Uno
The border we broached at a desolate crossing called Tecate, like the beer, where we fumbled for pesos to fill the cooler. Later, the pavement ended in San Felipe, farther south, most of a day’s twisting drive south from la frontera. A dusty town of mean looks and men hawking barely feathered parrots at the intersections.

We could hear the ocean, but couldn’t find it, and gave up in the sands somewhere south of town for sleep and drink. After a night of watery beers and listening to boats landing in the dark without lights, we lay in the dark desert south of San Felipe. In the night, there was the high revving of boat engines coasting to a stop, then followed by silence, then the bouncing rumble of a four by bour spinning over the dunes. We tried to gauge the distance. We were lights out already when we heard them, and they were running black, too.

We laughed with nervous bravado, and drank more beer, but we pushed on again a full day the next morning, because of the obvious interpretations of what the sounds held. On through what seemed, maybe, the ominous town of Puertocitos, a shanty town where we tried to visit the hot springs.

The beating sun had given way to clouds, which piled into bruised thunderhead anvils, cumulus clusters spilling over the mountians to the west. The Sea of Cortez to our east was choppy and shimmering, the crowns of the steep black islands at sea wreathed in smoke. The fishing villages, but also the whitey retirement encampments, abandoned and spray painted, all along this stretch of the coast. Here, forty miles from gasoline, shit was tagged and half burned and sledge hammered, and not a soul to be found.

When we reached the tiny shanty villa of Puertocitos, there was a gate across the road, just smack dab across the dirt “highway,” and a little girl, maybe twelve years, walked out from a shanty and held up a “stop” palm with absolute authority, looking absent-mindedly over her shoulder. An older man, heavy lidded and stumbling, leaned an elbow on the hood of the truck, the girl at the passenger door, she said with palpable derision and a cocked head:

“Que Pasa?”

In my lousy Spanish, I said, “We’re looking for the hot waters.”
Five dollars, each.
“Solo miramos, primero, por favor?” I manage to fumble out.
No, no look first, pay now, she says.

He pulls on a meshback that says “POLICIA” in yellow letters, and flips open some sort of book, conspicuously unclear whether or not he’s poising the pen to grant a pass or a ticket.

“No, gracias, pero gracias… .Muchas gracias.” I say, waving.

The hot sun had disappeared, and the clouds were piling up.

I backed the truck out from under his arm, and we gain the road, south.

It drizzled slow rain the rest of the day. After the slicing sun of southern California, it leaves our eyes ringing, this photon inversion. And also: Desert plants react within just a few hours to rain, so we stop often to photograph ocotillo sprouting tiny leaves. In fact, nearly everything that knows how to grow springs a coating of unreal, iridescent green, of tender shoots, just hours old. The white dirt of the roads turns powder brown. What were brown sticks are now outlined in shimmering green. The white sky turned bruised. It’s like driving through a photonegative of a vacation slide.

Dos.
Kyle puts his hand on my shoulder, gently. “Watch your profile, friend,” he says softly. He means: against the sky. I had been in a half-crouch standing and twisting to see if I could still make out my wife’s form, further up the hillside in the dark. There’s a fine mist blowing, and the sky is so dark it seems almost purple, and in my memory, the sky is somehow almost seething.

We have machetes and a spotlight readied, and our Hawaiian spears, but we’re not sure if they have rifles or not. It’s drizzling a light mist, it’s been doing that since… what time is it, anyway? Dawn is still far off. This is supposed to be the desert - this part of the Sonoran gets less than two inches of rain a year, so we’ve been thinking it will clear up any minute now. We’ve been thinking that since yesterday.

His eyes are trained downwind.

Memory formation is physiologically enhanced by adrenaline.

But ask any survivors to recount their tales, and you’ll hear as many stories as witnesses.

We have decided in whispers that when it comes to it, Hannah is to flee pell mell, I will spotlight and charge, Kyle will flank and machete.

And there’s a reason the military drives around with Humvee loads of soldiers with fully automatic rifles, and there’s fifty-cal machine guns aimed from behind sandbags at the numerous military checkpoints on the highways. But we’re a long way from them or pavement.

