with dune buggies...
I saw canals siphoning off the last water from the Colorado river and sending it out into the desert, to grow salads in the Imperial Valley...
I saw the new Iron Curtain under construction. I saw the dusty squalor of Mexico that sends the immigrants northward, eyes in the sky along the border, and the burning desert immigrants have to cross.
There's a lot down here that's not headed in the right direction. But I'm headed south
Don't know when I'll get to the internet again; probably in Bahia de los Angeles.
Arizona and arriving in Mexico
November 22-23, 2008
I crossed the border at Tecate, which was a sleepy place. People just wandering across the border. I parked in the "declarations" lane, and no one came. So, I went up to a guard who was lounging around, and showed him my informal list. He looked it over, reading the English, though speaking in Spanish. Said I was OK. Didn't have to fill anything out. I didn't have to get a car importation permit, since I'm in Baja, and that's like an island. I got a tourist card. However, I did get insurance for 2 weeks. It's expensive. No need to put a deposit down on the car.
Update: As of 2012, Mexican regulations have been getting much stiffer.
Good thing I came in through Tecate. For one, it's a calm place. For two, it was closer to my destination. For three, the other crossing I might have made from San Diego is the busiest international crossing in the world! Lucky I avoided that. Fourth, they make a good beer in Tecate, so I picked up a six pack.
Everything has been a hassle (excepting the crossing). Getting money. I tried several ATMs. The first one didn't work for my card. But then I found one that did. Problem is, I didn't get enough money.
Pemex doesn't take credit cards for gas here. I was going to need a lot of cash. So, this morning, I went through a big town and stopped at the ATM. Out of service! So, I thought the teller (at the attached bank) might be able to do it for me. So I stood in line. About 40 indians were in front of me, and I wasn't sure it was the right line! After waiting about 20 minutes, I saw a receptionist come in. I asked her, and she said they couldn't help me with the debit card--only at the ATM! But she did tell me where I could find a working ATM. There, I got loads of pesos.
Next, I went shopping. I asked a few women where the yogurt was, since I didn't see where it was. they nearly died giggling. Later, I checked with a shelf stocker, and found my pronunciation had been a bit off for yogurt. No sprite without sugar. But, I got some avocados!! I steered clear of the various cactus fruits in the vegetable area. I have seen cactus farms. Rows and rows of--prickly pear.
Next, I tried to deal with calling home. Found various phone booth options expensive, and can't always find a working booth. Next, considered buying a cell phone. Not that expensive--but then I found this intenet cafe. An hour for less than a dollar. That's the way to go. But probably won't find another for 4-6 days.
I'm now in Lazaro Cardenas, a dusty, noisy place stretched out along the main highway. Two stoplights. Several big but dirty supermarkets. It's near the pacific coast. This afternoon, Monday, I'll be headed out into the desert (along the main highway). Maybe stop in or near Catavina, which is about as far as I got in 1962.
Last night, I didn't see many places to stop for the night, and if I did, I was past them by the time I could react. I eventually found a one lane dirt road headed away from the main highway, and took that. I passed a few places where it was just wide enough for two cars, and could have, should have, parked there. But I went on, expecting something better. Alas, there was nothing. Eventually, I found a place I could pull off, but it was steeply uphill. I tried it, and it was steep!!. My water started to drain out of the dank. Luckily, my gas didn't drain from the car. I didn't sleep so well, since I constantly had to guard from rolling down hill on the bed.
But otherwise, it was a nice spot. I was looking down on a small valley with vineyards and ranches. There were only about three clusters of one or two lights far off in the distance. A quarter mile away was some ranch building with two bright lights, staring at me unblinking like two bright eyes. Far away, a dog barked once or twice during the night. In the morning, miles away, a rooster crowed.
I was by now about half a mile from the highway. For some reason, the sounds from the highway seldom reached me. Throughout the night, great trucks, all lit up in colored lights like carnival floats, glided by silently, like ships on a wine-dark sea. The stars were intense, and range after overlapping range receded into the deep blue and purple darkness. The dry hills, covered only with small brush, smelled like a combination of some sickly sweet, aromatic scent, combined with dust. At night, except for the faraway dog, it was utterly silent, and the stars were very bright.
The next morning, I figured out my road was the road to a settlement, and there was no junction for about 4 miles, so I didn't want to go ahead, since it was pretty rough. On the other hand, I'd have to back out half a mile to the highway, since there was no place to turn around. I opted to back out, but I was worried some other traffic on my road would develop and there would be a jam. So I got up at dawn, and painfully backed out. No real problem, but it was really slow. Now I'm an expert in backing trailers. And no one came along, so I needn't have worried.
Except for two military checkpoints (for Northbound traffic), I haven't seen any sign of trouble. Jersey City (where we saw some real Mafia type characters) was probably more dangerous. No gang types visible here. And, now I'm far south of the border. By far the biggest danger seems to be the highway, which is narrow with no shoulder. So I'm being careful, keeping speed always below 50 mph, and driving as recommended always during daylight. Once I hit a speed bump too fast, but now I'm clued in.
So far, I haven't seen any nice places. But I do have some good ones in mind: High desert around Catavina; Bahia de los Angeles on the East side; Bahia Conception on the E. side, S. of Mulege. That might be enough, but if I do more, It would be La Paz; Cabo Pulmo near the tip on E side, and Cabo San Lucas, where there is a RV park near the beach.
One thing I'll bet you didn't know, and I didn't either: There is a developing wine country here. Quite picturesque. Probably like the CA wine country a la 1900.
First high desert campsite
11/24
Today it has been strangely hard to start writing, probably because it’s all so new and somewhat stressful. I haven’t settled in to a routine yet.
Today I drove from a little below San Vicente to well below El Rosario. The driving was hard, because the road is dangerous. It is narrow, with no shoulders at all, and few guardrails, unexpected things ahead, and occasional large semis.
I stopped mid-morning in Lazaro Cardenas, to try the ATM (after a failed attempt in an earlier town). Then I shopped for groceries, and also attempted to solve the phone problem. Eventually I opted for an internet café which was quite cheap. There I worked for two hours. I read a little New York Times, but here, so far away, it doesn’t seem very real or important.
Mexico hasn’t changed much, except that every thing has grown, and ruined miles and miles of the outback. There’s garbage everywhere, and dust and squalor. But people are helpful and friendly and honest. But the towns look much as they always have.
The big change is agriculture. What used to be mile after mile of empty, dry, flat coastal plain, is now studded with huge agricultural enterprises. Most of them are hard to fathom. There are literally square miles of sterile looking green houses—not exactly greenhouses, but immense banks of fabric tents of much the same shape as a greenhouse.
What’s inside, and why they are used, I can’t imagine. Maybe it’s a way to keep the sun down and also prevent evaporation, stretching the water. They are highly organized, with regular port-a-potties, and separated from the outside land by formidable fences.
I came in part to relive my trip of 1962 and see what is changed, and also to experience more of what I liked when I was first here. I have only a few images of that first trip, so it’s hard to recognize the same places. I do recognize a few for sure, and some other memories are coming back, though it’s hard to tell for sure whether they are real memories or something planted as a false memory by the present experience. But I think a few are real.
What really surprises me is the distance we came on the dirt roads. I’ve been traveling two days on a paved highway, to reach where we did in 1962. I saw a road that looked like the one from 1962. Just two ruts. Maybe it even was the original road.
