* * *
We got it started and I drove it around town. The clutch chattered a little and the shock absorbers were busted but there seemed to be no serious organic ailments. He had $495 on the windshield and we closed out at $375. That still sounds like too much but even now, after what happened, I’m not kicking about the price. It was in the back of my mind that I could sell that piece of iron for about $600 in Mexico. Pay for the trip. I did feel bad about getting in ahead of the Big Bear folks. They must have had an accident or a death in the family as they did not show.
I bought two new tires and put shocks on the truck and had it serviced and tuned up, new plugs and everything, and altogether sank another $50 in it. Then for $20 more I joined the Automobile Club of Southern California so I could get a big map of Baja and a detailed driver’s log. This is a fine map (although it doesn’t show elevation), and the log is good too, but I believe the best mile-by-mile guide for the Baja run is the Lower California Guidebook by Peter Gerhard and Howard E. Gulick (the Arthur H. Clark Co., Glendale, California).
* * *
I didn’t know this fact at the time because it’s hard to get any straight, first-hand dope about Baja in Los Angeles. A woman at the Mexican Government Tourist Office gave me a turista card, said the road was very bad and sent me to the Auto Club for any further information. A girl there gave me the map and log and her best wishes, but no, she didn’t know how I could get in touch with anybody who had made the drive. People I knew said, “Why don’t you fly down like Eisenhower?” and “Did they ever find those people that were lost down there?”
At the Mayan temple that is the Los Angeles Public Library I read the works of such veteran Baja desert rats as Erle Stanley Gardner and Joseph Wood Krutch. I pored over the Auto Club map and log, which carries a list of exactly 100 items of equipment to be taken on the drive—things like spare axles and leaf springs and a short-wave radio. And a calendar. Probably so you can note the passing seasons while you’re trying to change an axle down there on the Vizcaino Desert. “Confound this list!” I exclaimed, after calculating the expense, and went out and bought a few things you would take on an ordinary camping trip, plus some gasoline cans and water cans. (A small roll of baling wire was the lifesaver.)
I am not a hunter or a fisherman or an adventurer, nor do I have any particular affection for Mexico or the beauties of the desert, but I do like maps and I had long been curious about that empty brown peninsula. It snakes down through almost 10 degrees of latitude from Tijuana to the Tropic of Cancer. It is 800 miles long (more than 1,000 by road) and ranges in width from 150 miles at its bulging midriff to about 30 miles at the Bay of La Paz.
People live there of course, and by choice, but then people will live anywhere, even in New York City and Presidio County, Texas. The 800,000 inhabitants of Baja are not enough to clutter up the landscape. Most of them are concentrated in and around the northern border towns of Mexicali, the capital (200,000), and Tijuana (250,000), with a sprinkling of farmers and fishermen and billy goat ranchers and cattlemen scattered all down the line.
The Spaniards first saw Baja in 1533 when an expedition sent out by Cortez sailed into the Bay of La Paz. A number of abortive attempts were made to colonize the place but no Europeans were hardy enough to stick it out until the Jesuits came in 1697. The Indians then living there (estimates of their number range from 12,000 to 70,000) were possibly the most primitive of any in the New World. They slept naked on the ground and wandered aimlessly about eating worms and roots and the lice from one another’s hair. When the Jesuits came they found “not a hut, nor an earthen jar, nor an instrument of metal, nor a piece of cloth.”
* * *
In 1768 Fra Junipero Serra and his Franciscans replaced the Jesuits, who had fallen from favor in Madrid, and the Franciscans in turn were replaced by the Dominicans in 1773, with Serra going on to bigger things as a missionary to the upper desert of Alta California, now a fruited plain governed by Ronald Reagan.
American forces seized Baja and held it throughout the Mexican War, but the treaty negotiators at Guadalupe Hidalgo gave it back to Mexico in a fit of indifference. Five years later, in 1853, a 29-year-old Tennessee filibustero named William Walker sailed into La Paz with 45 men, captured the town and the governor without firing a shot and proclaimed “the Republic of Lower California.” The central government of Mexico did not offer much resistance, but the United States, then trying to swing the Gadsden Purchase, disapproved of Walker’s adventure and forced him to abandon his new republic after seven months by blocking shipments of men and supplies. (Walker later became president of Nicaragua. In 1860 he was executed by a firing squad in Honduras.)