We are crouched on a rocky volcanic hillside, maybe fifty vertical feet higher than the truck and our camp, maybe thirty yards away. When the wind shifts just right, and the bare ass moon makes a half-assed glow, we can see two figures frozen in a crouch on the beach, halfway from the boat’s landing spot to our truck, a third holding the boat in the water. Have you ever focused your eyes so hard it hurt your temples?

We are in a deep cirque of mountains, a small clearing maybe a tenth of a mile wide, a rocky shoreline, there’s a dead dolphin with ivory ribs exposed somewhere there, by the overhanging cliff, on the boulders, strangely beautiful, though you can’t see it, I’m strangely aware that it’s there. We’re camped at the north end, where the coast meets a cliff in jagged shards of boulders. They, in the dark, without lights, knew the far southern end had small pebbles and shallows to pull the boat in, and step silently to shore.

We were thinking this secret cove was safe off and out of sight of the road. We had pegged the road as the source of any danger, and had rambled down a devastated 4×4 trace to this beautiful place: black rock beach, red slash mountains, pristine country, and had assumed the impassibility of the road offered us protection. We had, until a few minutes ago, planned a few days to spend here. Two boats had passed far off, hours earlier, while we were sitting around a fire. The assumption is that they marked our location, and have returned, assuming we would be hard asleep.

Now the trail was only trapping us. The pavement had long ago ended in the grumpy dusty town, and I figure it’s a twenty five mile walk without fresh water, north to Puertocitos, across open desert before reaching anyplace with water. At least Hannah got the passports on our crawl out of camp a few minutes ago, bless her brave heart.

In my memory, huge islands at sea loom black against a tumultuous sky. I know they are there, but I don’t know how I could have seen them. These things we call memories are slippery, changing things.

Tres.
There was fear in the initial moments, when Kyle shook me awake, and we realized a boat was silently coasting in, only visible by its dim outline, and its wake of phosphorescent algae, the color of a glowstick. The shit in the water, the algae, it’s luminescent, you can see the low peels of the waves, like neon lines. A thing like a boat, it adds oxygen to the water, and makes its own comet trail.

Over the sound of the rain pelting the shell of the truck, and the tarp:
“Hey, Andrew, uh, you awake? I’m watching this boat.”
I lifted my head.
“It already came back and forth, and then did it again.” He’s slow and thoughtful. “Then they stopped and I could hear them talking. Way out there. In Spanish.” Kyle’s standing under the tarp off the back of the truck, hands on his knees, wearing nothing but a giant beard and the bottoms of his long underwear
“They were running out there with their normal running lights, like turned on,” Sound can travel a mile or so easily over open water like this. “Then they got like all really quiet and cut the lights.” He’s puzzled and serious.
I prop up on elbows in the truck, and focus on the phosphorescent trail, the silhouette of a panga coasting parallel to shore. “They’re way out there, don’t worry,” I say. He’s a bit younger than me, but he’s lived eight months on end, years total, down here, on the beaches, but I’m tired. “Man, they are way out there.”
“No they’re fucking not.”
“Oh, shit, you’re right.” Depth perception re-adjusts, and kicks me in the face. “Hannah, wake up, get your boots on, boots on!” I scramble to throw her boots at her, grab a jacket, and roll out of the truck.
“They are on the fucking beach. They are on the fucking beach right now,” he says with a detached and slow factualness, hands still on knees, in his underwear.
“Should I hit them with the spotlight?” “What do you think, light them up?”
“I don’t know.” Pause. “I’m not sure that would be a good idea.” Neither of us want to say the obvious: that it just might attract gunfire.
This is some bad juju.
“Fuck it. Abandon camp, fucking abandon camp,” I whispered.

Quattro.
Like everything, this moment started a long time ago.

It’s Baptist truth that California will one day fall into the ocean for its sins. However, it’s true that Lower California (trans: Baja California) already has. It was thought to be an island by the Spanish explorers that approached from the south, although it hadn’t actually been one since there were plesiosaurs and the inland ocean reached up to what’s now celebrated as Reno, Nevada. Desert and ocean.