One of my memories was driving the jeep out on a beach, and coming to a point, where there was a narrow inlet into a bay. There were steep hills nearby, and as we watched, a pod of porpoises swam right by us into the bay. Looking at the map, I figured out that the place was San Quintin, now a town of maybe 10,000. Back in 1962, there was no one there at all.
Boojum trees
When I saw my first Boojum trees not far south of El Rosario, I shouted. It was great to see them again. There was no one there to think I was nuts. I yelled, “Hi Boojum trees!” No response. Then I bowed , like a Muslim to Mecca.
Just then, a pickup truck sped around the corner into sight, and honked. Maybe he understood. The trees are truly astonishing—endemic to Baja (and no where else). They reach up to 30 or 40 feet high here (elsewhere, up to 70 for the species).They may have a single stem, sometimes double stems—and there are branching trunks often, but the branches go straight up also, much like the main trunk, and often as large. In addition to the trunks, they have short (about 2-3 feet) and thin branches, longer near the bottom. The branches bear leaves and thorns, and they also have leaves on the trunk. They shed the leaves in the dry season.
At the top of the main trunks, is a large inflorescence of flowers, spreading out like a bunch of roots or tendril. I haven’t noticed yet whether or not the flowers are in bloom, or dried old ones. Probably old. On top of all this, many of them have drooping Spanish moss, because it is often foggy here. A rare fog desert.
Boojum trees are named after a tree in Carol’s “Alice in Wonderland.” With the leaves, short branches, and moss, the Boojums look like hairy, upside down carrots. Up close, their trunks look muscular.
Boojum trees are as tall or taller than saguaro cactus. They are not in the cactus family, but in a family of their own, along with the ocotillo.
It’s true that saguaros have a lot of personality, and that no two are the same. But Boojums have even more personality, perhaps because there are more ways they can be different from one another. They can be straight or lean at an angle. They can have one trunk or many. The flowering arms on the top look like eye stalks on a slug, like they are checking you out. But the weirdest thing is the way the trunks of many have twists and bends to them. They seem to be alive, writhing in slow motion, like sea weed flapping in the current. More observations on Boojums here.
From my first trip, I had a memory of topping a hilltop on the road, and looking ahead into a broad valley, utterly empty, but scintillating with light and color, almost like snow. It was the fresh grass catching the light, and the daisies shining in the sun.
Today, in late afternoon, I topped a similar rise, and saw… a valley ahead, with a great gash across it—the road. Not only was the road straight, but the 'dozers had scraped a lot of desert, to get gravel for the road. It was sickening. On top of that, the desert wasn’t lush as when I first saw it, but was a dull brown and gray, from a long time without rain.
At most places where you can stop the car, there are large amounts of garbage, broken bottles, and toilet paper everywhere.
I stopped at one spot near the top of a pass. There was a track leading down into the empty desert, and I followed it for maybe a quarter mile, past the garbage and into the virgin desert. Lots of interesting plants and boojum trees. Lots of short dried grass clumps, yellow against the red soil. It smells good, and aromatic. The road reminded me of the one from 1962—maybe even the same one.
Usually, you can’t leave the roadside, because there is a cattle fence or no passable road. But just before dark, I found a place where many people had stopped or camped before, with a passable dirt track leading away from the highway. For the first hundred yards, the area was filthy with garbage and toilet paper, but I persisted, and eventually found a clean and nearly flat spot.
Now, about 8 pm, I’m settled into a campsite off the highway, somewhere in the high desert, inland, south of El Rosario.
It has been overcast most of the day, making the dry desert look dull and flat and ashy. But at least not hot. A big winter storm has been forecast for tomorrow for San Diego.
When I had set up the trailer, about dusk, I took the chair a few hundred feet up the hill, beside three boojum trees, and had a beer.
It was utterly silent, except when a car or truck went by at wide intervals. There were a few crickets chirping, but mostly far away, almost so far you weren’t sure they were there, except for one closer. Then, as it got dark, some animal, a bird or maybe a ground squirrel, cried loudly in two notes: chip-squeak! That was all. The temperature is nice, maybe 60, with little wind. Later, about 9:00 pm, there were a few sprinkles of rain.
Since I may be slightly visible from the road, I have been worried for my safety. But actually, I think it is quite safe. I don’t think the bad guys in habit the wilderness any more—they hang out in cities or towns, or busy roads. The military checkpoints should help to keep crime down. But I have been going though scenarios in my mind. If there is trouble, there won’t be any help—I’ll have to rely on my own ruses, of which I have several in mind.
I turn off the lights in the trailer and step outside. It is utterly still, not even crickets or wind. I shine the light 360 degrees around, holding it near my eyes, to look for reflections of eyes—panthers (gulp), or anything. Nothing. With light off, I can barely see the difference between the black landscape and the sky, which has a faint glimmer of starlight through the clouds.
In the dark, I can just barely make out a few trunks of the boojum trees, but when I switch the light on, suddenly they are all there, a surprising number of giants around me, caught in the light, suddenly freezing in mid motion. Perhaps they had all been dancing together, but when the light came on, they froze in their various odd postures.
There is still a sprinkle of rain, not enough to wet the desert floor, though the trailer is spotted with drops on its dusty surface. But the desert smells even stronger now, a hard-to-describe sickly sweet, aromatic, medicinal odor. Different from the creosote bushes after the rain in Big Bend.
When I shine the flashlight up into the sky, I see the drops, medium sized and small, coming down at different speeds. Some of the larger ones seem to float down, almost like snowflakes, gently flirting with the desert. This is completely different from the harsh thunderstorms of Utah or Arizona, where the big drops pelt and scour the desert in a deluge, giving rise to flash floods.
It’s hard to slip into the Max way of thinking here, except maybe when the pickup truck caught me bowing to a cactus. In a national park, you have the incongruity of bureaucracy trying to run nature, or to explain nature. Trying to manage a lot of different people crammed into one little space, and keep all of them neat and tidy and not harming nature or themselves or each other. But here in Baja, different rules apply. (The rule is no rules.) There’s no bureaucracy, no protecting anything, and especially, no silly people to embarrass or enrage Max. There are Mexicans, but they aren’t silly—maybe just inscrutable.
National Park rangers are like Sunday school teachers, trying to wheedle “meaning” through to unruly kids as they throw spitballs and stick gum under the pews.
11/25/08 Studying the Cirios
I woke up to a cloudy sky, with no wind. Temperature maybe 65 F. There seemed to be patches of rain far away, with some dark clouds, but later patches of blue appeared. I played some music, which I could hear far away from the trailer, because the desert was so still. No one to bother. You feel completely free here. With the trailer, I have everything I need to stay a week: water, food shelter, shade, and entertainment.
I went out to get acquainted with the local vegetable inhabitants.
Boojum trees: Quite plentiful here. I have seen them at all stages of life and death, down to small trees 3 feet tall. I finally found a young plant about 14” tall in all, growing out of rock. The upright thorny branches (no flowers) were growing from a very thick conical trunk about 6” high. The only other small one nearby (4’ tall) was also growing out of rock. They seem to grow in associations or groves, but there are very few ones under 6’. I suspect they grow to hundreds of years of age. They are past flowering—there are dried yellow old male and female? Flowers on the tips. They seem to like rocky ground, and can grow out of cracks in the rock.
