Peter Jensen

Henry and I had talked Collin into going with us, offering vague promises of good eating and restful days aboard the boat.

My blue work shirt is half unbuttoned, crumpled open under the driver's shoulder strap. Maps, notebooks, and the ubiquitous AAA guidebook to Baja California stratify atop the dash, drifting into the narrow space between vinyl and windshield. At times the reflection from paper combines with a certain angle of sunlight to cast an ephemeral hologram between my eyes and the narrow, humpbacked, two-lane road. I want to cram them all under a seat or into a glove box, but there is no room.

The long road to La Paz. Most San Diegans I know who’ve been traveling Baja since the road opened in 1973 have tales of someone who was killed or seriously injured.

The cab of a basic Ford pickup has no storage other than the middle of the seat. The seat, however, is fully occupied by two other adults, my 22-year-old son and my 74-year-old father-in-law. Air temperature outside is about 70 degrees, cool for this area of Baja between the palm-choked river upswell of San Ignacio and the parched mountains of Santa Rosalia, where the desert meets the Sea of Cortez beneath several exuberant teats called Volcan las Tres Virgenes.

Bags of nuts for sale in Loreto. Even Loreto, touted as recently as the early 1980s as “the next Cabo,” has one of the emptiest — and largest — hotels on the entire peninsula.

For the last ten miles I’ve fiddled with the heater control knob after it fell off when we hit a pothole. It was on a straight stretch near the last ejido marker, one of the hundred or so ranches that warrant a small sign along the 922 miles between Tijuana and La Paz. The hole caught me a little by surprise, and frankly, I’m still annoyed. Driving about 60 miles an hour, sometimes 65, is way too fast by most standards. It’s hard to tell, because Henry, my father- in-law, disconnected the odometer and speedometer back in San Diego. He doesn’t like instruments that measure things, especially time and distance. He also likes to maximize the warranty on a truck that he’s considered a lemon from the day he drove it off a lot in Texas. In truth, the engine has at least one rod that makes an odd ticking noise.

On the road to San Javier. We leave the wind-harried boat again and drive a narrow but very passable dirt road through the Sierra de la Giganta to San Javier.

The road, in some stretches, is more of a gravel berm capped with a one-inch frosting of asphalt. A driver learns to read the depth of a pothole by its shadow. These warning signs, scattered across the rough surface, come in clusters — toenail -clipping-shaped dark spots where the slanting winter sun stumbles near the lip of every fracture. This shallow black skin is all that stands between two factors that weaken or tear a road apart in weeks: torrential rain and a sun that arrives each spring with the ferocity of a war bird cluster-bombing the land with incendiaries. Sometimes you can weave your way clear at high speed;, but if a car or truck or one of the particularly fast sausage-shaped buses that ply Mex 1 every few hours is coming the other direction, you straighten your line, grip the wheel, and take your lumps.

San Evaristo. Two barefoot men shovel the crystals into what look to be 50-pound sacks. The larger, stronger one then lifts each sack onto a scale, evens up the weight with a partial shovelful, and sets it aside to be laced closed.

Like many travelers in Baja, I will never completely get used to two-lane traffic on a road no wider — including its so-called shoulders — than two passing tractor-trailer rigs. Even they would probably kiss mirrors. The slightest flinch or sleepy nod will send your car tumbling over an edge. Mistakes are fatal.

Children's parade, La Paz. Streams of schoolchildren march behind pickup trucks booming everything from disco to mariachi music.

Most San Diegans I know who’ve been traveling Baja since the road opened in 1973 have tales of someone who was killed or seriously injured, their last journey in the back of a Red Cross ambulance. They all share stories about “white cross” experiences. I wonder if any gringo families have erected a marker or shrine for their lost loved ones along the road’s edge. Though I greet the passing death -crosses with a shudder, thea Mexican sees them with the same sense of inevitability that Moctezuma awaited his astrologically forecast death at the hands of the Spaniards.

Seamus talks of meeting his wife in the vineyards of France when they worked as seasonal pickers, of walking across India, of driving through Mexico in a car that couldn't go much more than 30 miles an hour.

This is the problem. I have foreseen my death on this trip. I cannot accept it. It scares the hell out of me. It rides in the truck with us, roosting on the bumpers, pecking its way into the fragile cab. Having recently quit a career I held onto for 23 years, I left San Diego on a trip of celebration that seemed to change within hours to a doomed voyage where all I could hope to do would be to save my son Collin and his grandfather, Henry K. Our plan is to drive to La Paz, ready Henry’s sailboat, which has been there since 1992, and bring the boat about 150 nautical miles up to Puerto Escondido, a perfect little harbor not far from Loreto. It is the kind of trip I have made several times before, so I can’t identify this morbidity that grips me. But it is palpable — real as the crooked black nib of a vulture's silhouette hunched on a cardón's upraised green hand.

Coke stack, Santa Rosalía. I’m determined to hike the hillsides covered with rusting machinery from long-closed copper mines: a giant museum — or footprint — of early 20th-century technology.

I shove the knob back on its metal dashboard stem. As I return my right hand to the wheel, a brown Honda Civic, two grinning young Mexican men in front, sweeps around the curve, heading right at us on our side of the road. When a car is going too fast, it squats, then bounds, then squats again on its springs. This car is going much too fast, and I have just enough time to squeeze a bit to the right. Sprays of gravel ravel Gatling-gun our truck’s wheel wells. The Honda swerves just in time. When I glance in the left side mirror, I see the driver’s side wheels go airborne, regain the roadbed, straighten. Collin is visibly shaken. So am I. Henry, however, lets out a little Texas-style whoop (he was born near Dallas) and says, “Who-ee! Git back over there!”

I slow the car and venture a look his way. He’s smiling as if just saved from a long bout of boredom.

“Say, Pete," he says matter-of-factly, looking at me from behind gray-rimmed glasses that often slide down his nose, “the next time that happens, don’t go to the right. You almost dropped your wheels over. I’d rather have ’em clip us. Hell, they’ll bounce right off. Anyway, those big off-road truck tires I have on the rear wheels will keep us from spinning out. Man, they grip the road!”

