Author: Bob Elwood

June 1, 2017

Corrections, Amplifications, Apologies, Final Thoughts

Apologies

Since establishing this blog I have been deluged with spam in the comments section. As a result I could not read the comments to find the real ones; for every real comment from a friend were a hundred junk messages, some running on for pages. Only now that I am home have I been able, with guidance from Zach my technical advisor, to sort out the wheat from the chaff. So I apologize for not acknowledging any comments en route. Continue reading “June 1, 2017–“…and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began…” T.S. Eliot”

May 20 to May 26, 2017—Making tracks for home, the gravitational forces becoming stronger the nearer we get

Moundville State Park, Alabama

There are 25 dirt piles in Moundville State Park, the largest about forty feet long by sixty feet wide and  sixty feet tall, the lowest barely deserving the label “mound.” They were built over the thousand years preceding the 14th century by the Native American Empire that stretched from Ohio to northern Florida, a loose confederacy known collectively as the “mound-building people.” The state park is alongside the mound village and is imbued with a solemn, mysterious atmosphere; it has the vibe of a city of the dead and an ancient riddle. It was a curious feeling to be one of only a handful of people spending the drizzly night amongst these ancient remains. Before retiring I walked among the mounds in the dark, under an umbrella.

The museum on site had quite a collection of locally-collected artifacts, vessels and large ornamental plates featuring recurring motifs–the open hand with an eye on the palm and the snake tied in knots. These objects were artfully executed, with sure lines and highly polished. One of them, a circular plate of copper two feet in circumference and incised with the hand/eye image, is said to be one of the most significant Native American artifacts in existence. The experts have not come to a definitive answer on the purpose or meaning of the mounds. When we saw similar structure on the Gulf shore of Florida the official speculation was that the inhabitants sought the higher elevation to catch the cooling breeze and escape the miasma and mosquitoes. Seemed a reasonable explanation there and I don’t know why it wouldn’t apply here. The Moundville village also had ponds where fish were cultivated, the excavation of which supplied the mound material. So I can imagine a guy digging a koi pond and using the dirt to build himself a nice little platform like a patio; his neighbor sees that and decides to do the same, except he has to make his higher. And so on. Anyway it was a great destination for us. The informative and well-stocked interpretive center is in a nicely-designed concrete structure built by our old friends The Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s.

Chattanooga, TN

“Gone to Chattanoogie, Gone to Chattanoogie, see my ponies run, pretty mama.”

Very much like Pittsburgh in its recent history—a factory town where all the noxious fumes of the economy hovered over the town, trapped by its valley location. When the factories closed the dirty city became depressed, economically and in all other ways. A forward-thinking master plan and state infusions of money turned it into a model of recovery. Chattanooga was one of the first successful river-walk communities (imitated now in cities like Oklahoma City that don’t even have a river), one of the first to offer free public transport in the city center. Now, like Pittsburgh, it is a desirable residential and tourist center, and a medical services hub for the region. An 1890s bridge was turned into a pedestrian walkway and this fostered the growth of the communities across the river.

We stayed outside Chattanooga, at the foot of Lookout Mountain in an RV camp. I stayed up half the night talking to a guy who was an Air Force-trained anesthetist who rotates in an out of military settings. Curious to me is that he is an armed medical specialist and engages in military operations when not doing medical work; I guess I had always thought of medical personnel as being non-combatants. He was a bit of a braggart and a conspiracy-theorist, but his experiences were so far from mine, or any one I know, that I liked hearing his stories. He said he looked forward to the end of his enlistment obligation so he could contract himself out to the military for the same work as a private citizen and make some real money. If I understood him correctly he suggested that he could make over $700,000 for a six month stint in a combat zone.

“As the sun pulls away from the shore, and our boat sinks slowly in the west…”

We stayed our last night in a state park in southern Virginia, about an hour north of Bristol. It was a Thursday night and the park was full as the Memorial Day weekend approached. And apparently it was full of people who knew each other and/or were related to one another. There was a lot of commotion in the tightly-packed camp, with kids running around, sullen teenagers commiserating, and the adults yacking and laughing in small or large groups at this camper or that camper. Lots of accent and lots of bumper stickers affirming a dedication to hunting, NASCAR, the current president, various sports teams.

We made a dash home, crossing the Potomac around 3pm on Friday the 26^th, one year and two days after our departure.

 

We had seen a lot of country in 25,000 miles—gorgeous gorges, beautiful buttes, a mess of mesas. And we met a lot of nice people, some of whom will remain friends. But after all our travels, as Judy Garland said, “Be a darling and make me another martini.”

 

May 1 to May 20, 2017

Moab, Utah

The weather in Wyoming and the plains being on the too-cold side, we decided on a bold course southward, to cross the US at a warmer latitude. Salt Lake City was the turning point. We could have turned left there and crossed into Colorado and Kansas, but it is a very mountainous pass that I didn’t want to drag the trailer through. We continued downward to Moab, Utah.

Very popular place this time of year, Moab is. The winter is too cold and the summer too hot, so visitors shoot for the few weeks in spring and fall to visit the wild and beautiful landscapes hereabouts. We managed to secure three nights lodging, at a steep rate of 50$+ per night. Arches National Park and Canyonlands National Park were short drives away and we spent  a day in each.

Arches features surreal redstone formations in a high desert setting. The most impressive, to me, are the giant ones—smoothsided monoliths rising straight up hundreds of feet.

The park derives its name from the arch formations of all sizes, of which the park has thousands. The downside of Arches is that everyone is supposed to stay on the narrow trails that lead to the formations, and when the park is crowded you are constantly rubbing elbows with fellow visitors. The park rangers are at pains to keep people on the trails because the desert floor elsewhere is covered with a thin crust of biologically active material that, over millennia, converts the sand and rock into soil. You can see it everywhere, and to step on it is to set it back in its work by thousands of years. So visitors drive from place to place about the park and march single file from parking lot to arch and back.

Returning from a fairly arduous hike I heard pounding footsteps behind. An agitated man passed me, looked about, and ran back the way he had come. A hundred steps later I found a little girl about to break into tears. “I lost my family.” “Did your father have short hair and wearing a purple shirt?” “I don’t know because I don’t speak English.” Her name was Emily and she was Quebecois. Brenda came along and I told her to hold the girl’s hand as we went back up the trail. Her family came in sight and they embraced and wept.

Canyonlands is much the same as Arches in trail restrictions but fewer people go there so the experience is different. And for my money the north end of Canyonlands park contains some of the most dramatic scenery in the country.

 

The park was created in 1964. The story goes that secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall was flying over the land in a government jet with the official in charge of building dams whose name no one remembers. They flew over the junction of the Colorado and Green Rivers and the dam guy said he planned on putting a dam there and flooding the canyonlands. Udall thought, no, it would make a better park and lobbied LBJ to preserve the land which Lyndon did, like within a few weeks of Udall’s asking. Imagine these guys flying over the western lands like gods, deciding the fate of vast swaths of country.

New Mexico

Our planned course would bring us within a few hours of Albuquerque so we called and asked if we could visit again with the grandkids for a few days. That’s when the plot thickened. Hillary had a five-day conference starting the following week in Palm Springs CA (“Dermatopathology in the Desert” it’s called, legendary among dermpaths) and asked if we wanted to come along and help out with the kids (and the neighbor kids since the good friend neighbors were coming along too.) She had tried to hire babysitters in Palm Springs but hadn’t found any she was comfortable with. “Sure,” we said. So we committed to a fifteen day diversion.

I have to confess that the attraction for me was driving her Tesla to Palm Springs. They were all traveling by air and we would drive out. She has the D model 85S. There a few models above hers going to the 100S, which is the fastest production car on the road, going to 60 mph from a deadstart in 2.2 seconds. You heard me, 2.2. The Tesla is one bad motor scooter. I didn’t abuse its power, oh no, not me, but it is safe driving when you can put yourself in a nice little pocket of calm, with no other traffic around you, by the simple expedient of zooming to 100+ mph, briefly. Am I right or am I right? The vagaries of charging the thing are a little annoying, and make for a slightly longer trip, but to me it was a small price to pay for driving what must be the most well-designed and highest-functioning vehicle ever put on the road.

We stayed in Sedona AZ on the way out, and drove through Petrified Forest National Park. Both are worth the diversion.