Ocotillo—there are a few here.
Cordon cactus: Many here also, quite large and massive. Seem to like better soil. They appear similar to but more branched than the saguaro. No saguaro here.
Cholla: I have seen two or three species here, but not the teddy bear cholla. Different species from AZ?
Prickly pear (opuntia) is rare here but does exist.
Barrel cactus: There are a number of types and all are common. There is a large fishhook type with red spines on the crown. There is a tiny fishhook type that grows on rocks.
Cactus with barbs on spines: don’t know which kind, but I tracked them in to the trailer. They clung to my shoes soles tenaciously, and to the rug.
Columnar cactus: somewhat like the organ pipe but much smaller and more bushy—Two types—one of these has very dense spines, down pointing, almost like dark shaggy fur; the other is smaller with smaller & fewer spines.
Ground cactus—growing in broad clumps close the ground, with white spines. There are two types, one with large spines and one with small.
Yuccas: Back by El Rosario, I saw some very large, yellow flowering agaves, but they are not at this spot. Here, there is one very common, medium-sized yucca that grows vegetatively in clumps, flowers, then the flowering plant dies. The clumps are large and look old. There is also a smaller vegetative growing one that looks similar to lechugilla (less common).
Thorny shrubs: many. The shrubs are especially common, and in more variety, in the washes. One shrub has a quarter-sized, oval, light green leave, like the Madrone. In the wash grows a small shrub with a light grayish-green leaf, very soft and furry, somewhat succulent, that is very fragrant—a sage-like smell that may be what gives the desert its aroma.
Grasses: a variety, now all dried. Plus some very tiny plants. Dried flowers: some deep reddish brown, some are ochre—all very common and colorful.
Animals
A raven came to watch me, landing with great difficulty on the top of a boojum, where the spiny branches point up at angles. Some bird called loudly at a distance, possibly a jay. Signs of cattle. Many rabbit scats in some places. Various canid scats, smallish, maybe foxes. Numerous rodent burrows. No lizards. No ants or grasshoppers seen. No mammals seen. One moth seen, a few flies in trailer (not house flies), and one mosquito in the wash. Old wasp nest. Honeybee hive in a hollow boojum tree was raided by humans. One small spider seen on ground, and one spider hole in ground, diameter of a penny. No water present. Summary: there’s a great variety of plant life, which must be fairly lush after the rains. The animal life seems almost entirely dormant.
I had some stomach problems, caused by the “Mexican carrot cake from hell” that I ate yesterday. So I decided to stay here for another night.
In the late afternoon, I climbed the nearby hill, and got some good views. Had some tense moments when a pickup truck stopped to check its engine, which I saw from the hilltop. Good views of the surrounding desert and silhouettes of cactus against the sunset. In the evening, I worked on writing for a few hours, and at 8:00, it started to rain, lightly but steadily. The desert began to smell a fresh, aromatic smell, different from before. I went out to wash the trailer. The rain sounds nice on the trailer from inside.
How benign the desert seems, so quiet and still. Nothing stirring. Just the quiet cactus. But it wasn’t always so. Imagine an Indian trying to cross the peninsula, without a track. It must have been horrendous to weave between the cactus, with nothing but moccasins on your feet. No water or food for many miles.
The trucks glide by in the dark like ocean liners on a dark sea. Without any other lights, they are extraordinary. Each one is brightly lit with scores of colored lights, each one individually bedecked. Perhaps the wives of the drivers, at home on the shores of the desert, recognize their homecoming from a distance by the pattern of lights. I don’t mind the noise, because it’s slight, widely spaced, and because their friendly presence reminds me I’m not totally lost.
11/26/08 Waxing the trailer in the desert
It’s light from 6:00 am to about 5:00 pm (sun sets at 4:30). Today, I slept in until about 6:45, because it was raining. I rained much of the night. Fairly early in the morning, the temperature reached 70. But at 6:30 pm, it was down to 64 in the trailer.
Shortly after I got outside, before breakfast, the sun came out, so I took a walk for maybe an hour. All the grass, and especially the boojum trees, were shining with a million trapped drops of water, and everything looked bright with color that I hadn’t noticed in the duller light. There were even some puddles on the ground, and the soil was soft in places. Many of the plant seem to trap water drops very well with their branches or leaves.
I made a good omelet, and tidied up inside. Then from about 11 to 3 pm, I waxed the trailer—last night I had wiped the dirt off in the rain, so this was too good a chance to miss. I drank beer, listened to music, and polished and polished. It felt good, the temperature was just right, and the surroundings were beautiful.
Then, for an hour before dark, I went for another walk. It seems like I have my own private botanical garden. No signs “leaflets three, let it be,” no rangers, no other people to bother with my music, no initials carved in the cactus (but there is a lot of garbage nearer the road.)
All day, there has been more animal activity. In the morning, honeybee and some tai chi flies were checking out the trailer—possibly they thought was one big flower, since it is so bright. There were also some birds, especially in the evening. A few small birds, that didn’t come close, but I could hear them.
At 7:30 pm, after supper, I went out and was surprised to see the sky completely clear, although there is lightning in the far distance to the N. The car, trailer, and chair are all beaded with water, probably left over from the recent sprinkles. But surprisingly, nothing else is wet or misted—not the boojums, the cactus, or the ground. So, either these plants haven’t cooled as fast in the dark (causing condensation), or else they all are absorbing the water that fell or has formed.
I spent many hours (today and other days) looking for boojum seedlings, or plants less than a foot tall, but found none. Apparently, they only reproduce during years when conditions are just right. More.
Today on my various walks, I was continually amazed by the landscape. The trees are so strange—I feel like I have touched down on some alien planet, and I’m there to study and puzzle over the life forms that have no parallels on earth. On thing I keep thinking.... If all these plants are so totally protected from herbivores or whatever, then—by God, I don’t want to meet those critters anytime soon. They must be pretty menacing, to have caused the evolution of such defenses. You’re on the alien planet, and finally, you discover, to your horror, why everything is so well defended. What’s that—I hear something outside, crashing, thundering… the trailer is shaking….
I wonder if the extinct giant ground sloth grazed on some of the larger cacti?
11/27/08 More Cirio study, and more waxing in the desert; then on to boulders field
I awoke to a temperature of 57 F, surrounded by fog at the higher elevations. The trailer was covered with water droplets, and when I went outside, I found that the ground was damp, and there were a few drops also on the plants (but not as much as the trailer).
On examining the boojums, I found that there were a few drops here and there caught on their leaves. Here is some additional evidence that the boojums are supremely adapted for obtaining moisture from the air:
1) The leaves are in clusters of 4, 5, or 6, facing generally upward. They make ideal baskets for catching or forming a droplet, and channeling it to the center of the cluster. The only drops I saw on the boojum were on the leaves. Some cactus also had drops on their spines, but it seems hard to imagine that spines are a good way to absorb water.
2) The short boojums grow anywhere (ridges, slopes, flats, good soil, rock), including right from nearly solid rock. In rock, it seems hard to imagine that they could have an extensive root network to quickly absorb rainwater. The giant organ pipe cactus hardly ever grow in rock, let alone solid rock. So they must depend more on roots, and in fact I have seen roots out maybe 12 or more feet from a large plant.