I think he’s a maniac. As much as I love the man and as many times as we’ve traveled together, I think he’s a maniac. There was the time we were driving the Adriatic coast down to Dubrovnik. That curve near Split. I’d rather be under mortar fire than ever get in an Alfa Romeo with him again. Then there was the incident up in the Trinity Alps when he piloted a Cessna Centurion seemingly straight down onto a runway that looked as if it’d been carved out of the forest by a few marijuana harvesters with a chain saw and a weed whip.

He has clearly used up his allotted nine lives, some of them in dramatic fashion: a plane crash in the Sierra Nevada, where he and two sons took several days to walk out (“Fortunately, we ran into a guy whose fishing partner had died from a heart attack just the night before, so we borrowed the poor fellow’s sleeping bag,” Henry told me); and in 1949, when he was in the shipping business in the Orient, he was trying to sneak a company freighter out of Shanghai when it took a few rounds from a Chiang Kai-shek gunboat. (“Damn shells went right into a forward compartment. I didn’t know whether to stay up on deck or go down in the engine room and get a little metal around me.”)

Henry is about 5'10", stout, but not at all fat, and he walks with a peculiar toes-out waddle that you usually see on ballet dancers. His hip bothers him now and then, so he puts his hand on one knee whenever he goes up steps. His forehead is very high, burned brown from the sun, and the folds of his cheeks are usually bristled with a week’s growth of white beard. He is coordinated, smart, and very hard of hearing, so most of his talking is done in monologues.

When he was 53 he decided to become a lawyer in California after some real estate ventures went sour. He’d graduated with a law degree from the University of Texas before joining the Navy during World War II but had never practiced. I remember watching him walk around for about four months one summer in the early 1970s with a tape recorder and earphones, listening nonstop to law study tapes. He passed the bar that fall, first try. He said it wasn’t a big deal. “I type fast,” he’d say, in explanation of the advantage he had over the younger aspirants.

Within a year or two he’d pulled the family from the brink of financial ruin and over the next two decades secured an active semiretirement that included his fate-tempting toys: a small plane, sailboat, and a variety of pickup trucks on which he puts about 40,000 miles a year between his daughter’s and my house in San Diego, a home and some businesses in Dallas, and a home near San Francisco. His wife sometimes goes along but more often stays home and receives his daily calls and messages via ham radio relays.

I watch him as he drives, listen to him talk — mostly about what we’re going to do to the boat when we get to La Paz. There is no hint of concern or depression, and I marvel at his resilience. Henry, too, has his demons. Only a few months ago he lost a son to AIDS, a son who was his usual partner in these trips to the boat.

Baja was made for travelers like Henry. They organize expeditions down its length and into its hidden beaches, coves, and islands without much more fuss than going to the local shopping mall. You gather an ice chest, a few sleeping bags, a propane camping stove, some pots and pans, and about a hundred dollars’ worth of canned goods and frozen meat, and you’re off. If you read all the guidebooks and follow directions on being prepared, you sit in your driveway for three weeks trying to get a thousand pounds of gear into your truck.

Baja was not made for Collin. Henry and I had talked him into going with us, offering vague promises of good eating and restful days aboard the boat. We had tricked him with this line before, but his easygoing nature usually allows him to relent one more time. Collin had recently graduated from 14 years’ worth of special education classes in San Diego at the age of 21. He is severely learning disabled by a chromosomal aberration. During the first mitosis there was an unexplained break — a ringed fourth chromosome resulted, causing aphasia (difficulty in speech and cognition). Whereas his father and his younger brother are both almost 6'8" (he calls us giants), Collin is only 5'6". He is quiet, listens to music constantly, reads a great deal, and prefers not to stray very far from his favorite chair by a fireplace. A trip to Baja is a bit of a stray.

Before the incident near San Ignacio, we spent the night at San Quintin, after a midafternoon start out of San Diego. It is November, and the northern coast of Baja has very much the same temperature and weather pattern as San Diego. Henry has driven most of the way, pushing hard from Tijuana to Ensenada (Collin counting out the toll road money from a jelly jar of quarters that rattles annoyingly in the glove box), then down through the roadside olive stands of Maneadero, the vineyards and orchards of Santo Tomas and San Vicente. This is one of my favorite areas of Baja, especially the Rio Santo Tomas valley, because it reminds me of what San Diego’s Mission Valley must have looked like in the mid-1800s. A few stands of California sycamores are losing their leaves, and the chaparral has gone to a winter gray.

Each year seems to bring a little more prosperity and development south along the highway, and many fear that the rural nature of Santo Tomas, characterized especially by a few ruined adobe walls, will soon be lost. But mountains are a powerful Maginot Line against the endemic Baja rash of cinder blocks and mortar, and the lively building boom taking over the plain from Maneadero to Ensenada may take some time to come to Santo Tomas.

Henry’s driving has already increased my sense of dread. He swings down the road into Santo Tomas like a hawk peeling off a ridge, guns it cross the valley, and begins ascending the ridgeline with gusto. In addition, as I sit on the right side of the cab and riffle through some papers and journals, I find some notes from a previous trip written while crossing the border at dawn. They read like an alarming look at a Dante-esque world:

• Baja — stripped of its Alta California by border-slash of whipsaw fence that crosses a mottled desert thigh, bathed in white lights where the surge of shanty-towns froths against the back of a mesa throat and ravens attack the last scraps from a tacos de cabeza cart; Baja at dawn crossing south near the border arches of cracked concrete, a guard pointing one finger toward inspection purgatory, trucks loaded with salvaged lumber limping home, stumbling Goodyear-shod dromedary RVs down on their springs under Silk Road loads of gas, water, neoprene, surfboards, and sleeping tourists. A rising sun combs awakening streets, filling the bowls of vaguely nuclear bullrings, warming the backs of men climbing to the top of the steel fence to stare down at green Broncos.
• At the first tollbooth, yellow and black-striped fins harvest traffic in only one lane before releasing the chaff to spill down the coast of La Joya and Rosarito.
• Baja — your thousand-mile dangle helped seed the upper continent with explorers and priests before Jamestown, leaving behind a string of stone churches that are the Chartres cathedrals of a mountainous spine that touches the Dog Star in smooth, thornless union with a land so bleak, so beautiful it sleeps naked but for the scant clothes some violent moisture brings.

