Sunday, March 31, 2013

Pissing in the Ocean


3/31/13
The news is full of ultra conservative Islamists this and that and how these guys and any secular parts of the respective populations in Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Iraq and on, can’t agree on how to share power. They all end up rioting in the street and blowing each other up. The people who get power end up disenfranchising the others. I wonder from afar: these guys all live in the same country, why can’t they be on the same team? Why can’t they pull together and put ideological differences aside for some constructive nation building where all would benefit? Give the religious guys some space but don’t let them run roughshod over the secular; find a system where everybody can have some breathing room. It only makes sense. Why can’t we just get along?

Then I have an epiphany, this same sort of dynamic is playing out right here in my own backyard in the USA.  And the question arises: is there any real difference between ultra conservative Islamists and ultra conservative Christians or Jews? No there is not. This issue is not about content; it’s about dogmatic behavior.

This is the exact same dynamic we’re seeing in Washington DC, the no compromise, black and white view of the world. Here is the exact same paralysis and inability to get along, failure to be on the same team, failure to address common challenges. No need to worry about ultra conservative foreigners, Talibans and Islamic fundamentalists, we have our very own brand here at home. These people are all essentially the same in their behavior, rigid, inflexible, literal, impossible to reason with. Everyone has everyone else checkmated and the future looks bleak for any kind of e pluribus unum.

The critical difference in America is that the US came into being explicitly to avoid theocracy, to give space for the religious to be free, in all their particulars, at least ideally. Every religion thinks it is literally true but in spite of this paradox, in the US there is breathing room to practice. US religions need to be content with this great gift and allow freedom for all; that’s our umbrella; that’s our game plan. We in the US are not about imposing one religion’s strictures on everybody else. Any movement towards theocracy just dooms us to an age-old spiral of repression of which modernizing beliefs were supposed to cure.

The paradox: religions themselves don’t grant each other any legitimacy anyway. There is no salvation through religion in general because the religious are all at each other's throats as well. The dogmatic proposition is a zero sum game. These questions cannot be argued along the level of content because none of these guys give an inch; it’s a waste of time to talk about content with the religious or those for whom politics has become religion. Unfortunately this same template applies to ideology of all kinds. The vast and rich texture of human thought and culture gets reduced to an all or nothing proposition, incredibly foolish but indelibly woven into our behavior.

In the US we have our freedom mythos, but freedom for who, for what, why? Practically speaking, freedom seems to be only for those who get power; the rest have to suck it up. The Civil War was our version of riots in the Egyptian street and it’s plain to see that for many that war is far from over. There is not much difference politically between the current US and the current Egypt or Iraq. 

Democracy is in tension with freedom because once a majority rules, it precludes freedom for the minority. Any democracy contains the seeds of its own undoing then; it will only last as long as those who get power respect minority rights or a rule of law. And rule of law is anathema to the theocratically or ideologically inclined. Laws are seen by these folks simply as means to entrenching power. I just wonder why people can’t allow each other to exist with different views? Why the propensity for a zero sum outcome? I can let all churchgoers and abortion getters live; they don’t hurt me; why does any of this have to be all or nothing?

All these tensions and contradictions are inherent in human behavior in general, not just the US; Machiavelli, power and control these issues come up in everything, not just religion. Study baboons and you’ll have people pretty well figured out.

As an example of what the world is up against, we are having to deal with people who think the sun revolves around the earth, that Adam and Eve lived with the dinosaurs, that there is no need to steward the earth now as all is about some after life. If these Gods are so powerful, why are they letting people behave in such immoral ways? Why are they letting the world go to hell in a hand basket? What kind of crazy game is it that people are supposed to have so much faith in? Well, this is about people after all, not gods, people are the ones creating the mess. People are the ones behind it all, not gods. Gods are just a smokescreen, a Wizard of Oz fog machine to deflect responsibility for humanity’s own actions.

With my perspective colored by the manufactured fiascos of the fiscal cliff and the sequester, I arrive at only a more solid opinion that the human race is incapable of co-existing and that we are doomed to go down in the flames of internecine warfare of all types.

In Egypt, they have this great Arab Spring, a chance to turn the tables on a nasty dictatorship and find a brighter future. What do they do? They find another dictator ASAP. These guys should be on the same team, everybody getting a seat at the table, ways found to give everyone a bone. What instead? We see an incapability of being able to work together, the same all or nothing scenario seen across the whole world. The results?  Paralysis and violence.

This all the while species like the rhinoceros, tiger and leatherback sea turtle face extinction because people cannot cooperate to behave appropriately when dealing with natural resources. Sensible behavior and stewardship is trumped by a free-for-all of every dog for himself.

I guess people can find space to be optimists but as far as I can see, that is pretty much pissing in the ocean.

Thursday, March 28, 2013

AFSC - IMYM Joint Service Project


In 1996 my mother found an ad in the Friends Journal for a service project in Mexico and said she would pay if I wanted to go. This first trip to Trigo Moreno, into the Sierra Madre Mountains in Mexico, set me onto totally new paths and enriched my life in ways so interesting and deep that I am really thankful I chose to go. I’ve been back so many times now it totals years.

For me, the opportunities for self-reflection, reflection back onto life in America, reflection back into past life ways, the chance to perfect my Spanish language, the chance to make new friends from another world, led me to attend the University of Sonora for 1 year in 1998, and to continue to return to Mexico with a respect and admiration for the people and the culture.

I have developed a great interest in the regional history of NW Mexico, studied the plants and ecosystems, the current economy, broadened my travels in the region and feel like I have become a part of the story. I am no longer a mere visitor, an outside observer. I see Mexico from the inside and now, during this time of contention about immigration, I see the human face behind all the talk.

As well, these AFSC-IMYM projects have introduced me to dynamic and interesting people who are as much a cause for growth as going to Mexico itself. It is a great opportunity to associate and to measure one’s own thoughts against the depths of considered and deep Quakers and like-minded people. It is really fun to be in a mixed age group where all flavors of idealism and experience can be tasted.

All this above, mixed into real-world situations, just really stirs the pot and creates a context for a transformational experience. If life is not about growth and deepening, then what is it for?  To me, these projects represent the opportunity to find real quality and value. If you want the real deal, this is it. And as for flavors, this formula is simple but really satisfying. The simplicity magnifies, brings you to the essence, which is waiting to be discovered, you choose to drink or not, modern camouflage is stripped away and what is left can potentially be clear insight, meaningful growth and transformation.

