The following is a three part report of a trip with my wife, Mary Ann, Suzanne, a friend, and me.
February is alleged to be the best month for whale watching at Scammons and San Ignacio lagoons and we were off on an expedition. Mary Ann, Suzanne (GeoRock) and I piled into POT (Poor Old Trooper) and headed south to spend the first night at Cielito Lindo. By the time we arrived it was way past happy hour but we bellied up to the bar anyway and greeted old friends and introduced Suzanne to the locals. We ate dinner and crashed early, wanting to get an early start to San Ignacio the next morning. We checked in with Ricardo at Rice and Beans the next afternoon, asked him to make radio contact with the whale watching folks for Monday and then toured the town, the old Plaza and the mission and later had dinner at the hotel. On Sunday we headed south to revisit the villages of Santa Rosalia, and Mulege and drop off the pavement at Santispac on the northern fringes of Bahia Conception. On Monday we were off to see the whales.
The drive from San Ignacio to the lagoon is about thirty-five miles. The road is graded, wide and crosshatched with heavy washboard. It's so heavy you almost can't get on top of the washboard by applying speed. It took us an hour. I'd allow two, but there was no appointed departure time for our boat out of Antonio's at La Fridera. We checked in with Rubi, one spunky young lady at the small group of buildings and boats. She showed us around and Mary Ann asked if we could have a meal on return from our expedition.
"Certainly," she responds. "What would you like, shrimp or scallops?" Mary Ann looks at me. I shrug my shoulders.
"Lets go for the scallops." She tells Rubi.
"And what about your friend?" Rubi asks.
"Well," I said, "she's a vegetariana."
"A what?" Rubi asks, stupefied.
"She likes seaweed."
"I see." Rubi responds sagely. "Would you enjoy our vegetarian plate?" she asks Suzanne.
Shortly, we were ushered into a panga and our guide took us twenty minutes west, almost to the mouth of Laguna San Ignacio and the whales. Let the games begin.
Everywhere we looked whale cows and pups were floating gently on the surface, pups curling across moms back and rolling underneath in the calm waters of the lagoon. We watched in fascination as the pairs frolicked off the sides of our boat, in length only a small percentage of their lengths. They never came closer than perhaps 15or 20 yards from us. Our guide told us that there were not many whales at the moment. He explained that the bulls were still in the lagoon. He pointed to a ferocious activity at a distance and told us that was a bull trying to mate. He went on to explain that the cows breed in one year one and bear young the next. So assumedly half the females are breeding and the other half are bearing young every year.
"Once the males leave, usually in mid March, the females nurse their young until they are strong enough to make the run back to the Bering Sea." Our guide tells us in Spanish. "Things calm down after the males are gone, and the mothers are left to grow their young." I translate this for Mary Ann and Suzanne. They chuckle and look knowingly at each other. But I know who's really in charge.
Soon a whale is nearby and sticking her head straight out of the water. Her body is entirely vertical with the waters surface. What's she doing, I ask the guide.
"Spyhopping." He responds.
I repeat the word, confused. Yes, he says, spyhopping. It's obviously an English word and concept. I guess it is the cow's way of gaining maximum altitude to ensure that the surrounding water is safe for her pup. What an exciting concept and it carries me through a moment of warmth of mother and child and then there are more males nearby and the waster is rougher as they pass through. Then another female spyhops and we're back to just cows and pups and everyone is enjoying each others presence. There is no conflict between protective whale mother and humans. Last year Mary Ann traveled here with Debra and Miguelito and the cows actually herded the pups up to the boat and encouraged the humans to touch their babies. Mary Ann has shown me pictures of this. What a wonderful moment frozen in time.
Behind us is a great roar and we turn to see a male above the surface, falling massively back into the sea with a giant splash that sends water in all directions for hundreds of feet. Around us, whale tails, wider than our panga, are rising gently, delicately above the surface and falling silently back into the depths. It is an awesome time. An exhilarating experience.
After two hours the radio our guide is carrying springs to life and he subsequently asks if we are ready for our meal. We turn and head back to Antonio's rancho. Our adventure is over. But only to face another facet of the day.