We switch drivers, and I take us into San Quintin in darkness. Night in Baja sees a world of seemingly limitless horizons shrink within the knitted scope of your headlamps. The next top-knotted boojum tree becomes a landmark, nature’s version of the microondas (microwave) towers that have been rooted into the top of a few dozen mountains and passes. A dune takes on the same scale as an island, and the sound of surf behind it may be a hundred yards away or half a mile.

I pull the truck into the puddled dirt before the barrel-shaped office of Cielito Lindo Motel. Light and cigarette smoke seep from its open door, along with the squalls of a baby. I step inside, where I find a bearded young American man, apparently the father of the baby, playing backgammon with a tanned, blonde, gravel-voiced gringa of about 55. He interrupts their game for a minute to accept a few bucks for a camping space. It doesn’t strike me as odd that he, and she — probably are the owners. Many Americans live in retirement along this northern coast or have married into Mexican families. There’s already a blurred seam between the two cultures in some coastal resort areas. Here in San Quintin, however, many of the factors causing unrest in Chiapas exist in the fields. Tens of thousands of migrant workers surge into camps here each summer, most of them from southern Mexico.

We’ll spend the night in a once-ambitious campground that has now fallen into ruins at the edge of dunes. In a few years it will be gone, covered by sand pushed ashore then blown inland from Bahia Santa Maria. Other forces mankind’s activity here as well. Cinder cones on the edge of a larger, more protected bay to our north have been active as recently as the last few thousand years, and Indian artifacts have been found beneath layers of ash. San Quintin was once the site of a small American and English colony of about 200 started by the Lower California Development Company in 1890. By 1896 the dream was abandoned because of unrelenting drought, and all that remains is a small graveyard on a hillock above the bay.

The moment spent inside, breathing the smoke and stale, warm air, and listening to the baby’s squalling, has made me profoundly lonely. Sometimes spending 30 seconds in someone else’s living situation has me imagining myself living their life for years. I am fascinated, respectful, and appalled at the same time. The confusion links back to traveling the West with my agronomist father, who would announce to everyone in the car that we were entering the next town — no matter how small — and to pay attention to all its sights. As we drove through he’d say things like, “I wonder what it would be like to live here?” and “Look at that gas station. Seems to be doing a good business.”

Sometimes he’d pull off the main drag just to tour a few residential streets, wondering aloud at the sagging front porches, a screen door left open, laundry blowing on a line. He considered the ordinary to have almost metaphysical power. The secret of life lay hidden in the way a waitress stuck her ballpoint pen through the strap of her wristwatch after taking your order. The day’s sermon could be found in every small town newspaper's recounting of Agnes Thompson’s victory at the church bridge tournament. Dad would be at home in Baja, where a Pemex sign can still be cause for celebration.

I make dinner, broiling a few steaks in a wire barbecue basket with a long handle. The contraption allows me to simply heap glowing coals on the ground and use a single rock as a fulcrum to keep the meat two inches above the heat. It’s about as close as you can get to just throwing raw steaks into a fire. We sit on the bumper of the truck, Collin bundled against the fog in a green parka, Henry and I wearing sweaters. I pitch a tent at the dunes’ edge, but Collin insists on spending the first night in the cab of the truck. It takes him a while to transition to camping, and he’s small enough to use the bench seat as a bed.

Despite his age and relatively normal physical abilities, I often treat Collin with a level of care more suited to an invalid. My protectiveness extends to sometimes reaching for his hand when we cross a street, zipping his jacket, opening a door, all of which he’s perfectly capable of doing himself. Tonight I tuck him into a quilted bag, arrange his pillow against the armrest on the passenger-side door, and wish him a good night. Henry is already in his bag in the tent when I crawl in. During the night I sense the air balancing between sea and shore as a night breeze dies and a thick layer of fog coats the tent with moisture.

In the morning I awake to the sound of Henry dropping the tailgate and rummaging for milk in the ice chest. He’ll have his traditional bowl of cereal and a single cold Danish, the kind you buy in the supermarket that's been flattened beneath cellophane on a flat sheet of white paper. I heat coffee water on the stove and wonder when Collin is going to be awakened by all the clatter. No motion from the cab.

Finally I go around the truck and gaze in through a slightly fogged window. His face is slack, immobile, mouth open. I knock on the window. No response. I knock again, louder. Still not the slightest movement.

In a moment I panic. Did he suffocate in the closed-up cab? How could he not hear me if? The keys are still in the ignition, where I left them, so I frantically search the sand for a rock to break a window, spot an old brick, and am just about to pick it up when I take one last look inside, my heart beating wildly.

Collin is smiling up at me.

When he opens the door, I yell, “What in hell are you doing, pretending to sleep! I thought you were dead.”

“Fooled you, didn’t I?” he says, with that mischievous look that he’s been giving me all his life as if to say, “Dad, you’re out of control, and only I can bring you back to reality.”

In the days before Mex 1, El Rosario was considered the gateway to the true Baja backcountry—a place of four-wheel-drive river crossings, difficult tracks along coastal cliffs, and tangles of desert paths that braided their way through the cholla cactus, doing their best to confuse you.

Neither Henry nor I traveled Baja before Mex 1, and we’re quick to admit in the company of seasoned Baja travelers that we’re neophytes. We don’t spend a lot of time far from the pavement, primarily because we’re usually trying to get to a boat and get on the water. Like many who’ve made the journey only in the ’80s and ’90s, we tend to romanticize the earlier days, painting a legacy of rugged adventure.

It was an arduous trip. But once, talking to Thomas Mahnken, a Del Mar resident who drove to La Paz many times in the 1950s and early ’60s, I made the mistake of saying that a four-wheel-drive Willys must have been a necessity.

“Baloney!” shouted Tom. “I’d pass every type of car on the way to La Paz. You think the Mexicans could afford or even find some special rig to make that trip? They’d just load up a passenger car or old pickup and go. If they came to a bad spot, they’d pile out and rebuild the road with rocks or brush to get past.