I really support this program and the leadership of Mike Gray and would encourage anyone interested to find out for themselves or to contribute that which they may.




Sierra Madre to Baja, 2007 Journal



Trip to La Mesa De Abajo, Chihuahua and to Baja California: 6 Weeks on the Road


10/24/07
The area now inhabited by La Mesa de Abajo village was previously territory of the Lower Pima Indians. Up until the late 1800s Apaches raided down into this area of the Sierra Madre as well. As the Spanish moved north in their conquest of Mexico, Missions were built, mining was undertaken and gradually the Indians were pushed back into marginal terrain and into a marginal role in society; they were a conquered people. Upon this land came immigrants from North Carolina, fleeing the Civil War or it’s effects. Their last names were Clark, Moore and DeMoss and they came to Bermudes, Chihuahua and eventually their families colonized the nearby area and pueblos now known as El Cordon, Campo Americano, El Encinal, La Mesa Atrvesada and La Mesa de Abajo among others.

In those days there were no roads into La Mesa de Abajo (La Mesa) and large predators and Indians had not yet been extirpated. It would not be long for that however as cattle ranching and grizzlies, jaguars and wolves just do not mix. Now there may be an occasional puma but for all intents and purposes, the cattle are free to roam and investments on the hoof pretty much stay alive save for accidents and old age. There are Indians now, a few Guarijillo living in La Mesa. Indians have as well mixed into the Mexican gene pool but the former cultures are pretty much a pale shadow if even that.

At La Mesa there were no utilities and it was not until relatively recently that there was introduced small solar electric systems and a solar water pump to bring water up from a spring in a lower arroyo. In the 70s people started to get diesel cattle trucks. Almost all home construction was and is with adobe. Barns and sheds and most buildings at the ranchos are of wood. Roofs were thatch, maybe of palmillo, of which there are still some, including the oldest and largest house, that of Tomas Clark Villa.

Initially La Mesa was covered with mature pines, probably similar to ponderosa pine parkland. Small wells were dug around the houses but this did not last seasonally and/or in dry years and water had to be hauled from below. The older boys worked all day hauling water, one trip after another. Water must have been a crucial issue during the late winter and spring when cattle had to be brought to the mesa top due to lack of forage below. Now corn stalks and leaves are milled with gas-powered mills, usually run by an old, disembodied truck engine and belts. This feed is bagged and stored, along with the left-overs from bean threshing, to feed the cattle in the winter. I don’t know how or if they milled the corn before. From the get-go the people became intimately acquainted with the level of carrying capacity of the land, water and their labor. You couldn’t have more cattle than you could feed and water, plain and simple.

The pine parkland was cleared for what is now a series of family fields and holdings between the two “bandas” or family groups there, the Clark Villa band and the Clark Moore band. They refer to each other in general as “la otra banda” or the other group/family. There is a third family, that of Don Facundo Lopez Quintero and the two unmarried sisters Luz and Candida. The sisters are near blood cousins of the Clark Moores who inherited the land that Facundo has worked. They adopted Jesus who married a girl, Rafaela, from La Mesa Colorada. Hard drinking is haunting the Lopez Quintero men; Facundo quit some 30 years ago after much strife and fighting and now Jesus is battling the same trouble. Tavo Clark Moore says Facundo is just like family, muy Buena gente, which goes to show that you can make a new beginning after the drink has brought you low.

 Bayo beans are grown as well as corn and squash, there are apple orchards nearby, quince, many peach trees and kitchen gardens. Other fruit and nut trees have been brought in, walnuts, a citrus tree called naranja-limon or orange-lime, the plantings all seem to have one use or another. In good years enough beans can be grown to eat, save for seed and sell. Calves are sold, cattle butchered and sold, cheese, butter and requezon (cottage cheese) made in September for the year, milk dranken (sic) at the ranchos and from a home milking cow, jamoncillo (boiled milk candy) made for a sweet treat and in general enough food can be generated to get by. As Jose Luis said, “we are not dying of hunger”. Another person told me there is “always enough” beans, even in bad years when too much rain, hail, frost or not enough rain impacts the harvest.

Amidst of this is a social, family world where all is intertwined. Everyday is a face-to-face day where the modern notion of being an individual does not apply. There is no turning inward away from the community to interact only on one’s own terms. These people have grown up together every day and they know all the details of each other’s lives. That there is this face-to-face aspect does not therefore mean that all is one big happy family, hardly so, only that this is the form of human social organization people have used since the beginning and from which some of us are recently emancipated, for good or ill. It seems curious, compelling, different, genuine, whatever, to the outsider; to the insiders, it is just the life they live. To outsiders the parameters of their life’s book are interesting, the salient aspects stick out and are noticed but as with all storybook characters and fish inside tanks, they usually don’t know they are delimited; that’s just how things are.

Today the traditional world there is undergoing change; little by little a growing steam of modernization affects the day-to-day life and plans for the future. It takes a lot of work to manage a family herd of cattle, grow and harvest crops, repair homes, repair fences, make cheese and butter, make clothes, shoes and saddles, blacksmith metal  products and maintain a water system.  The young folks have had a taste of modern life in Ciudad Obregon, Sonora and many have left and are not coming back to be farmer/ranchers. Few of the up and coming are planning to stay and continue this life style. There are kids in the computer business, as carpenters, electricians, factory workers, as street taco vendors, in school to be architects, kids who have illegally crossed the border and the adults themselves spend more and more time in Obregon returning only for crucial functions and tasks. The cash economy has drawn people away.  The older Thomas Jefferson type of freeman economy, a very admirable self-sufficiency, of make stuff all yourself, that is free, yes, but damn hard. Many are willing to sacrifice this freedom for more ease and convenience and for the Pandora temptations of the modern world.

Those that stay manage the affairs of their extended family, mainly cattle issues, herd movements between pastures etc. The grandparent generation does not want to be anywhere else but since winters can be cold, they end up stir crazy in the city until they can come back. Of course this is all quite a simplification, but the observations hold to a degree.

