by Peter Heller
“Ready?”
“Ready.”
“Uno, dos, tres—!” Ugh.
Philosophically, with regard to material things, there are two ways of moving through the world: Light or heavy. Swift or bogged down. The absolute happiest times in my life were when I was responsible for the least amount of things. Backpacking, with home and food in one compact fifty-pound bundle. A long bike trip, when all I carried in the world was a tent roll and two panniers. A month-long horse trip from Colorado into Wyoming leading a single packhorse with light packs. I spent most of my twenties in a blue Toyota pickup with a cap on the back, two kayaks on the roof, and everything I owned in the back, under the plywood bed. That was living life close to the blood-beat of Now. What I did back then was everything.
One of the things that appealed most to me about the Beast was that she reminded me of those days. Not an inch of space had been left to its own devices; everything doubled itself, had two uses at least. Nobody can do this better than a German. The lower bed was a seat, a car trunk, a chest lid. The driver’s captain’s chair was a front seat facing forward, a dinner chair facing backward, and a recliner when dinner was done and you wanted to stretch out and read. The stove top was a drying rack when it was time to do dishes.
What is so appealing about this kind of efficiency? I think people spaz out and buy RVs and yachts just because they see all the cabinetry, the ingenious tucking away of every element of daily life, the whole thing fitting together like a puzzle, compact and hidden; some atavistic neuron group at the base of the brain begins firing, some nesting-lizard response.
As our time in Huntington Beach began to tick down, I became focused on outfitting the Beast for everything she needed to survive the long trip into Mexico. The first thing I did was shod her with aggressive Hakkapeliitta triple-ply, on/off-road tires. I Cloroxed and rinsed her ten-gallon water tank and filled it with fresh water; topped off her underslung propane tank. I had the mechanic change the oil and check her all through: fluids, brakes, clutch, alignment. After the tires, I put screens in all the windows. Kim had bad reactions to bug bites, so I also fitted a net over the upper bed and got some twelve-volt fans.
The next problem I had to tackle was how to carry surfboards securely. Bruno and others who had surfed a lot in Mexico said to always sleep with the boards inside the van, no matter what. It’s not difficult to cut one strap and slide a board off a roof. Bruno said that at La Fonda, where we planned to stop first, just inside the border, boards were stolen all the time. He said that a friend of his left her car there for lunch and came back and her car was gone. Another surfer got killed right in the parking lot. Dang.
We had heard a lot of these stories, and they had begun to mount up and produce a toxic gas of fear. Everyone we talked to said, Never ever drive at night. Bandidos, drunk drivers, animals in the road. Mostly killer thieves. Experienced Baja travelers recommended that we find a place to camp several hours before sunset. Sounded like a trip to Transylvania.
Given what we had heard about Mexico, how could we prevent our boards from getting ripped off when we wandered across the beach to look at a break, or stopped for a meal? Online I found a company called Inno that made a slick locking rack. All my life, carrying kayaks on the roof, I had been a simple tie-down man, proud of my tight trucker’s hitch. This rack dazzled me. It looked a little like a ski rack. I ordered one for each side of the roof and two extra-long crossbars to support them. No throwing ropes over the top here: two stiff rubber arms rose from the inside of the rack, at the center of the roof, and angled over the crossbar like cranes. You slipped the boards onto the padded crosspieces and pulled out a loop of steel cable from a roller on the outside. You caught the end of the rubber crane arm with the loop, then turned the knob on the roller, reeling back in the cable with a ratcheting click until the arms and the cables were snugged down tight over your boards. Then you turned a key in a small silver lock and nothing would release the boards but a pair of stout side-cutters.
Wire cutters are not uncommon, even outside of America. Well, the main thing was that no barefoot surfer could just walk past the van and lift a surfboard. If thieves wanted the boards badly enough to carry specialized equipment, there probably wasn’t much we could do about it.
Some of the boards would go inside. It was a real chore stacking all the boards on the roof, and then there was no way to lift it for sleeping, so I figured we could keep the boards we used every day down below. The nine-footers fit easily. I got an industrial version of an adjustable shower rod, a steel bar that extended itself by twisting, and fit it behind the front seats, above the level of the stove and cabinets. That way we could rest the longboards across the rear bench seat and the bar up front and still get into the little fridge and closets beneath them.