“Safe travel in most parts of Baja is a factor of how fast you want to go versus how fast you have to go,” he continued. “In those days if you went five miles an hour when you should have been going two on some stretch, you’d get in trouble. Now it’s 65 instead of 50.”

In El Rosario the road cuts inland along Rio del Rosario before climbing the boulder-heap mountains around Cataviña. Peppers, ribbons of red when seen from a distance, dry in the hillsides above this reasonably prosperous little town. The schoolchildren, as in almost all Baja communities, are immaculately dressed.

Before Mex 1, during rains, the bajada at El Rosario would stop traffic for hours, even a day or two, until the river dropped back to its peaceful meanderings. Now there’s a bridge. The river’s flood stage power is still evident in the fortress-like cliffs just upriver from the bridge, where the water has deeply undercut and carved sedimentary hillsides. From here on through Cataviña, the roadside along every tight curve will be sown with crosses, sometimes amid mounds of broken green glass soda bottles that must have cascaded from a careening soft drink truck. This stretch is particularly familiar to San Diegans who make the drive to Bahia de Los Angeles in a single day; the graffitied boulders of Cataviña means the turnoff to “L.A. Bay” is not far ahead, the first easy access to the Gulf of California since San Felipe far to the north.

Here are the first forests of cirio. In his recently published book, West Mexico from Sea to Sea (La Paz Publishing, Ramona, 1992), Charles Kulander summarizes the way this oddity has literally stopped travelers in their tracks from the earliest explorations:

• The most unique plant growing in this dry wonderland is the boojum, a weird plant usually described as an inverted twiggy carrot, first seen about eight miles south of Rosario.
• Growing to 50 feet, it is an unmistakable sight. Called the milapa by the Indians, it was christened the cirio (wax candle) by Father Fernando Consag in 1751; the cream-colored flowers made it look like the altar candles he carried with him. The Jesuit Clavijero listed it in his History of California under the chapter Noxious and Grotesque Plants. Two centuries later, in 1863, a botanist gave it its western name, Idria columnaris, awarding it its own genus (nearest relative is the ocotillo). When botanist Godfrey Sykes sighted his first Idria columnaris in 1922, his first words were “Ho, ho, a boojum, definitely a boojum,” inadvertently giving it the name most North Americans now call it (the boojum is a mythical creature in Lewis Carroll’s Hunting of the Snark).

We push hard, down into Guerrero Negro, with its predatory eagle monument (the rusting metal recently repainted) marking the line between Estado de Baja California and Estado de Baja California Sur. We’re now on Mountain Time, 444 miles south of Tijuana. We blow past San Ignacio without stopping, almost hit that brown Honda on a curve outside Santa Rosalia, then follow the coast southward. By dusk we’re looking over Bahia Concepcion. A horseshoe bend leads down into a cove called Santispac.

The campsites along Bahía Concepción are Baja’s new heaven or hell, depending on your viewpoint. If you’re driving from your farm in Indiana, recently retired, in a big Bluebird bus (the ultimate RV) or bubble-nosed Bounder (heir apparent to the Winnebago), Santispac looks mighty good. When we arrive, almost every space along the beach is taken up by huge RVs lined up like suckling pigs at Mother Gulf. Satellite dishes are tuned to the heavens. Generators thrum. The lights shine from upholstered interiors as cocktail hour winds down and dinner commences. Driving in on the broad, sandy flats behind the beach, it’s difficult for three mortals in a small pickup to catch a glimpse of this legendary bay by moonlight.

We pay a small entrance fee, too tired to look for anywhere else to camp, and manage to spot one palapa umbrella near the south end with about a car’s width of unoccupied beach beside it.

Many of Baja’s beaches are backed by mangroves, and the stagnant water breeds a lively collection of insects. Henry and I debate the merits of erecting the tent, despite an air temperature that has risen 20 degrees since the night before in San Quintin. I finally decide it’s easiest just to slip the screen door portion over our heads as we sleep in unzipped bags on the sand. Collin, of course, has elected to sleep in the car after discussing with us at great length the merits of the truck’s seat doubling as a bed, despite the difficulties caused by a few seat belts jabbing him in the back.

That night, reading John Steinbeck’s Log from the Sea of Cortez as various winged creatures fly around my flashlight and rasp their way into my flesh with their mouth parts, I come across the passage:

• There was another reason for anchoring outside; in the open Gulf where the breeze moves there are no bugs, while if one anchors in still water near the mangroves little visitors come and spend the night. There is one small, beetle-like black fly which crawls down into bed with you and has a liking for very tender places...his bite leaves a fiery itch; his collective soul is roasting in Hell, if we have any influence in the court of Heaven.
• It will be good to get aboard the boat in La Paz.

Marina de La Paz is at the southeastern edge of the city, near the Navy base, across the bay from the flats of El Mogote, the sand spit that protects the harbor. The city’s malecón is only a few hundred yards away; a sea wall and narrow beach function as promenade, park, exercise center, and restaurant row within blocks of the city’s busiest downtown area. Other sailboats ride at anchor not far from the beach.

We park the truck in the marina’s gravel lot. After some quick arrangements with Mary, the marina operator, to bring the sailboat’s slip fees up-to-date, we begin hauling gear to the Myken, a 36-foot fiberglass-hulled Islander. Henry bought the boat in 1989 in San Francisco, where it had spent its first decade sailing the bay and poking east into the delta region. It hadn’t made it into blue water past the Farallons. Now it was a veteran of a good run down the coast of California and Baja California, around Cabo, and into La Paz, where it had been berthed for about a year, at the ready for our short runs to Isla Espiritu Santo and Partida, the local islands north of the city.

My spirits are up. Collin turns to and helps make several trips. Timid and quiet, he often doesn’t do much work only because he gets left behind in everyone else’s rush to finish. On this trip I’ve vowed to slow down and let him participate, and together we roll cartload after cartload down the bouncing quay. Aboard, Henry and I reorganize the boat, rig the headsail, and line the Myken down to the fuel dock to fill her empty tank with diesel. That evening at sunset we fall into the berths on either side of the dining table, exhausted, each holding a can of Tecate beer.

