It a short drive there from the village, depending on your vehicle and habits. For Wild Bill in a rush it'd be just a moment. It's maybe 10 miles of dirt, depending on the status of the tides and the shallow lagoon that lives there only at the highest tides. It usually takes me about 20 minutes from town, but I drive half-fast as some and faster than others.

The road swings south out of the village and then back toward the shore where it passes a number of tourist homes, some fine and expensive, some just simple cottages, thrown along a beach of dark sand. Then it winds away from the beach, behind an old mine at Cerro los Angelitos, after which it drops back to the sea and continues several miles, south along the water. We lived here in the '70's, my new wife and I, in a simple hut of cactus and thorns and thatch, all from local plants, disrupted by the construction of the transpeninsular highway.

The road continues edging south and east along the side of the bay. Eventually there is a fork in the road. If you take the western branch, you'll visit Las Flores and then some. But for this moment, take the eastern leg.

There are several routes through the desert there, working toward Rincon. Most of these pass close to the sad and lonely cattle ranch in the middle of nowhere with sagging ocotillo fences and bent walls of the aging sunstruck wood, grayed and worn by the ages and winds. A few scrawny cattle munch parched brush here.

All the roads work through a usually drying desert lagoon, scrubbrush, jackrabbits and cactus, the carcass of a steer alongside the road, dried and leathery, picked by coyotes. There are two dusty and unused dirt airstrips there too. As you near the south end of the bay and turn more toward the east, the Diaz cabin and a number of other vacation houses fall into view. You're in a lowland between the Sierra Las Animas to the east and the Sierra de Libertad to the west. If it's summer you'll be hot; there is little movement of stifling air.

The road parallels the beach, although somewhat inland, to avoid the lagoon. Eventually you approach the beach and can stop the engine and walk the golden sands of Rincon. There are a number of houses here but they're mostly vacant, summer homes, protected by the few in attendance. At this extreme southern end of the bay the water is quiet. There is likely a good-sized sailboat anchored offshore in the quiet water. The breakers are exhausted by the time they fight against the logistics of this place and are spent, worn down to tiny crests that silently lap the shore. Rays work the shallows. Gulls and pelicans face into the light breeze to avoid bad hair days. A split-tailed Magnificant Frigatbird idles high in the sky, looking for a meal in the dispassionate death-on-the-surface of the water.

In a place like this, you could possibly pull your life back together, you could re-fashion the dreams you had as a child, a younger person, a freshout, and divorcee, a cancer-ridden short-term personality. At Rincon, on a steamy summer afternoon, with just you, alone, you might re-focus on the thoughts and aspirations of a previous time in your life where you were less cluttered with the daily marches to and from the social drums.

It's a place for the mind to wander and wonder.

It's twelve hours from the teeming streets of downtown Los Angeles