Given the ubiquity of the drug industry in Mexico there has been some speculation by close outsiders that some may be involved in growing pot. How could they get all the money to buy those houses in Obregon, vehicles, new roof, etc? However others close to the scene say no. I guess people will gossip. And until the hard facts are in, it is all talk.

In one big respect, people are moving out not only from modernization pressures and the desire for an easier life in a cash economy but also because of the limited level of resource carrying capacity of the land. The land cannot be subdivided indefinitely. If each banda or extended family can run approximately 250 to 300 cattle, on range below La Mesa around the main water drainages, each kid cannot just indefinitely add another 50 cattle for themselves. This is basic Malthusian math.

So then part of the other side of all the immigration issues people hear about in the US, part of this is the result of a growing Mexican population and less resource base. It’s also modernization and industrialization of agriculture. People have to go to the city as the country provides pretty much nada if you don’t have any land. So you have to move out as there is not the resource base for your whole generation there at La Mesa, maybe you learn a trade like Sigifredo and Dora’s boys and stay in Mexico in a city or maybe you cross the border illegally like the son of my good friends. All these sons then live in two worlds, at once modern and traditional. They are on a hero’s journey, to master two worlds and bring back a boon from their adventure. Or more simply, they may stand to make a high hourly wage and then be able to send some money home. One son brought his Mom a washing machine from the US and a generator, so now maybe she doesn’t have to spend so much time washing each item by hand on a cement washboard. Women spend an awful lot of time in the kitchen and doing laundry, so stuff like being able to buy tortillas and have a washing machine, can save two, three or more hours a day.

This living in two worlds for the younger generation and for the older folks who go to Ciudad Obregon more, has got to create cultural dissonance and friction. You see you can buy shoes instead of make them, you can buy beans instead of grow them, you can finish your job and be done for the day, no cattle to tend, fences to repair, wells and water lines to tend. Maybe there are other religions, other ideas and notions, the Internet, there is satellite TV with 500 channels and the small, Sierra Madre world is blown to smithereens. There is no telling how many ways a culture is broadened and how it changes. Probably little by little as each extended family member decides to adopt this or that feature. One sign is by who wears baseball hats and who wears sombreros. The younger and/or more progressive wear the baseball hats mostly and only sombreros to special functions, the older folks always wear a sombrero and never a baseball hat. There must be plenty of other stuff like that.

Still the yearly markers and fiestas draw people back to the traditional core. The great round of life itself provides passages that are marked at the village level, marriage, birth, death, planting, harvest, cheese time, all these sew threads to counteract the currents of modernization.

La Mesa has two major extended families, El Cordon has two extended families, El Encinal has one, Campo Americano one or two. It seems that whole villages are really just extended families. There is a sort of boundary represented by perhaps how far one can ride in a day by horse, how far one goes to a dance and can meet people and this becomes the defacto boundary for an extended family and for a world. One could then, theoretically overlay circles of extended families and lay them over the terrain of the Sierra Madre, this would represent all of their particular and proscribed face-to-face worlds.

So, what do families make off their cattle and agricultural products? How good do these guys do? Calves: $2-4000 per year, beans:up to $1000 per year, plus home trade work, leather, metal, machaca (dried/pounded/shredded beef) businesses. A living can be made right off the land, but it is hard and demanding. Enough can be generated to buy sugar, coffee, flour, produce, gasoline plus tools and whatever, roofing material etc. That there are only nominal land taxes, no income tax, means that people keep just about all they make.  Government services are still provided at a certain level, cement, block, health clinic, help for solar, water, maybe road work once every 10 years, so a family sees clearly their bottom line and that the government will not be taking it away, as in the US, where we have much better roads for our taxes but other additional benefits are not so clear for the 15 or 25 or more percent that we are fleeced for.

There is a yearly round of planting, harvesting, of making cheese, making bacanora etc and a round of the generations rising and falling, grass thriving and then harvested. This all unfolds within the context of, under the umbrella of the traditions that these people have. As I sat one day with Jose Luis comparing the North American cash economy, social mobility etc. Luis noted “our world is very small”. And some do better than others; Gerrardo and Blanca are hustlers, they work hard and earn their money with a machaca business. Gerrardo can be slaughtering cow after cow, can’t find enough cows to buy; he is filling a demand for machaca there in Yecora.

To give a general point of comparison, in the 1930s Tucson, AZ had 30,000 people of which half spoke Spanish. The town was made up of ranches, cattle was king, there were leather shops, tanneries, family businesses etc. This is what you generally find now in many bustling Mexican pueblos and cities, that the economy is agriculturally based with cattle ranching predominant and that the level of technology and the means of production are changing towards more modern forms. Instead of a labyrinthine store upon store of family businesses chains are starting to invade, the mass advertising culture is invading, being overlaid upon a life style and economy equivalent to one hundred or more years in the US past. And these guys are supposed to grasp and compete economically in the framework of NAFTA? Shoot, these big treaties seem to exist at a level where only fictional large players can even take advantage; regular folks wonder at it all. It is the same as talk by politicians: what are these guys saying now? All we know is that it does not apply to us, the people on the street.

Yet large cattle trucks, semis, show up in Yecora and cattle are sold to be exported to the US, calves and rodeo bulls, bucking bulls, so there is a consciousness that what is raised at family levels can then go to the US, an awareness of the price per kilo, how 9/11 impacted the export business, how maybe it is more worth it to make machaca in Mexico than to try and score by exporting herds of heifers and calves.

My friends will work as hard as anyone, and do good high quality work but they are like Thomas Jefferson competing against Wall Street, the cards are entirely stacked against them. They are campesinos with maybe 50 cattle each on marginal land in a world of other campesinos in similar situations. They can get by comfortably and even well given predictable weather but they are, like me, small bits of flotsam in the strong current of the modern world economy. The forces at work seem to entice, draw you in but then once you have bitten, once you go for the materialism, you are left with the hollow feeling of having lost your traditions and those things that give meaning to life. Myself, I am born into it; I never had a real traditional life, only mock traditional experiences like at Farm and Wilderness. For me to throw out the hook and revert to the natural state is darn near impossible. It is a Pandora’s Box of modernization that at once allows me to reflect on this life and also to see the aspects of which I may be missing.