“I tell ya, Pete,” he says. “It’s good to be back. I spend a week or two at home and I start to go crazy. There’s nothing to do but garden, and I think I’m past that. The thing about Mexico is the peace. Out there at the islands, anchored in a little bay protected from that north wind, you can just rock yourself to sleep.”

I look at him in the dim light coming from a plastic dome mounted on the mahogany plywood overhead.

“But don’t you miss the impact people have on you?” I ask. “The way they need you, ask you to do things, invent your day for you, whether you want them to or not? Frankly, I don’t know what I’m going to do without having 30 phone calls a day that expect an answer.”

He pulls his glasses off and scrubs his face with a palm. “Man, oh man, the day I didn’t have to go into an office ever again took a load off my shoulders. I got to a point practicing law where I didn’t give a shit, and it was getting dangerous.”

I ask what he means by dangerous.

“You screw up and you’re hit with a lawsuit you can’t get out of. If I could make a recommendation to any young lawyer, it would be never prepare someone’s will. You never know about a mistake until someone is dead, and then it’s too late to fix it. Anything else you do, as least you have a chance to catch your mistakes and correct them.

“People told me I was good, but I was never as technically qualified as I should have been. Hell, I didn’t look at a law book between 1941 and 1971. To come back into a field as a 50-something-year-old — it was too much. Say, what’s for dinner?”

Collin looks up from the magazine he’s reading, his owlish eyes mischievous, knowing I am tired, my back aching from ducking down the hatchway again and again, but also knowing I am the only decent cook among the three of us.

“Yeah, Dad. We want dinner. Din-din, din-din, we want din-din.”

Henry takes up the badinage.

Astonished, I look at both of them, this self-made millionaire in his mid-70s, former captain-of-industry type, and his fragile grandson, acting like two birds in a nest looking for a worm.

Baja can do that to you. It makes you stupid. And when it does, when it begins to strip you of the phones and appointments, the overpriced restaurants and the watch on your wrist, you start to get smart again. It sounds like Henry and Collin are way ahead of me. I fire up the stainless steel Sputnik-like barbecue bolted to the stern rail and make a nice little meal.

The next day Collin and I jog into town to watch the annual parade celebrating the anniversary of the revolution. For more than two hours, streams of schoolchildren march behind pickup trucks booming everything from disco to mariachi music. The trucks are jammed with stereo equipment and big public-address speakers, all powered by snarling gas generators in the same truck. Every athletic team or club in the region is represented.

Soccer and volleyballs are above the street like some sort of giant bingo machine gone berserk. Children with stage-paint moustaches, sombreros, and bandoliers stuffed with cardboard rifle cartridges crisscrossed over their chests stand on flatbed trucks above signs like “Revolución Zapatista.” One group of teenagers proudly wears their school T-shirts:

“Preparatoria Mahatma Gandhi.”

It is an extraordinary reaffirmation of the Mexican love of family and children. An entire city salutes its youth and, instead of standing them on the curbs, asks them to be at the very center of its celebration, its sense of revolution, its hopes for the future. We stand, awed by it all, on park benches in front of the cathedral, then retreat to the mercado to buy tortillas when the final vanguard of young boys on bicycles signals the end of the show.

La Paz now has more than 200,000 inhabitants but feels much smaller — even on a parade day. The people here are used to foreigners, dating back to the coke ships from Europe that stopped here in the late 1800s and early 1900s before continuing up the gulf to the copper mines at Santa Rosalia. But as I walk the streets, I again garner the stares that I’m used to and, I confess, even enjoy wherever I go in Mexico. There was an instance as a teenager when I went into a dive shop in Guaymas to buy a face mask to replace one I’d clumsily dropped on a rock after a day of spearfishing. The owner was stunned to see someone 6’8” duck under his doorway, and after a friendly greeting he disappeared for about ten minutes, leaving me standing in the middle of the sparse store, trying to read some local dive literature in Spanish. He returned with almost a dozen friends and relatives, most of them children, and they stood as close to me as they could to appreciate my height.

Today in La Paz, as if I’m trolling for attention, I once again attract a small band of boys who follow me quietly for a block or two. Their attention is polite, almost formal. They disappear when we again reach the malecón and turn toward the boat. I am not at all self-conscious; if anything, my height creates a ripple that I enjoy watching spread through a crowd.

When we return to the marina, Henry emerges from below deck with grease up to his elbows. Three things are wrong: the engine won’t start, the bilge pump is malfunctioning (and to make matters worse, a cup or two of oil has leaked into the bilge, creating a noxious soup), and the outboard motor for the dinghy has a frozen throttle handle. The idea of sailing for the nearest island or an anchorage up the coast today looks like it’s out of the question. Once again I’m reminded that planning is often meaningless in Baja where, if equipment doesn’t slow you up, paperwork with the port will. And when that’s taken care of, the winds will freshen from the north in a matter of hours until they decide to howl steadily, keeping you sailing back and forth on your anchor for three days.

I pull the outboard off the dinghy's transom, set it on its side on the dock, and prepare for a little surgery on the frozen throttle. Collin sits across from me, watching, and I notice something about myself. I don’t care if fixing this little engine takes an hour or a day. If we leave tomorrow or the following day, it will all be the same. Baja time is taking hold.

The channel out of La Paz is easily followed today but one can imagine what one of Cortés’s pilots, Fortún Jiménez, encountered when he tried to negotiate his way into the bay past the extensive sandbars near the mouth. It was 1533, and Jiménez had been charged with finding a strait through North America, “if it exists.” The little ship, constructed by Cortés’s men at Zacatula, near what is now Acapulco, found the bay peaceful that day. Jiménez thought he’d found an island, and it’s quite likely that he gave California its name. David J. Weber, in The Spanish Frontier in North America (Yale University Press, 1992), takes up the story:

• Perhaps it was Jiménez that gave California its name, one that soon extended to both upper and lower California, and then to the entire West Coast as far north as Alaska when Spanish mariners reached it in the late eighteenth century.
• Records do not reveal who named California, or when, but it is clear that by the early 1540s Spanish mariners referred to the land Jiménez had discovered as California. The name derived from a tale of chivalry popular in the early sixteenth century, Las Sergas de Esplandián, by Garcia Ordórtez de Montalvo, which told of an island called California, located “at the right hand of the Indies.” There, the story went, Amazon-like women entertained men only once a year in order to engage in an intimate activity designed to perpetuate the race. Nearly a decade before Jiménez discovered Baja California, Cortes had heard accounts of an island rich in pearls and gold and, as he put it, “inhabited only by women without any men.” Jiménez, then, may have known what to look for.