This then was the place that Andy Davis and I set out for last July 15 [1966—Ed.] in the gray truck that we had come to call, in our humorous way, “the Diamondback Rattler.” Andy is a friend from college days at State U., a fellow Arkie exiled in California and a pretty fair hand with a crescent wrench. He got clear to go right at the last minute, and a good thing too.
* * *
We entered the freeway off Sunset in Los Angeles at 6:30 a.m. hoping to beat the rush-hour traffic, since I had no U.S. insurance on the truck. (I did have Mexican liability insurance. Not having it can lead to trouble, like jail.) The freeway was busy even at that hour but we were aggressive, if slow, and held our own. We hadn’t quite got to City Hall when the front wheels started shimmying. A sudden, terrible vision appeared of Andy’s wife driving out to pick us up at about the Disneyland exit. Then we found that the shimmy started at 48 m.p.h. and went away at 56 m.p.h., so we were okay as long as we kept the speed above the critical point.
We had about 600 pounds of gear in the back, the heavy stuff being four 5-gallon cans of gasoline, three 5-gallon cans of water, three 1-gallon water bags, one 2-gallon can of motor oil and a sack of spuds. The tires were aired up hard and tight and there was not much sag. At San Diego we bought some ice and piddled around, then crossed the border at Tijuana and drove through town resisting shouts on all sides from auto upholsterers and hawkers of religious statuary.
The road is paved for about 140 miles south of Tijuana and it is a pretty drive in the mountains and coastal stretches around Ensenada. This is a port city of about 35,000 people and the last town of any size before jumping off into the interior. We had a mechanic there check the shimmy and he said the trouble was a warped wheel. If we drove 3,000 kilometers at 50 m.p.h. the vibration would cause the front end utterly to collapse. He seemed sure of those exact figures. We could have put the spare on but for some reason we didn’t do anything.
A few miles south of Ensenada there is a roadside stop where a uniformed officer checks tourist cards. The card is all that is necessary for driving in Baja. In mainland Mexico a turista windshield sticker is required, and a much closer check is kept on vehicles. Some idlers were hanging around the guard shack and when it became known that our destination was La Paz, one of them divined my plan and said the truck ought to bring about $750 down there. Wasn’t that illegal, bringing a vehicle into Mexico and selling it? This got a big laugh from everyone except the officer.
We stopped for the day not far from Ensenada on a high bluff called Punta Banda overlooking the sea. Beautiful prospect. The two-burner gasoline stove worked okay and we had bacon and eggs and potatoes cut up with the peelings left on and fried with onions. The bargain Japanese canteen cups were a mistake. The metal was some Oriental alloy that had the property of staying 38 degrees hotter than the coffee therein. Fried your lips.
July 16. Odometer read 247 miles from Los Angeles. A cold white fog blew in during the night. Hated to get out of those sleeping bags. We couldn’t see the sea. We had a leisurely breakfast of eggs and corned beef hash and were on the road at 8 a.m. This pace didn’t last long. We told ourselves we were not going to rush, but before the day was out we were leaning forward on the seat just trying to get miles behind us. At a store called El Palomar we gassed up. The Rattler was getting 17 miles per gal
lon. Also bought some 2-inch Rocket Boy firecrackers from Macao. (“Light Fuse. Retire Quickly.”) Some surfers from San Diego stopped by in a Volkswagen truck and asked if we had a firing pin for a .22 pistol. Sorry.
We left the pavement at Arroyo Seco and the gravel surface wasn’t too bad for the first 15 miles or so, then it got murderous. The road was built up about 3 feet above the desert floor and drainage had made corduroy of it. We drove the ditches mostly where it was not so rough, although much dustier. Red dust. Several times we had to stop when it enveloped us. We picked up a hitch-hiker named Miguel. He refused to understand my Spanish even after I had treated him to a pack of Dentyne. A lug nut worked loose and rattled like crazy in the hub cap. Put it back on and discovered five others loose.