Over the years I have developed a sense of the region, of Sonora and southeast Arizona. I am more than an observer; I’m in the story to a degree more than a stranger and as such these musings are not anthropology, they are an insider’s views, an accretion of information representing my travels, interests and studies. I have an anthropology degree but have no expertise in manufacturing pure anthropological things. But I go to Yecora, Sonora, the local commercial and administrative hub in my corner of the Sierra Madre mountains and I see Mini, daughter of Lupeto and Adele,  at El Commercial on the plaza, “oh yes, Johnny Machaca, yes I’ll tell him and the people in Trigo Moreno that you said hi, and yes, Wencho is OK”. The dusty streets of Yecora carry on with the local bustle of life, Gerrardo and Blanca’s machaca business, one after the other of massive old Ford trucks go by, a burro, a mule, the river, the Pima Indian slums on the other side of the river, the plaza, scene of so much debauchery and life’s passages, the church, the Mission, the daily unfolding of sacred and profane, the same guy serving good food in Los Aguajitos restaurant gives me a knowing welcome. Yecora is “town” as in “we’re going to town to get supplies”; “we’re going to town for a fiesta and to get drunk”. Yecora is the first and only big town for a long, long ways. Villagers from all around live in Yecora full or part time, those who don’t make a bigger jump to Obregon, Chihuahua, Hermosillo look to Yecora as the place to go. Kim calls it Yecador. My Mom called it Yucca. It is hard to say, YEH-core-uh.

There is a sense of change in the region, that the old ways are giving over to the new, but  slowly, the forests are getting logged but in a primitive manner, daily life is still sleepy, in it’s own time. Two hundred miles to the north is the border fence with the USA, the Border Patrol is everywhere trying to stop people who make no cash or maybe a dollar a day. Huge fences of steel and barbed wire, high tech radar stand as monolithic dumb statements to complex issues with no easy answers. Paintings and art are festooned on the wall on the Mexican side, mocking, shocking, true, skeletons climbing the wall, it is all they can do or say, as forces large and serious are right there on the other side ready to interdict.

Woven threads of history unravel and are sewn together again. Indians, dispossessed, live in ramshackle huts made of pallets, tarpaper and cardboard, pieced together by whatever is available. Prejudice and poverty they face in large draughts, this after so much blather of civilization, salvation and true religion, so much blood and suffering. It is a cruel and stark reality, the juggernaut of the impulse to convert, civilize, to get mining resources, to benefit, has all left the Indians in abject poverty with their traditional culture shattered. And the church and government have the nerve to speak of the truth and salvation, of what people need to do? When a whole people are smashed and ground up to nothing but a body and a life, and you see them in their shacks and trash, you wonder, what happened? Who is responsible for this? My thoughts move to structural aspects of injustice, large sweeps of state and church actions, people crushed by the force of history and ignorant ideals unable to be seen or reflected upon. Trying to own the Truth blinds you as sure as Icarus flying into the sun.

No one is responsible now; no one can pay the debt, no one can own it, to the hammers the world still looks like nails; the winners take all and leave the conquered as so much flotsam and jetsam. Any just purpose of society seems entirely lost, on both sides of the border. The notion of change by simply pulling oneself up by their bootstraps is a fantasy of the winners and the well off. What seems clear is that society boils down to every dog for himself and that the white man’s civilization has been nothing more than savagery in fine clothes. 

Many who come here to La Mesa and to the rural Sierra are seduced by the sense of idyllic, simple life. Yet any group of people is going to have their problems: that is part of the deal. Idyllic on the face of it, maybe yes, yet underneath are the same human foibles and folly of the whole race: prejudice, lust for power and control, religious intolerance. The issues are not necessarily in finding the right entity to blame, but of maybe looking in the mirror and seeing that is just human nature after all. Just because life appears to be quaint and taking place within a museum exhibit doesn’t mean there are no problems. It is really just a question of scale and technology that make up the big differences. Human troubles are all of a feather; the differences are in how big a bird the feathers are on.

But what an exquisite experience to be dropped into a traditional, face to face village, as if off of the Starship Enterprise, onto an alien world; those on the ship and in the world both ensconced within their perceptive shields, heroically trying to understand any common threads, seeing faults, trying to meet and then: connection! Oila! Horizons are broadened, depths deepened, transformation is gained. And for this gringo, it wears off. And not only this wears off.  My accumulated knowledge and wisdom seems to evaporate in the dawn of a new day. These things have to be lived, not saved and guarded; batteries get discharged. For one such as I seeking the dynamic quality in life and the potential for transformation therein, stasis is just plain boring; the stasis is just a time out, a recharge, do the laundry, rest, a chance to make enough money for the next dynamic adventure. Stasis is the chance to write about the dynamic.

So there exists this foreign world. Leaders then bring people in. In a milieu of two languages, being in a foreign country with lots of questions from the newbies, people in the know can make up answers. Here issues between translation and interpretation are especially pronounced. Interpretation is always an issue anyway, what you think, what you know and for me and other big mouths there exists what I call “professor syndrome”, that you always appear to know what you are talking about even if you really don’t. Sometimes and for whatever reasons, it is hard to say, “I don’t know”. The tongue seems to want to flap. Anyhow, and this is obvious, people say what they know, they can say no more than that, so what comes out of someone’s mouth is a direct indication of the parameters of who they are, the breadth and scope of their experience. Their and the accumulated story, like the Canterbury Tales, has many threads and chapters, and whether it is fact or fiction, for the intrepid traveler, the proof is in the pudding. In a journey into the past, to La Mesa, there is a fantastic element of blurred lines between fact and fiction, between fantasy and reality and that is not only coming from the professors, it is as if you dive into a swirl of vision, of strange desert plants wizzing by, up into the mountains, past ranchos and realities and who you are and who they are and what is happening all gets called into question. New orders emerge, new insights are gained, a reflection on the present that can only be achieved through the triangulation of being in a foreign country, in a lost world and all then gets jumbled and a person is forced to think and make a new order out of the flux.

