San Diego Reader

Not long after the New Year, my friend and neighbor here in Zacatitos, Marilyn Z, sent me an email saying that, at 81 years of age, she had lost her battle with cancer and had passed on to the other side.

Marilyn went on to say that when she left her beloved home in Baja to see an oncologist in New York, he told her that although things looked bad, she still had two treatment options: chemo or radiation.

“Which would you recommend for your wife?” Marilyn asked.

“Well, my wife and I are divorced, I pay her huge sums in alimony, and I hate her dearly. So for her I would recommend both.”

“Then I don’t want either,” Marilyn said.

“Good choice,” the doctor replied.

It was the first time I had ever received an email from the other side, the first time I had ever heard such a thing was possible, but it didn’t surprise me at all that it had come from Marilyn. She was always capable of surprises. I once watched her march bravely into surf higher than her head (she was only five feet tall), just for the pleasure of feeling the ocean toss her around. When people asked Marilyn why she painted her house in Zacatitos an outrageous purple and lime-green, she told them, “Because you can’t do that in the U.S.!” For her, Baja was a chance to get a little more fun out of life at a time when most people her age were resigned to the slow daily death of TV and trips to Walmart. Her courage was rewarded with a youthful, irreverent humor and a house full of friends to enjoy it with.

Besides sharing her cache of cold beer with me, when I had no means to keep a beer cold, and allowing me to beat her at Scrabble on peaceful Sunday afternoons, Marilyn taught me some of the fundamentals of surviving in Baja: where to buy drinking water safe enough for a gringo’s weak stomach; where to find good emergency medical care; where to get sopa de mariscos at Mexican — not tourist — prices; and where to get the best deal on Pacifico by the case. She told me her philosophy for living in Mexico was the same as living anywhere else: “Don’t hurt anybody, and try to help somebody if you can.”

And, she said, “Be sure to pay your property tax in January.”

So before the end of the month, I took my angelic friend’s advice and drove the 10 kilometers of dusty road into San José del Cabo to pay my annual tax.

At 500 pesos, or less than $50 per year, the property tax in Baja California Sur is so cheap that even unrepentant surfers like me, who squandered their youth on the beaches of San Diego, can afford to retire here with some hope of squandering their old age in a similar way. You might think of this place as another chance at the Leucadia of the ’70s, the place and decade my wife and I met. It’s beautiful, it’s peaceful, and it’s still fairly cheap.

And don’t tell anybody, but the surf here is better than Leucadia ever was. Most of San Diego County doesn’t get a south swell, which is why the surf is so poor in the summer. This place faces south, and in the winter, when the north swells arrive, you can drive over to the Pacific side in an hour. This place lacks the crowds of California, the violence and racial tension of Hawaii, and you can get here in just about any vehicle with a thousand miles of abuse left in it. If the Mexicans deported us and shut down the border, we would have to hire coyotes to smuggle us back in.

It’s not uncommon to see California’s newly arrived surf refugees, like dust-bowl Okies, camped along Baja’s beaches in broke-down, rusted-out vans, with an old gray-muzzled dog and a patched-up longboard. To ex-wives and the IRS, they might as well be dead. Their past may have been ugly, but for the first time in a long time they have a future.

As surfers who watched the California coastline ravaged in our lifetimes, we might prefer that people back in the U.S. go right on thinking Mexico is too dangerous for them to live here. Some surfers here will resent my even talking about how good conditions are, for fear the crowds will become as intolerable as they are in California. And maybe they’re right. If Americans prefer to keep their misconceptions about Mexico, maybe it’s better things stay that way. But the truth is, except for those bad border towns, most of Baja is a more tranquil place than the typical American city. The gun violence taken for granted in the U.S. as a constitutional right simply doesn’t exist here in Los Cabos.

A friend of mine who lives in Northern California, but spends half the year in Baja, was asked by somebody at home, “Isn’t it dangerous to go to Mexico?” And my friend said, “Yes, it is. You have to pass right through L.A.”

When my wife and I read a gruesome story about a man from Carlsbad who murdered his parents and fled, possibly to Baja, we were shocked. “That guy better be careful. Doesn’t he know it’s dangerous down here?”

Of course, our family and friends in the States think my wife and I are crazy for moving here. They watch way too much news on TV and think drug lords in black Escalades sweep through the streets every day, shooting and beheading people. When a friend heard we were moving to Mexico, he asked, “What in the hell inspired that? Insanity?”

“We just felt like somebody needed to move in the other direction,” I said.

This misconception of Mexico being more dangerous than the U.S. hurts Mexico, which depends on the tourist business for about one-third of its revenue. Every time Lou Dobbs, or any of the other angry and embittered commentators on TV news, opens his scowling mouth, a few more Mexicans lose their jobs. This is a very real problem here. The American media’s neurotic insistence on portraying Mexico as a more dangerous place than the United States serves no purpose other than to prop up Americans’ damaged self-confidence. It hurts hardworking people.

The good thing is, Mexicans always find a way to survive. If the hotel where you worked as a tour guide lays you off after the flu panic, you wash cars in the supermarket parking lot. If you lose your job as a waiter after the American banking crisis, you sell ice cream on the street. If your back gives out after 40 years of laying block, you bag groceries for tips. All Mexicans work.

I took the beach road into San José and stopped along a stretch of white sand and turquoise-colored water to drink a Pacifico in honor of Marilyn Z. Though she wasn’t a fisherman, she was the first to tell me about a beautiful and bizarre-looking beast called a roosterfish that favors this coast. It has a huge silvery dorsal fin like an Aztecan headdress and an attitude like a guard dog. It attacks a feathered lure with ferocity totally inappropriate for such a tranquil place, and it fights to the death. A surfer friend of mine who likes to troll for fish from his paddleboard, trailing a lure from a line strapped to his ankle, was nearly pulled from his board and dragged underwater by a roosterfish before the 40-pound test line snapped.

A person could live in the American suburbs, quiet as a casket, and never know such a remarkable creature existed.

At La Choya, I stopped for a minute to watch a crew of Mexican block-layers at work. Marilyn told me once, “Stop at any job site in Mexico and breathe the air. It smells of fabric softener.” And she’s right. The smell is like a gift of love from the workers’ wives, who would never let their men, no matter how humble, go to work in dirty clothes.

Laying block is one of the hardest, most tedious jobs imaginable. But all of Mexico is built of block, and somebody has to do the work. People everywhere who work in crews enjoy a camaraderie that makes the difficult labor more tolerable, and it warms my heart to see how these workers laugh and joke with each other to pass the time. At one point in my life, I worked as hard as they do. I don’t miss that work because I know what it does to your body, and I have the surgery scars to prove it, but I do miss the camaraderie.

All over Mexico you can see older men who have spent a lifetime doing block work. Many of them drag one foot — what neurosurgeons call “foot drop” — as a result of permanent damage to the sciatic nerve. In the U.S., a worker lucky enough to have medical insurance would have surgery to relieve the pain and pressure on the nerve, which results from a herniated spinal disc. In Mexico, the workers often wait until the pain goes away on its own, a sign the sensory nerve has died. But it’s also a sign the motor nerve has died as well, and the muscle will soon atrophy.

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