This sea, the Sea of Cortez, is a place of even oceanic extremes. Tidal variations are thirty one feet up and down at the northern end, exposing mud flats up to three miles in width. Back before the US Corp of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation entered into their fifty year battle of dick and dam size comparisons, the tidal bore that ran up the Colorado River was once large enough to overturn ships, not to mention the formation of huge whirlpools and rips in the midriff region of the Sea. There are eerie shallows that extend for miles. There are basins fourteen thousand feet deep beneath the surface

This moment began at least 11,000 years ago, when our stupid sojourn was presaged by folks moving down the coast, probably following the coast down from Alaska. They settled out in this cul-de-sac, the Yuman linguistic family in the north, and to the south the Cochimi, now mostly annihilated. Though there are a still few, and we would eventually find them, but that is a story for later.

After Cortez routed Montezuma, failing to understand that the rooms of gold he found were simply gilded in gold, and went absolutely psychopathic on the populace, he started hearing about this grand Island, where we sit. That was 1532, and Cortez heard about pearls, garnets, turquoise, silver and gold, and the rumors of the “Island of California.” He sends Ximenes, to this “Island,” known as Ciguatan by the Michocoan King, and also called Isla Amazones after folk legends of nude women warriors. The expedition returns empty handed, so in 1535, he goes to see for himself.

This moment began on a balmy morning in Montmarte, outside Paris, a year after Ximenes sailed across from the mainland, but yet a year before Cortez goes to check things on the Island. This moment begins underground, literally, in a crypt; the crypt of the Chapel of St. Denis, Rue Yvonne le Tac. August 15, 1534, when Ignatius of Loyola (born Íñigo López de Loyola), a Spaniard of Basque origin, and six other students at the University of Paris gathered in a secret meeting. This group bound themselves by a vow of poverty and chastity, and called the the Society of Jesus. Yes, enter the Jesuits.

The history of Baja is also the history of the Jesuits. Within just fifty years of the meeting in a tomb, the temporal length of one man’s becoming a man in modern America, they were in Central America, China, in Baja California, in Alta California. In the case of Latin America, it’s a tough call: Were the Jesuits the religious infrastructure, backing up the occupation by the Spaniards? Or were the Spaniards the shock troops that backed up the don’t-take-no-for-an-answer-we-will-send-your-soul-to-heaven-like-it-or-not Jesuit? Within a few short years of their arrival, they had built dozens of towering cathedrals, and with disease had inadvertently killed off about ninety five percent of the locals. A loss deeper and older than most US cities, ghost monuments in the middle of nowhere. The totality of desolation, the totality of extraction.

The Spaniards might be the reason they speak Spanish here, but the Jesuits are the reason for the ghost Cathedrals in the middle of nowhere, the Shrines to Mary along the side of the road, overlooking the wrecked skeleton cars at the bottom of the passes.

Cinco.
This moment began just a few months ago, less than a year, anyway. The plan had started in a simple, if slightly ambitious way.

The summer earlier, in Montana, in a drunken pact, seven or maybe eight of us decided we’d meet down in Mexico. Each of us would chip in a few grand, and we’d buy a sailboat in San Carlos, and then, you know, take it from there. They were fearless in ways I can only aspire to, and it seemed the right train to latch onto. They were traveled adventurers, peaks in Ecuador, stabbings in Peru. None of us had sailed before.

Hannah and I had driven from the Southeast to meet up with the crew in San Diego, and the months long plans we’d been working on had broken apart like a comet, chunks burning off in our arc to the west, until we were just a fiery meteor in a tiny Toyota pickup sitting low on it’s rear axles; me, my wife, and my Montana stoneworking buddy, Kyle, crammed in like sardinias; he stroking his grizzly adams beard, the only traveler to make the rendezvous. Nobody else made it. The dream of the seas, though was still limply alive, evinced by the fifty pound duffel of books on sailing and oceanography anda few scrawled email addresses concerning used boats, to write when and if we got to La Paz.

Working for us though, was our momentum, unencumbered of gainful employment, and pockets full of folded money that would go farther in Mexico than in the states, and a winter to pass before the building season began again. We gathered up some threadbare wet suits and fishing gear and painting supplies, firesale castoffs from the haves and have-mores of San Diego.

And so, on a sunny day in January, we crossed the border.