11/2 Pinacate Biosphere Reserve area
We returned to the USA with the group from La Mesa and I tried to steer us out back out of Tucson ASAP, in spite of friends I have there, as we had limited time and our vacation was not to go to Tucson. We got on over to Organ Pipe National Monument where the desert was really nice, lush, thick, and there we camped essentially on the border with Mexico, poised to go in again. Across into Sonoyta, Sonora and to the Pinacate area it seems extremely dry. It may not have rained here at Cono Rojo since we were here in 3/06. Down in the sandy flats most of the creosote bushes are dead, palo verde trees are dead, senita dead (some with green arms remaining) and yet there is an occasional leafed out ocotillo or brilliant brittlebush. The majority is just bone dry, not a mammal to be seen, few birds. We got our spot at Cono Rojo camp under the lone palo verde tree and it was nice to settle into the vast, mystical quiet. I went immediately, across a good one hour stretch of volcanic desert to a hidden slot canyon, to the Emilia pools which were all dry except two, one small pool in a shady rock depression and the mother pool reduced to a small, algae infested puddle. Even the plants in the Emilia wash are dry. Here in the Pinacate, perhaps one of the harshest, hottest desert areas in North America I suppose the plants must be ready to take it, but now they seemed right on the edge, many dead. How much can it take before it will be gone, turned into something else? This area is in the rain shadow of the Sierra over on the Baja peninsula, in global desert already, the arid factor is multiplied. The heat is multiplied by black lava flows. It is hot, dry, extreme, and very isolated, vast spaces of desert devoid of any human presence; so quiet you can hear sounds of silence.

11/4
I saw one bat, two yellow finches, two ravens, a couple of other little birds, a velvet ant, one dove, a flock of quail, no mammals. Insects and their arthropod ilk seemed to be doing OK. The paucity of wildlife shows that the Pinacate is gripped by a severe drought. It is hard not to notice. Life’s hold is weakening. Is it a shame or is that just the way it is in a marginal area?

If in evolution life leads to no particular end and “progress” is a misnomer why the human emphasis on success and excellence? If evolution is not about leading to any “greater” or “better” or “more advanced” state, why then the persistent social pressure to be and do just that? Is this social pressure then against nature?  Survival of the fittest is no more than saying that those that survive, survive. Fit is not “better”, fit is just life clinging to life, just life doing what life does; to live is to “succeed” then; it is inherent, living itself and reproducing is success; the rest is gingerbread. Those that survive, survive. Those that succeed, succeed. Whatever it is on top of that, you find what you are looking for. In the end, you do what you do, that’s it. (This paragraph exists in a wedge state between Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins, two deep players in the evolution discussion, who have different takes on many things.)

While this sort of fatalism may be accurate it’s not emotionally satisfying. It seems to me somehow sad that from the 1931-35 drought, the bigger trees in the Pinacate are gone and have not returned, that the Shasta ground sloth is gone from Ventana Cave to the north, sad that what is living now can change to extinct and never be again. The uniqueness and poignancy of life, of a life, of a species, can vanish. Extinction and death baffles me with wonder. The Sand Papagos, the people of the Pinacate are gone for good, all their memories expunged, extinct, leaving only the land they walked on and sherds and shards here and there. And yet while branches of the metaphorical tree of life wither and die, the trunk remains, to grow back when the rains come or to last until the bitter end.  And even then still some life would remain, lichens, bacteria, until some putative final extinguishment after which there would be no reflection back at all on life, no potential to generate the tree again, life gone for good, back to the silent reign of the eternal inorganic.

Looking at things this way life seems positively omnipresent here now, flies on the Gatorade bottle, a lone dove cruising for crumbs, spider webs and muted greens. Compared to eternal silence, a fly is a welcome friend.

The saguaro cactus, elephant trees (torote), old man cactus (senita), red barrel (biznaga) and jumping cholla (cholla guerra) seem the most drought resistant. The saguaro/ palo verde plant community only got up to Ventana Cave, nearby, around 4000 years ago, moving up from the south as a loose grouping of plants as glacial climes retreated at the end of the last ice age.  At about 250 years a saguaro lifespan, that makes only about 16 generations of saguaro around here, not many. So life advances and retreats, takes what it can get, does what it does. Call it success, call it what you will; life works in response to big inorganic pulses of axis shifting, ice ages, orbital variations, solar pulsing, all contingent in the end upon the sun and it’s energy. And around here, sun is not I  short supply.

11/5
We took a very interesting ride through the Colorado River delta, once one of the premier wildlife areas of the world and now reduced to dry, sandy salt flats with a paltry man-made run-off. We saw Mexican styles of irrigation and agriculture, navigating from San Luis Rio Colorado to Coahuila to La Indita Buena for a great meal of steaks and then across the river proper, which was dry. The Colorado River is actually dry before it hits the ocean. A fellow told me, where we bought purified water for 75 cents for 6 gallons, that there was much less water now over-all and that the agriculture was much less than what it had been. There is a history here.

Basically the Colorado River originates in the USA and the water is all used up by the time it gets to Mexico and the delta area. The Colorado River Compact, between the US states in the drainage area, was made during wet years and the amount of water in the river was overestimated. And so now the amount of water allocated is more than is actually available. So more water is being taken out than is coming in. Put this on top of a regional drought and the water issues magnify. When the big dams went in, the years it took to fill them siphoned major water from Mexico downstream. That was the beginning of the end for the delta, delta wildlife and Mexican agriculture in the area. The pre-dam era of the delta is pretty much gone for good now, as no US interests are going to give away to Mexico a commodity that they themselves cannot agree about and must fight for every drop of. You can read a description of the mostly original delta area in Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac. 

There were no signs hardly to any of the places we went and between Kim’s deft map work and me getting out to ask directions, we made it out of Sonora and into Baja California. We headed down the delta, through huge sand flats housing the granular remains of the Grand Canyon, salt flats, remnant husks of former vitality, barren salt flats, just a shame, so many things a shame, the drought, extinctions, the genocide of the Indians, the enslavement of the Blacks and where would it stop if we were to give reparations? All of human history needs one reparation after another. The Christians and Catholics could certainly pay big for their sins, whipping the Indians for not going to church or for not working for the missionaries. Catholics and Lutherans could pay for burning my Mennonite ancestors at the stake just for believing something different. It is tempting and satisfying to place blame but we are all the same. It is a vicious cycle that really needs to be broken of peace is to ever have a chance.