3) Most of the desert seems to be dormant now. I suspect the rainy season is in the winter, so we are at the start of the wet season. Yet most of the boojums have some leaves now (a few are without). If you depend on catching fog droplets, then you want your leaves ready at the START of the foggy season—not coming out as a result of activity enabled by rain.
4) The boojums don’t sway much in the wind. Deserts are windy places—right now, there’s a 10-15 mph wind. Yet despite the fact that the trees look like frozen motion, they move hardly at all in the wind. They are remarkably rigid for such a tall and slender shape. But if you are trying to catch little droplets, you can’t afford to sway, because too much movement would shake off the droplets before they could be absorbed! The thicker base of the boojum may be an adaptation to help prevent sway, rather than being a reservoir for moisture (or it could be both). In a long slender shape, the most force from wind will be on the base, yet any movement at the base will be magnified higher up, so the base has to be especially rigid—the thick base to the tree provides the needed rigidity. The problem of swaying may be what limits the height of the trees. Any advantage from growth above a certain height would be counterbalanced by greater shakeout of water drops due to more swaying.
Why do some trees have multiple arms, while others just a single stem? Ones with additional arms might sway more, but this would bed compensated by a greater surface area to capture fog. So there’s not a lot of selective pressure for an unbranched (versus branched) trunk.
It’s now 7:15. The sun came out briefly after dawn, but now there’s a brief rain shower, with a dramatic sky, with some blue, and brightly-lit cloud tops. The shower only lasts for a minute.
5) Additional evidence comes from a comparison with other plants here, especially the related ocotillo. The ocotillo is common in Big Bend and southern AZ, not fog deserts. Here, I looked at 5 ocotillos, and none had leaves, indicating they are not following a “fog” strategy. In addition, they were swaying noticeably in the wind, as were the bushes and grasses.
Interestingly, other cacti seem to be quite rigid—neither chollas nor organ pipe cactus were swaying. The chollas might be adapted to fog by not swaying, by having dense spines (to catch fog), and by the curious bumps on their arms. When horizontal, as many of the arms are, these bumps create little depressions that could catch rain or fog.
The yuccas all have a great shape of leaves, like a bowl, to catch rain. The large organ pipe cactuses have channels running along their arms, and I wonder if they can absorb the water that must pool where the arms come into the main trunk.
There is another cactus I call the little organ pipe that has very furry clusters of long spines near the ends (1-2’ lengths of the arms) that could catch fog (except that they point generally downward). Some of the small flowering plants have clusters of dried flowers (or seeds) at the ends of their stalks that have become very wet, like little round sponges.
If the weather I have seen for the last few days is typical of the rainy season, plants adapted to absorbing water before it hits the ground would have an advantage. There are long periods of fog or high humidity, and short light showers. The ground is damp at the surface, but it’s unlikely water penetrates very far most of the time. Once in the ground, other plants could compete to capture the moisture (and probably some do that here). Rock outcrops present a poor environment for extensive root networks. So its better for a plant to capture the water before it hits the ground.
Let’s take these speculations a step further, and imagine the structure of the plant community, assuming that fog capture is important. In the temperate forest, plants are stratified in the competition for light. The dominant maples reach the highest, shading out the others (and their saplings are adapted to survive in the deep shade). Here, there could also be stratification: The boojums reach the highest, sweeping the highest fog. Chollas are much sorter,, but they have dense clusters of branches, dense spines, and depressions to catch water. They do not sway. They present a large cross section to sweep out the lower fog. The yuccas are still lower, catching the rain right at the ground level. Still other plants must compete for the water that reaches the soil and sinks in—again at various levels below the surface.
Summary of adaptations for catching water before it gets to the soil:
- Rigidity—little sway
- Depressions or leafy bowls or furry spines for catching droplets or runoff.
- Places on plant surface that can absorb water efficiently (these I can’t observe)
- Water catching structures (like leaves) deployed at start of season foggy.
I polished the wax in the afternoon, after first drying off the trailer. Then I went for another walk, into an area dense with boojums, looking for saplings, but found none. However, I did notice a tendency for trees of the same size to occur together, indicating that probably they do reproduce only on certain years. Sometimes several trees were constricted in the trunk at a certain height, as you often see in organ pipe cactus, possibly indicating a bad year.
I left the campsite (at Km 113) at about 2:00 pm, and continued south. Evidently I had been near the crest of the peninsula. Next, a sign announced that we were in a protected area, and another announced “Valley of the Cirios,” meaning boojums. The clouds lessened somewhat, but continued to be dramatic. There were a few wayside ranches, an empty RV park, and tiny restaurants, plus many abandoned ones. There was a broad valley, with a few green fields and a settlement. But then empty desert on a vast scale, truly astonishing. No power lines, no roads, no houses—nothing as far south and west as you can see.
Then we entered the boulder fields. This scenery is so amazing that I’ll leave it to the photos to describe it. However, there was much graffiti on the rocks, and I even saw a truck stopped, with what looked like a professional spray outfit working on a rock. But I retained my cool, because the desert is so vast, it can’t be spoiled by spray paint anytime soon. And, it’s Mexico, and it’s their country.
I found a sandy road leading into the boulders, and pulled off the highway. I explored it on foot, and found it quite satisfactory. After parking the trailer with some difficulty, I went for a walk in the last half hour of sunlight. Extraordinary vistas and plants and eroded rocks. I rambled half a mile or more, taking photos, and climbed a pile of boulders for a view of the landscape with the setting sun. Then back to the trailer for a beer, then supper. Words cannot describe what I saw. I was amazed and astonished. I’m going to try to list some of the elements that make it so amazing. Some of them wouldn’t appeal to everyone:
1) Very alien plants, many of which are also very large.
2) Many of the cirios, organ pipes, yuccas, and the twisted deciduous tree seem to be very old, and have never been defaced or disturbed. Likewise, the blasted, wind-eroded rocks and soil also seems ancient beyond comprehension.
3) The clouds were extremely dramatic.
4) The air is very clear—zero pollution. This makes for bright colors, & distant views.
5) The desert is very empty—no power lines or distant buildings or antennas. This gives it a limitless, untamed feel. There are no airplanes overhead.
6) You don’t share campsites or walks with anyone. You don’t feel you are impinging on others, or vice verse. This gives a feel of total freedom. Strangely, the truck traffic and the graffiti almost fit with this theme. You can do whatever you want—even deface the desert, and the desert wins, swallows it up.
7) At this spot, the boulders add a new dimension, creating more complexity—an alien, seldom—seen landscape.
8) The desert is full of mysteries. For example, there are so many holes in the ground, and you never see the rodents and spiders that made them. Lots of scats, but who left them?
Camping among the boulders, and on to Bahia de los Angeles
11/28/08
It was 49 F when I got up. Went out fairly early for a walk, and went out about 3 mi. on the old road, and back for a total of nearly t6 mi. There is more bird activity today, again saw a white-rumped woodpecker on cactus and saw 4 hawks at the top of 4 cactus arms. Also the grey “cardinal.” There are some flowers blooming here, some compositae and some littler tiny things. Also a rose-like flower, and actually one ocotillo plant. The ocotillos here are very large and some of them have their leaves. Ants are active, and I saw one mouse. Canid tracks. Lots of mammal activity, recent, including deer tracks.
