Escape Velocity

by Charles Portis

  They found an old, rusty, six-volt coil in a shed and Andy went to work with them on the Rattler while I had coffee with Garica’s mother, who spoke very good English. “You’ll be okay when you get to Guerrero,” she said. “They have everything there.” We sat at a table in her dark kitchen, earth floor. A timid teenage girl poured the coffee and two men stood in the doorway blocking the light. I sat there like a boob for some time smoking and drinking their coffee before it occurred to me to offer the cigarettes. Nobody asked for one, and they had been out of smokes for 10 days, I learned.

  Señora Garcia said the market for canned turtle meat was not so good. Did I think the people in the States would like it? It added a nice touch to many different dishes. I said it might go over in Southern California, which came out like—those nuts will buy anything—although I don’t think she took it that way. I hope not.

  The change of coils was an improvement, temporary at least, and Andy got the voltage regulator perking again. The points in it had been sticking too. We left the Garcias some stuff and struck out once more for Guerrero.

  * * *

  Almost immediately we got lost trying to thread our way through a maze of ruts down the coast. We kept bearing right, seaward, which was a good plan except that it didn’t work. Twice we had to double back; one road led to a deserted beach and stopped, and another took us into some impassably deep sand. The spare tire fell off but we didn’t know it for a while, with all the other noise, until the spare carrier started dragging and making a terrific racket. We wired the carrier back up under the bed and backtracked again until, very luckily, we found the tire.

  Soon we were traveling inland, southeast, you couldn’t fool the compass, but there was no way to get off that road. At Rancho Mezquital a couple of cowboys in leather chaps told us we had left the coastal road far behind but that we could still reach Guerrero by taking a certain right turn down the way. Good. Now we were out on the Vizcaino Desert, driving and driving and not getting anywhere. The road was not so bad here, smooth sand ruts. We rode up high on the sides to keep from dragging center.

  This was no open desert but a thickly growing forest of cardon and cirio. The cardon cactus, with its right-angle traffic cop limbs, is like the giant saguaro of Arizona, although there is said to be some small difference. The cirio (candle) looks like a big, gray, bristly carrot growing upside down, with a yellow flower on top. It grows in Baja and in one spot in Sonora and no place else on earth. Naturalist Joseph Wood Krutch calls it the boojum tree.

  We came to a village and an old man there said it was El Arco. This could not be because El Arco was way below Guerrero, almost 50 miles, and we got out the map and showed the old timer how he was wrong. He insisted that he knew the name of his home town. Again we had missed the cutoff. It was not in the cards for us to see the fabled Guerrero or Scammon’s Lagoon.

  The store in El Arco was out of gasoline. This village, too, was once a gold mining center, with more than a thousand workers, but the mines closed after a long strike and perhaps 100 people live there now. All of them were indoors on this day except for two little girls who were wiping the dust off the storekeeper’s Chevrolet pickup. He gave us a pan of water to wash up with, and offered $10 for the radio that was slung under the dash in the Rattler. I said okay and he and a pal went to work. Those two should enter a Motorola removal derby. They had it out in about a minute, antenna and all. Parked beside the store was the dustiest 1965 Ford Mustang in the world. The foolhardy owner was taking it to La Paz and got this far before busting up the radiator. He had hitched a ride back to Tijuana to get a new radiator, the store-keeper said, and was now gone two weeks.

  We camped that night south of El Arco beside the biggest cactus we had ever seen, a cardon with 12 spires, nine of them 30 to 40 feet high.

  * * *

  July 20. Mile 792. Up at 5:15, before sunrise, some quick hash and coffee, then onward across the Vizcaino. The road was rocky, something like a dry creek bed, and we soon lost high gear—that is, we couldn’t shift into high. We drove in second much of the time anyway but this was a nuisance. At 11:30 a.m. we reached San Ignacio, which is a true, classic oasis. You come over a hill after hours of desert driving and there it is below, two limpid ponds fed by springs, a large grove of date palms and a shady little town square. Some 900 people live there. On the square is a whitewashed stone church that has walls 4-feet thick. It was built by the Dominicans in 1786.