We spent our six days in Palm Springs playing in the pool with the kids. Palm Springs was a Hollywood getaway of the 1960s and developed an atmosphere of libertinism. It is famous among architects for the concentration of mid-century modern design—low slung, angular buildings. There were some in the neighborhoods where I grew up and never considered them remarkable in any way (think sunken rooms, vertically-seamed exterior sheathing, sliding doors), but they are cool to see when altogether in one place and well-maintained.

The San Jacinto mountains rise up at the very edge of town on the west, and are the steepest mountains in the US, rising almost 11,000 feet from Palm Spring’s sea-level elevation over a mere seven miles. Snow and sequoias on the mountains, and 90+ degrees in the town.

 

Drove back through the Arizona mountains, through the copper mining region. What wild open spaces in this land, and what a short amount of time it took to rake it of its resources.

We left ABQ the day after we got back from California, picking up the truck and trailer from Tom’s RV shop where some mechanical issues were attended to.

Natchez, MS

Drove all day for three days to cross the Mississippi into Natchez yesterday, for a gathering of old-time musicians. Some of Brenda’s acquaintances from Augusta Music camp are here, as well as Harry Bowlick, the Missouri fiddler that we had met in Buena Vista music festival last September. I dropped her off at the festival while I explored Natchez and came back to camp with a pound of just-steamed crawfish from a roadside stand. Very hot and humid and storms threatening.

People in the south are so friendly you have to take it into account when planning your day. I bought some groceries before stopping at C&K Crawfish Steamers. The  crawfish-steaming establishment was an old gas station/service station and they steamed the critters in big pots in the old service bays. Clay, the C of C&K, took time from his steaming to engage me. We shook hands generously and had an extended exchange while the perishables in the car earned their name.

Brenda and I took a guided tour of the small city in a glorified golf cart. It was worth the $20 per person as the guide was quite knowledgeable and the town interesting. Natchez is intact. It was not destroyed during the Civil War because the mayor surrendered the city to the Yankees after the firing of a single round from a Yankee gunboat. The Yanks were sailing down the Mississippi after pulverizing Vicksburg and the mayor did not want to see his city suffer the same fate.

The Mississippi was experiencing record flood heights when we were there. The 58 foot crest that was occurring when we were there had only been exceeded a few times in recorded history. No river I’ve ever seen shows as much raw power as the Mississippi in flood. It gallops. Detritus moves downriver faster than a person can run. Near the bank we watched numerous whirlpools, several feet wide and a foot deep, disappear and reappear.

Natchez is mostly built on a high bluff so little of the city is exposed to the swelling of the river. There is a little enclave at the foot of the bluff which was, historically, the location for brothels and bars. A few wooden buildings still stand there and we had lunch in one of them. A famous duel was held on a sandbar here in 1827. The duel denigrated into hand-to-hand fighting among a small group of men, one of whom, Jim Bowie, distinguished himself by skillful deployment of a large knife, known everafter as the Bowie Knife.

We’ll stay here a few days to rest up and make the turn towards home.

 

April 27, 28, 29, 30—One night stands along the Oregon Trail

April 27, John Day River

The Army Corps of Engineers has a small camp at the mouth of the John Day River where it enters the Columbia. A very nice facility, $12/night with full hookups using our National Park senior pass. As we progressed away from Portland the weather improved and was delightful when we made camp, if a little breezy.

Brenda was still recovering from the explorations of the oral surgeon back in Portland and took to bed. I found a path above the camp that ran along the river. I walked for six miles through some  of the most beautiful terrain I have ever had to myself, and I don’t say that lightly. The john day river has its own gorge, steep slopes and cliffs descending from maybe a thousand feet, covered in new grass. The wind kicked the river up in mist below which made rainbows just above the surface. I saw herds of antelope or deer running across the hills from miles away. The river meandered side to side and around every turn was another enchanting vista. I  just kept walking. (Had to negotiate three fences but there were no warning signs and it seemed like they were designed to accommodate the determined hiker.)

A lot of things are named for the early explorer John Day. On one of his adventures, right near where the ACE camp is, he was taken prisoner by local residents. His belongings were taken from him, including the clothes on his  back.  He had to hike 80 miles back in the cold buck naked. Seemed like a civilized way for the locals to send a message, I think.

April 28—Farewell Bend, OR

Found a lovely state camp along the Snake River. Early settlers floated down the Snake from its eastern reach to this point, then headed overland to Oregon, hence the name Farewell Bend. Wagon ruts worn into the stone near the camp. I took a walk down along the river a ways then hiked the mountain overlooking the camp for my own personal cardiac stress test which I passed apparently. Our trailer is in the trees to the right of the island in the picture. This is the southernmost point of the 1000+ mile Snake; it flows right to left and heads north here to the Columbia, of which it is the principal tributary. Idaho on the left bank of the river. Got cold here at night, some coyotes in the distance.

April 29—Twin Falls, ID

Drove around Boise, through the unspoiled lands along the Snake river. Winds howling across the vast basin. Took another thirty detour off the highway through Hagerman Valley, a stunning gorge with waterfalls pouring out of the rock escarpment down to the Snake. The aquifer that supports the farms along the flatland above the cliffs is one of the most bountiful in the country. The area is rich in fossils and fishing. I had left a message at an rv park with hot springs. They never called me back and of course they were booked up when I arrived. Five hours of driving to a dead end. We wound up at an unappetizing rv camp in the unappetizing area around Twin Falls.

The Perrine Bridge crosses the Snake here and is one of the world’s favored sites for jumping off with parachute, it is that high. It is one of the only places in the US where you can do so without a permit. We stopped to watch some of these thrill-seekers. Gave us a thrill, not pleasant, watching people pitch themselves off this high bridge.  Evil Knevel tried to jump the snake here with a jet-powered motorcycle, which motorcycle flamed out over the river leaving the daredevil to rely on his chute and suffer the opprobrium of his fans.

 

April 30—Honeyville, Utah

A crowded but beautifully-situated camp north of Salt Lake City. We got to soak in the hot springs there, the most mineral-laden springs on earth, according to their PR. Kit Carson soaked here, and Charles Fremont.

You probably can’t tell from the picture but the sign to the right says “Elwood City Cemetery.” The town is located near Honeyville and we had to take a look see. Not much to look at, and no way to discover the origin of its naming. No Elwoods in the boneyard.

Quite cold here and a little investigation revealed that there was a lot of cold in our future. Wyoming, Nebraska and Iowa were projecting colder-than-average temps. I was particularly concerned about making the mountain crossings in Wyoming. There was rain and freezing across the state, with black ice reported on the high passes. We could wait it out but decided on a bold course to head south and cross the US at a lower latitude. It also means negotiating the Rockies north to south. part of the route is on Utah State Route 6 which is called “The deadliest road in the US” (how could one not go?)  This trajectory would put us in vicinity of Albuquerque again, so, guess what, we’re heading back to ABQ for another visit.

Without getting the timeline too confusing, developments arose just in the past hours that will put us in Palm Springs California in mid-May. We had planned to be back home by mid month but the situation is evolving. Will explain later.

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April 12^th to April 27, 2017                       

We spent two weeks in Portland with Zach and Molly. They have a very nice craftsman style house, built 1910, in southeast Portland, across the street from a Trader Joe’s. I had taken on an indexing job as a favor to a publisher who had been a customer of mine for the twenty seven years I’ve been in business, and stayed deskbound for five days. We managed to squeeze in some exploring but the fact is it rained almost every day. Everyone knows it rains a lot in the southwest but even long-time residents were surprised by the duration and intensity of the precip. Portland is a temperate rainforest anyway, and everything grows easily and profusely, but with the saturation that had been going on for months the flora was in riot—a jungle without the jungle atmosphere of rot and fecundity, fertility and death. And without the heat.

Molly is active in the comedy circuit here and we attended some top-notch, and some bottom-rung, performances  including one of her own routines which was among the best—professionally-crafted, funny, well-received. We toured Zach’s office in the tallest building in Portland, a pink monolith thirty stories high. Both his company and Molly’s have nice cafeterias with wine and beer on tap, available to employees at all hours including nonworking-hours. I wonder how far I would have gotten suggesting that to my employers in 1980.

Portland is one of the most open towns on the planet. Weed is for sale at many stores for recreational use, it has the most per-capita strip clubs than any other US city, and has quite a few sex clubs where people go to have casual sex with strangers. Of these three types of businesses I visited one. It was clean and modern, like an Apple store, with stainless steel and ceramic fixtures and soft lighting coming from someplace not readily identifiable. I had a free consultation with an expert before deciding whether or not to invest. It was not as expensive as you might think.