The boojums (cirios) definitely prefer rocky places, compared to other large cactus. Still, no sapling cirios. Lots of wind-eroded granite boulders. At lunch at 11:00-12:00, the temp in the trailer was 75 F. The sky is mostly clear.
A letter home (summarizing trip so far)
I'm a little lonely at times, but pretty good. You'll have to see this some day. You'd hate getting to where I am, but I think you would like it here. It is much better than Big bend, because warmer at night, cooler during the day, and scenery is better. The plants are awesome. Way, way better than TX. That was just a warm-up for AZ, and AZ a warm-up for here. You can just camp anywhere, for a as long as you want, and no one bothers you. I got a full tank of water before crossing the border, and still have maybe a third. I don't even have to bother people down here for water!!
I've been solving one mystery after another. Latest one.... In all the cirios and other trees around there, there is a large ball like thing, maybe an epiphyte, or a mistletoe like parasite. Haven't been able to look at one up close. But wow: a cactus with epiphytes!!! That's cool.
About an hour before sundown, I stopped by the road, fantastic view of the mountaints, to take a photo. I heard two coyotes howling not far away!!
But to make a long story short, it's fantastic here.
It was a long drive, and until I got south of the populated areas, it was nothing but squalor. But once I made it to the desert--words cannot tell. I camped for three nights in my own botanical garden, spending each day studying the cactus, mostly the boojum trees (cirio trees in Spanish). Check them out on Wikipedia. I've figured out that they are adapted to getting their moisture from the air, which is pretty unusual for a cactus. Lots of special adaptations for that, but some of the other plants have equivalent adaptations. Not much in the way of animal life, though.
After the "cirio botanical garden," I camped last night in a great plateau of eroded (by wind) boulders. Fantastic scenery. Very dramatic clouds , and super clear air make for amazing scenery.
Then, the drive today was fantastic. I drove through an enormous valley, bordered by a big range, and the valley was forested with--cactus, really big ones, the cirio and organ pipe cactus. In addition, there's a really beautiful tree, probably an acacia, with impossibly thick trunks and gnarled branches, like giant bonsais.
Unfortunately, I don't have a book of these cactus, but I'm fully occupied just studying their adaptations. Names don't matter. We had a fair amount of rain over the last two nights, and so, either because of that, or because I'm further south, there are some flowers out now, and more animal life.
There are lots of good camping spots. But tonight, I'm paying $8 to camp by the beach at this seaside hotel where they speak English. I may go kayaking tomorrow. It's a fantastic bay here, sort of like SF bay, but with big mountains around it. Big tide here. I've already checked the tide and the wind for tomorrow. I think I prefer camping in the wilderness to in "civilization" like tonight.
Everything is fine with the trailer. The beer (Tecate) is great and cheap, the yogurt and the avocados are also great and cheap. I got a little sick, but it passed quickly, from eating the "carrot cake from hell." I think it wasn't a germ, but just an allergic reaction to the low quality ingredients. I imagine it was made with mouldy flower, carrot peelings, raisin rejects, etc. You get the picture.
I've been trying to solve a mystery. The cirios seem to reproduce only on certain years. If I am right, none have reproduced for a number of years. Anyway, I can't find any seedlings, though I've looked for hours. They grow up to maybe 40' tall, taller than the organ pipe cactus, and they can grow out of nearly solid rock, just the teeniest crack. The young trees have the most amazing armour you have ever seen. I'd hate to meet whatever these cactus are protected from.
I don't know when I can write again. Maybe tomorrow around noon, after I go paddling. Don't know how long I'll stay here. Probably tomorrow night, then go south. I may be content with going no further than Mulege, which I hear is nice. I'm a little nervous about being away so long.
I have done a little writing, but not too much, since so much has happened since Big Bend. And its hard, without being able to consult with you.
I would prefer to have companionship, but I can't think of anyone else who would enjoy what I am doing. There are a number of very friendly Americans here, but I don't feel I have much in common with them. So I prefer solitude.
Started the mystery by Nevada Barr "High Country," but she's so wordy, it really puts me off. Hard to read. But while driving, I was listening to a good one, titled "Presidential Deal," which I liked.
First Paddle in Bahia de los Angeles
11/29/08 Today I got up at 7:00 and got ready to paddle, leaving maybe 9:00 or 9:30. The wind started light but it wasn’t long before it started to increase. I paddled maybe 8-10 miles, and was tired.
After supper, I went out at sat overlooking the bay. The bay here is roughly like San Francisco Bay, though ringed with higher and rougher mountains, and dryer. You look out into the bay, and there is not a single light to be seen. Nothing but the stars, and the larger stars reflect in the bay! There is no highway sound at all. The occasional murmuring of someone on the beach or from the next house down the beach. Earlier, there was only the sound of the generator, and now that it’s off, it’s dark, no lights at all, and all you can hear is the chirping sound from the windmill (generator). There are three of them on the room of the hotel. It also has solar panel.
I paddled today out in the big bay, windy but OK. A bit of a hassle getting ready and out. too much sun. But very beautiful.
I just finished supper. Beef enchiladas. With biggest margarita you ever saw, as big as a fishbowl. A fishbowl a shark could swim in. So, may be under the table soon.
Max says, If you haven't seen a pelican yawn, you haven't seen anything, you haven't lived. Saw lots of pelicans, some great blue herons, some seagulls, some terns, some oyster catchers, some gannets, some cormorants, some sandpipers. Islands were very barren, I prefer more life. They say there are whales, orcas, seals, and whale sharks here, but I didn't see any.
Was a bit windy, starting a bit after I started, but not dangerous.
I have been talking to a few of the folks that have retired here. Go back and forth to California where they are from. VERY VERY different from Green Valley, AZ here. Also very different from a national park and the retired people working there. Glad I saw this. Puts the other in perspective.
Certain folks retire at Oakwood Village. Others go to Green valley or to be campground host. The others come here. You have to see these folks to see the whole spectrum. And here, they run the gamut, but I have been talking to some rather intellectual types. There have also been some very un-intellectual types as well.
What to they do here? Fishing is big. Watch sunsets over the bay. They read a lot, and do "projects." Some of the gringos that live nearby on the beach meet here at this hotel for meals, drinks, Internet, and just conversation. The woman "Marta" who runs it is quite worldly and speaks good English and treats these folks like friends an neighbors.
11/30/08 Visit with Jon and Janet on the beachfront; Summary of characters here
Names and a few other details have been changed to protect privacy.
Today I got up after some tedious dreams, relatively late, maybe 7:30. I decided to go for a walk before having breakfast. There was very little wind. It was interesting seeing the beach side trailers and bungalows (photos). About half a mile down the beach, I was surprised to see Jon and Janet, who waved. So I stopped to chat, and would up staying for a good while. They suggested I come back later for a beer, so I did, and also got a photo of their place. Their next door neighbor has turned an old discarded air stream (small) into a little beach house.
While visiting with Jon and Janet, we walked more than a mile down the beach, to a sandy point past an estuary. Then I cam back for breakfast about 11:00 and instead had lunch, then lazed around the trailer in the hot part of day for about an hour and a half, listening to music. Then I went out the museum, and bought a book on Baja plants, and chatted with the lady who was looking after it. I found out they average two inches of rain a year, but it can go 2 or 3 years without raining.
