BAJA CALIFORNIA

Mexico’s Land Apart

“a Pathless, waterless, thornful rock, sticking up between two oceans” – wrote a Jesuit
missionary in 18th Century, describing the scene of his ordeals, Baja, or lower California.

High and dry, the mountains forming the peninsula’s backbone are particularly
uninhabited.
“If it were lush and rich, one could understand the pull, but it is fierce and hostile and
sullen.” – John Steinbeck

100 miles of water, more or less, divide the peninsula called Baja or lower California
from the rest of Mexico – this body of water is also known as the Gulf of California. In a
1000 small ways the isolation has shaped the natural and human history of the Baja
peninsula and made it as twins raised on opposite sides of a mountain range. Both born
poor and have spent their days looking to the desert sky for miracles. But Baja grew up
harder and lonelier and generally worse off than other parts of Mexico – mainly because
here the sky so rarely, cooperates. Baja’s central desert gets between 1 – 3 inches rain a
year – about the same as Death Valley. Except for hurricane years and a few regions that
get unpredictable downpours, all Baja is a desert full of thorns and sharp rocks and wide-
eyed children who have never seen an umbrella. People are spread thin. Because it is
barren and mountainous and exceedingly lean in the things that make men rich, Baja has
repeatedly foiled man’s attempts to make something out of it.

Discovered in 1533, this new land was dubbed ‘California’ for its resemblance to a
fictional island described by a Spanish author of the day. Guerrero Negro, where the
world’s largest solar-evapourative salt mine is located. The new highway has paved the
way for development and watered Baja’s dry-gulch economy with a steady stream of
American cash.

Mexico’s highway 1 – beyond Tijuana the highway rambles along the scenic Pacific
coast, its reverie interrupted by billboards and banners plugging in fractured English, the
condominiums, restaurants, and hotels built along the road for US consumption.
Wherever the highway goes, it captures towns – pulling commerse away from the centers
to strip along the pavement. Tourists become fewer the farther south you drive along
Mexico 1. Many never make it past the curio shops and cantinas of Ensenada, home of
the Baja 1000 off-road race and the Mexican tuna fleet.

The peninsula if a crazy mix of Mexico and US.

“If Mexicans went to San Diego and acted the way some Americans act down here, we
wouldn’t just throw them in jail, we’d close the border.”
A gray-haired matriarch says, “Bad roads, good people. Good roads, all kinds of people.”
Living off the barren land, paipal Indians were so isolated that they escaped deadly
epidemics of smallpox, measles, and other diseases that spread from mission to mission.
Like their ancestors, they use a fine pit to bake agave, a staple of the Indian diet. “It’s not
easy to get food from cactus.” One observes, “But if we work hard, God gives us just
enough to live.”

The highway turns inland, away from the cool Pacific, and sets out alone into a torrid
landscape of cactus and dust and the bones of a thousand dead automobiles, picked clean
by backyard mechanics.

Symbol of Baja – a tumbledown mission, or a heap of rusty mining equipment, or a

clutch of abandoned ranch houses reeling in the wind. These monuments to the failed
dreams of Baja California bristle with the sound of sand carried on the hot wind and they
invariably gather other things cast away, blocking the litter that blows incessantly across
the landscape, fluttering around forever immune to the disintegrating effects of rain
because there is none.
Driving the desert, the thermometer reads 100 F. The scene out our window was a no
mans land of reddish volcanic mountains and scorched vegetations. Mars with cactus.

“It’s a thin line between life and death this time of the year.” A lot of plants go into a
dormant phase during drought, like deciduous trees in winter. They die by degrees – first
the tips of branches, then the branches, then the stem. The roots are the last to go, and all
it takes is a little rain to reverse the process.”

Indians roamed this desert during pre-Columbian times they hunted snakes to supplement
their diet of beetles, mice, lizards, cactus pulp and roasted agaves. Red meat was a
delicacy so prized that they customarily tied a string around each morsel, chewed and
swallowed it, then pulled it back up for the next fellow. During the summer they dried
their feces in the sun, picked out the seeds, ground them up, and ate them again. Winds
and a thousand changes in climate have sculpted these rocks into monuments to the
sublime hand of erosion, and in the white sands grow plants that match them in size and
majesty. Later, cloaked in the light of a dying fire, we listened to the creek of cactuses
swaying in the wind and warmed our bellies with tequila from a tin cap. Somewhere out
in the boulders, a coyote wailed beneath a spray of cold stars. Evolved in isolation, the
buojum tree grows only in Baja California and across the gulf of Sonora.

One perfect afternoon I took a walk in the desert. I could smell rain, and it seemed the
desert could smell it too. On that afternoon, in that place, I could hear those sun-tortured
old cactuses cloaked in thorns and withered hide, sigh with sweet anticipation, poised for
rain, then the clouds went away, as they always seem to, and the land became very still
and quiet. The sun shone, and again the heat was clear and sharp.