  We asked around and located a garage. It was run by one Frank Fischer, an elderly gent who said he had been in Baja since 1910, when, as an engineer on a German freighter, he had jumped ship in Santa Rosalia. “It was the second mate,” he said. “I didn’t like the S.B.”

  He called in the house for his son, a man about 40, and set him to work on the Rattler while he, the elder Fischer, told us a few things. He had been to the United States once, in San Diego, in 1917, but had found no reason since to return. American and Mexican beer did not compare with European beer because the water in the Western Hemisphere has saltpeter in it. Mexicans did not know how to fix roads. He looked over our 9mm. pistol. “German?” No, Spanish. He handed it back. “Then it’s no good.” The United States had been wrong everywhere since 1945 and was decidedly wrong in Vietnam.

  “The U.S.A. is no good splitting these countries up,” he said. “Germany, Korea, Vietnam. All those boys getting killed are poor boys, they are not rich men’s boys.”

  We agreed that the draft was not fair.

  “Look at goddam L.B.J. Johnson,” he said. “His sons are not over there.”

  We said we didn’t know the President had any sons.

  “He has two sons hidden there on the ranch. He’s keeping them out of the war.”

  * * *

  He said he kept abreast of these things from a German newspaper he subscribed to. We argued with him a little about Vietnam, then decided to let it ride, remembering the Mojo proverb—man with faltering ’52 Studebaker not wise to antagonize mecanico in middle of Baja. (And yet the Mojos—squat, hairless, loyal—were foolish in many ways and the tribe was no more.) The young Fischer said a small flange had fallen off the gearshift column. He fixed it and put a new spring in the voltage regulator. That, he said, would correct our electrical trouble. Could be, but Mexican mechanics seemed to be spring happy. The charge was only $4. Did they want pesos or dollars? “Dollars,” said the old man.

  At a roadside stop called the Oasis we bought all the gasoline in stock, about 12 gallons, and had a shower and a change of clothes. We were filthy. The owner of the place had magazine pictures of John F. Kennedy and Lopez Mateos [president of Mexico 1958–64—Ed.] tacked up all over the walls. As I was shaking the dust out of a shirt he said, “Mucha tierra,” then asked what tierra was in Ingles. He had a tablet in which he entered English words that came in handy with the gringos passing through.

  “Tierra es dirt.”

  “Dort?”

  “No, dirt.”

  “Si, dort.”

  “Dirt!”

  “Dort!”

  “Okay.”

  On the road again, high gear working, amp meter showing charge. Below an extinct volcano called Las Tres Virgenes we ran into a road-block. A 2-ton grocery truck coming north on the one-way shelf road had a flat, right rear, and the driver and his partner were repairing it there with a cold patch. They had no spare. The truck was built for dual wheels but like most big trucks in Baja this one was running with single wheels because of the narrow ruts.

  A ’58 Ford car going South had tried to drive around the truck but had slipped sideways down the hill and bogged in the sand. So now everything was blocked. Another car, a ’58 Mercury and two pickups were also ahead of us. The cars and pickups were all together, a convoy from Tijuana to La Paz. When Mexicans deliver cars down the peninsula they usually travel in a pack, with a truck or two along to carry gasoline and other gear. It would be hard to make it with a loaded car, the clearance would be so low.

  The repair took
about two hours and a good part of the time was spent pumping up that big 9.00/20 12-ply tire. The driver had the stamina of a horse. He wore an Afrika Korps cap and had a bandanna tied around his forehead. Andy pitched in and helped pump while the convoy drivers and I sat in the skimpy shade of mesquite bush and passed around a water bag and smoked Domino cigarettes. It must have been 120 out in the sun.

  Late that afternoon we reached the Sea of Cortes, or, as current maps insist on calling it, the Gulf of California. No cold blue Pacific breakers crashing here. The water was green and very salty and warm, almost 80 degrees, and still as a lake. A slight lapping along the black gravel beach was the only movement. It is not always like that, we were told. Treacherous winds come up often on the Gulf, and from time to time a big blow called a chubasco.

