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Maps in baja norte in baja sur Mulege
courtesy of
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We forget it is twice the length of Florida; twelve hundred miles of road through an intense history that changed the world, forever. I never read Steinbeck. I wasn’t one for the classics - they had been read so many times before. And in travel, I was hoping for that new book that was yet undiscovered. In New York, I would tend to not know where I was going, rather than jet for Times Square. And here, in Baja, I was seeking a book still cracking at the seam with newness. A place known only by those who walked its streets. And newness in account is approachable in Baja, this unwanted place tamed neither by Mexico or America, industry or tourism. I didn’t require adventure, and had little desire for the true unknown or original. What I wanted was discovery. To know something I had not known before, nor had I expected to find. Because in travel, discovery isn’t cutting the mescal and peering into its fibrous tissues, it is learning about oneself, about recovering memory and about carving out future. And that is why, this time, neither Vance nor I had any interest in stopping in Tijuana. We stopped in Ensenada, a dirty rat-hole, to stock up on vegetables and beer. We took to the eastern side of the city; the side where the cruise-ships are thoroughly out-of-view, where we paid a man to watch the truck while we picked tomatoes, serranos, white onions and avocados. “It says here that they cannot sell beer,” Vance said. “We’ll get it somewhere else,” I said. But there would be no beer, not further inland, nor down the road through red-dirt vineyards, and along valleys of cactus farmers and under quiet, green and pleasant valleys. The tamales, sold in a bare shack out of a plastic bag, by three men, were tasty, but ‘Cerveza?’, ‘No Cerveza!’ “But Why?” “Presidente!”
We continued on, south along the Pacific, and when the plastic bags and beer bottles gave way to a spare barrel cactus or desert scrub, and gentle dunes cast into the sea, I felt oddly at home. Somewhere north of the quiet town of El Rosario, in the middle of nowhere, we turned off the road and onto a beaten gravel path to a rugged sandstone coastline; mountains, hills and cliffs and the Pacific’s pounding surf. Under our feet was a giant hole in the earth. The sea had cut an underground cave and settled here: a stretch of beach underneath the earth. Four seals were in the water. One had no head. Sharks. Somehow, this hole led to the sea, and we wanted to find out, but, “paddling in there is too dangerous. Lets put that out of our minds right now.”
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When we arrived in San
Quentin, we also found that ‘Presidente’ was not letting the beer out of
the fridge, so we continued on, south, and past a two-legged dog, dragging
its way along the pavement, sweating in the sun and looking up every so
often to see if anything would change. Blinding light cursed this unwanted
place; the outskirts of San Quentin. The houses were like toys, unadorned
and block-like. Few bothered to plant vegetables or tend their lot. And
the rest left their garbage free to fly in the wind; catching on the
creosote and affixing the land with the sickness of a place that had given
up. 