It is said that people are flying from Amsterdam to visit Portland.

Hillary and Tom and Clementine and Tavish flew up from Albuquerque for a few days and we took a wine tour in the Willamette Valley, visiting five wineries. I have toured vineyards and wineries in two of the world’s greatest wine-producing areas. Next time you see me you will see that I am now in possession of specialized information about wine and how to approach a new prospect. I will swirl it in the glass, sniff it, and hold it up to the light. Then I will take a small sip, mixing it with as much air as I can without making objectionable noises. Then I will sit thoughtfully looking into the middle-distance. Then I will string together some adjectives, some of which are not often thought-of in connection with wine. “A presumptious nose,” is my current favorite. No, seriously, there is a lot to know and experience about wine. At one of the tastings we attended someone said that “some people choose not to learn about the complexity of wine.” I think I know a truism when I hear it and that had the ring of truth. All I know, and want to know, is that the explosion in recent years in the growing of grapes and the making of wine has the world awash in good, cheap vino.

Brenda had a tooth problem in Portland. I’ll spare you the details but we got the situation stabilized until we get home in a few weeks. The very good dentist we found was also a fortune-teller and said “I see a root canal on the near horizon.”

Bade farewell to Molly and Zach and Stumptown and drove a few hours along the Columbia River gorge. True to its name, it is gorgeous.

March 27 to April 12, 2017—Carmel by the Sea, Pinnacles NP, some place forgotten, Sonoma Valley, northern Cali coast, to Portland OR

From Jalama Beach outside Lompoc we drove up the coast, through the artichoke –growing district around Castroville and the garlic capital Gilroy, through the mists and fogs reaching in from the sea, to Carmel, below Monterey. (Would have driven up the coast but the bridge below Big Sur had washed away turning forty miles of Highway 1 into a dead end road.) We camped in a county park high on a bluff near the Presidio military base. We arrived without a reservation and found a nice spot to park the trailer, hiked up some steep hills for a couple hours while the camp filled up with small trailers and truck campers. Some people living in tents occupied a handful of the  sites, gaming the camp residency restrictions by changing the reservation name every 14 days. They made the bathrooms a tad overused and unsavory, but we were only here for the night. We had contacted a couple living in Carmel who used to live in the Bushwood area. We didn’t know them well, had been out with them a couple of times with mutual friends, but they were good people and we looked forward to dinner or drinks together, but circumstances on both sides prevented it—we advanced our schedule by a day so we could  get to Healdsburg for Alan’s, our friend from Mexico, birthday.

Drove across the Salinas Valley and into the beautiful, isolated mountains east. Arrived at Pinnacles National Park in time to hike into the gorgeous landscape—mountain meadows, crystal streams, the pinnacles of stone that erupt out of the steep, grassy hillsides. Built a decent fire as the cold came on. Saw condors the next morning. Sighting them is exciting as there are so few and their extinction was almost accomplished in recent years. As a bird, at the distance we saw them, they are little more than glorified vultures. The condor is the largest bird, but at any given moment there are condors smaller than turkey vultures, and these we saw. Not awe-inspiring in person, necessarily, but their backstory makes them superstars of the bird world.

Came back west into the Salinas Valley to a nondescript camp in a nondescript town. Talked with an Australian family at the tail end of their two week trip in a rented RV. We had been seeing quite a few of these rental campers since entering California; quite popular here.

Like the Imperial Valley south, the Salinas Valley is wall to wall vegetables. Impossible to calculate but I believe we were looking, at various times, at fields containing a half million servings of spinach or broccoli. Mind-boggling, what people make this land do year after year. And we hadn’t even seen the Central Valley which surpasses Imperial and Salinas in production.

 

Healdsburg

We had met Alan and Betsi soon after arriving in Mexico, when we were camped next to one another in San Felipe and stranded there for five days during the gas crisis. As Brenda says, we started talking with them as soon as they got out of  their camper and didn’t stop talking for six weeks. We arrived at Betsi’s house in Healdsburg, an hour or so north of San Francisco, on the 30^th and took up residence in her guest cottage. And there we stayed, quite comfortably, for eleven days.

 

Brenda and I had spent a night in Healdsburg seventeen years ago and it stuck in my memory as being inexplicably expensive. A simple breakfast downtown was fourteen dollars. A few hours nursing drinks at an open mic set us back almost as much as dinner at Café des Artistes. The town square was lined with chichi clothing shops. I had always been perplexed as to how this attractive but otherwise undistinguished town managed to exist in an economic stratosphere. Betsi, a resident since the 1970s and former member of the planning board, explained in a word—wine.

Healdsburg is in Sonoma county and is the motherland of California wine-making. There had always been winemaking here but in the 1980s the market exploded. It became a status symbol to own a winery and every dot-com billionaire and Hollywood royalty wanted a piece. Every square inch of land is now covered in grape vines and every winemaker or wine-snob wants a piece of Healdsburg real estate. The most unassuming house here can easily sell for $750,000, and the nouveau riche of San Francisco who buy them don’t want to live here but only come up for the occasional weekend in wine country. The town has many craftsman style houses built in the early 20^th century and many have been expensively restored, making for a very attractive town, but the underlying economy is exotic and a weird vibe permeates the place. We went into a small bar that served only grilled cheese sandwiches, baked potatoes and wine. The wine started at $50/bottle and the baked potato was $15. The potato came with sour cream and bacon bits.

We had fun in Healdsburg with Alan and Betsie. Went to an old time fiddlers contest in nearby Cloverdale (where I won a Hohner guitar on a $5 raffle ticket). We visited wineries (Francis Coppola’s, Simi,  and Acorn/Alegria which is owned by a friend of my sister’s.) Took day trips to the shore and local sites, railed at the nightly news, compared different strains of weed. I don’t think I’d ever fallen in with new friends so quickly and after eleven days we were still carrying on the conversation we had started in Baja.

 

Fort Bragg and Trinidad, California

I had intended to take a week to get to Portland OR, traveling up the coast to the Colombia and then across. But the rains came on and the forecast was for continued rain into the foreseeable future. So after ten months of travel we were finally inconvenienced by the rain. Believe it or not, we had not encountered anything but brief periods of rain since May of last year. But we were in it now and persistent rain makes for miserable camping. If we had encountered this kind of weather at the beginning of the trip I think we would have turned homeward after a week. Rain makes for a boring, messy existence. So we made tracks for Zach’s without delay.

Stayed near MacKerricher State Park in Fort Bragg, CA. The park is on the ocean and is a great place to see the gray whales returning from Baja to the north in the spring, and, indeed, we saw them spouting and breaching in the near distance. I think I recognized one that we had seen in Baja weeks before.

I made a navigation error leaving Fort Bragg—there were notices saying that a section of rte. 101 had washed away forty miles ahead. By my calculation we would be able to get off 101 just before the washout. In fact we drove right to the washout and had to retrace a beautiful but tortuous path back over the mountains. Wasted almost two hours.

We turned inland for a ways then back to the coast so I could visit an old friend who had moved from Garberville CA to Trinidad CA since he and I had last talked in 2000. Was taken aback to find him in a wheelchair. Some 18 months before he had acquired Guillame-Barre disease while hospitalized with pneumonia. This insidious disease manifests in various ways but in some people it has the effect of paralysis. Greg hadn’t walked in 18 months; most cases substantially remit over time and he is improving slowly. His recovery will depend on getting access to a state program that provides rehab therapy with transportation; he finds out if he qualifies in the next few weeks. Greg said our visit cheered him a great deal, and I hope it’s true.

Spent our last night on the Pacific in Charleston, OR, near Coos Bay. The rain fell and the wind blasted the Scamp through the night..

Left the Pacific to head inland through the dunes area of southwestern Oregon and along the Dean River. With all the rain the valley was bursting with spring life—buds, blooms, lambs, calves; rushing streams, curling mists, lush grasses and mosses and new-sprung leaves; postcard pretty for fifty miles.

 

March 24 to March 27, 2017—SoCal

My brother’s daughter lives in LA, in Culver City, and that was reason enough for us to visit the City of Angels. Booked at an RV camp in Long Beach which I expected to be a noisy, chaotic place but was actually quite pleasant, backing up to a little wetland near the port facilities.

