This Is the Place

by Margot Kahn

  My parents made Baja friends—windsurfers and gringo retirees—and even consumed the occasional margarita. These new friends, who I would meet on my visits, all seemed to know a slightly different pair of people than I did. To them, David and Linda enjoyed leisure. They had people over for drinks. They owned kayaks. These things resonated with nothing I had ever observed during the eighteen years I had lived with my parents.

  I snorkeled in the Sea of Cortez for the first time, descending the newly built concrete stairs to the beach and swimming out in front of the house. Floating above the rocks, I tailed yellow and black angelfish, sergeant majors with their vertical stripes, clusters of tiny puffer fish, and long, silvery cornetfish. Schools of blue-and-gold snappers swam in towards shore, then darted back out to sea. Reef fish are highly territorial, and every day I swam out I saw the same individual boxfish loitering around the same rock formation. I would float on the surface until I spotted it, about six inches long, deep indigo-black and covered with white polka dots.

  At dawn, six days a week, a droning, rhythmic buzz rose from the water. It was fishermen leaving the village in the simple, sturdy outboards called pangas, bows slapping the water like metronomes. They paralleled the shore, heading north every morning, and returned before the afternoon winds picked up. If you timed it right, you could intercept a fisherman on the beach upon his return, and buy a huachinango—a Pacific red snapper—before he sold his haul to the trucks that came from Los Cabos and La Paz. In the afternoons, windsurfers steered their taut, triangular sails on miles-long reaches towards open sea before tacking back to shore. We watched them like we watched the birds, admiring color, grace, and the way they knew how to use an air current to their advantage.

  In those early days there were fewer houses around, and the wildlife still had a tendency to encroach. One morning I opened the door to the bathroom and there, coiled into a spiral on the tiled shower floor, was a disturbingly long, thick snake. I caught my breath, stepped back, and slammed the door shut. Then I slowly cracked it open and peeked back in: I hadn’t imagined it. It was pale and scaly, with distinctive black and brown blotches in a symmetrical row along its full length, the marks of a rattlesnake. It was larger than the ones I’d seen, alive and dead, on nearby roads, or maybe it just looked bigger because it was curled in my shower. I closed the door and heard my heart pound.

  Immediately regressing, I did what any child would do in the situation: I called my dad—the professor, the suburbanite, the late-night mathematician. And he, after taking a look at the creature and closing the door with great care, scratched his head and stroked his beard as he pondered options. It wasn’t as though there was some snake removal service you could call, even if we had had a telephone. Still, I was surprised when he returned from the garage with a machete. “We have a machete?” I asked my mom.

  I did not see the ensuing operation. I heard clanging and grunting; forever after there would be gash marks on the tile. “Don’t go in there,” he said when he emerged, sweat beads visible on his forehead. “It’s a mess.”

  Most of the specific, fully articulated advice I remember my dad ever giving me had to do with cars and money: Check your oil. Carry tire chains in the trunk. Buy real estate and index funds, and don’t try to game the stock market. On a long, late-afternoon walk through the cactus-covered hillside, earth rosy in the waning light, he urged me to open a Roth IRA. He rarely weighed in on anyone I was dating, but when he did, he tended to be right. I called home in tears once from a sublet in New York’s Soho; the man I was seeing had broken it off. My chattier, more outwardly emotional mother was absent, so I laid it all on my father. After listening for a while, he said simply, “it sounds like he’s bad news for you.” And somehow that made the truth suddenly obvious and actionable.

  When I got pulled over for speeding in my Ford Escort at the age of nineteen, my father, who I feared would be mad, sat down beside me and with no rancor, compared me to a loaf of bread that just wasn’t quite baked. Even two decades later, during what would turn out to be his later years, I wasn’t entirely sure that I was. In the years after my parents built the Baja house, I moved to New York, then to Washington, DC, then to Paris. Then New York again. My parents visited me in every city where I lived. In Brooklyn my father, by then well into his seventies, hoisted a heavy armoire onto his back, where it dwarfed him, and carried it up the steps into my apartment building.

