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in baja norte in baja sur
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We lit the stove and wrapped it in tin against the pounding wind. We cooked sun-dried jalapeno eggs, and quesadillas, and then walked the shore with flashlights, under cliff and around boulders the size of cars. The wind was constant, keeping me up at night, rattling the pots and the tent. But I settled for Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire. After all, wind, and the biting cold of the Pacific, this is travel. By its very definition, travel is inconvenient, travel is messy and filled with unexpected blights, and is particularly antithetical to the Ensenada cruise line commercials, although a cruise line’s passenger fall into the same sort of messes as us; lost luggage and seasickness, hours of boredom, anything.
But senselessness got the better of us, and we hauled Sonora down the cliffs and into the water; Vance hadn’t paddled in ten years, and in this particularly mean surf, we let the kayak free in the water and he jumped for it, paddling for the cave. “Out to sea first,” I said. I wanted to see how he fared. “You’re paddling like a canoer” I yelled. “Get away from the shore, you’re gonna get impaled!” He hadn’t heard a thing, of course, the water was loud and crashing. In a few minutes, he had gotten the hang of it, and headed for the narrow slot-canyon water. Because of the velocity change through the channel, I wasn’t quite sure what would happen to Vance when he passed through the dark, and when he did and I could no longer see him, I ran up to the top of the hole, thinking of Vance-splat against the rocks. But when I reached the hole, he was walking on the underground beach, “Hey…seal skull!” When I met him back on the ocean-side, and he said, “So how do I get back on shore?” I said, “I don’t know yet.” The tide was pulsating from two-feet below to seven-feet below; and the scaly route to shore was filled with mussels. “I’m gonna line up right here,” he said, and preparing to jump ashore, the kayak flipped, the water sank to seven feet below the rim, and Vance was thrown against the sharp rocks. It was precisely these rough shores that landed Baja on the map. Any connoisseur of chili peppers will tell you about the varieties around the world - Thai chilies (tasty), scotch bonnets from Jamaica (milder than habaneros) - any Mexican market will boast a good deal of striated blankets and colorful colors. But it was the ‘Manila Galleon’ - Spanish tradelines - four hundred years ago, and the cunning English pirates, whose battles of gold, spice and theft made Ensenada, and further south, vital (if not Pirate infested) supply-line stopovers from the Philippines to Acapulco and to Barcelona. Baja (it was known simply as California back then) was the middleman to the Latin world’s sense of spice (Asia); to Italy’s tomatoes (South America), to Mayan dyes (Philippines) and inks (Indonesia), to Spain’s empire, and tea for the English (China). When the wave-line rose again, Vance climbed ashore, ecstatic, bleeding, shouting. That was Vance, one hundred percent lunatic, and that enthusiasm stayed with us for days, despite the fact this was the last time daytime temperatures would drop below one hundred degrees.
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