We “fix” the engine by simply removing the air filter and squirting some WD-40 into the maw while Henry turns over the starter: hence the origin of the word cranky, at least when it applies to recalcitrant diesels.s The electric motor bilge pump is a toasted mess. Several wires had shorted and apparently caused some other damage, but I repair a frozen manual pump mounted in a storage locker up by the helm, and we have a backup submersible pump that can be lowered beneath the floorboards in a pinch. Even Henry doesn’t like to set sail without a few backup systems in place, especially when it comes to taking on water.

Neither of us knows much about the true nature of engines or how to actually fix one, but like most boat owners, Henry and I aren’t afraid to tinker until something happens — hopefully something that isn’t permanently damaging to us or the motor.

We leave the bay under power, cruise past Pichilingue, where it’s said that Cortés came ashore and founded the first European settlement in California in 1535. Kulander creates a wonderful image of the armor-clad Cortés striding along this beach ceremoniously striking the bushes with his sword, claiming land (that would become a ferry terminal in modern times) in the name of King Charles of Spain.

Setting the sails for Espiritu Santo, our reach takes us slightly west toward the middle of the channel, but we’ll go with the wind while we’ve got it. There always seems to be a reliable breeze near La Paz, but it dies soon once you’re away from land. A few other sailboats are out and about, but the gulf seems strangely quiet, mirroring the lack of activity we also noticed coming down the highway. It appears that business is suffering badly throughout Baja, perhaps because many tourists are flying directly to the cape area and bypassing all of the peninsula's midriff. Even Loreto, touted as recently as the early 1980s as “the next Cabo,” has one of the emptiest — and largest — hotels on the entire peninsula. A championship golf course rarely seems to see a foursome, and the ambitious port development at Puerto Escondido has only recently been renewed with some desultory work on a condominium.

I turn over the helm to Collin and watch him hold to a distant mark. His concentration is ferocious when he takes on a task like this, and I wonder how this can be channeled into some sort of job now that he’s done with school. Seeing him watch the compass on its pillar before the heel reminds me of one of the mysteries of his problems with short-term memory. Over the years we discovered that if you ask him to do several actions, such as “Please pick up your dishes, rinse them, and put them in the dishwasher,” he can never get past action one or two. “I forgot,” he will say. When asked “Do you remember the rest?” he’ll answer, “What else? I forgot.” Yet within the same vault of neurons is the ability to remember detail so vivid, so exact, that it is almost photographic — but only if this detail was part of an experience that happened to Collin directly and only if it happened some time ago.

Once, when he was 18, I mentioned an electric motorboat we had rented for an hour or two when Collin was 2 years old. The boat was on San Francisco’s Stowe Lake in Golden Gate Park, and we hadn’t returned since. I would be in Golden Gate Park the coming weekend, and I mentioned to Collin that I might return to the lake for old times’ sake, not expecting him to recall anything.

“I remember the boat. Dad,” he said. “I had such a good time.” I nodded in agreement, not wanting to challenge him. He then proceeded to describe the color of the boat, its dashboard, the fact that it had a broken seat, and several other incredible details about that afternoon when he was only two that were accurate, even exact.

Thinking of it now, watching him steer, I move over next to him in on the rear seat and put my arm around his shoulder. I begin to cry, silently, not sure why, and although he doesn’t notice, he doesn't move away either.

Ten feet beneath the surface, in water so pellucid that suspended sand looks like stars catching and reflecting the filtered sunlight, I float close to about a dozen brown, canine torpedoes. Myken drifts in the lee of Los Islotes, a sea lion rookery well-known as a great dive spot. Here snoreklers come face-to-face with these darting acrobats. I’ve assumed a submissive stance, if that’s what you can call it — butt down, arms and legs relaxed — while a large bull comes over for a closer look.

Too close. I gently fin backward a few feet, rise to the surface for a breath, and dive again. I appear to be outside his territorial boundary, and he loses interest. When I move closer again, into shallower waters amid a few boulders that rise from the bottom, he cruises out, immense compared to his odalisque mates and pups, eyes alert in gnomic head.

Even in late November the water here is warm enough that I can leave my wetsuit in the locker, and I stroke and dive in just a swimsuit along this rock outcropping for almost an hour. When we arrived, a panga was dropping four college students ashore, the Mexican boatman passing jugs of water, daypacks, and other paraphernalia to their outstretched hands. By the time I pull myself back up the stern ladder of the Myken, the student scientists are ensconced on a rocky ledge above the rookery, settled in to observe the sea lions throughout the day. They take notes, speak softly into tape recorders, and occasionally take pictures. Collin and Henry sit quietly in the shade of the cockpits dodger, content to watch the watchers.

Out by the cliffs of an up-thrust rock formation, the kind of volcanic priapism that bursts from the water near almost every Baja island, point, or other fold in the coastline, another panga rocks from side to side as two fishermen pull fish after fish over the gunwales.

They angle with hand-lines, and as fast as they can bait the hook, toss it over the side, run the weighted line over a taped index finger, and jig a few times, they’re pulling in what appear to be small snappers.

I sit on the forward hatch in the sun to dry off, watching this concentration of activity that runs the gamut from education to commerce to recreation, and feel that I’m finally starting to relax enough to enjoy myself. The water took away much of the tension and uncertainty left from the drive. For a moment I feel as invulnerable as a teenager, free of responsibility for children or career, the peninsula and its gulf no different than the changing, sometimes violated wilderness inside me. The land — perhaps a mountain like one of the Virgins or even this rocky rookery — is the only avatar I can hope for right now. If I have a prayer, it is to remember this moment as one I lived well enough to never forget.