  Living back in North America, I discovered a five-hour direct flight from Newark to Los Cabos. The southern cape was developing, and the state had paved one of the dirt roads between Los Cabos and La Ventana, cutting the three-hour drive from the airport in half. I could leave Brooklyn in the early morning and be at the house by mid-afternoon.

  We kept a stick-shift Nissan pickup truck with a broken air conditioner at the house. During absences, mice sometimes took up residence in the engine and we had to make sure they didn’t chew through anything essential. I drove around in flip flops, Mexican folk music blaring from the radio, now happily reminded of my own primordial muck, before Baja and writing for pay, a time of crummy cars, poor decisions, sunshine, and bare feet. All the locals who had sold lots to foreigners had purring, big-tired, shiny trucks, amid which our Nissan was an eyesore. Friends who came to visit asked if we couldn’t please use their rental cars instead. I took an irrational pleasure in our old truck, though. The pickup was part of the place for me, and the place reminded me subtly that I didn’t have to live one particular way. In New York I worked at a magazine, endured blizzards, and deemed car ownership insane. But in Baja, the spot where my parents played out a new act, I felt like I still had choices about who I was going to be.

  When, around 2012, my parents first said they were thinking about selling the house, I hoped they were just floating the idea, conducting a mental experiment. I felt a deep sense of possession, as though something that was rightfully mine was under threat. I argued with my dad. What he never said explicitly was that he had less energy these days. That caring for the house was draining him, physically and mentally. He had begun to feel the responsibility as a burden. I offered to take it over, to buy it. In fact, I didn’t have the money to do this, but beyond my lack of funds, I sensed that he didn’t want me to have it at any price. He preferred not to bequeath his children a remote, high-maintenance stucco house at risk of annual hurricane damage. The old, preretirement dad was back, the one who didn’t dabble in luxuries, who preferred owning things that made sense on spreadsheets. I tried to reason him away from this point of view, with no luck.

  They listed it, but it didn’t sell. They stopped going to Baja, but I continued my annual pilgrimage.

  When I first met Joe, another wandering writer, I told him during one of our earliest conversations that I would like to someday drive from Vancouver to Baja’s southern cape. He said that sounded fun. Four years later, married and living on the West Coast again, we did. We covered the thousand-mile stretch south of Tijuana in three days, taking turns at the wheel of our nicked but sturdy Subaru, plunging through canyons of elephantine boulders, winding above the sea, pausing in missionary towns surrounded by lush oases.

  On La Ventana bay, the pangas didn’t buzz northward every morning anymore, due to a combination of overfishing and the lure of other trades. Fish were, paradoxically, easier to get, because instead of haggling with a lone fisherman, you could just go to the pescaderia in town. There was a proper tortilleria now, too, and well-marked trails all over the hills where you could run or ride a mountain bike. In winter, you could now take a yoga class any day of the week. Windsurfing had all but disappeared, but kiteboarding had boomed, and now we watched that sport’s airborne sails move south along the bay every afternoon. My polka-dotted boxfish, or its progeny, still lurked around the same rocky reef where I had always seen it. Manuel had passed away the previous fall at the age of seventy-nine, so I visited his widow at their compound to pay respects on behalf of myself and my parents.

  The house entered
into contract a month after we learned the cancer in my father’s bowels was stage four. Joe and I were in Baja when he started chemotherapy. I felt glad I could be at the house one last time, but uneasy over the miles between my dad and me. I embraced the practical tasks that fell to me during that trip, like letting the realtor in to inventory the contents; they made me feel useful in the face of an otherwise helpless situation. For all my earlier railing against the idea of selling, I felt some relief when I looked at a crack in the wall and realized I didn’t have to worry about whether it was caused by a shift in the foundation—it wasn’t going to be my problem. This is what my father was unburdening me of, and now it was my job to help him.