I returned to Jon and Janet’s late I the afternoon with my own beer. We had two each, then they suggested we to out to supper and meet the regular crowd of Americans. We never did find the Americans, but had a nice supper of seafood enchiladas at a local restaurant. When I returned to the hotel, I found that they were projecting old movies (Clint Eastwood oldies) on the side of the building with a video projector (& videocassette player). It was like a drive-in movie, but I didn’t stay.
Summary of the people here I have met or heard about:
Marta—runs “Raquel & Larry’s” motel
An extremely pleasant, worldly, friendly, and helpful woman of about 45 years. Treats everyone like family. Knows all the expatriate Americans who live nearby and treats them as friends. They stop in for drinks or Internet or suppers. She was raised on the “mainland,” but has been on Baja working for Larry for 15 or 30 years. She says that she couldn’t survive here without the Internet. She does everything on it—it’s her only contact with the outside world.
Larry & Raquel—the owners.
Larry apparently has a business in Ensenada, probably construction. He is here from time to time. His wife Raquel was murdered about 2 years ago on the highway about 50 mi. north of here. The police don’t know who did it, but think that it was a case of mistaken identity. Nothing was stolen. Since she was driving a car rather like those drug people use, they whoever did it intended to murder someone else, who would have been driving a similar car. Otherwise, there is very little crime in this town. Valuables, vacation homes are safe here, which you can’t say for Northern Wisconsin.
Jon and Janet
They are here for two weeks. They are both very lean and fit. He has a page-boy haircut, and she has short hair also, almost a butch. He’s maybe 5’8”, she’s about 5’1”. They have faces wrinkled from the sun, and she a very sharp, ferret-like face, though pleasant. She’s very energetic & intense. She says she’s "a type A." He is a retired electrician who now does prototype building for a company, and she a physical therapist, semi-retired (works 2 d a week). They are from California. Here they have leased a small beachfront property for 10 years for $700/year.
On it, they have placed a medium-sized RV and covered it with a metal roof (looks nice and neat, Aussie style) to keep it cool. They have an 80 SW solar panel that takes care of all their needs, which charges 2 sealed truck batteries. They also have a solar water heater that doesn’t work, which they built themselves. For water, they had 1500 gallons delivered (for $50) to a tank they put in a little outbuilding, partly underground. They use solar electricity to pump it to a faucet near the house. The batteries are housed under the trailer. They have a little concrete deck, and the whole thing looks very neat and cozy. They have and inverter (for A/C) for little chargers set up for their marine radio and other appliances.
They have two extremely light boats called a surf-ski (smaller, one man) and an outrigger (2 person, quite long). They are built by the company he works for. They are extremely light, and fast. The one without the outrigger (surf-ski) is of a type used by lifeguards in Australia for rescuing people in surf. They are faster and more capable than kayaks but require a higher level of skill. They can be paddled at a sustained 4-5 mph, much faster than a kayak. Jon is 71, and has excelled at about 12 sports: Ocean sailboat racing (CA to Hawaii), rock climbing, downhill skiing, X-C skiing, kayaking, marathoning, sailplane flying, cycling, etc. He also tends towards more extreme sports, such as “ultramarathons.” By excelled, I mean competed and won something like at least a 4th place. Janet shares some of these with him, like marathoning and the outrigger races. For example, they did a race out from San Francisco Bay, through the Golden Gate, out to sea, and back, and in rough weather.
They both read a variety of good books, and Janet loves her morning paper and decaf. Neither have had children, they are not married though they have been together for about 9 years (don’t see a need for it).
They described a guy out in SF bay in heavy wind who was paddling an outrigger or surf-ski. Keep in mind--you ride on top of these, so there is no passenger compartment to flood. So if you capsize, they ride high in the water. The guy capsized, and the wind picked up the boat and blew it like 50 yards away. He swam after it, but it picked up and blew further. So he had to swim for shore, which was a mile or more away, in the freezing SF water. He had to land between some barnacle covered pilings, in heavy surf, but he made it OK.
Jon and Janet told me about some other people they know down here:
The Publisher.
He lives about a mile S. on the beach. He was a professor? Now, he’s into self publishing. He found the company that actually prints most of the books in the US for all the publishers. He knows how you can send them a disk and get your own book printed, in any quantity. He thinks this is the wave of the future. He likes to talk your ear off... just drop in. He’ll try to persuade you this is a great idea.
The day-trader
They know a person down here who does day trading (stocks) about 6 hours a day. He does it on the Internet, but since he’s frugal, he'll drive up with his laptop to near Larry’s Bar or The Publisher, who have wireless Internet running, and do his day trading from his laptop in his car. They say he is very intense, kind of crazy. I said, yeah, that day trading will make anybody crazy. I had to give it up. I decided to make an honest living, and now I feel more grounded in reality. What an image this guy would present: This frenetic trader, very intense, sneaking up in his car to someone else’s Internet signal, to trade away his day on the stock market, from far, far off the grid—in Bahia de los Angeles.
The Old Miner
He is an American, from Las Vegas, who used to do prospecting. He’s something of an alcoholic, and frequents one of the bars here. If you go there in the afternoon, and buy him a drink, he’ll tell you endless stories. The Publisher put his stories together in a book for the Prospector, and is publishing them for him.
Ken and Luisa
I met them just out of town, as I arrived, at the overlook. They were just arriving too. They have been here many times, and they were going to Raquel & Larry’s, so that’s how I found it. He’s American, a contractor from CA about 51 years. She’s Mexican but living in the US, probably married formerly to an American but divorced. She’s Ken's “girlfriend.” They are traveling in a dusty and a bit dented pickup truck with 2 cheap kayaks on top and a huge black German Shepard (friendly) in the back with it’s water bowl. Ken is good looking, big mustache and stubble on chin. Luisa is a little heavy but pleasant looking, very dark, and speaks nearly perfect English.
Both were very friendly, chattering on about trivia, without trying to find out if you cared. Ken was a bitter about his former divorce. He said more than once to several people that his former wife embezzled a million dollars from his business (which is why it wasn’t doing well), plus “stole” a number of things from their house. Luisa very pleasantly rattled on about something to me, but I can’t for the life of me remember what it was.
The Pilots
Two couples (one with a small child) flew their planes down from California. There is a good landing strip here, and they said the flight takes only a bit over two hours. They just walked over the Larry’s from the runway.
They very pleasantly offered to do a search for me with their planes, if I went missing with my kayak—but I’d have to wait till the next day (since I said not to consider me missing till after dark). The woman of one of the couples, Jamie (blond, hefty, pleasant face, blond) also is a pilot, I think for the wildfire fighters in CA. The man from the other couple was very pleasant, handsome, looked like a young doctor. I think he was some kind of military pilot. These pilots seemed technically oriented, but informal and friendly, western style. This second guy had a pleasant young, dark-haired wife, with a kid about 12 months old.
Retired wildfire fighting administrator (federal, retired)
He’s a very "in command" guy, ruddy round face, maybe about 50. Since he started at 18 as a wildfire fighter, and had the federal system pension, he is now retired, young, on a good pension. He ran into the pilot Jamie, and they actually know people in common (since they were both in firefighting). Small world. This guy seems to know everything. When I wanted to know about the weather, he went right to a website for sailing weather (Sailflow.com), which gives you sailing weather reports for all over the world. We got one for this very bay, and it proved pretty accurate (but then the weather is always the same—no rain). I saw his trailer, like Jon and Janet’s, but fairly long, and like all here, covered with a roof to keep it cooler. Had the various wind generators, etc. He also had a medium-sized fishing boat on a trailer out front of his hours.