Seis.
“The Sea of Cortez,” by John Steinbeck comprised pretty much the entirety of my knowledge about Baja. And that book’s not really about Baja, so much as it is about the Sea of Cortez, and it’s inscrutable mysteries. And more than that, it’s about white guys and their obsession with collecting and naming. All my preparations had been spent studying sailing books and diesel outboard repair manuals, and pouring over listings of omantically dilapidated sailboats.

That’s not entirely true; my preparations had also included checking daily on the crime wave reports of northwestern Baja. Shit was going down all through December, and into January, apparently, cars with sirens pulling over families and kneeling them down execution style, for psychological kicks while they ransacked motor homes. One gang rape. Two young surfers killed in their sleep by having rocks dropped on their heads. Fuck all that: Tijuana, Ensenada, Rosarito psycho shit, we’d just neatly sidestep it in the four by four, roll down through the east side of the peninsula, to Baja Sur, far south, where everyone agreed it was safe and friendly. There was some sort of power struggle going up there in the north, a vacuum of leadership in the cartels or the policia (which are vaguely overlapping entities, anyway).

Northwest Baja: White people taunting the have-nots, driving RVs packed with tens and tens of thousands of dollars of quads and laptops and every goody in the world. Not us. I mean, I harbor no illusions about the pretension and status that any motor vehicle carries in the third world, but among the many gringo targets, we’d be small fish. Just had to squeeze around the hotspots, stick to the backroads, no different than navigating the supposedly “bad neighborhoods” and cities of my train hopping days. The places I was always told I’d be mugged or knife or worse, but found only stories and kind folks. Trouble is easy to find anywhere.

I knew there was a lot of desert, and I knew that the northern parts were in some ways an appendage of the resorts and surf culture of southern California. I knew a little Spanish, a holdover from junior high Spanish classes. I’d been around by car, by frieght train, by foot, by boat, but I’d never really left the country. Except for a week or two of volunteering back in junior high, in some dental clinic in a border town in Texas with unbearable Arkansas evangelists.

We crossed into Mexico, and everything changed, a limping dog followed us through the dusty streets, limping only when eyes were upon it. It was well fed. We went into the offices for a tourist visa, and had to wake up the manager from a cool dark room, he left us with forms to fill out, and went back to his nap. I filled mine out all wrong somehow; I woke him up again and tried to explain, he just shrugged, it will be fine, no matter. The only important thing was to pay, across the unpaved street at the stucco “bank,” where a lone women worked, and get the stamp. I’ve always liked working with folks from south of the border, always valuing the day and life over the work at hand. I had never seen this same ethic applied to bureaucracy.

Siete.
Crouched on that hillside, in the rain, half an hour has agonizingly passed, one clicking minute at a time. The fog came up thick for three or four of those minutes, and then eased back off.
“I can’t see them, can you?”
“No. Wait. Yes. No. The boat is drifting off shore.”
Kyle has excellent vision. But with his cueing, I can see the boat is now several yards offshore.
“How many people are in the boat?”
“I can’t tell.”
“I can’t see anybody on the beach.”
“Me neither.”
“Shh.”
Whoever is in the boat, they are crouched down, and the boat lifts up and down on the waves. The fog is such that we can’t see the shore.
It take eons. The boat is drifting, silently north, bobbing towards the point. The rain continues to mist on our faces.
Kyle was once a contender as a pitcher in the minor leagues, and I have gathered up a small pile of stones, golf ball through hardball size. Last night’s plans of drunken bravado and hand-to-hand have changed to a more tactical long range engagement. I will blind, Kyle will drill with stones. Hannah will still flee pell mell.
I check my watch. The boat has been floating just a few yards off the beach, slowly drifting north for thirty minutes now. What the fuck are they up to?
At forty-eight minutes, the black smudge of a boat drifts north around the point, just beneath us, and there’s a sputter of engine, but no lights, and it rips north, hugging the coast.