And we are thrust into contrasts big and bold, unable to be avoided, Mexico so poor, backward, polluted, uneducated, a prostitute here in San Felipe, a rich gringo paradise of drinking and shooting off fireworks, ATVs, power boats, motorcycles, fishing boats, Skidoos, just a knuckleheaded scene of pure decadence and recreation while poor Mexicans live in cardboard shacks nearby. I need a good run-on sentence every now and then. It is a big fish eat little fish pecking order of exploitation, with certain parasites and cleaner fish perfectly adapted for scavenging up the scraps of the big boys.

We drove for a few hours in the dark to get here and it was hard, glare, no signs, narrow road, no shoulder, erratic paint on the road, stressed, we pulled it out and found a spot for twenty bucks and that gets us in for the night, Kim in the shower now, fireworks blasting down the beach; we’re safe! It is a tough reality to get used to. “When are we going to start having fun?!?!” The shower was not hot, we’re in the dirt, there’s trash and a pack of big dogs on the beach. We’re not in Kansas anymore; the amenities expected in the states are not here and one must adapt or go home. To get to fun, you have to survive the gauntlet of a trial by fire, of getting used to different forms of infrastructure and culture.

11/6
A new day comes and the propane tank is back to not working after exchanging the tank in Independence, CA. It seems likely the trouble is the adaptor hose from REI; we’ll see about getting that addressed today, a shop for food and down to Punta Willard for my first wild boojum trees. The night was filed with infernal incessantly barking dogs, fireworks and yelling and screaming from drunken gringo neighbors, par for the course. This is what you get when you go to the tourist places.

11/9 Puerto Santo Tomas
On 11/6 we went back to the States, to Calexico to get small propane canisters at WalMart after determining that our hose/ tank situation could not be fixed or replaced and that no small propane could be bought in Mexico. The only way we could work our stove was to regroup and get another system and that system was in the USA. After getting what we wanted Kim navigated us west in the States, driving south of I-8, and gaining elevation over to Jacumba and Boulevard, CA. We stayed in a very nice oak grove up in the hills in a sort of hidden lost corner of California, positioned to re-enter Mexico through Tecate.

The area coming down from Tecate over to the coast is the wine country of Baja, big vineyards, olive groves, the requisite chateau, gates, guarded entrances, there’s even signs to follow for touring the wine country. We looked for one mission and saw a vineyard on the way that was totally pathetic in comparison to those in Alta California, and you were supposed to have that as a destination?  What do you call a half-dead vineyard with trash and dead dogs around it? Château le Basura?

And there was trash everywhere, agricultural areas with trash plowed into the soil, tattering plastic stuck on fences, dead dogs, dead cattle, skeletons, toilet paper, huge areas burned to a crisp down to the Santo Tomas river. We saw busloads of Indians working big fields. There is abject poverty, yards swimming with trash, clothes on the line being enveloped by clouds of dust everywhere, cardboard, tin, tar paper, pallet shacks and then a little colony of gringos with super rich houses with all the stuff, tile roof, solar, wind, yards, steel fences and gates, shutters, grass and this in sight of the ramshackle fishing village where the people must drive by everyday bringing their shellfish and fish to market. Here is this pocket of wealth with nearby barracks of Indian laborers making cents per day. The contrast of Third World with well-off gringos is astounding! It is so blatant. You can’t help but notice. There must be resentments. Welcome to wine country in the Third World.

Kim and I are by no means well off in the US; we are a matter of thousands of dollars from nothing, no insurance, no house, no lucrative jobs or private incomes etc but when we are here we appear to be quite well off. The little red truck, in the US a beater, here in great condition and filled with toys like computer, digital camera, tent, down pillows, 2 burner stove, propane, tools, 1st Aid, radios, plenty of food etc. The amount of stuff we have, for sheer entertainment and recreation, the contrasts of our low budget First World “vacation” into the Third World, are stark and revealing. The Third World is shocking in its filth, depravity and poverty, in its lack of education, health, infrastructure, environmental, social and economic ethics. I see it is all on a continuum. Kim and I in Sonoma are equivalent to the Mexicans here; we are servants and laborers. The state of California will do nothing for us; we are one illness or accident from being homeless; we are the same as these people relative to the state, peons to be ground into dust. The immigrant issue is a false alarm when in fact my own government could care less about me.

It’s a struggle to see such socio-economic disparity and not feel compelled to make some sense of it, yet sense is illusive with so many causes and issues involved. It’s tempting to simplify it somehow, reduce it to a manageable one liner, an easily understood premise. I also see where the dividing lines are with any explanation, you have your bootstraps camp of free market individualism on one end and your complete structural prejudice, victim folks on the other. And while I am shocked and forced to think, theMexican people are in the great majority, unfailingly friendly; they are not bitter; they wave, they chat, they are open, unafraid, it is quite pleasant to socialize with most Mexicans. Unlike in Sonoma, CA where we live now, where not one person will wave to Kim. In Sonoma they barely even look at you, so immersed they are in issues of their own import. Kim, upon conversing with a big fish RV driver at a gas station mentioned that it was odd that we had to come all the way to Mexico to talk to each other, and he said, “well you can’t talk to everybody”.

One noteworthy thing we saw over and again, the rural agricultural labor in Baja is primarily Indian, pure Indians from the south of Mexico brought in and housed on site for the same type of hand work that Mexicans do in the USA. Clearly everyone along the spectrum of money is interested in getting labor for as cheap as possible and also paying as little as possible for the produce. Maybe this is how Mexican produce is made affordable for locals, the agricultural workers are paid a paltry pittance. Just as wealth is concentrated in the US at the top and that whole method of accumulation of resources and siphoning the value of poor people’s labor, that whole method carries through all the way to the bottom of economic arrangements in the world. This is one reason why Jared Diamond calls the US a “kleptocracy”, it is a system based on robbing people of their value. Mexico is learning well from its big brother.

11/11
This is Kim and my 6th anniversary of meeting.