With all the extra security, the Beast sat up on top of her big tires like a warhorse. She was so unabashedly rough. She looked exactly like 318,000 miles of bad road. She was the color of sand and mud. The sand was the once-yellow paint roughened to the texture of peeling skin. The mud was the scraped patches of rust, the veins of it between body panels. The headlights, though as old as dirt, were as round and trusting as the eyes of a child. The grille gave off a cryptic smile, like a dog’s. The sliding side door growled open and barked closed. Between her frame and the ground were hand-spans of daylight, nine honest inches, as much as a four-by-four pickup. She just looked tough and true. You knew she wasn’t concerned with frivolous things.
We were feeling pretty proud of ourselves. At least I was. Kim watched me unload my purchases and took daily tours of the Beast with cheerful encouragement, but I could tell that she was leaving the details of this odyssey to me. I got the sense that she was coming to support me, but in truth, she did not like relentless sun. She would really rather go somewhere without bugs and sun, like San Francisco.
Next I got plastic cans for water and gas. Blue and red, so nobody would mix them up. I lashed them neatly into an indented storage pocket in the front of the roof.
Extra water, extra gas—what else? Something for flat tires.
The heavy off-road tires I had gotten on the advice of other Baja travelers. It was important to have an extra ply of steel in the part of the tire that hit the road, and in the sidewall. There was usually only one paved road in Baja, and that was the main road. I’d heard about potholes that could swallow a truck. The rest of the roads were dirt, rock, sand. Every other plant had a thorn or a spike. Flats were endemic. Most veterans advised carrying two spares. Our one spare was slung under the frame up front. I couldn’t bring myself to carry another; I’d have to make a mountain out of the stuff on the roof. Instead, I tried to prepare for two flats in the most desolate place by getting a patch kit—the kind with the plug you twist through the hole—and several cans of Fix-A-Flat. The stuff actually works, I’ve used it in the city: screw the nozzle onto the tire stem and reinflate with a spray of thick glue that fills the hole, then drive to spread the goo around the inside of the tire. I also got a cute little tire inflator that runs off the car battery because people told me I wouldn’t be able to get the tire up to pressure with a bicycle pump.
It is always this possibility of breakdown that looms in the mind of a Baja traveler. A lot of people travel down the length of the peninsula in convoys of two or more vehicles. It makes a lot of sense and eases the threat of being stranded alone and without help in the desert. If you look at a map, you can see that much of the Pacific coast of mainland Mexico is strung like a rosary with cities and towns and pueblitos. There is some form of coastal highway all the way down. It’s not like that in Baja. There is one road mostly down the middle like the vein of a habanero, a narrow, shoulderless highway that in places staggers east and west, reeling from one coast to the other, and that’s it. Except for a few spots, the only way to get to the Pacific coast is on a branch road, usually dirt.
I sailed that coast once, helping a friend deliver a sailboat from San Diego to Mazatlán, and I was stru
ck every day by the total desolation. A hundred miles would go by without sign of a harbor or a town. The rest was sere hills and cliffs every color of hide and blood. It was intimidating, is what it was.
On August 19 we slipped all the boards into their zipped Cordura bags, loaded them on and into the van, and headed for the border.
THE OCEAN AS A SECOND LANGUAGE
Interstate 5 passes through San Diego in a blizzard of billboards and fast-food strips. You wouldn’t know you were near the ocean but for an occasional slice of gray water in the distance and a glimpse of the port itself as you pass over an estuary. Then the highway shoots straight for the border. The exits get sparse. There are signs for Mexican auto insurance. There’s a sense that this part of the wide interstate was built for one thing only: to expel you. To deliver you into the arms of another county. The sun was lowering over the palm and scrub hills on our right and I began to feel we were being funneled toward our fate. I thought that cows must feel like this as they are herded into the last turning chutes.