We climb out of the panga and enter the simple restaurant. Mary Ann and I share a plate of tasty scallops mojo de ajo. Suzanne is presented with a plate of mixed things not meat. It's quite tasty she tells us.
"MMMMmmm." We respond, loving our seafood and garlic.
"How's everything?" Rubi asks.
"Better than sea turtle." I offer. Suzanne is squeamish. Mary Ann cringes.
Rubi launches into a very informative tutorial about her position in the scattered village here. She is trained in conservation and protection of endangered species here in Laguna San Ignacio. Her husband and brother-in-law also work to educate the locals on the concepts of preservation and protection of those elements of our environment that are at risk. How cool, I'm thinking, that this far into the outback the word is getting out. These three have integrated into the villagers and carried forward a mission to inform and introduce change into family traditions that have carried on for perhaps centuries, to help local families understand how select habits can damage their futures, can have a negative influence. How far we have progressed, I reflect, awestruck. It's an easy deal to sell a city dweller on not eating some food they never thought about anyway. But to convince a family that has made a living by capturing for generations some animal that has become endangered that it would serve the world better if they gave up their pursuit? That's a difficult challenge.
Rubi sparkles in her conversation, telling us the impact and cooperative influences she and her kind have had on the locals, how most folks now recognize the need to protect the environment and the endangered. She excitedly cites incident after incident where the rural community is working toward a common concurred objective. Mary Ann, Suzanne and I are touched with the moment. On the drive back to San Ignacio Rubi and her world dominate our conversation, rattled somewhat by the nasty washboard surface.
In our room we wash and prepare for dinner. Suzanne tells us how she's missing Pete and knows how much he would love this day and our experiences. We dine in the hotel restaurant and later sit, the three of us, in our room, talking late into the night. Rubi and her impact on a remote world, well hidden from modern day hype is once again our focus. Tomorrow we head north and then east, across the peninsula for the even more remote beaches of San Francisquito.
Two or three simple lean-to's, a land-bourn camper laying on the beach like a turtleshell and a couple of rough trucks standing guard along the sandy bluffs of the blustery gulf. Sun-darkened men worn down from a day battling with a rocking boat, nets and surf, working to bring in the catch at this remote outpost, diving into the depths for mussels, scallops and squid. The fish camp at San Refael.
Five miles south at four in the afternoon of a gentle spring day we were driving north, out of San Francisquito and bound for Bahia de Los Angeles, passing through one of the more remote parts of the Baja California peninsula.
I was driving the lonely dirt track. We were admiring the vast fields of green, strewn with the yellows and purples of tiny delicate wildflowers just beginning to pop up across the desert floor after the recent rains of springtime.
After the bad washboard of the El Arco road we were pleased to be back on the smoother surfaces of the wayward and less traveled track here in the outback. I had decided not to air down because I had neglected to pack my compressor. We were hitting the 40 MPH mark when the first tire blew. By the time I stopped it was in complete tatters. We changed to the spare and continued. Within the next 10 minutes we had, simultaneously and contemporaneously, two additional flats. Three blowouts a thousand miles from nowhere.
We stopped to evaluate the problem. The two back tires were airless, the shredded spare useless. Both front tires were in good shape. Looking at the map we were a few miles south of San Rafael, a tiny point on a page of the Baja Almanac, a periodically occupied fish camp.
I wasn't certain what to do, but it seemed reasonable to crawl slowly into the camp and see what resources she offered. It was that or hike back to San Francisquito, many miles distant and with little to offer in the llantera department. So we drove north, limping and slow, the sand of the road cushioning my worn rims.
By the time we reached San Rafael it was dusk. A wind was howling out of the west, blowing sand and dust across the bluff on which the huts were positioned. Several men were wrapping up the efforts of a demanding day at sea. We pulled into the center of camp and shut off the engine, climbed out of the truck. Curious men approached to greet us. I explained our predicament and they went to work.