From a US environmental standpoint, it is curious that Mexican national parks permit full cattle grazing. This so goes against any notion of preserving nature as is, to have cowshit everywhere and the land thrashed by over-grazing. Yet cattle is king, at least in northern Mexico; this is the way people can feed themselves, gain some self-sufficiency and make some extra money. Who are the US people who have benefited from massive cattle grazing and concomitant hamburger eating, who are they to say that Mexicans should manage their lands differently? Why not buffel grass? We need our own house in order before we start telling other countries how to act. Mexico is like Alaska or China in attitudes towards the environment, hell-bent to repeat all the mistakes of the forbearers. And meanwhile the forbearers lecture: do as I say and not as I do or did! Pretty much it boils down to that in order to achieve material prosperity, the environment has to get used. It is not just, for people in poverty to be asked to hew to severe environmental protections when they have barely their minimal physical needs met and while the people asking this are living in pure comfort deriving from major environmental degradation that is hidden from well-clipped middle class realities. Let’s get real here.

Cattle is King in northern Mexico. Maybe it is a frontier attitude based on a myth of unlimited resources, but that doesn’t really matter when you need food and money just to survive. And in the Mexican national parks, fine efforts are being made to be clean and organized yet you can drive all over the meadows, meadows filled with ruts and tire tracks; the human use is paramount. And to be fair, hey, there is a lot of education to happen everywhere to arrive at honoring nature above ourselves. The whole of humanity needs to get on the same page to adequately plan for the future. This will demand leadership from the US to way tone down the consumption, that we would have and consume way less material stuff. This is a good ideal but total fantasy when thinking how it might actually happen. People would actually sacrifice?

In the San Pedro Martir National Park, at the two-meter telescope observatory we were talking with the head technician about infinity and grains of sand. That puts a lot in context. Up there in the telescope is a long way from the Third World. This was good, as here then is a highly educated counterpoint to the mass effect.

I could carry on about the state of Mexican national parks, where they stand on a scale of resource management, but actually it is very pleasant and for $24.00 for 2 people 4 days and 3 nights and not a soul but us, total tranquility, a rarity of an automobile tour experience, and no petty enforcers coming around to hassle us saying we can’t do this or that, we’re entirely alone in a large, wild area of big pines and gray granite boulders, it’s a good deal all around. And we got to see California condors flying free, perhaps the sighting of a lifetime.

11/15
Every nice beach place in the Baja is crawling with gringos, always contrasted with the local poverty and servant population. So essentially to find a great beach you have to be around other knuckleheads like yourself trying to get away from white people, but the white people are always arriving to invade your privacy. You are always discovering the intimate enemy, yourself. Hence a Mexican tourist paradox: you never escape from what you are running away from. And to boot you are forced into the same class distinctions and hierarchies as in the US, rich guys with huge houses and giant luxury RVs on the beach, fancy, exclusive hotels and then trashy parks and waysides for the less well off. There is a white collar and blue-collar tourist Mexico.

If to dogs all people look alike, then perhaps to Mexicans all gringos are the same, and since many gringos vacationing are big, fat fish with obvious wealth, then it seems to follow that little fish gringos could be made of money too. So there is an effort to fleece you for every little thing. This is the tourist economy everywhere, fleece whenever possible for as much as the market will bear. So when you get big fish that will pay a lot, that inflates the market and the little fish all have to buck up the same; it’s just like living near Hanover, NH, Sonoma, CA or Norwich, VT.

It is a complicated hierarchy of class differences on the Baja between all the types of Mexicans and gringos, but all are very aware of where they stand personally. I find myself near the bottom of the pile in the US but as an interloper King here. At least I know who I am and speak the language and know Mexico’s history. Many of my big fish compatriots speak little or no Spanish and simply caravan to their RV beach havens only to associate with each other the whole time. It’s no wonder then that many Mexicans are thrilled when you go into their little stores and speak to them, ask what is up, display some interest in their lives, maybe try and transcend the tourist superficiality and make a heart connection. The way to really get in to Mexican culture is to be invited into the home for coffee and food; when they get you at the table you become fictive family, you are in. If you can make it past the level of being a possible sheep to fleece, then you are really in; you have made friends for life.

Now this is an interesting ethical dilemma, the phenomena of littering and wildcat dumping. Does one continue with behavior to not litter when most everyone else obviously does not care? Does it make a difference to piss in the ocean to satisfy your inner sense of right and wrong? There may be a trashcan next to the road but the trash is then dumped right over the hill, making a mockery of even putting it in the can. You carry trash for miles to put in a can but the can is an illusion of congruity with your ethics. You put it in the can to feel congruent with your main behavioral streams. So if the local mainstream is opposite or different from your inner sense of going with the flow of the rules, that puts you against the grain, to mix a metaphor. It appears pointless then to hew to a behavior that no one else is. This is behavior and not ultimate morality. Ethics is behavior. By whose standards do we measure then to decide if we are right or wrong in our actions to litter or not? Is it wrong to behave like the Romans when you are in Rome, they say for you to do that.

Here’s an example: I saved water in Tucson religiously for 20 years only to see newcomers build homes and water grass, make more golf courses and swimming pools. I realized the water I was saving was not going for any conservation purposes.  My saved water was being squandered for uses I and other water savers absolutely did not intend. There is no point in doing it then if your efforts are for naught.

With the litter and trash in Mexico, it just becomes strata anyway; it becomes buried one way or the other over time. So what if it is in a landfill or out front for all to see? It may be more honest to not hide your trash but to see the fruits of your consumption right before you.

What it boils down to in Mexico is that people are so poor there is no incentive to work for any abstract sense of the commons. There is nothing in it for someone to not litter. There is no benefit and there is no fine. It is clearly every dog for himself. For people to behave one way or another there has to be an inherent benefit for them; the advantage has to be clear, perhaps a reward is necessary, otherwise why sacrifice? Sustainability is an abstraction to people living on a daily basis, a payday-to-payday basis. What could be a decent reward then?

Yet, every dog for himself is isomorphic and goes right on with rich gringos too, there is little ethic of the commons and plenty of selfish behavior. Having lots of money does not translate into ability to sacrifice or better commons oriented behavior; the behavior may be even worse. This is not a socio-economic issue then; it is a human nature issue. To establish any ethic of the commons in a world of dogs for themselves is a difficult proposition. As an individual, a citizen, as kin groups and family, there has to be some quid pro quo to put effort into commons, state and worldwide commons that give no immediate individual benefit. The tragedy of the commons is nothing more than the inherent tragedy of human nature where the pervading ethos is every dog for himself. It is a defacto truth then that the commons will be spoiled if people, rich or poor, are left to their own devices.