“Is this a trap?”
The reason they froze on the beach, on the way into camp, was because we drank a lot of bottles of beer. The empties were lined up on a table, and as Kyle crawled out of camp, he knocked the table, setting them clanking as we crept northwest up the gully out camp. We crawled up to tactical advantage, and they knew it. They weren’t yayhoos, messing around.
“I don’t know.”
“I can’t see anybody on the beach.”
“That don’t mean too much.”
We clench our eyes shut and listen for cobble moving on the beach.
Kyle drills rocks at shadows. We creep to the cliff edge where the boat last was, and heave a few boulders, wondering if they left anyone. We’ll later learn there is no one more patient than a Baja thief, but that’s a different story.

“Let’s take back camp, before they come back with help.”
We creep in with spears.

Fuck it, abandon camp. We’re wondering if they left for reinforcement.

We cram all the gear into the back of the truck in a record sixteen minutes, a time never again to be broken in our four months in Mexico, while Hannah keeps watch with the spotlight ready. Four sets of pupils appear, but they are just coyotes.

I rev up the truck, and start inching it up the trace, towards the dirt “highway.” No headlights, of course, and I’m burning the clutch and, yanking on the emergency break to keep from lighting up the tail lights. Kyle walks ahead with an LED lamp as I crawl the truck over the wet boulders. He jumps back in the cab when we finally get to the road.

Right turn is north, back towards Puertocitos, and the direction in which the boat departed.

Left turn is south, and further in.

“Well, team, what the fuck?” I ask.
“I don’t fucking know anymore, man,” says Kyle.
“I don’t think we should let this stop the plan. Let’s keep going.” Hannah delivers with her Anne Frank optimism, in spite of all available evidence. I’m about ready to make a haul for the border, it’s just that locked gate and creepy Puertocitos is in the way. It’s locked all night, right across the highway, according to the signs.
“Left?”
“Yeah, I’m not ready to give up,” she says with finality.
“Alright, south then.”
It’s seventy miles until the next dot on the map. South, then.

Ocho.
This is bad juju to drive this road at night, and against all advice you will ever find, but god, it feels like such a relief to be mobile and out of the trap. It’s a few minutes later, and we’re just beginning to parse what just happened. The clay has become slick as hell with the rain, and the washboard sets the truck to skidding. I slow it down. We are calm champions. We’ve made it less than three miles or so, and are making it up a steady switchback incline when I spot headlights in the side view mirror, maybe a mile or two back, hauling ass, and drifting into a turn.

“We’ve got headlights coming from the north.”
“Are you fucking kidding?”
“No.”
Kyle twists his body around out of the passenger side window in the wind for a minute, then retracts back in.
“They are hauling ass.”
Supposedly, no one runs this road at night. Who’s running it tonight, in a rainstorm? I don’t say nothing, but the timing is about exactly right for pincer move, if the boat went back immediately north to one of the fish camps. (In the next two days of rambling this road, we see and hear but one other car.) There’s nothing to be said. There’s brief conversation about whether to seek shelter on a side road, or haul hard on the main road, but there’s nothing but steep mountain passes, and the question is academic anyway: there are no side roads.

So we run hard for an hour. I’m not a stranger to back road driving, and I’m taking it as hard as I can. The headlights lose a little ground behind us, but not much, they are visible on every crest as we come through the mountains.

Finally, we hit the flats, and I open it up, planing it out over the washboards. It could be nothing, but we’re not taking chances.

Then there’s a cutout plywood soldier on the side of the road, and then an “ALTO!” sign.

I lock up the wheels into a fishtailing halt, and two guys in camo and balaclavas and rifles come running confusedly from behind the lean-to guard station at this remote militaria checkpoint. I bounce out of the cab.

“Amigos! Amigos!” I say with my arms in the air.

Adrenaline has reduced my kindergarten level Spanish to idiocy.

“Bandits! Bandits of the Sea! Come to Camp! Bad Bandits! Headlights! I look headlights! I want to camp Next! Next Military! Camp Friends!” I’m trying to dredge up my Spanish I last took in seventh grade, and I remember in the back of my mind as I played charades for these two soldiers, I was thinking about a story of a woman that returned to Poland after not having been there since her childhood, and the language came flooding back to her. Problem was, as she eventually learned, she was saying the equivalent of things like “Me want glass of wa-wa.” I wonder if there is some emotional equivalent to this language connection, a regression. Am I turning into a twelve year old?