  The final time I left the Baja house, I took a last look at the sea from the roof, then descended the outdoor stairs and climbed into the car, which was fully packed for the 2,300-mile drive ahead. Joe had checked the oil, as he always does before a trip, and was seated at the wheel.

  After I got in, he jumped out and ran to the courtyard gate, from where I heard a familiar, hollow tolling. A moment later he was back in the car, where he handed me the cow bell that had hung on our gate for so many years. We drove through El Sargento, now many times larger than it was during my first visit. We passed Manuel’s home, the church, and the pescaderia, and drove from dirt onto paved road. Tawny hills met blue sky met dark blue sea, Baja’s three-part color wheel. At a new building that housed the realtor’s office, Joe pulled over, and I got out and dropped off the keys. My dad now had one less thing to worry about.

  He passed away five months later. The cow bell now sits on my desk in our urban home. Occasionally, I ring it, and I’m back in Baja—my father fiddling with some repair, my mother puttering in the garden, and me at my desk, looking out at the pelicans and sails.

  Elisabeth Eaves is the author of Wanderlust: A Love Affair with Five Continents and Bare: The Naked Truth About Stripping. Her writing has been anthologized in The Best American Travel Writing (2009), The Best Women’s Travel Writing (2010), and Lonely Planet’s A Moveable Feast, and she is the winner of three Lowell Thomas awards from the Society of American Travel Writers. An editor at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and a former staff writer at Forbes, she has also written for Afar, Marie Claire, the New York Times, Slate, the Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. She is also the co-founder of Type Set, a co-working space for writers in Seattle. Elisabeth lives in Seattle with her husband, Joe.

  We Carried Ourselves Like Villagers

  Catina Bacote

  I go back and whole apartment buildings are gone. Brush completely covers the brook. There are no basketball courts, clotheslines, or cellar doors. The wooden logs that marked the bus stop have been taken up, too. Even the sign, green with white letters, EASTERN CIRCLE has been done away with. I watch a few kids run around in the cool evening air, under a darkening sky. My childhood here may not have been so different from theirs, but then again maybe it was, because even though the layout is the same—apartment buildings strung along a sloping hill, thin trees scattered here and there, and a handful of parking lots—the spirit of the place has changed.

  The projects lie on the easternmost edge of the city and when I was growing up it seemed as far away from the mall, McDonald’s, Burger King, and the Coliseum as any neighborhood could get while still being in New Haven. It felt like we were more in the country than in the city, and it wasn’t just the shallow brook that we jumped across or the rust-colored cliffs that broke the skyline; it was the way we just about lived outside in the summer and how we could recognize someone from far away by the cut of his face or the curve of his back as an Allen or a Diamond or a Ricks. It seemed like only a dozen or so families lived in the neighborhood because so many of us had relatives there, whole clans with long-standing ties to the projects stretched from the top of the hill all the way to its bottom.

  We carried ourselves like villagers—charming, quiet, territorial—and even though our well-being didn’t hinge on the rotation of crops or a robust rainy season, our rhythms were still in tune with the seasons. Regardless of what the calendar announced, we marked summer from the first warm day of spring to the last balmy day of fall; winter was no more than a holding pattern, a time to cool down and rest, because as soon as the days got longer, Eastern Circle opened up.

  Picture the first hint of clear skies and rising temperatures: shorts yanked from the bottom of drawers, feet slipped into dusty sandals, apartment doors thrown wide, and hundreds—and I mean hundreds—of kids waking up from a short slumber, a hypnotic haze, and fanning out across the projects. We didn’t just settle for jump rope or Mother-May-I, we put our hands on everything Eastern Circle offered: stacking mud pies along the side of buildings, catching caterpillars in mason jars, and spreading eagle on the ground, one eye opened and the other closed, aiming our marble for the makeshift hole.