  * * *

  We breezed into Santa Rosalia (pop. 5,361) on a strip of blacktop at 40 and 50 m.p.h., just flying. The shimmy was gone. This is the first real town you hit after leaving Ensenada and we cruised around a while taking in the sights—the new police building, a pastel blue church made of galvanized iron. Santa Rosalia is a copper town; the mines are nearby and the smelting and shipping is done here. A French company used to run it (they brought that odd church over in sections) but it has been a Mexican operation since the early 1950s.

  At the Hotel Central we had fried shrimps, caught that afternoon, and a salad, paying no heed to guidebooks warnings against eating fresh vegetables in Baja. A truck driver from Tijuana who was a little tight on beer joined us. He was on his way home from La Paz. We struck him as a couple of good sports, he said, and he believed he would turn his truck around and go to La Paz with us.

  “I know many beautiful ladies in La Paz,” he said. “Many.” He elaborated. Two pals came and dragged him back to the truck. You can take the boy out of Tijuana but can you take the Tijuana out of the boy?

  A young married couple from Santa Monica named Bob and Judy (Dick and Jane had just left) were also stopping at the Central. They had sailed down the Gulf in an 18-foot catamaran. Or rather they had sailed as far as the Bay of Luis Gonzaga, about 300 miles up the coast, where the fiber-glass cat had cracked up on some rocks. They hitched a ride in the rest of the way with their cat loaded on top of a truck carrying 1,000 gallons of lard. It took five days; the truck had six flats and broke an axle. But they made it. Things have a way of working out in Baja. Santa Rosalia was the nearest place they could get fiber-glass repairs.

  Crime fans will remember Billy Cook, the desperado with the bad eye and the tattoo “Hard Luck” on his knuckles who murdered six people in 1951, including an entire family, and movie fans will remember the Edmund O’Brien film, “The Hitch-hiker,” about Billy’s auto flight down the desert with two hostages, but who remembers that right here near the Central was where Billy was tracked down and nailed by Tijuana Police Chief Kraus Morales? That evening we sat outside and listened to the local mariachi band. Bob and Judy had been planning to sail around the tip of the peninsula and back up the Pacific coast. They were making a film of the journey. But now maybe they would sell the cat in La Paz if they could get a good price. Bob said I might get as much as $1,000 for the truck there. The band played until well after midnight.

  July 21. Mile 919. Up early and down the street to the Tokio Cafe for Spam and eggs. A big gringo in a cowboy hat who looked and sounded like Lee Marvin, the actor, flagged us over to his table. He said his name was Jim Smith and he lived in San Ignacio.

  “I saw you guys there yesterday at Fischer’s,” he said. “I didn’t stop because I don’t get along with the old man. I guess he told you all that crap about jumping ship.”

  * * *

  We said he had, whereupon Smith gave us his version of the Mexican advent of Frank Fischer. Without prejudice, it was even harder to believe. I won’t repeat it, just as Sherlock Holmes would not tell about his case concerning the Giant Rat of Sumatra. (He said the world was not ready for it.)

  Smith said he had been in Baja on and off since 1953. He had been a cop in Lubbock, Texas where he missed capturing Billy Cook by minutes, and in Los Angeles, where a motorcycle accident had banged him up and provided him with a pension, which he didn’t think was big enough. Now at 35 he was “guide, hunter, pilot, boat skipper, writer and freeloader.” He had ridden the length of Baja on muleback, a five-month trip, and it had once taken him six weeks to deliver a truck to La Paz; he had to replace the engine and differential on the way.

  He said he was related to President Johnson (“I’m kin to half the folks in Texas”) and then went on to attack him with great passion, exceeding even Frank Fischer on this score. But from a different angle.

  “That’s why I’m down here, to get away from that crap. I’m making my last stand here. You know what they’re trying to do now? Boy, the Great Society. They’re trying to send some of those Peace Corps punks down to Ignacio for training. Well, you can take the word back, Shriver better not send any of those[img]beatnik[img]s around my place or somebody is liable to get his head blown off.”

  Song: I Left My Head in San Ignacio. Smith said his first wife had remarried, a man named John Smith, and that he, Jim Smith, was now engaged to a wealthy, 31-year-old Mexican widow. (“They got this priest checking up on me.”) He expressed contempt for most writers about Baja (he likes Antonio de Fierro Blanco’s novel, The Journey of the Flame) and for all dudes and tourists, but he likes to talk, too, so he has to make do with what comes along.