Guys with houses N of Larry’s on the beach
I saw these two guys talking to Marta. They are in 60s or early 70s” Look very tanned and grizzled. Both skinny; one had a shaggy black-grey beard. One or both are at least partly bald. They looked somewhat like beach bums (at the best) or like Robinson Crusoe. Short pants, short-sleeved shirts. Sandals or thongs. I saw their houses from the outside. These are real houses, right on the beach front, though as houses they are basic. Palm frond shades (palapas) over their front decks. When I walked by on the beach, one of the guys was out on his deck, doing nothing that I could make out. He waved at me.
The Mexican Biologist
When walking on the beach, I saw a plastic pipe about 4” in diameter coming town to the sea. I asked if it was the sewage outfall. Jon said no, it was a seawater intake for aquaria. It seems there is a Mexican who went to graduate school in the US (Berkeley?), and came back to help save the sea turtles here that swim all the way to Japan and back. He has some big aquaria to raise them, and he has done a great job of educating the local people to help save them.
The Town of Bahia de los Angeles
There are three communities here. The other two are some miles around the bay, accessible by dirt roads. Where I am is 1-2 miles N along the beach from the main town, proper. The main town has a main avenue lined by haphazard hotels/motels. Some of them may be nice inside, but they look unimpressive from the outside. This is definitely not a mainstream resort like Cancun or Los Cabos. The town does have a police station, reserve wardens (the offshore islands are important reserves), a nice museum, telephone office for making calls, several Internet places, several small markets, 2 gasoline stations, display of natural history giant photographs with captions on the main street, little park with band stand, etc. But generally, the town and houses of Mexicans are very sloppy and run down. Piles of old equipment and wreckage and thousands of old tires lying about, as in a frontier place, but worse than usual.
There is an army post N of town. The town’s water comes from a permanent spring; settlement here goes back at least 6,000 years. Sports fishing and watching whale sharks are big draws here, but mainly it’s just the beachfront life of retired Americans. Electricity from outside arrived only a year ago; prior to that, there was a generator and people only had electricity maybe 3 hours a day. Phones do not seem to be common. Most people, Mexican or American, rely on the marine radio. The Mexicans use the distress channel 16 for all their chatting or calling to husbands on boats, like a big party line. So everyone in town knows what’s happening to everyone. The cook at Larry’s, Cochina, listens to it all day long, since her husband is always out in a boat (a fisherman? Or works in tourism?). However, the Americans use channel 68 or 69 for their party line, like a telephone. If you are kayaking, you use 68 for emergency, since you will get English speakers, and more of them with boats ready to help you.
To get to Bahia, you drive about an hour on a spur highway, paved, which ends in town. So, it’s really off the grid. All the Americans here seem to be handy & self-sufficient, and friendly & informal, and into “projects.” Everyone has solar or wind power. Things are very slow here now because of the worldwide economy. At the restaurant we went to today, there was an extremely glamorous Mexican woman there alone, dressed like a prostitute.
The dogs in town
There are a lot of dogs, all friendly, though some bark a lot. I heard that Mexicans get rid of dogs, if they are nasty. All the dogs here are bilingual—understand English as well as Spanish. Where Ken and Luisa were here with their great big black dog, I saw an amusing sight. There was a little tiny dog that lived nearby, kind of bowed legged, like a bulldog (but it wasn’t). Some kind of little bitty mutt. Anyway, it was trying to play with the big black dog. It was racing this way and that around the big dog, and leaping up in the air to lick or get the big one to play. The big one was sort of interested, but didn’t quite know what to make of this tiny, feisty provocateur (or pretender). So it half-heartedly went along with the play, occasionally trotting after or playfully lunging for the little dog, who was running in circles around the big one.
Temperatures today in trailer: Noon: 82 F (plenty of wind, feels cool inside but hot in the sun), 10:45 pm: 66 F. You definitely need a sweater in the evening.
12/1/08 Paddling among the dolphins
I went paddling today to the S end of the bay, about 13 miles round trip. I met Jon and Janet at 8:00 and we set out together. But their outrigger was so much faster they soon pulled ahead. After a while, we spotted 100 or more dolphins, and I stopped for maybe half an hour to watch them. They went on the visit some friends at a small settlement, Brian and Diane.
Brian is a retired carpenter, a big bear of a man, very affable. He looks relatively young, except for a hearing aid. His wife is very upper-middle class looking, well dressed. They were both very tan. Their house, which I could see at a distance, was one of the nicest in these parts, colorful and neat. But very light and summery. He did most of the building himself. The 5 of us talked on the beach. They talked about a nearby geodesic dome, which apparently has been a disaster. It was hard to seal. Since it only rains a few times a year, they got complacent.
They sealed the joints between the segments with many, many tubes of caulk, but apparently they were a little stingy and didn’t use enough. They had gone ahead and finished the inside, with sheet rock, etc. So when it finally rained, and they weren’t there, the sheet rock all warped, and it was as steamy as a hothouse inside. So they did more caulking, ordering something like 300 tubes of caulk. Besides the leaking problem, it gets very hot inside, even though they have a central vent at the top.
Brian was also talking about the trip into town along a very rough road. He has a car with big tires. His wife was joking, that she doesn’t know how fast he drives when he does it, and she doesn’t want to know. It takes her 26 minutes, and it takes him 19 minutes. He says the tires don’t wear much, since they are mostly in the air.
He described one incident on the trip to town. Suddenly, the steering wheel was loose in his hands. So he stopped and looked at the steering gear. It was attached to the wheel mechanism with three bolts. Two had broken or fallen off. When he tried to tighten the third (and only) bolt, it broke. So he fixed it with some polypropylene rope he had in the car, just like the Mexicans do. They fix everything with that rope.
I asked him if he had a boat. He said: “All those toys you see around here are mine,” and he beckoned with a sweep of his arm. There were about 3 cheap plastic kayaks in a pile. There were two motor boats, one small and another somewhat bigger. Then he mentioned a Laser that had its hull turned over some distance away, and a Hobie Cat. So much for the boats.
Both Brian and Diane seemed pretty well-off. They had been there for two months this time, and would be staying a few more weeks. He made a date to eat the following day at a restaurant with Jon and Janet. They are in a very isolated community—there are about 65 lots in it. They say they have been trying to buy their lot, and expect all the Byzantine paperwork to go through within about two years. It’s hard for foreigners to own land in Mexico.
Yesterday, when we were walking down the beach, there were a group of about 15 young people out on the beach, doing some kind of group exercises, something that looked vaguely like Tai Chi. They looked healthy, young, new agey, some with tattoos. A gorgeous young woman, scantily clad. They were living in two little palm-covered shelters (palapas), (and a small vacant lot between a couple of bungalows—so much for camping in the wilderness) where they had their camping gear spread out. There was a bus parked behind that had the words “Audubon Expeditions” on it.
I asked Jon what they were doing, and said he had seen or heard them talking about “eye contact.” He elaborated to me (not sure if it was guesswork, or if he had read about it): The birds are extremely sensitive to where humans are looking, because birds have extremely good eyesight. So when you look right at them, you make them nervous. If you look away, then you can approach them more closely. Jon said he thought there were doing “eye exercises,” practicing averting their eyes from birds.