One of the soldiers pats me on the arm and cocks his head, like one might to a retarded child, and says “Esta bien, amigo.” I was trying to say, “We’re glad to see you guys,” but then I realize, I think I said some thing like “Me like you to like me.”

They want to look in the cooler with a their one almost burnt-out headlamp, that they share. I’m happy to oblige.

They seem to intimate that we can camp nearby, if we want. I don’t want to camp nearby, I want to hang out next to that big fire I see they have behind the guard shack, because it’s cold as shit, sit right fucking shoulder to shoulder in between them, hang out with the guys with assault rifles. I don’t give a shit if they’re seventeen. I don’t have a gun (they’re incredibly illegal here, ten years in prison for having a round of .22 ammo. Thus ensuring that only wealthy criminals are armed. And thus ensuring that if somebody’s going to bother with the risk of carrying a gun, it won’t be some stupid .38. It’ll be a full auto AR-15.).

Hannah and Kyle are sitting shell-shocked in the cab, relying on me, the equivalent of a 12 year old brain damaged translator.

One thing I’ve noticed in, this, my two days of driving in Mexico: there’s a lot of crosses, nay shrines, and scary falling apart mountain roads, and a lot of vehicle husks at the bottoms of ravines. My mind’s been busy computing velocities and brake patterns the last hour in order to avoid not ending up at the bottom of one of these ravines. But now relaxed, and unclenched, percolating thoughts suddenly fall into place; not a logical progression, just a re-analysis of data.

The car behind us could not have come from farther north than Puertocitos, 25m north. The gate is locked all night. New realization: The gate is about smugglers. The smugglers don’t bother me. It’s just like the drug trade anywhere… they are businessmen, they don’t care about you. You get in the way of the business, then there’s a fucking problem. Otherwise, live and let live.

This truck behind is not a smuggler. They are hauling ass south. No one smuggles shit south.
What I thought to hope to write off as possible paranoia: The road mileage, plus the amount of time we spent throwing rocks at shadows, plus the packing time, is an almost perfect intersection of a boat’s travel time north, from when we saw the boat peel out in a phosphorescent V. To when the truck showed up at the entrance to our cove.

And then my stomach gets a little cold, when a line from a book called Practical Nomad, about the military presence you find at third world borders and airports; something to the effect of “don’t be scared of the machine guns and dogs… They are there to enforce the government’s monopoly on weapon and drug trafficking.” The monopoly on… The monopoly on….

It occurs to all of simultaneously that we can’t really trust anybody at this point. Hannah leans out of the truck, “What are they saying? Can we camp here?”

“They’re saying we should camp there, across the road.”

“I don’t know about that,” she says seriously.

I clap the soldiers on the arm, and floor it as soon as I’m far enough away to not pelt them with gravel.

Nueve.
We’ve lost the valuable headway we gained coming down out of the pass while the pursuing vehicle was in the turns. I get it up to about seventy, searching for turns to the right, away from the water, when finally there’s a road. I lock it up, and reverse to it, turn right over the edge of the graded road. We jump out and break some Palo Verde limbs, and scrape them over our tracks. I cut the lights and go back to using the clutch and the hand brake, and Kyle jogs ahead of the truck in the dark pointing directions. We can see the glow of the lights of our followers in the distance, coming to a stop at the checkpoint. We’re trying to roll far enough off the road to find a rise or a hide, but it’s nothing but viscaino flats. After only a few seconds of them stopped at the checkpoint, we hear the truck engine wind up again, spitting gravel. I yank the emergency break, bail for the back of truck, and yell for Kyle.

“Kyle! Come here! Help me cover up these reflectors!”

I smear dirt and mud on the chrome of the bumper in near panic. We stand with our asses up against the brake lenses, hoods pulled low, and sweatshirt collars pulled up over our noses to hid the gleam of skin oil, a hunting trick, leaned against the back of the truck, and watch our followers come over the rise, Hannah again primed for a run, fifty feet away behind some cactus, and I say aloud to him, because there’s no one to overhear,

“Man, this is totally fucked up.”

“Totally fucked up,” I hear the calm reply.

We stand in the dark and wait.