There was some initial head-shaking concern that my problem could not be solved with the meager equipment available at San Rafael before the Mexican mentality of Just Do It sputtered and caught the moment. Makeshift tools appeared; a rear tire was removed and de-rimmed. An inner tube was located and cut into shards to form a plug. Glue was produced and applied and the rubber thrust into the eye of the hole in the first tire. A small pump inflated the tire and tested the patch.
The second rim was removed and a similar patch effected. There was no pneumatic pump or changer, no gauges or electrically driven equipment, no automated support. All the efforts of the several men were accomplished on the sand and in the dark of a wind driven night. Seals were tested and found faulty, patches were reapplied and re-tested, tires were once again removed from rims until each repair was perfected.
In the midst of this grand labor I was shuffling through the camp, assisting with whatever I could. I came across a 5-litre box of blush in the back of the Trooper which I opened and positioned on a nearby table, filled plastic cups and passed them around to the normally beer-swilling men who tentatively accepted my offering. But we were filled with great humor and mirth by this time and joking about all sorts of silly stuff and tapping each other on shoulders and making jestures and generally goofing off while completing the job at hand, namely patching my tires.
It was a wonderful time with friends we had just made. They all lived in Bahia de Los Angeles. I was surprised we hadn't met them previously. They came to San Rafael for 5-day sprints to catch fish and fill a van and then drive back to the Bahia where they would pack their catch onto a larger truck steaming north toward the markets of abundance, where they were sold at the best prices to a demanding public.
The wind continued. The sun had now completely set behind the hills to the west and a chill settled over the beach. One of the men directed Mary Ann and Suzanne into the beached camper, turned on a dim light sponsored by a small solar cell and retaining automobile battery. "Musica romantica?" he suggests with a sly wink, playing an old audio tape of warm Mexican music through aging sunbeaten speakers.
As the evening wound down it became clear that my third tire had passed the inspections of the men, was blessed and remounted on my right rear hub. This left me with three tires, total. There was no patching the fourth; the damage was just too great. We were still stranded.
Seeing the situation emerge, one of the men, Julio, came forward, offered to let me use a tire and rim off his truck to get to Bahia de Los Angeles, where I could leave it with Sammy Diaz Jr., a mechanic and the tire man at the bay. Julio would retrieve his tire a few days later, when he arrived at the bay by boat.
Before I could refuse Julio's spare was mounted on my left rear hub. We were now ambulatory, albeit without a spare. We joked and shook warm hands on a chilly, windy night in the heart of Baja. I asked how much I owed them for their efforts, for their limited supplies that had been expended in the repair of my tires. There were jokes about leaving Suzanne behind in lieu of other forms of recompense.
"That's up to you, amigo. Talk to Pancho." they said.
I pulled a second box of vino from the back of the truck, bagged some bucks from my bolsa and pressed them into the hands of our hosts, hoping that it was a respectful act. By this point we were all truly all fast friends.
I suspect they were a little late in their fishing business the next day. By the time our truck pulled out of camp none of us were feeling much pain.
Mary Ann and Suzanne and I drove on into the night. We had no spare tire and thus I drove slowly over the lava roadbed the remaining three hours to Bahia de Los Angeles. We laughed and looked loving back at the men that had so selflessly come to our assistance and offered unending support in our need. We pulled into Camp Gecko late in the evening and unloaded into one of the unoccupied rooms there. We had arrived in Bahia de Los Angeles secure and safe, if a little wired and tipsy, thanks to the good and strong men of a small and sometimes occupied fish camp named San Rafael.
The next morning we drove into the village where I bought two used tires from Sammy Jr. Then we carted Julio's tire over to the house where his family lived, adjacent to Carolinas museum. I deposited it there with a woman I assumed to be Julio's mother, along with what I hoped to be an adequate propina. Not that a reward was necessary. Human kindness was the glue that pulled us through such a trying moment.
We awoke with the sun slanting through the rippled panes of glass and weathered thatch at camp Gecko. We hung on the edges of our previous night's threat. The men of San Rafael would become, I knew, one of those rare moments we carry into forever as cherished. Suzanne made coffee, Mary Ann dressed and the three of us formed the day. We checked in with Doc and Beach Bob. At Bob's we met George and Doug, both locals.