We got together with Caitlin in Long Beach for dinner and sitting around the campsite; very nice time with a sweet kid. Brenda and I drove, sans trailer, the thirty miles to downtown LA (ninety minute trip) and signed on for one of those hop-on hop-off bus tours. It was just what I wanted—exposure to various neighborhoods and sights of the city. Next time someone says Beverly Hills, Rodeo Drive, Sunset Strip, Paramount Studios, Hollywood Hills, Chateau Marmont, Grauman’s etc., I’ll have an accurate picture in mind, not some mental image from Beverly Hillbillies or something. We got off the bus to walk to Little Ethiopia to have a great Ethiopian lunch. The lady who served us was very familiar with the Washington DC Ethiopian restaurant scene

For our second night we hosted the guy we had met at Joshua Tree and his wife at our campsite for Friday evening cocktails. She was born and bred LA and made me laugh with her valley girl imitations. He is retired from teaching at a ritzy private school in LA, she is still enjoying her work in social services for a few more years. interesting to me she had known Tom Lehrer, one of my favorites, a satirist, a writer of comic social/political songs.

In a coincidence our next door neighbor at the RV park was a woman who went to Gallaudet college in the 1960s and taught deaf students at Leonardtown HS in St Marys County in the 1990s. I am sure if we had more time and could have communicated better we would have found friends in common; the connections didn’t come up until we were hooked up a pulling out.

Except for the traffic and the expense I could see why people live in LA, or any other city for that matter.

Found some side-street parking in Venice Beach to check out the show there. It is famous as a haunt of odd-balls, which is saying something in southern California. So we did that for a couple hours, maybe too  early in the day for the full weirdo display, then headed to Malibu. Stayed at a decent, expensive (+$50) RV park overlooking the sea. The seaside access all along this coast is blocked by private homes which is irritating. Water access in southern California is as bad as it is in the Chesapeake region; the rich get the shore, the masses cluster in the few remaining public spaces.

Drove a long way north to a county campground at Jalama Beach outside of Lompoc. Here we see what a gem pacific California is—velvety green mountains sloping or rushing to the wild surf. This park is reached by driving 14 miles through verdant mountainous terrain with little signs of habitation, ranches I suspect. Our campsite was way up on a hill overlooking the sea. A half-dozen kite-boarders were furrowing the sea. It was relentlessly windy, but bearable because the scenery was so wild. The scenic Amtrak train passed by about 100 feet from us twice a day. It was so windy we couldn’t hear it. I was surprised to see so many oil drilling platforms off shore.

March 19 to March 24, 2017—Joshua Tree and environs

Snagged a spot at Cottonwood Springs camp in Joshua Tree National Park for two nights, south end of the park. Nature lovers from many states were piling in to enjoy the exceptional weather and to see the wildflowers and cactuses in bloom  (“You should have seen Baja,” I didn’t say to anyone) and all the six camps were full  Another feather in the national cap is Joshua Tree. What farsightedness of our ancestors to preserve these places. Now climate change is having a measurable effect on the strange Joshua Tree; foresight is always in demand, I guess.

[A chuckwalla lizard in Joshua Tree.]

Met a nice fella camping at the park who lives in the San Pedro neighborhood of LA who offered us a space in his driveway when we get there. We had booked a couple nights at an expensive RV park in Long Beach to visit my niece Caitlin and planned on leaving LA after that but if one of us, walking down Wilshire Boulevard or having a phosphate at Schwabs, gets discovered by a director we might have to stay for a screen test.

After two nights on the south side of Joshua Tree we relocated to a private campground outside the north sidefor one night so we could hike around Black Rock Canyon. The town is Twentynine Palms. There is a Marine base nearby and the town exists to serve that entity. There are many choices in Twentynine Palms if you need to get your hair cut or if you need a massage. The massage choices include Okinawan, Thai, Ancient Thai, Vietnamese, Tokyo-style, and others. Nuanced variations of things interest me; I might have to research this.

 

Spent over two hours at a Verizon store in Yucca Valley, trying to sort out the problems with Brenda’s tablet. We had purchased it specifically for this trip and it stopped working before we entered Mexico which meant no Verizon stores for three months. After fooling around with it for a long time while Brenda and I went out for lunch the store techs said they will have to ship it off to the factory for repair and will lose all the photos she has taken with it over seven months. Are you fucking kidding me? At the end of the long  tet a tet with the technicians in the store and on the phone at headquarters, one of them had the nerve, per their orders, to ask “are you satisfied with your Verizon service experience today?” “No, actually, I’m furious that you can’t save the contents of the hard drive and give me a new device right now.” Nothing like a tech problem and a manualized service industry to undo the months of calm demeanor I had cultivated south of the border. And I am sure someone could save the photos on the hard drive if they were devoted to it.

Drove here, to Adelanto CA, a nondescript camp in a nondescript town. The Air Force closed their base here some years ago and the town has been struggling ever since. They made a bad or corrupt deal with companies that run prisons so now there are four large prisons here which generate hardly any tax revenue. The campground is at 3,000 feet and higher ranges are visible east and west. Storm clouds were cresting the mountains from the Pacific in dramatic fashion as we arrived, threatening storms. Instead of rain a windstorm kicked up and obscured views in all directions to less than a hundred yards. It lasted for an hour. Cool!

We took an uber hire to a thai restaurant a mile away. It was too cold and windy to walk. The place was a small house in an empty dirt lot, with nothing to distinguish it as a place of business except a small “open” sign and a tiny sign perched on the roof gutter with the name “thai-siam.” One old guy and his cat, three four-top tables, books on Buddhism and thai magazines scattered everywhere. The single copy of the menu had been stolen from another thai restaurant and had a piece of masking tape covering the price column on the right. He spoke little to no English, took our order, or “an” order, and disappeared in back to cook it. Meanwhile he brought Brenda an enormous goblet of white wine. Needless to say the food was excellent. We sat around with him for a while and watched some thai karaoke with him, laughing at the laughable performers. I expressed commiseration on the death of his king, who passed in October and whose pictures adorned the walls. He disparaged the current king. All this communicating done in mime. As we were leaving he brought me two bottles of Sing Ha to go, on the house, the total bill an even $30.00. He and Brenda hugged.

 