It was siesta time at San Quintin Bay but we woke up the owner of a little resort there and bought two cans of beer. We drove around the bay and ran into some more surfers. They were in a Volkswagen car and a Nissan Patrol, a kind of Japanese jeep, and had driven down from La Jolla. The Nissan owner, a four-wheel-drive snob, said they were turning back here, and intimated that we would be wise to do the same with our clunker. We showed them our tailgate.
We had hoped to make El Rosario that day but at 7 p.m. we gave up and pulled over near a rocky beach for the night. The desert—sand, cactus—runs to the very edge of the sea here. You expect a fall line and a marginal strip of something or other, but the desert simply stops and the water begins. For miles up and down the coast big breakers were crashing. There was nothing else to see. We built a fire of driftwood and had a big feed—bacon, potatoes and two cans of black-eyed peas. We had passed up lunch, and continued to do so. It would waste valuable driving time. The surf here was violent and as it retreated through the rocks it made a weird grinding noise that kept us awake for some time.
July 17. Mile 401. Off at 7 a.m. in a mighty burst of Studebaker power. Too much; the vacuum hose to the windshield wiper popped loose. Got it back on, then saw that one of the arms from the little motor had fallen off. Could have fixed it easily with a piece of wire but kept putting it off. Mañana. We had used the wipers to clear dust away.
* * *
El Rosario has 400 people and a green jail, and the weekly bus going south turns around here. Ditto the telephone line and mail service. We stopped for gasoline and children stood in doorways to watch us. South of town we saw our first Auto Club road sign. The American club posted the entire route with metal signs a few years ago, but few are left and most of those have been shot up so as to be unreadable. Probably by Americans as it does not seem likely that Mexicans would waste expensive .38 and .45 cartridges on such mean foolishness. Mean because it’s so easy to get off the main road—Mexico 1—even with a good map and a compass and a close mileage check.
We met two big trucks hauling slabs of marble or onyx and pulled over out of the ruts to let them by. They stopped to pass the time of day, as is the custom, and we had our question ready.
“El camino a San Agustin es malo?”
A gringo-sounding Mexican at the wheel said, “Yeah, it’s malo as far as you’re going.”
We kept foolishly asking that question, hoping someone, even if he was lying, would say the road got a little better. It got very hot that day but we had no way of knowing the temperature since our thermometer was no good. It would register 50 degrees one minute and 130 the next. At mid-afternoon the needle in the amp meter stopped moving. We pulled up short thinking the fan belt had broken. It was okay but the distributor wires were loose and the screws that held the top on the voltage regulator had shaken out. The top was just hanging on. Andy messed around with things and eventually got some movement out of the needle and wired the top back on.
We started climbing a range of burnt red mountains on a roadbed of sharp rocks. On the harder pulls—some stretches appeared to be 45 degrees—the engine began to miss and sputter. Too hot? Water in the gasoline? Bad points? The spark plugs were new. By getting running starts we rammed that poor old truck up and over each crest. The Cadillac tires never bargained for this but they held up.
On the downgrade the engine smoothed out and it was running like a sewing machine when we reached San Agustin. This was a forlorn hut right out on the desert with a windmill, not moving, and seven or eight guys sitting around drinking tepid Modelo beer from a kerosene refrigerator. One played a guitar and sang. We got some water for the radiator out of their storage tank. The water is no good to drink, they said.
A cloud of dust in the distance drew closer and soon an air-conditioned Jeep Wagoneer pulled in bearing a San Diego dentist, his wife and eight-year-old son. “La Paz or Bust,” said a little sign on the window. “We’re going all the way to Cabo San Lucas,” said the boy, which news the Mexicans received with equanimity. The dentist said he too had had trouble with things shaking loose, and had had one flat. When driving in sand, he said, he let some air out of his tires for better flotation. He had a spark plug device that used engine compression to pump them back up. Nifty.
A few miles below San Agustin we saw our first palm tree, in a low wash where there was some underground water near the surface. There was a house nearby in some shade, and a very hospitable woman who let us draw some water from her well. “Es muy bueno,” she said, and she was right, it was sweet, cool water. Such ground water as exists in Baja is often brackish or alkaline to the taste. We drove on and began to look for a place to stop but this was flat desert with no natural features that would make one place better than another so we finally just stopped. In 11 hours driving we had made 98 miles.