I was kidding Jon about that, and spoofing the idea. “How can you watch birds, when you have to look away?” “Can they see you’re looking directly at them if you use binoculars? Or a camera?” And I mimicked watching birds with binoculars, but looking somewhere else than where the bird is.
Returning from the south end of the bay, I had to fight the wind, which had must come up. We didn’t see any whale sharks. Jon and Janet went back ahead of me, after asking several times if I would be OK, and offering to pick me up from town (which was 1.5 mi. closer) with their pickup truck. I declined
It was a long hard paddle. I made it to a sandy point to rest, and watched the birds there: little grebes, pelicans, several kinds of seagulls, and egrets, and a vulture picking on a fish. When I got out to see what he was eating, it turned out to be a small hammerhead shark.
I was met halfway back from there by Jon and Janet, who offered me a sandwich, “If I asked Janet real nice.” Rejuvenated, I was able to paddle the rest of the way back.
I watched the sunset play on the mountains and islands, and watched the stars come out. Then I read the new cactus book, and took a shower.
Heading back to the USA
Day 1, 12/2/08
I woke up a little after sunrise, but Jon and Janet were already out running on the beach, as I learned a bit later. I started to pack up for the road, and when I was about ready to load the kayak, conveniently a man came over to ask me about the trailer. This was especially opportune, since Larry’s resort was now completely deserted, with no sign of any staff or guests.
I talked to the man for a while about the trailer. He was a very trim and handsome guy with a craggy, suntanned face and a sort of Julius Caesar hair style, blond or gray, I couldn’t quite tell. I didn’t learn much a bout him, except that he lived in CA and came down from time to time, staying with people who had houses along the beach. He rode his motorcycle down. He said he was thinking of a trailer, to put somewhere along the beach, and since he was “batching it,” a small Casita might be just right.
I shopped for groceries in Bahia de los Angeles, and heard someone shouting angrily as I came out the van. The only person I saw nearby was an older woman (nice looking) pulling a child on a wagon. I had breakfast at Alejandra’s Palapa Restaurant, reputedly the best in town.
While I was parking, I noticed the woman who has passed me pulling the wagon before. She was beckoning angrily at me and shouting, probably cursing me. What this was all about, I don’t know. Probably has a grudge against Americans, or is mentally ill. But the great majority of Mexicans were friendly and helpful. A few were bored or disinterested, but this was the only angry person I ran into.
I got off mid-morning, and drove slowly, stopping for a lot of photos, or to look at plants. I found some very small cirios.
I nearly got back to civilization--El Rosario--by dark. At sundown, I stopped at the top of a pass. If last night was spectacular, watching the sunset, and the stars come out over Bahia de los Angeles, then this evening was, surprisingly, even more spectacular—and unexpected. Baja continues to surprise.
At the top of the pass, I pulled off the road—to find that fog was creeping over the mountaintops, and that the temperature had plunged 20 or 30 degrees. There was a very light wind, it felt like I had stepped into a refrigerator. Wispy clouds of fog were lighting up pink with the sunset, and the many large Cardon Cactuses, yuccas, and cirios were silhouetted against the pink clouds and deep blue sky. Since the mountaintop was a broad dome, everything was perfectly silhouetted against the sky.
After pulling well away from the road and parking the trailer, I continued to walk away from the highway on the same faint road. Far away, the ranges of mountains melted into the deepening purple gloom, softened by fog. As I continued to walk, the tall desert plants became more dense, and seemed to close around me, reaching high for the pink and purple sky, twisting this way and that; the closer ones reaching high, the ones further away hugging the horizon more closely.
As is grew darker, Venus, Jupiter, and the crescent moon sharpened in the sky, and made the perfect accent to the cactus silhouettes. In the distance, a number of trucks, all lit up, climbed up to the pass, surrounded only by a sea of purple—not a single other light on the landscape for as far as I could see, maybe 50 miles.
When I arrived at this spot, I noticed one other car parked off the highway, pointed down at a steep angle, even though there was plenty of near level ground to park on. As I scouted around, I hear the sound of metal tools on rock, either a geologist’s rock hammer, or someone digging—and I fervently hoped it wasn’t a grave. As it started to grow dark, the person started to holler. Perhaps it was a prospector who had struck it rich—or maybe he was calling for his companion, who was also out looking at rocks.
I continued walking for maybe a quarter mile, marveling at the amazing environment—the cactus silhouettes, the purple fog, the fading electric skylight, and the aromatic smells of the desert. As I always do, I was checking to see if the road could handle the trailer, and if there was a place to turn around, so I could camp further from the highway. The report was positive for both, except that a large yucca plant had fallen into the road. I would have to move it or puncture a tire, and how do you move a large and heavy yucca, prickly as it is? So I decided to stay where I was, since I was pretty much out of sight of the road, though I could hear the trucks.
After being in the trailer a while, I decided to step outside in my slippers. I was immediately enveloped in the luminous, cool night, the crescent moon partly visible through a thin fog. All was silent, and the ghosts of the cactus and cirios were barely visible.
What makes this landscape so extraordinary is this: In a temperate forest, the trees and foliage are typically so thick that you can’t see very far. But here, the cirios, yuccas, and cactus are nearly as tall as forest trees, yet they have few leaves, and are more widely s paced. So they feel rather like a dense forest, and yet you can still see both the mountains, along with the more distant cirio and cactus that become very small with distance. With the air so clear, you have a feeling of vast distance and immense expanse.
Everything is so old—the rocks, plants and mesas—as if the clock stopped long ago on the entire peninsula. And yet the geologists say that it was only yesterday, geologically speaking, that Baja California separated from mainland Mexico. Another difference from the temperate forest is the shape of the vegetation. In the forest, you can’t really see the shapes of individual trees because of the foliage. But here, each and every plant’s unique shape is revealed, starkly against the sky or sunset. Every Cordon Cactus and each cirio is a unique, quirky individual, gesticulating like an Italian caught in mid-sentence by a photo.
Before bed, I went outside again. It was totally dark, not a light or a star anywhere even though I’m on a mountaintop, and totally silent. So dark and silent it was disorienting—I had to struggle not to lose my balance.
The world wad divided into two hemispheres. The one below, representing the land, was black. The one above, the heavens, was dark grey, but some light from the stars was penetrating the fog. The air was very cool and humid, with a slight wind blowing, with a faint organic smell. Between the black and the grey halves of my world, I could barely make out faint shapes, so indistinct they were almost just intuitions. As I looked at the sky, groups of faint stars would wink on and off, as the wisps of fog drifted by. Back in the USA, it’s nearly impossible to find total darkness, without any artificial lights.
Day 2, 12/3
Travel today from the pass south of El Rosario to Interstate 8, roadside rest just north of the border.
Day 3, 12/4
Travel today to Slab City, Imperial dunes at sunset, and then camping on a side road off the small highway N.
Day 4, 12/5
Travel today to mountains on I-70 at roadside rest, west of San Rafael Swell.
Day 5, 12/6
Traveled today through spectacular San Rafael Swell, through Arches area and Rocky Mountains, to roadside rest in W. Nebraska on I-75 or 80.
Day 6, 12/7, Sunday
Arrived home about 11:30 pm in evening.
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