March 14 to March 19, 2017
The Flight Out of Mexico
After the luxury accommodations in Ensenada, a stroll along the waterfront, and the purchase of a replacement hose, we headed to the crossing at Tecate. Tecate is east of Tijuana, west of Mexicali, and the least-used crossing of the three. We stayed at a rancho in the mountains before crossing, a very well appointed and maintained joint, about twenty minutes from the border. We were the only residents of the large campground, except for the one old gringo who had been there three years, feeding the wild cats and doing acrostic word puzzles. Mexico is a place you really can disappear into, if you were on the run from something or just want to disappear a la Ambrose Bierce or the guy who wrote The Treasure of the Sierra Madre whose actual and pen-name both escape me at the moment . The place had a miniature golf course, of all things, an 18 hole, really difficult one. We stayed two nights at Rancho Ojia. The only drawback of the place was that the road fronting the camp was pitched downward steeply and ended in a sharp turn, so all night and day the truckers were descending in low gear, blowing the engine compression out the stacks at an incredible volume. I suppose you could get used to it.
Made our run to Tecate and the border then, stopping to fuel up along the way. I had been trying to sell the bicycles we had bought for 60 dollars in Florida lo these many months ago. I tried again at the Pemex gas station, “Tengo dos bicecletas para la venta” the selling phrase I had been repeating in several preceding towns. “No money senor,” said the station attendant, but he called over a woman working inside the station. She went inside the Scamp to examine the bikes and made gestures of unsureness. I took them out of the Scamp. The station attendant rode one around the station making ‘yippee’ type noises and we all laughed. She asked “Cuanto cuesta?” I said “Ochociente.” She thought, then shook her head. I didn’t know how to say “make me an offer” but made gestures I hoped suggested that notion. She said “siciente(?)” and I said “done” and sold them for 600 pesos, thirty dollars.
Then I had to get rid of the pesos before crossing the border so drove around Tecate until I found a tequila store.
The line for the crossing, the finding of which involved some minor adventures in which the Mexican police took a helping hand, was an hour long. Vendors sold water and foodstuffs along the line and we used up the last of our pesos buying our first churros, fried breadsticks coated with cinnamon and sugar crystals.
An easy passing through the border, once we arrived. We were diverted to the special inspection area because we had a trailer and had been so long in Mexico, which I had been led to expect. The inspector had some Maryland history and was also a Scamp owner, so we talked about those things and less about the heroin, Mexicans, and guns hidden in the trailer.
Back in the USA
I sent the kids an e-mail when we got back in the States in the form of a riddle, “We are where the King of Rock and Roll said ‘…the hamburgers sizzle on an open grill night and day.’ ” I doubt they got the reference to Chuck Berry’s “Back in the USA” but I like to expand their horizons. (“From the coast of California to the shores of the Delaware Bay.”) The next day The King of Rock and Roll crossed over to The Promised Land.
Just thirty miles from the border we stayed in a pastoral park, in Potrero, San Diego County. Only forty miles from downtown San Diego but this place was as bucolic as the English countryside. A Baja “caravan” of five big rigs pulled in later. These are people who paid $1,600 to be led around Baha for three weeks, with a guide making arrangements. I had looked into that before starting out and thought about it. Some of the caravaners started hosing down their rigs as soon as they arrived, despite the California water use restrictions and even though they looked pristine already compared to ours. “Yep, we’re home” we said to ourselves. We were sad about leaving Baja until we reached our next destination at
Salton Sea, California
I could not not go to the Salton Sea which I had always heard of as one of the country’s great ecological disasters. A fascinating place, and not quite what I thought. In 1905 a mismanaged scheme to divert water from the Colorado River, via a canal that went through Mexico, went wrong. The dikes failed and for sixteen months the entire flow of the Colorado poured into this area 300 feet below sea level and created California’s largest lake, the Salton Sea. It is 46 miles long and almost as wide and has no natural outflow. In the late 1950s and through the 1960s it became a swinging rat-pack era destination. Golf courses, hot mineral springs all around, hotels, bars, seaside resorts. Speedboat records were set here—the high salt level of the water made the boats ride higher and the low elevation made the engines perform better. By the late 1960s scientists stared to realize that, with no natural outflow except evaporation, the salt levels of the lake were rising rapidly and killing the various fish species that had been introduced. Also, the shoreline was rapidly receding. Jump forward to the present and you have ghost towns surrounding the “sea” whose salinity is half again as salty as the ocean. The only fish that can tolerate it are the introduced tilapia, and they die in record numbers and coat the shoreline which is now a long distance from the various forms of beachfront amusements built fifty years ago. The “beach” is a mixture of salt and decomposed fish skeletons. Brenda got a fish bone stuck in her foot walking the “ beach.” During its lifetime the Salton has become an important flyway for migrating birds and its disappearance would have a serious impact on a great number of migrating waterfowl, so schemes are regularly proposed and partially enacted to save this accidental lake. Meanwhile agricultural nutrients continue to run into it from the Imperial Valley and the salt content increases as it concentrates through evaporation. An odd challenge, this body of water. Saving the Salton was a primary objective of California Senator Sonny Bono’s, to add another element of strangeness to the Salton saga.
The Imperial Valley here, irrigated from the Colorado, is the most intensely cultivated ag areas on earth. The breadth and variety is astonishing. You eat from it, I eat from it, frequently.
There are several VERY large RV parks here between Niland and Mecca, CA. Fountain of Youth has over 1,000 sites. We stayed at Bashford’s Hot Springs ($37.50/night) which has close to 200 sites. Most of these sites are taken up by long-term renters, mostly Canadians from BC. They arrive in October and leave before their six month visas run out making them subject to US income tax. They were all in the process of leaving when we arrived so we had the pick of the best spots and got one right near the mineral baths. As a bonus, we found ourselves next to the nicest people in Salton, if not the hemisphere. He offered me a beer after I sweated from setting up the camper, and later brought us a gallon of water because the park water was very minera. Ian of Vancouver Island was traveling with his on-again off-again companion Kate who flew from her home in Ireland to winter over with Ian in Salton, he himself being a child of the Emerald Isle. Such genuine and sweet folks, and it was St. Patrick’s Day when we arrived so we got to spend it with souls of the old sod.
The heavily-mineral laden water comes out of the ground here above boiling. They pump it up into cooling towers and it flows into six concrete tubs where one soaks in the still-very hot water. The ambient temperature is closing in on 100 here during the day so when you come out of the hot baths the air feels cool, long enough to get you to sunset.
The San Andreas fault ends, or begins, here. The mountains are giant synclines going every which way. In some narrow passes you can touch the North American tectonic plate with one hand and the Pacific plate with the other. A rare formation called a ‘fault gouge’ emerges here, which we visited, driving a few miles into the desert. It is just ground up rock like plain red dirt but it is the material that has been ground under the earth at the interface of the two tectonic plates.
Stayed two nights, enjoying a band at the community center the second night. An acoustic guitar player singer and a bass player singer of some age; the harmonica player and his wife the trap drummer were both ninety years old. The harp player made a nice pass at “Yellow Bird” which made me think of Whitey Madrzkowski who liked to sing and play that number on guitar. I think of you often, Whitey.
We also went to Slab City, not far away. Since the 1960s, through some fluke of confusion between state and federal government, this large piece of desert was taken over by anarchists, free spirits, and other outsiders and has become a habitat of squatters living in every kind of makeshift structure. We just drove through so I can’t answer questions about the operations or governance of this city, or even if such mindfulness is present here. It has a library, some entertainment places, a gigantic “outsider art” construction dedicated to Jesus and the Bible. I don’t think there is anything like this place in the world.

Mexican Miscellany and Addenda

The Indolence of the San Ignacians

We stayed several days at the lagoon near San Ignacio; one of my favorite stays. The people of San Ignacio are made the butt of jokes that portray them as the laziest people  in Baja. This is an unfair stereotyping, of course, and it is believed that the jokes are spread by the people of La Paz who are, in fact, the least energetic people of Baja.

1. Miguel is sitting on the porch of his home in San Ignacio. He sees a scorpion approaching slowly from the other side of the porch and yells for his wife to bring the antidota because he knows that, eventually, the scorpion will make it’s way across the porch and bite him.
2. Miguel is sitting on his porch; his friend Ramon sits on the other side of the porch. Ramon says, “Miguel, it is a miracle! The sky has opened up and I see Jesus Cristo, the virgin of Guadelupe, and a host of angels descending from the heavens!” Miguel says, “Ramon, my friend, I wish I was on your side of the porch to see it.”

(On the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, when I was a wee lad I remember a version of this joke based on a floating mountain, a couple of” hillbillies,” and the element “upsidaisium”.)

 

The Roads and Traffic

The bridges of the major highways, of which there are two, that cross the seasonal rivers, of which there are multitudes, are washed out with regularity. During the rebuilding of the bridges all traffic is diverted onto dirt. Only the barest effort goes into the construction of these detours, which can be the only road for years and can run for a hundred yards to a mile or more; they are soft sand, hard rock, foot deep mud or a combination of all three. They are rarely wide enough for two vehicles. There is no attempt at traffic control. It is a free-for-all and if they are muddy you have no choice but to plow ahead at a high speed to prevent getting stuck, hoping that you don’t have to negotiate passage with an oncoming passenger bus. Like a lot of traffic situations in Mexico, it would be comical if it weren’t so stressful and fraught with danger.

Sometimes you see stop signs where you would expect to see them. Sometimes they are on the left. Sometimes they are on the far side of the intersection, on the left or the right. Sometimes they are twenty feet ahead of the intersection they govern. Sometimes there is no sign but the word “Alto” is painted on the road. No one pays any attention anyway. They might slow down in acknowledgment of a stop sign, but imperceptibly. Gringos like me just confuse the local drivers by stopping entirely. The cities might as well have no dividing lines or traffic signs of any kind; traffic in Ensenada is a goat rodeo.

There are traffic calming devices called “topes” in every town. These are speed bumps. Some topes are well marked; sometimes a sign alerts you that one is near; most are unmarked in any manner. They don’t conform to any standard. Some are just thick ropes embedded in the pavement or dirt; some are like asphalt I-beams embedded in the road. You will not get far in Baja without slamming into a few of these. Sometimes they appear out of nowhere on the highway, marking a bus stop or a pedestrian crossing to a cemetery or a taqueria.

A lot of Baja road projects give every indication of being pork projects—a nice road in the middle of an otherwise dirt-track town that goes to the home or business of someone influential;  a stretch of overly engineered road, connecting long stretches of decrepit highway, built by the contractor cousin of the local jefe. While we were in Los Barriles a large crew was building a sixteen inch thick, heavily rebarred concrete road about five blocks long through an undistinguished neighborhood . There was nothing about this stretch of road to distinguish it from the rest of the town’s’ roads which were deeply-rutted dirt affairs—it wasn’t a heavily-used thoroughfare; it didn’t connect anything to anything. Meanwhile the sidewalks of the town had unmarked holes in them large enough to lose a wheelbarrow in.