  * * *

  We all went down to the waterfront (where there was a rusty, half-sunken ship) and watched Bob work on his catamaran. It was blue and looked sturdy enough. There was no shelter on it except for what shade the sail provided. Judy, a pretty blonde, was a game girl. We got a mechanic there to check out the Rattler. He wore his cap sideways like Cantinflas, not for any antic effect, as he was very gloomy, but for some practical reason of his own. He put on a new voltage regulator. It didn’t do much good but, like hypochondriacs, we no longer expected results, we just wanted attention.

  Smith said Mexican mechanics were ingenious. He said one down below La Paz had managed to break an anvil. How much did he think the truck would bring? “You might get $500,” he said. “Studebaker parts are hard to get. They like Chevys.” Smith himself had a Volks camper and renovated weapons carrier with high clearance. “You could sling a cat under that baby,” he said.

  The guidebooks dismiss Santa Rosalia as a boring mill town but we hated to leave. Down the line we ran into some long stretches of deep sand and drove across them as fast as we could, using some principle of momentum I don’t fully understand—as though you could catch the sand napping. We got stuck a couple of times but rocked free without too much trouble. With four-wheel drive these places would be a breeze.

  Mulege was the next settlement and it looked like something out of Central America, with its little river, date palms and thatched roofs. There are several expensive resort hotels here to accommodate American fishermen who fly down in their own planes. The place also seemed to mark the end of the hospitality belt. Behind us we had met with nothing but a ready generosity; now when we asked directions we got grudging, mumbled answers. The same with the Yanks, no more wilderness camaraderie. We had supper that night at one of the hotels, La Serenidad, and our table was next to one at which two American couples were sitting. An uncomfortable hush prevailed. Nobody spoke to anybody. Maybe we just wanted them to ask about our trip.

  * * *

  It was the off-season and there were no other guests. The manager said 42 planes had come in on Memorial Day. His big problem, he said, was getting good help and supplies. “For days now I have been out of Cointreau.” Roughing it at La Serenidad. We left and did some night driving for the first time, and played around with the spotlights. But we couldn’t distinguish the little potholes from the big ones, the axle busters, because of headlight shadows, and we gave it up after a while. My air mat had blown away and I folded up the tarp and used it for a pad. We heard a coyote yippin
g and howling that night but he was not close by.

  July 22. Mile 985. Up at 5:30 anticipating the drive on the ledge of terror above the Bay of Conception. An American in Santa Rosalia had described it in fearful terms. “All I can say is, don’t look down,” he said. This was misleading. It was a one-way shelf road above the water and if we had met another vehicle it would have been inconvenient, but there was plenty of room for anything short of a Greyhound bus. The water in the bay was so clear that we could see big fish lolling around from 200 feet up on the cliff. There were good white beaches along here too, and lots of pelicans.

  We stopped for a swim with the mask and snorkel and tried out our Hawaiian sling. This was a fish spear (really a frog gig) with a loop of rubber wired to the end of the handle. When you grasp the handle up near the business end you have a cocked missile. Catamaran Bob told us how to make it. We got two gray fish about as big as your hand and grazed some bigger ones, fat groupers, but before we had mastered the use of the thing we had broken three of the four tines on rocks. The fish were plentiful and multi-colored. It was like swimming in an aquarium. The pelicans had better luck. They dive-bombed all around us with heavy splashes and scored almost every time.

  After leaving the bay the road got worse and worse and the terrain took on a sinister aspect. Big volcanic slabs of rusty brown rock we had not seen before. It was the hottest day so far. Andy started belching, more than seemed necessary, and blamed it on the heat. I said that didn’t make any sense. He said it made as much sense as my wearing that stupid cow-boy hat all the time. Then there was a dispute about who was responsible for the chocolate mess in the glove compartment. Leaving those Hydrox cookies loose in there. Over the door there was a strip of metal that pulled out about four hairs every time you put your head against it. It had been a small joke; now we beat on it with fists and wrenches. We were having trouble again shifting into high gear and we argued about whose was the better shifting action—his double-clutching maneuver with a brief pause in neutral, or my fast jamming move.