* * *
After supper we broke the code of the desert by needlessly hacking open a barrel cactus. The hide was thick and bristly and it took about five minutes with a sharp machete to get to the middle. Bulletin: There’s no water in those things. Not in this one anyway, just a damp core that could have done little more than infuriate a thirsty man. It was too hot that night to get inside the sleeping bags so we lay on top of them under the wide and starry sky. Then some bats came around and I zipped up and sweated. Andy’s concern was for snakes. We never saw one.
July 18. Mile 499. Corned beef hash with Tabasco for breakfast. We had other things but Andy kept wanting to eat that stuff, going on about what a hearty dish it was. The next settlement down the line was Punta Prieta, once a gold mining center, now a handful of huts on either side of a dry wash. The gasoline man was David Ramirez. He siphoned it out of a 55-gallon drum and we filtered it through a chamois skin. We told him about the sputtering and he removed the points from the distributor and filed them with an emery cloth. Still no good. He took off the carburetor and cleaned it. Not much better but we decided to press on for Santa Rosalillita, of the three L’s, a fishing camp on the coast. You don’t have that trapped feeling on blue water. Ramirez had worked on the truck for about two hours but said there was no charge. Maybe a pack of cigarettes. We gave him some smokes and had to force money on him.
On the way to the coast we saw a lot of ground squirrels, or anyway some kind of speedy rodents with tucked-up white tails, and hundreds of quail, the gray kind with crested heads. And a sand-colored bobcat, who stopped in the road for a moment to see what was coming, then fled. The Rattler choked and popped on the hills but made it in.
There was rejoicing in the fishing camp. The supply truck from Tijuana had arrived just ahead of us. It was a week late and the fishermen—there were some 30 or 40—were out of gasoline and cigarettes and down to short rations. Now the smoking lamp was lit and a blue haze hung about. A young abalone diver named Chito was the mechanic of this lash-up and he was under our hood in a flash filing the points, resetting the timing and blowing through the gas line. A solemn little shirtless boy held Chito’s cigarette while he worked, between drags. He held it still and was careful not to get his thumb and finger on the mouth part. Chito declared that the spring was bad in the spark advance. He found a similar one, cut it for length and put it in. That didn’t do it either. Chito gave up. Must be t
he puntas, he said.
* * *
What to do? There was an old 1-ton Studebaker truck in camp that might have some usable points in it but the owner was gone and would not be back for a day or two. Pete, the skipper of a launch, said he would be going to Ensenada in about a week and we could ride up on the boat with him, get the points and come back with him. Thanksgiving in La Paz. Or we could try to make it down the coast to Guerrero Negro where there was a big salt works and probably some repair facilities. Scammon’s Lagoon was down that way too, where the California gray whale breeds and calves. We didn’t want to miss that. This seemed the best course.
We had to cross a deep gully getting out of the camp and it took about 20 running starts before we finally got up the other side, to loud cheers from the pescadores. (Let me say emphatically that the Champion Six, power-wise, was equal to any grade we met with; it was just that the firing system was on the blink.) Another young diver named Adam Garcia hitched a ride with us. His family lived down the coast.
About two miles from camp we hit some deep sand and in getting out of it we let the engine stall and die. Now it wouldn’t even start. Well, that was it. Garcia asked if we wanted to sell the truck. No, not quite yet. He continued on by foot. It was growing dark. After some cussing and some recriminations we decided we would walk back to the camp in the morning and see about the points in the derelict truck. Sufficient unto the day was the evil thereof. But was it the points? So many hands, including our own, had been in that distributor. Maybe the coil. A cold wind was blowing from the sea and we took all the gear out of the back of the truck and slept in there under the tarp.
July 19. Mile 597. Just before setting off on the hike we had a last-minute go at the starter. The engine caught the first time. Hurrah for the bonnie blue flag! We loaded quickly and took off once more for Guerrero Negro. In about a half-hour we came to the Garcia fishing camp on a wide sandy beach. The main business here was catching cahuamas, big sea turtles, for canning. Garcia was surprised to see us. He rounded up a brother or a cousin who was something of a mecanico.