Cops and the Military

The local police are the most corrupt and the most likely to try and shake down the gringos. We have not been stopped by any municipal cops but talked to plenty of people who have. They charge you with some imaginary infraction and offer to resolve it on the spot for a price. If you think it is too much to pay you can offer to follow the officer to the police station and resolve it there, which usually makes the cop back off. Or you decide it isn’t worth the hassle and you pay the twenty or forty dollar shakedown. While we were in baja 160 local cops were fired for being unable to pass a lie detector test about abuse of office.

One guy told me he was stopped by a policewoman, on foot, for making an illegal left turn. “Uno infracion!” she said. He had left his wallet in his camper and so didn’t have his license. “Dos infraction!” She commanded him to drive her to the station house. He didn’t have a back seat in his vehicle so the large woman sat in the space allowed. After going to the station and paying the $20 fine, the policewoman asked for a ride back to her post. He drove her and they all laughed and felt like friends.

The federal police have checkpoints but these are for citizens, it appears; they waved us through in all occasions except one when the officer wanted to know how much our trailer cost.

The military runs checkpoints throughout the states of Baja. I don’t know what they are looking for exactly. We were stopped at about a dozen. Sometimes they are eating lunch and just wave us through. On about four occasions they went inside the trailer and poked around. Only one guy acted all business, the rest were quite pleasant and friendly. On two occasions the inspector mentioned Trump. The first time I said “Trump es muy mal hombre” but thought afterward that this could sound like I was saying “Trump in one bad dude” so the next time I used my son’s recommended construction, “Trump is basura” (“Trump is trash.”). The commondante, upon hearing this from an American, was visibly touched. He held two fingers together and said, “Mexico, Estado Unidas, like brothers.” We shook hands warmly.

According to several fellow travelers, the police and the military personnel are sincerely interested in the high intensity, focusable flashlights you can get in the US–looking them over, inquiring about the price, and where to get them. A friend of mine in the 1970s financed his travels in Belize by trading sets of sewing needles; from the sound of it you could probably bring a case of these flashlights to Baja and barter for accommodations and meals.

 

People’s Attitudes

Ninety eight percent of the people we encountered treated us like we would want to be treated, with benign neglect. One percent of the people were jive—being too friendly, too eager to help us buy or find something. One percent was not hostile but evinced a barely-concealed contempt–conduct your business and get out but don’t overstay your welcome. Some towns like Cabo or Todos Santos or San Felipe really rely on tourism and there you will find the overly nice as well as the barely tolerant. In the towns of the interior that have lively agricultural or industrial economies, like Guerrera Negra or Ciudad Constitucion, or even Santa Rosalia on the coast, there is no warmth but a general sense that you had best keep a low profile and clear out at the earliest opportunity. In the more remote towns with little tourist trade and marginal economies, like Mulege, Bahia de Los Angeles, and Bahia Ascunsion, the people were relaxed, friendly, sometimes interested in us; these were our favorites. Sometimes we could share a joke, like  when Alan and I brought bags of dirty clothes to the laundress. She asked, “Junta?”  I made an exaggerated shocked  look and said vehemently, “No Junta! Tengo una esposa!” (“Not together! I have a wife!”). She cracked up and when we returned the next day she started laughing again.

Geronimo

Geronimo has been the most frequently-mentioned personality of our trip, from Florida, where he was imprisoned, to the western states where he made his fame. He cropped up in Baja too, at a small display in Mama Espinoza’s restaurant in Rosario—a glass case contained artifacts supposedly left by Geronimo’s war party when they passed through.

Environment

I have never seen waters as healthy as those of the Gulf of California. Wade out knee deep, pick up a piece or rock or coral, and the life just falls off it—tiny crabs, starfish, worms. Fish and waterfowl of all sizes and types abound. Of course one old Baja hand who had been coming here a long time burst my bubble by saying, “You should have seen this place back in the sixties.” Of course.

The net fishermen of San felipe have almost succeeded in exterminating the vaquita porpoise, the world’s smallest and most endangered cetacean. Their current population is estimated at fewer than sixty individuals (the porpoise, not the fishermen). While we were in San Feliipe the Mexican navy was patrolling the bay looking for illegal fishing activity. A few days before we exited Mexico some san Felipe watermen beat up three government environmental scientists and burned their vehicles. In Maryland the watermen just have to ask Governor Hogan to fire scientists whose findings might lead to limits on harvesting, as happened around the same time as the San Felipe violence .

Hot Pepper

One day at Danny’s taco establishment (stick-made covers that swing down over the door and the windows, four tables) I saw an older gentleman ask for something, and Danny’s wife brought out a bag of long, slender green peppers. He ate them like celery, biting off big hunks between bites of his tacos. The next time I dined there I patched together a question from my dictionary, “Cuales fueron pimientos, que vi a viejo comer, aqui?” gesturing to where he had been sitting. She produced the bag of peppers and offered them. Of course I had to try them. Hottest thing I ever bit into willingly; it was all I tasted for the rest of the meal. She laughed.

Vaqueros

A Mexican cowboy on horseback—bolt upright, bright white hat,blue- or red-checked shirt, wide leather belt—is one of the most cool, dignified dudes you will ever see.

March 7 to March 14, 2017—Getting the Bends, exiting Mexico too quickly

Bahia de Los Angeles

Drove from Guerrera Negra on the Pacific coast to the Bay of los Angeles on the Sea of Cortez. The desert was an absolute riot of color, carpets of vivid purples, yellows, marigold orange. The mesquite trees in bloom, too, tangles of orange filament in the boughs. Boojum Trees, or cerios cactus, are prevalent here. They are up to twenty five foot tall cones, about ten inches wide at the base and tapering upward. Leaved branches about six inches long, widely-spaced, sprout from the cone. Another plant whose name I don’t know is up to twelve feet high and at top spreads candelabra-like arms, each supporting an orange or yellow flower the size and shape of a saucer with a teacup on it. Massive octopus-like cactus growing along the ground. Medusa’s head-like cactus here and there. A landscape that must have  been seen by Dr. Suess at some point.

Bahia de Los Angeles is off the beaten track, about sixty miles from the highway en-route to nowhere. It is a small fishing village, winter- or permanent-home to a handful of gringos. We rented a spot on the beach, no amenities like electricity or running water but it came with a round stone-walled building open to the sea with a palm frond roof.

I hiked three miles, climbing 900 feet up the hill behind the town, half the distance to the highest peak there (the mountain chain it belongs to rises to almost 6,000 feet a few miles away.) I got myself into a bit of a perilous situation against my self-made promises never to climb anything remotely dangerous alone and never to move forward unless I am sure the handholds and footholds are secure. I’ll forgo the ugly details but found myself in a situation where all the stone was really loose slate, coming apart in briefcase-sized slabs or crumbling underfoot. I wrenched my back pretty good trying to keep myself from sliding down the mountain through cactus and briars. Still have pain standing up. Brenda, sensibly, hiked the sea shore. About 14 islands of various sizes and geologic composition offshore. A beautiful, remote location. You can rent a nice one-bedroom casita near the beach for 300 US$/month.

Rosario

Thence several hours driving to a run-down RV park in a medium-sized agricultural town in the interior. We were the only residents. There are scores of similar places throughout Baja—large camps that were well executed in the 1960s or 1970s, perhaps, but fallen into decades of neglect. The town is famous among gringos for Mama Espinozas restaurant. This town and the restaurant in particular figured prominently in the many Baja endurance races that started in the 1960s—the Baja 300, the Baja 1000. In the beginning the races were open to any vehicle of any type; now they are restricted to races just for motorbikes, or just for dune buggies, etc.

 

Outside of town was a geologic feature of interest, a collapsed volcano cone right on the shore. The on-line info said you can stand on the crown of the cone and look down at the water-filled crater that sea lions favor. The road was three miles of bad road and halfway in the road ran uphill at a steep grade and had major fissures –I was disinclined to continue up that slope. I found a place to pull over and we hiked into an arroyo toward the water. I guessed it would emerge on the ocean shore near the crater and we could hike to it on the beach. The arroyo did not take a direct route to the sea; it wended around through the mountains for two miles. It was full of interesting rocks and formations,

and there were fresh (undried in the mud) bobcat or mountain lion prints going our way. When we did finally reach the Pacific we were in a wave-crashing, steep-walled box cove with no access to the beach. We had to hike back the way we had come and never did see the crater or sea lions. It was  fine hike though. Funny how the idea of a large predatory feline being in the vicinity complicates your viewing behavior.