In San Evaristo we anchor off a curved beach backed by low desert, a few houses, and a ridge to the north that hides another bay and a small salt farm. Once again I have to cajole Collin into action, telling him that a hike will do us good — give us a needed stretch after a few days in the boat.

We run the heavy fiberglass dinghy into the marble-size rocks of the beach and pull together on the painter to drag the craft up far enough so it won’t drift off. I have a few bottles of water, my cameras, and a couple of apples. They will be enough for a few hours out in heat that seems intense rather than vaguely pleasant, now that we’re off the water. A few children from the houses come down to greet us, chattering happily. I can’t follow their patter well at all and am reduced to the most basic greetings once again, the frustration of every gringo who knows that the only way to really converse in this language is to live here for a few years or more.

Walking inland, my sea legs have me rolling. I almost bound up the hill, while Collin trudges gloomily. Too often I forget that what I find interesting may not intrigue him at all. Salt ponds fall in that category. But when we crest the ridge and descend to the other side, where another village has the propitious shade of a grove of palm trees, he agrees to walk out to the distant beach over a levee in the ponds.

We approach a cone of salt, pure white against blue water. Two barefoot men shovel the crystals into what look to be 50-pound sacks. The larger, stronger one then lifts each sack onto a scale, evens up the weight with a partial shovelful, and sets it aside to be laced closed. I taste a pinch. It is extraordinarily strong. Or is it that I haven’t had a drink of water since we left the boat?

Near the point, a cemetery’s crosses stitch the lava rocks between a cliff and surf. An abandoned panga, its hull a battered mat of fiberglass, sits nearby. We rest there, searching for colored stones and shells at our feet. I find a bleached bone that appears to be cetacean, perhaps from a fin — it looks like a finger joint from a giant hand. Collin finds a dimpled quartz stone, its mortero-like indentation the size of a thumb pressed into a cooling mineral dough. Both are small enough to slip into my pocket. I already see them on the white shelf above my desk at home — talismans, cleaned and sculpted by a long trip down the gulf.

The wind has been blowing for two days. High pressure over the southwestern United States means strong northerly winds that drain down the gulf before blowing themselves out somewhere past the cape. Myken pulls at her mooring in the inner harbor of Puerto Escondido, bit in her mouth, shrouds strummed to a high whine, stern lurching back and forth just enough to keep us thinking she might let loose. Going adrift is almost impossible, thanks to the fact that we’re tied to several engine blocks on the bottom of the bay, but the thought crosses my mind often enough to check our position against that of a few other nearby boats in the harbor.

Henry left this morning. He hooked up with a fellow we met on the morning radio net who was looking for a little company on his drive to La Paz. He’ll bring the truck back tonight. Meanwhile, I go ashore in the dinghy to meet a married, middle-aged couple from Northern California. They’re interested in hiking with me up a nearby canyon in the Sierra de la Giganta, a backdrop to Puerto Escondido and Loreto so steep and green that it looks like Bali. Even the cacti seem to grow in naturally terraced gardens.

I meet the two of them at the dock, and it is obvious that he isn’t interested in hiking at all. He just came along to see that his wife wasn’t hiking with someone he didn’t approve of. She and I set off at a fast pace through the empty lots and streets of what is still being planned (financially backed by a French company) as an ambitious waterfront development. Once again, just as they have been the two times I’ve been anchored here in the last year, a small group of laborers is working to clear weeds. I try not to let my ambitious, productivity-driven North American attitude take over as I walk by. It’s impossible — although I don’t show it. It shames me to observe things in Mexico that are outside my knowledge, my experience, and pass judgment on how the job can be done “better.” But in a moment I see how to clear the weeds on this area (about the size of four football fields) in only a day or two: “Let’s see, simply take a skiploader, run it backwards to scrape...”

Stop! I say to myself. This tumescence of “do it better, do it faster” is the very thing I try to leave in San Diego when I travel to Baja. Nancy, my hiking partner, agrees when I tell her what I’m thinking.

“Sure,” she says. “My husband and I are the same way, but we’re getting over it. When we left our acreage near Willets and sailed to the gulf, we couldn’t understand the pace. Sometimes the simplest jobs or transactions will be glacial down here. He’s an engineer, so it’s his nature to come up with Rube Goldberg solutions, and he wants to do it for every fishing camp we go by.”

I remembered a schoolyard at San Evaristo where precious cinder blocks and had been used on a largely ceremonial gateway (no gate) and as pillars at the corners of a nonexistent fence (nothing really to keep in or out). Yet many of the houses in town were desperately in need of those very blocks.

“It’s just a gringo disease,” Nancy says, laughing. “There’s no vaccine except distance. When you’ve been away from home far enough and long enough, we all figure out that it isn’t that important anymore whether something gets done in a day or a week — who knows? In a year maybe. It’s not about laziness. There are other priorities here, too, besides work.”

We hike as far up a spectacular canyon as we can go. Nancy, who was a postal worker walking a neighborhood route for more than ten years, is hard to keep up with. She walks as fast as many people jog. At one point we climb a rock face that we probably should have roped up on. Small pools and waterfalls are our reward. I don’t think about any danger until I’m finished. Maybe I’m shedding a little caution.

Somewhere on the peninsula of Baja California there is an itinerant Irish leatherworker named Seamus still driving from town to town in a banana-slug-yellow 1980 Toyota sedan with a mattress tied to the roof. In the hatchback trunk is a single green ice chest topped with a knife-scarred cutting board. Greasy boxes are crammed to either side. They hold sacks of rice, beans, flour, onions, some canned goods, and a bunch of rapidly blackening bananas. Tortillas, their edges curling in the dry air, struggle to escape from gray wrapping paper.

On the day that I meet Seamus, Henry has returned from La Paz with the truck and I am fueling four jerry cans from the sailboat with diesel in Loreto. Seamus is dressed like a refugee from Telegraph Avenue, dreadlocks held back by a leather headband, leather encircling his wrists. Over his shoulder is a handmade leather bag bulging with tools, scraps, and a three-inch-diameter mahogany stick wrapped with several dozen braided leather bracelets that look quite reptilian. His wife and two children, aged two and four, are in the car with him. They are eerily silent and peaceful and are probably doing something with their hands: mending a garment; playing with a scrap of leather or a rock found on a beach.