That the last exit before the border was a town called San Ysidro reinforced the sense of imminent foreignness. And that all the signs were in Spanish, and everybody in the streets looked Mexican. We pulled into a gas station advertising seguros and bought a year’s policy on the van for $200. I didn’t even know what it was for except that I was told not to be stopped by the police without it. The closest food was a taco joint with orange plastic tables. We ordered tacos.
“Ready?” I said to Kim. She looked a little nervous. What was wrong with us? This was supposed to be fun. We were both world travelers. This was Mexico, for chrissakes. We were going surfing, not to the front lines. We had prepared for this moment for months. “It’s already four-thirty, do you think we should go?” I thought about the crossing, how they might pull us over and go through all our stuff, make us sign a customs declaration, how we might have to bribe some official not to charge us for importing surfboards. All this had happened to me and my friend Larry when we’d brought in a bunch of equipment for his sailboat. And by then, after filling out forms in triplicate, the capricious sun would be down and we would have twenty minutes to scramble for our camp before darkness settled and the vampires came out.
Do not get caught out on the highway at night … The admonition sang in my head with a ghoulish vibrato.
“Lista,” Kim said. “I don’t really want to camp around here.”
“Okay.”
We climbed into the Beast and thundered her up the ramp.
We needn’t have worried about the border. There was a gate like a toll station and a green light that blinked on as we approached. We never even stopped. Not an official in sight. Our lane funneled into a highway and we joined the other cars going southward at sixty miles an hour. We climbed a long hill with the Tijuana barrios on our left—narrow streets and beat-up concrete houses, mechanic shops—and the barren DMZ on our right—the high steel wall topped with wire, the big arc lights, the bulldozed swath of open ground just inside the U.S. where a white INS patrol truck idled under its bar lights. Poor Beast. She struggled up the grade in third gear and then we topped out and saw the sea. At last. What we came for. Relief swept through me. The ocean is the ocean is the ocean. We forked onto the toll road. The sun hung orange over the water. As far south as we could see was a continuous jumble of buildings on the sea side of the road. Mostly white stucco condos, strips of adjoining units, walled in and gated; or garish hotels with Moorish towers of concrete, metastasizing at the edge of the sea cliffs. Tall billboards staggered up the highway, THE GOOD LIFE AT MAR Y SOL CONDOMINIUMS AND RESORT, always a swimming pool and a blond chick in a beach wrap smiling as if her life depended on it. A huge development being built by Trump. Older barrios of gringo vacation houses crammed wall to wall at the edge of the bluff, flaying the breeze with TV antennas and satellite dishes. Even the fancy stuff looked a little like a slum, cramped between the highway and the cliffs. And up to our left, on the scrub hills, bulldozers scoured out more paradise, unpainted blocks of concrete bristled with rebar, thousands of units under construction, waiting for subcontractors.
We passed Rosarito, where the cops were supposed to be predatory and where a four-stack Titanic gleamed at her pier—the life-sized mockup used in the movie. We passed Puerto Nuevo, an enclave of wall-to-wall restaurants by the water, famous for being mobbed up and for lobster. A little farther south a hundred-foot concrete Jesus, blue-robed, gestured at the ocean from a hilltop with a stiff, inward expression as if His last meal wasn’t sitting right. Under His hands we turned off and joined the local traffic on the bumpy coast road. A cluster of low buildings held the famous K45 Surf Shop. We pulled in. The owner, who spoke perfect English, didn’t seem to care whether we put our boards in the water or not. I told him we were beginners and showed him my map and asked him where we should surf. His expression said, No place. “Quatro Casas,” he said. “But this time of year …” He shrugged. “La Fonda is a good idea. You wanna go to Todos Santos? Going south …” He traced the pen along the one main road and marked the long interior stretch between Guerrero Negro and Constitution. “Fill up with gas. Don’t drive this part at night.” He sold me a little K45 sticker with a VW bus carrying a surfboard and we went outside and I put the sticker on backward—it was supposed to go on the inside of the window glass.
“The Mexican surf community sure is welcoming,” Kim said in a rare gust of sarcasm.
I shrugged. “Must be cuz we’re so close to the border.”