We drove to Las Hamacas for lunch and filled out a lazy day with Suzanne's first visit to the turtle sanctuary and Carolinas Museum, bought a new Baja book or two and just hung out at camp. The day was warm for late February, mid-'70's with a breeze varying across the day from many directions. There were two younger couples camping adjacent to us. We swapped life experiences. Both were on extended tours, one couple from New England, the other from Canada. They were in a place in life I had been, would never see again and I was happy for them and so looking forward to my own next personal adventures.
As Suzanne is a geologist, we decided to tour the region for areas of geologic interest. Mary Ann and I had visited a copper mine in the early '70's, north of La Gringa. It had been inoperable for half a century but still held history and there we headed that Thursday morning, just so few days ago, I ponder as I write tonight, listening to Josh Groban on the same CD player we used at Gecko.
There is little of monetary value in the old mine but it was an excuse to pass by the beaches north of the village where we had lived across the years and reflect. The road to the mine was as eroded as I remembered from a quarter-century before. It carries us through elevated inland valleys tinted with the green-blue varnish of early spring. The ocotillo are just blushing with red-tipped flowers a few days after the recent rains that left small and scattered reflecting ponds across the desert. We spotted tiny trails, padpaths across the hillsides where coyotes, foxes had covered ground between unknown objectives.
The mine I was familiar with was not a primary objective, I've learned. It was secondary to the main attraction, El Toro, an hour's hike from the end of the road. But we made do with our secondary site, picking small pieces of a blue-colored string from the tailings and wondering about the lives of those that had lived here. From the ridge we had climbed, I spotted two locations where the miners had no doubt spent their sleeping hours, one a simple dugout from a northfacing hillside; the other a more formal structure, aged by the decades, of stones stacked tall and struggling to hold the chill winds of winter at bay.
We bagged a few colored stones and wound back the byways to Gecko. That night Bob came by and we had a visit. The girls broke out their tequila. Bob and I persisted in our cervezas. The trip was winding down to the final day at Bahia.
We rose midmorning after visiting late the night before and decided to visit an outcropping of garnet not far from the village. We stopped for lunch at Las Hamacas again and were in the midst of consuming our favorite breaded fish (Suzanne was, of course, still chewing on her tasty kelp) when a fellow walked in and introduced himself.
"I'm Max" he announced. We all shook hands.
"We're going to poke around in the desert for an old garnet outcropping." We said. "Want to join us?"
"You bet."
And so we connected with Max and his wife, Polly, rock hounds par excellance. We drove to the location we had received directions to and parked and scoured the hills for the mid day and afternoon, finding the proper conditions to produce the semi-precious stones but never the stones themselves. We'd have to save the rockhunting experiences for the next trip. We bid Max and Poly adieu and headed back to camp.
It was our last night and a northbound trek was tearing at me, all the forces of nature bore against my heart and our wish only to remain in Baja or move further south to the adventures we knew were looming there, the loves and warmth's of the deserted lands.
Our touring friends joined us for a last hurrah. Suzanne and Mary Ann opened their favorite bottles of tequila. They raised bottles to open mouths and I snapped a 4-megapixle recording of their bad behavior. These two almost non-drinkers had made the driving on this extended trip seem so quick to pass, so small in comparison to the distances covered. I stood back for just a moment, in writing this, late on Wednesday evening, a few days after the trip. The three of us were new to each other. We had no specific expectations. We had grown to know a few basics of each other before our trip. But we knew we could fit and get along.
The shining moment of this trip was dead set in the center: the men of San Rafael. My vision of life was forever changed by these five wonderful guys. If we hadn't been in need we never would have experienced them. Without their giving nature Mary Ann, Suzanne and I would have been at risk. Maybe it was a Yin and a Yang moment. Maybe it was fate. But for several hours I was privileged to see into the core of what forms us as humans, our souls were bared on that small beach in Baja where we simply had time to share and carry forward. All this while changing tires.