 

The landscape north of here is very unique, starting around the town of Catavina. There are boulder fields and boulder mounds. Big fields of big, rounded boulders and big piles of big, rounded boulders. I suspect that the granite outcroppings here have gradually cracked apart and become smoothed by the wind. The stones look stream-worn but that couldn’t be the case in this high, dry location.

Not far from here a bed of giant fossilized copopods were unearthed in an arroyo. Also in this vicinity is El Marmol, where most of the world’s onyx came from up until recently. There is a school house built with solid onyx walls which was too far off-road for us to visit.

 

Up mountain and down to

San Quintin

Stayed at El Pabillon camp, behind the dunes on the Pacific. This is a prime agricultural region. The Driscoll company grows their berries here. If you have a strawberry from Mexico it was likely grown here. The workers are picked up in company buses at 5AM and brought to whatever field needs attention. The farms are vast, many of them giant scrim-walled-and-roofed greenhouses. I know they get the buses going at 5AM because the only other guy in the campground, from Idaho, asked me to go fishing with him. He had been coming to Baja since the 1960s, working in his early twenties on a tuna fishing boat out of Ensenada. The guy loves fishing and had arranged for a pilot to take him into the Pacific on his panga, his fourth fishing trip of the month. So we left at 4:30 and were out on the water ninety minutes later. Fished the Bay for ling cod, for bait, then went out to sea. Pangas, from shore, look like there are taking a terrible hamering, beating through the waves at full bore (135hp Honda engine on this one.) but they are surprisingly steady cutting through the water. We were in a thick fog almost all morning, maybe six miles out, pulling in sand bass, calico bass, johnny bass, redfish and whitefish, with regularity, all in the 12 to 24 inch range. Fileted out, back at Garcia’sfish camp, we had about thirty pounds of glistening white filets. My Idaho friend had a freezer and so kept the largest share, by agreement. I enjoyed being on the ocean and experiencing the panga, as well as the three-day portion of filets I kept.

We have a coleman cooler that I use to store our electric cables, water hoses, and other odds and ends. Since the water at the camp where we stayed was too salty I never hooked up and left the hose in the cooler box (the electric cable was hooked up). During the night someone stole the cooler with the water hose and, more distressing to me, my nice hiking boots which I had left outside to air. There were warnings in the guide books about this town. The farms are so hungry for agricultural workers that they attract “immigrants” from mainland Mexico who lack respect for local business owners like Maria who owns the campground. Maria had even posted a sign warning campers not to leave article unattended, but ten weeks of no problems in Baja had made me incautious. I only have myself to blame. The thief would be easy to find if you could gather all the thousands of ag workers in one place; he’d be the one with the nicest boots.

Also at Maria’s, I flipped a breaker trying to run too many cooking tools on the electric outlet outside the camper. The breaker wouldn’t reset however. Some of the other 110 amp outlets inside the trailer were working so I didn’t think there was a massive problem. But they stopped working shortly thereafter, as did all the utilities that run on AC, such as the fridge. Maria said there was a problem with the electricity connection in town but that didn’t really explain my problem. I thought I had burned up the unit that turned battery power into 110 power and that would be a real problem for us.

We drove three hours to Ensenada, which is a big town and would have repair services. I don’t know anything about electricity but took the parts apart that I could take apart, to look at them and say incantations over them. I discovered that the breaker was faulty, it wasn’t tripping all the way out and so wouldn’t reset properly. I felt like a genius for figuring this out. The other AC outlets and appliances were already working so what had happened, apparently, was that soon after I tripped the breaker by trying to run too many things the town’s electrical supply did indeed go out. The sequence of outages had me stymied for some time but I felt quite proud of having gotten the electric back in working order.

And so here we are at Estero Beach Resort in Ensenada. It is a luxe, pricey place which we felt entitled to after being ripped off and having mechanical issues. Pool, hot tub, walls, guards, hot showers, 50 US$/night. Another night here, a couple more nights somewhere else and the Mexico portion of our trip will be over. If someone were to ask me right now, “What was the worst thing that happened on your trip?” I would say, “Leaving Mexico.”

February 22 to March 6, 2017—Mulege To San Ignacio to Bahia Asuncion to Guerrero Negro

Returned to our old spot in Mulege, a tiled patio in a small permanent gringo community, in the village. Ate at Danny’s tacos, still our favorite dining spot in Baja. Took a failed day trip to Punta Chavato which my old Baja sailing book said had a great shell beach. The pavement ended about fifteen miles from the beach and turned into the usual unreliable dirt road—sharp rocks, soft sand. It would have taken us over an hour and a half to cover those fifteen miles. Turned about and made a return trip to Playa Requison to walk to the little island that lies just offshore there, but the tide was higher than usual and covered the sand spit that provides access to the island. Another fail. Found a little trail to walk above the beach then drove the few miles back to Santispac so Brenda could visit her little chihauha Lucy that she missed and that probably missed her. But the restaurant was closed and the dog and rightful owner nowhere around. We learned later that Ramon and Lucy were in Mulege while we were in Santispac looking for them. Three fails, in one day.

After a couple days in town we relocated to a cheaper, more rustic campground a little outside of Mulege, Campo Huerta Don Chano. Nice hiking here–to the seafront a mile down the road, to a remote beach over a ridge, and I took two long hikes in the arroyo behind the camp, climbing a 300 foot ridge to cross over to a different riverbed. Local legend says that two pirates are buried back in the arroyo and supposedly there is a rock with a pirate face painted on it back in the pirate days. I find it hard to believe that anyone would bother to bury a couple of pirates more than a mile from the waterfront, but the locals seem to believe it. In another example of the Mulegean embrace of the unlikely, the Mulege museum exhibits a plain aluminum sphere about four feet in diameter. The guide says it is a satellite that fell into a local farmer’s field one day in the 1980s. I don’t know what the object is but a satellite I doubt; it wouldn’t have survived reentry for one thing. But I suppose it could have fallen from a plane, a part of some military surveillance gear or something. I started to read Garcia Marquez’s A Hundred Years of Solitude to get acquainted with the literary notion of “magical realism” that is used to describe a lot of Latin American work, his in particular. I like the idea of the style more than actually reading it. Dream sequences in novels turn me off—fiction is such a “cheat” to begin with, the author having the authority to create a world from scratch, that asking me to buy into a dream sequence on top asks too much,   and this book of Marquez’s reads like an extended dream. There is a sweetness to it, and a feeling evocative of Mexico, but I turned away about a third through.

Our Canadian friends and their Canandian friends showed up in Mulege, surprisingly. Mark and Val just passing through, Geoff and Wilma staying a night in Don Chano. But the latter couple headed south to catch the ferry to mainland Mexico from La Paz and M&V were making a forced march back to Ontario to see to their dog Ozzie that had taken seriously ill. (In fact, they left Mulege on the 27^th and arrived back in Port Severn on March 5; that’s what Mark calls “firewalling it.”) Hang in there Ozzie.

There was a fiesta at Don Chano’s. A resident gringo sprung for a band and a pig roast to celebrate some milestone birthday and invited the whole camp. Carlos built a five cinder block- high roasting pit about five feet long and three feet wide, and parged it with clay he fetched from back in the hills. Then he and his brother shaved down the rough triangles of old growth wood growing on the lower few feet of the date palms around the camp, enough to fill the fire pit halfway up. They layed on some thick mesquite wood, fired it up, put the 180 pound cerdo on a roasting tray and put some sheet metal covering over, later taking a lot of the hot coals from inside and putting them on top of the metal. Total elapsed time from digging the footer for the fire pit to serving pig to a hundred people, 32 hours (eight hours cooking time). The band was a standard electric pop combo, alternating Mexican songs with American oldies that had a Mexican connection (La Bamba, some Buddy Holly numbers, Wooly Bully) or American songs that they could Mex up. (The only American band that I have heard played in many places throughout Baja is Credence. Baja appears to have a thing for CCR.)

We left Mulege with a little sadness after five days. We had enjoyed the town so much that we felt that maybe the best was behind us. We learned over the next few days there was no need to worry about that.