We drove a few more miles. The sun hung over the water. From a rise in the road we looked down a rugged coast of steep hills and cliffs and points fading southward in an ocean haze. The clefts and folds were shadowed purple and the rock faces blazed back the orange sun. Right below us, on the top of a bluff, behind a string of motels and restaurants, was a jammed crowd of tents, campers, trucks. Surfboards everywhere.
“That’s it?” Kim said.
“Yep, we just passed kilometer fifty.”
“It’s not what I imagined.”
“What did you imagine?”
“I thought it might have, you know, less people. Baja.”
I was starting to wonder if any beginner surfers ever took long road trips. The guy in the surf shop thought long and hard when I said we were kooks. He couldn’t really think of anyplace good for us between La Fonda and Todos Santos eight hundred miles to the south. Or maybe he didn’t want to. He did mention a famous spot called Scorpion Bay, but he said there had to be a decent swell from the right direction and it was a long way off the main highway.
I was getting the idea that most of the well-known spots would be over our heads, breaking too fast or breaking on rocks and reef. And the less threatening breaks like this would be as packed as California. We drove down to the bluff and through an arched concrete gate and a man in a straw hat came out of a house with a ticket book and took $18 for the night. Eighteen dollars! For that we better get a view. The campers were mostly Californians. Music spilled out of the Jeeps and RVs. Coolers everywhere crammed with beer. We rattled past a giant white water tank with rows of shower heads sticking off of pipes beneath it. Surfers were stripping off shorty wetsuits and sudsing up in the long warm evening sunlight. We rattled to the edge of the cliff, which was lined with campers, and I asked a Mexican family if they could move a couple of lawn chairs. We wedged in on the precipice under the blast of techno from a bar across the lot.
We looked at each other. Mexico. Time to make this car a home. We dug out the weight belts and strapped them on and jerked up the top. The sun balanced on the wide water. Well, we had made camp before dark like good boys and girls. There was no wind, and all along the line of the break below us knots of surfers gathered at the peaks.
THE END OF SOMETHING
La Fonda was harder than we were used to. The waves broke farther out, so it was a longer paddle, and they broke faster. But we had each gotten a couple of good rides and we were tired in the way one can only be aft
er a day of being battered by waves. We rinsed off the salt under the tank, and every cell of my skin felt alive to the breeze. Muscles relaxed, fatigued, happy, the wash of adrenaline ebbing away like a tide. The rhythm of rising and falling water still moved through our bodies like music.
It was Monday night and mercifully quiet. Kim and I had endured two nights of blazing party. The techno had gotten really enthusiastic after midnight and when it finally died down we had been treated to an hour of fireworks by some boys from San Diego; that was Saturday night. Sunday night there was a loud fight. The waves were crowded. Shower water ran in algae-chocked rivulets past the campsites. Cigarette butts and wrappers littered the packed dirt. A lot of campers pulled out early Monday morning, evidently on their way back to work in California. It had not been exactly relaxing.
But now the crowds were gone. I had the nose of my 8–6 up on a chunk of wood and was patching a small ding. I glanced over at the couple in the campsite next to us. A pretty girl poked forlornly at a smoky fire. On the dirt beside her lay the red plastic tie from the bundle of split firewood sold at the gate for five bucks. She wore a sorority sweatshirt and a blue ribbon in her blond hair. The boy, a little older, dug a pack of hot dogs out of a travel cooler in the back of his compact pickup. He was tall, lean, broad, and moved with the erect, shoulders back balance of a lifetime surfer. He opened a can of beans and set it inside the ring of rocks beside the fire. He put a hot dog on a fork and tried to roast it. Didn’t look like the brightest idea.
“Fuck. Damn.” He dropped the dog in the dirt, sucked his fingers. The girl rolled her eyes. He pulled the sleeve of his long T over his hand and grabbed the fork again, knocked off the ashes, thought better of it. He went back to the truck. He found a roll of aluminum foil, wrapped up four new dogs, and lay it in the fire.
She crossed her legs in the low camp chair and swung her beach sandal back and forth at the end of her toes, looked around the camp.