“Meanin’ not to bother you, sir,” he says in a heavy brogue. “But I am wonderin’ if you might be interested in me leatherwork?”

I shake my head no, well-conditioned by the thousand requests for handouts I’ve fielded — and ignored — on the streets of downtown San Diego. Automatic reaction. Then I lift my eyes again from the spout and its gurgling rush of fuel when I hear Henry say, “I think you can help me. Meet me at the Puerto Escondido dinghy dock later in the morning, and bring all your tools. You can patch something on the boat for me.”

We bring Seamus aboard the Myken. He spends the afternoon placing a new leather patch onto the dodger where a line from the boom will occasionally rub across the canvas. It is a perfect job, expertly stitched. He talks of meeting his wife in the vineyards of France when they worked as seasonal pickers, of walking across India, of driving through Mexico in a car that couldn't go much more than 30 miles an hour. We pay him about $30 and all the groceries we can carry back to his car, including a sack of California pearl rice that has him ecstatic. I make him wear a life jacket on the trip back to shore, for he admits he’s not a good swimmer and the wind waves are nasty even here in the harbor.

When he goes back to his car, I wonder if we just met the last true wanderer or the first of many new ones.

On our last day before beginning the drive home, we leave the wind-harried boat again and drive a narrow but very passable dirt road through the Sierra de la Giganta to the remote town of San Javier. The brief trip changes my perspective on Baja. The backcountry is so pristine, so untouched by tourism that I decide, in the future, to abandon the romance of sailboats and their distant view of the shore, and its people and begin the discovery of turning off Mex 1 for Baja’s quieter tracks.

One grand symbol of this wilderness and its secrets is the San Javier cathedral, a hand-carved stone edifice set in a remote valley. It may be the finest in a line of missions up and down Baja California. Since 1758 this ambitious structure, which would do many European communities proud, has stood unchallenged by earthquake or the infrequent rains. The only disruption today is a diesel generator at one end of town that sends an unholy racket bouncing off the nearby cliffs. I sign the visitors’ register beneath the name of a couple from Friday Harbor, Washington. The town, to be sure, isn’t such a secret after all.

After marveling at the stonework, especially the curvilinear forms that come to Moorish fillips above the side doors, Collin and I follow a small irrigation canal down the valley behind the church. We find an ancient cistern, then another, then a narrow ditch continuing past orchards and small vegetable gardens. At one point we pass a pepper tree with a twisted, four-foot-diameter trunk. We feel like Jesuits, lost in time, our robes warm and rough, a broad hat hiding our eyes in shade.

It feels important for me to stop in Santa Rosalía, the mining town on the Gulf founded by French entrepreneurs. Many times I’ve driven past, pausing once to examine a metal church designed by Eiffel (but also reported to have been made in Belgium). On another trip, rain turned the streets to rivers as we drove the waterfront area, awash up to our hubcaps. There never was an opportune time to stop.

I’m determined to hike the hillsides covered with rusting machinery from long-closed copper mines: a giant museum — or footprint — of early 20th-century technology that I hope will tell me something about the improbable contrasts of Baja; the laborers of San Quintin, the quarter-million-dollar motorhomes of Bahia Concepción, the lizard-skin Americans, the silence of a one-room mountain church. Thousands once worked here producing over 9,435 tons of copper in 1898 for the Compagnie du Boleo, bankrolled primarily by the Paris Rothschilds. (For a detailed history of Santa Rosalía, read Harold Huycke Jr.’s “To Santa Rosalía: Further and Back” (The Mariners Museum, Newport News, Virginia, 1970).

Henry and Collin are exhausted and decide to spend an afternoon napping in the first real bed they’ve seen in two weeks. I leave them in the motel just south of town, their room overlooking the ocean, the swimming pool empty as December begins.

Coke, brought in by square-riggers from Germany, fueled the giant smelters. More than 2000 tons of it were needed for every ton of copper smelted, and the fires spewing from tall brick stacks could be seen far down the gulf at night. Square-riggers crowded the water just offshore, sometimes breaking free in storms to lose great patches of their hulls against the shore. One wreck was even turned into a warehouse, slightly aslant, her vast bulk immovable. During World War I eight German square-riggers stayed for the duration of the conflict, their crews caught in a hellish purgatory.

No man had ever lived on this barren stretch of coast until the discovery of boleo deposits — rounded chunks of oxides and copper carbonates. The French, perhaps overcompensating, laid out a perfectly ordered city. Wood for housing and mining offices was shipped down from California and Oregon.

Most of the houses were painted with green and white horizontal stripes, an almost comical attempt to enliven the bleak town. Smoke and dust from the smelters settled in the long valley; it must have been an unbearable place to live.

I park the truck near an old hotel that once served visiting mining officials and seamen and begin the steep walk up to the city’s tallest remaining smelter stack. My legs, normally used to hiking, find the going tough. Slipping in the heaps of slag and pulverized earth, I end up climbing the top of an above-ground concrete tunnel until I stand at the base of the stack. A set of mine shafts and adits (the horizontal, crosscut tunnels that bore straight into a hillside) distract me, and I explore the inside of one large ore deposit that was hollowed out right behind the hill’s face. Inside, the stope is a giant room without a single brace. It is cool, silent, and strangely comforting.

I return to the giant brick smokestack, where a crumbled opening on one side reveals a pool of crepuscular light. I step into the mouth of the furnace to stand on the burnished, melted ore. Above me, the sky is the size of a quarter, hemmed in by the muzzle of the stack.

When I emerge, the city at my feet looks fragile, crumbling, fully a century old. The only constant stalwarts are the sea, the mountains, and the ripped earth. I think of Henry, the dead son he won’t talk about, the grandson he’s become close to for the first time in years; they will be a good match. I decide to walk back on the very edge of the tall wall, no fear, only the wind to push me off balance — but not enough to worry about. I’m finally ready for the drive home.