Pictures in and around Mulege

[Bouganvillea in bloom below the Mulege prison.]

[the canyon behind Don Chano camp is a mishmash of rock types. These above were found within inches of one another and represent eight different forms. The hills are punctuated with different types of gypsum, which was once mined here. A spear-type, a sheet form, and a red-tinged gyspsum below.]

San Ignacio

The mission at San Ignacio was built in 1749 to the same design and by the same hands as the mission at San Javier that we visited. The exterior of Ignacio is more interesting, and the wood carvings on the doors suggest some indigenous motifs, Mayan or Aztec. In front of the church is the town square, about the size of a basketball court, surrounded and shaded by giant Spanish Laurel trees, their trunks painted white about six feet up. Small shops selling crafts, food, or notions surround the square on three sides. It is a peaceful, quaint town that welcomes the gringos that gather to take the whale-watching tours that originate from here but really doesn’t care if they don’t come. The tour buses drive forty miles from the town to the Pacific and put everyone on pangas to go out and touch the gray whales.

We took a spot in a small, no-service campground on the outskirts of town. Our site was on the edge of a beautiful spring-fed lagoon about fifty yards across. On the other side was a date palm forest and, a little beyond, a five-story bluff of volcanic rock. Our end of the lagoon was home to a white duck, a couple dozen green-footed red-eyed coots, one pelican, some egrets and herons, and a small assortment of other waterfowl. They cruised the calm green water, diving, grooming, courting, and, in the case of the coots, occasionally fighting. The pelican cruised at about twenty feet, looking powerful; when he spotted prey he dangled his legs down, spread his wings and looked altogether goofy. If he caught something, which he always did, he put his beak up straight and gulped it down his gullet, looking now inelegant. Then he would cruise a little bit looking graceful as a swan, and become airborne with one or two strokes and look mighty again. Powerful, goofy, inelegant, graceful—repeat. Across the lagoon a horse, belled with a small iron bell, clanged around in the palm forest nosing up dates.

 

Hilda Suarez that managed or owned the campo let us borrow her canoe for a few hours, after some mutual pantomiming. We paddled (with the one long, thin, wooden boat oar provided) to the head of the lagoon, disembarking there to explore. We found the head of a small irrigation canal, made of cemented stone, that runs over a mile to the town from a fresh water spring. The Jesuits helped the townspeople build this acequia in the early 1700s, before they built the church. The acequia  terminates in a pool in town behind a restaurant where we dined one evening. From this large stone pool, about five feet deep, the water is diverted to two different agricultural fields on the outskirts of town. What a small marvel, to be so old and still so useful.

 

As evening came on I began to get uncomfortable that we were the only ones in the camp. We had always been in places where others were camping. I was getting ready to deploy my security regime, consisting of a piece of wire about the gauge of a good quality paperclip stuck in a hole in the inside of the door handle which would prevent someone from opening it. Actually it would only momentarily discourage someone from opening the door; a persistent turning of the door handle from the outside would easily dislodge or bend the wire. But three other vehicles entered camp just before darkness and calm was restored to what was one of the most tranquil and Edenic camps we had enjoyed. We stayed three nights. One night, a Saturday night, a large group of locals came to party in the camp. They played loud traditional Mexican music on a sound system. For hours the night was filled with the sound of children laughing and shouting. Their voices echoed off the bluff across the lagoon. At about nine the children must have been all sent off to bed as it was only young adult voices for the next hour and a half. They all laughed and carried on, and at one point everyone sang along to some bittersweet ballad about lost love or homesickness. We fell asleep listening to them. The next morning Hilda came to pick up all the trash and there was one green Dos Equis beer bottle floating upright in the middle of the lagoon.

Adios San Ignacio.

Bahia Asuncion

We were heading to Guerrera Negra (“Black Warrior” – don’t ask me), a town we had stayed in one night before and which we did not particularly like. Brenda searched the Baja guides and found a diversion for us, a ninety minute detour to the Pacific coast to a little town called Bahia Asuncion.

The road, straight as an arrow, went through some salt flats and a huge ranch called San Ramon. Spring had come to the interior of Baja since we were last in this region seven weeks ago. The road was lined with intense expanses of wild flowers—small purple, orange, yellow and red blooms amid the cactus.

The road climbed steadily as we approached the sea. The vistas back toward the center of the peninsula and the mountains were vast and unpeopled. As we descended to Asuncion a dense fog was pouring from the Pacific over the tops and down the sides of the mountains behind the town and the large offshore island at the entrance to the Bay. It was striking, and we later learned that the fog had rolled in only once before like that in anyone’s memory, many years before. We found the campground that was said to be in town, but it looked derelict and abandoned. This is not an uncommon occurrence; our guidebook is five years old and the Overlander website had no comments about this camp later than six months before. Businesses rise and fold quickly. I went into the adjacent hotel to make inquiries. The hotel was a nondescript two story concrete affair, twelve rooms on two floors. I waited outside the open door of the tiny office while the manager registered a guest, a process which entailed an extended discussion about agricultural policy, inquiries into the well-being of the individual members of the extended families of both parties, and analyses of various social and political issues around the globe. When my term came the discussion was brief. “Is this the campground Serena?” “Si, el campo de Juan y Sherri.” “Are you Juan?” “No.” He then drew me a map to the home of Juan and Sherri, on the bluff above the town. On the way there the fog tried to rise up over the bluff from the Pacific, trailing along the road we were on. Brenda spotted whales spouting in the Bay below and we watched for a while. I walked over to the house and was told by a resident caretaker that the derelict campground by the hotel was indeed the only campo in town. I told her the water wasn’t running there (I had tested it) and they said it was a town-wide problem, that the water came from Vizcaino seventy miles away and was unreliable. So we went back to the open, scroungy lot behind the hotel and set up camp. We saw whales close to shore and watched as they drew even closer to the shore. People started coming from the town to line the shore because, as we soon learned, it was, like the fog, remarkable for the whales to come in so close. They were breaching and thrashing a quarter mile offshore a half mile down the beach. Calving, someone suggested. It was the right time of year for the whales to birth, but it had never been known to happen in Asuncion Bay. Plumes of water were being ejected from numerous whales, near shore and in the distance. A sea lion popped out of the water right in front of us on the beach. The sun was going down. Another camper pulled into the lot before nightfall and we helped them get settled.

Walked the beach the next day and arranged to go out with our fellow campers for Sunday dinner. A short walk away was Bladdy’s, a restaurant under a palapa attached to a waterman’s house. There was a family event going on there and they apologized that they couldn’t serve us. They recommended a place down the street, Mary’s Loncheria, which was closed. Some guys on the streetcorner suggested Bladdy’s. I told them there was a “fiesta de familia” going on there and they nodded sagely and suggested Mary’s Loncheria which was six feet away. “Cerrado” I reported. They walked down to verify, nodded sagely, then told us, I think, to cross the street, go onto the beach, walk up the beach, and there would be a place. And there was–a part of a person’s house like an enclosed porch with a frond roof;  four tables, no signs and no other customers. The two women, sisters I guessed, happily started turning the place into a restaurant, calling up their niece or granddaughter to come over and help. The short menu listed five entrée options (shrimp, lobster, fish, beef, chicken) and they were out of three of them. I had fish fried to within an inch of its life, Brenda had a delicious fish soup Veracruz, our new friends had grilled fish. Salsa and chips, beans and rice, vegetables and avacodo, salads, French fries, four beers, a bottle of Lambrusco–$7.50 per person. While we were eating I saw some whales, maybe a half mile out, thrashing the water. Our campmate Greg grew up in Vancouver BC on the shore and knew from marine life. “Those are orcas,” he said and immediately one nosed straight up out of the water, white and black. Even I could tell they were not whales. The sisters were glad we stopped by. We were glad we stopped by.

Guerrera Negra

The wind was fierce driving back from Asuncion. Crossing the salt flats the wind had whipped the salt ponds into surfactant that blew across the highway like snowballs. We drove three hours to GN, arriving about six hours ago. We went into town to try and find some cat litter. We had run out in Asuncion and I went into town and bought some laying mash, i.e. chicken food. It makes a passable kitty litter. The lady at the checkout gave me a funny look. Maybe she thought I had a chicken in my camper. Or maybe she thought that I thought it was breakfast food. Here at Mario’s RV park in GN I just finished a generous helping of fresh local lobster, I’m sorry to have to tell you, and two margarhitas, before writing and posting this entry. Remember, kids, don’t drink and blog.