  The ground below our feet and the sky hovering above our heads belonged to us and nothing in our line of sight was off limits, except the thicket of Slippery Elms and Red Pines that stirred behind the brick buildings. Once nighttime came slow and easy, and made its way over the day, snakes, dogs, skunks, raccoons, and possums scurried into the projects. Only the small striped skunks left something behind. And since I had lived in Eastern Circle all my life I recognized the stench of their spray—musk and rot—as easily as the mouthwatering smells of bacon and grits and sweet potato pie. But most of the time the shadowy world of knotted trees and thick branches served as only a backdrop to all our fun.

  Except for the day my friend and I skidded back and forth in my grandparents’ yard kicking up dirt. Around the time when I called safe and she whined no fair, the massive trunks and twisted branches unleashed a pack of dogs. They didn’t seem to move toward us as much as drop down on us, a sudden hailstorm of muscled jaws, dark gums, and teeth. I ran one way and my friend ran another, and the dogs chased her. She stumbled up a rocky hill on the side of the yard before the dogs pinned her against a wall. Up on their hind legs, they growled in her face. She cried. They moved in closer. Her ponytails bobbed in and out of my sight. Hollering, I jumped up and down.

  My grandfather rushed through his screen door with a huge wooden stick, charging right into the pack of dogs. His voice boomed. The span of his broad back widened. Dust rose as high as his cheekbones. And just as quickly as they had come, the dogs retreated.

  Living in Eastern Circle and being under Dada’s watchful eye were one and the same. Stories from my family and neighbors about his acts of rescue were varied: Dada found a finger that had been severed and flung into the grass. Dada caught the pregnant woman flying down a flight of stairs. Dada arrived a moment before the bully threw his first punch. And even if you hadn’t heard any of the stories or spent time hanging out with him on his porch you knew his garden.

  The twenty rows of fruits and vegetables stood out from everything around it. The projects’ two-story brick apartment buildings looked identical. Each one had six apartments, all with the same white metal screen door. The garden broke up the monotony; its shades of emerald, ruby red, burnt orange, and gold deepened with the day’s changing light; from week to week, buds spread and leaves unfurled. Even the dirt, raked and moist, yielded variation: smooth stones broken into bits, tiny sand crystals, dark clay.

  People came by the house just to be near it.

  I lived up the hill from my grandparents with my mother and brother. Whenever I walked to my grandparents’ house Dada’s garden slowly came into view: tomato plants wrapped around branches, yellow squash tucked between leaves, eggplant suspended from vines like dark half moons. The last time I visited him I was a teenager and his work from the morning had left its mark. The loosened soil and watered rose buds gave the yard a sweet, earthy smell.

  We sat on the porch and dealt with matters big and small, like what kind of grades I had earned during my freshman year of high school and what he thought of my new boyfriend. He didn’t go on and on about what needed to be done or s
pin corny homilies like do your best or be careful. It wasn’t his style, plus he liked to hear me talk. He thought all my words lined up just right, even my beginner’s Spanish. So with great exaggeration I shook my mouth loose and told him to repeat after me: azul, marron, dorado, violeta. Raising only one of his eyebrows and clearing his throat, he asked me if I was ready. I pretended to think about it before I nodded. He didn’t speak Spanish, but he like to put on a show, so he gave a lot of weight to each word and rolled his r’s way too long. I leaned into his shoulder and laughed.

  I’ve come back to Eastern Circle because my memories of my grandfather rest here and even though it’s been over twenty years since I lived in the projects I’ve never found a place that felt so much like home. My grandparents moved into the development the first year it opened, in 1960, and four generations of my family have settled on this land. Sometimes I conjure up the neighborhood as more mythical than real, and I let my memories have their way, because there is an understanding to be gained in the mythical too—a way to get at a truth that can’t be reached any other way.

  When my family lived in Eastern Circle it was one tight-knit neighborhood. Twenty-one apartment buildings and one hundred and twenty black families all held together by the circle: a ring-shaped street in the center of the projects. Now walkways and signs divide buildings into distinct sections. And the porches flanked by two white columns look separate from everything around them. The kids have fewer places to gather, too: most of the grass fields have been replaced by concrete. The neighborhood seems like a scattering of apartments with nothing at its center.