Individuals and citizens then, need government control and family and kin groups need community control to check the impulses of every dog for himself. The government/ community entity is the one that establishes the ethos, as in not littering or saving water for drinking. If this entity is ambivalent, does not lead effectively, does not have clear priorities in terms of commons preservation, but allows every dog for himself to persist as a baseline ethic, then the entity is useless really except for furthering the every dog for himself world. This gets into a fundamental paradox of the French and American Revolutions of the 18th century, “freedom” and “liberty” reach a point of being counter-productive and so the pendulum must then swing to a more Hamiltonian way of operating society.

On another tack, trash issues are a matter of taxes and infrastructure. With no taxes to speak of, municipalities have no resources for trash collection, garbage trucks or landfills, especially small pueblos. There is no money for that to be collected. It is matter of local resources, none, and government administration, and the trajectory there has been for corruption and individual enrichment; it is one of the few ways to get ahead in life. So beyond individual ethics you need a level of affluence to provide cash and a whole administrative, governmental apparatus to effectively deal with trash; this leads right into chicken and egg questions, into Jeffersonian/ Hamiltonian, individual focus/ group focus. Is trash collected because of individual demand or because it is a good idea municipally?

11/16
Satellite dish, big boat, fancy truck, ATVs, Ford Excretion, big fancy house with giant bulwark of rocks set against the beach with giant sign saying Private Property, set against a poor village, the foreigners have the money, the private property and it is just ugly.

There should be a cap on income and the accumulation of property and wealth, on a sliding scale based on cost of living, property values, above the cap tax at 85%. Get rid of the guys who won’t work if not for obscene money and get people who want the job for its own sake. What about incentive for people who would be on the dole? Well, you make them like the CCC, they have to work for it, for the better of society, the environment, for the commons. No freebie unless incapable; you do what you can, do your best and offer that. This is a sort of utilitarianism, greatest good for the greatest number. You have to find something after unbridled choice and freedom has failed. You keep all the liberty in terms of ideas and expression and cap the liberty that has to do with material things. You consume ideas, art, music and things with qualities versus quantities. You create a new consumer, the interior consumer. The exterior consumers would be allowed, just taxed like all hell. This is a fantasy, of benign government regulation, but if we are to not just run the train into the ground, you have to start somewhere. Let farmers farm well, sustainably, support food production and clean water, create a new way of living where all dogs are for all dogs. 

This contrast of crazy wealth and poverty is clearly unjust, no good, and immoral.  The system is stacked in the wrong ways. Seeing this all first-hand in Mexico has brought this to the forefront of my thoughts. I have lots of thoughts but no answers.

11/19 /07 Now I will go backwards in time this section up to 11/21 was  typed out before the rest as a quick e-mail, so excuse any repetitions
Today finds us on the Pacific side, in Guerrero Negro, Baja California Sur. We pulled into town past the huge flag/monument marking the 28th parallel, which divides the states of Baja California and Baja California Sur. I went to a Refraccionaria and bought motor oil from a nice man named Juan, which still cost twice as much as the USA even though I haggled $5.00 off the price. Juan and I got along good, talking about the Discovery Channel and world issues of pollution. Kim and I then got a motel, I changed the oil out on the dusty street; we made a deal with the laundry girl to wash, dry and fold our clothes and we went out to a point in the huge bay here, where the salt flats are, where the dunes are, where there were millions of clam shells and the dusk came in thick with fog and then drove back here to the hotel through the bustle of Mexican nightlife streets; Kim made fresh salsa, burritos with cheese from La Maria in the Sierra Madre, with Salsa Sonora and now we are settled in for the night.

We came from an old Mission, San Borja, which was way out in the middle of nowhere, beautiful, in between Bahia Los Angeles and here. There we toured the old mission, took hot baths from natural springs, put mud on the skin, spent the night and a 19 year old Cochimi Indian took the starter out of his Toyota and transplanted it into mine. We stayed in their house and it was 100 Years Of Solitude for real, maybe 400 years….It was a special visit, playing guitars, telling jokes, seeing their orchards of grape and olive, a huge mango tree, date palms, avocados, bananas, a nice scene, sharing a day and night under the sky and stars.

Before that it was deep into the thick of boojum tree desert. The boojum or cirio, Fouquieria columnaris, is probably in the top ten weird trees of the world. It grows only between the 30th and 28th parallels in Baja and a bit in Sonora on the other side of the Sea of Cortez.  The impression is of driving through a Dr. Seuss book or through Lewis Carroll’s mind in The Hunting of the Snark, from which the name boojum originated. ‘Twas brillig out there certainly and the borogroves did gyre and gimble in the wabe. That’s what it was like, right down to the coast, to Bahia de Los Angeles, Sea of Cortez side, and 5 days under a palm palapa in front of gently lapping seas, bottle nose dolphins, pelicans, sea shells and the general total tranquility of what a south sea vacation should be. There was no one around but us.  We checked out the town, the little museum, the sea turtle restoration group, all with good conversations about this and that. In the museum, the artifacts were exactly like our friends living now in La Mesa de Abajo! Part of the trip then, we lived in a museum, from life 150 years ago somehow ensconced in the now. The temperatures have been amazingly livable, not extreme in any way, never cold, sleeping outside in cots under the stars, the Milky Way very close above. One night sea lions came in droves and dove and splashed for hours in the water right in front of us, hidden by the darkness, wow, listen Kim, did you hear that?!.

And before this we found ourselves in the thick of the Baja 1000 car race and that was wild. You should have seen and heard some of those rigs! We were out at night by the side of the road in Catavina watching these guys just smoke by, motorcycles, ATVs, VWs, monster trucks, Baja specials, stock cars, just crazy, and we could not fail to notice that one of the Baja trucks was worth probably more than many Mexicans will ever make, and the contrasts between the wealthy gringo foreigners and the poor locals, is a great gulf, that we have pondered, and tried not to separate ourselves from. The majority of the high dollar trailers, Baja 1000 people, the RV people, they bring all their own stuff and don’t stop in the little towns to buy tortillas and chat up the locals. That’s our trip, get into the local flavor and not get to where it is only other gringos around; we don’t want the Taco Bell vacation, we want to know what it is like for these folks who live as average Mexicans. And one thing I can say, we feel poor by US standards but here we appear as quite well off. Poverty is relative. The abyss between the northern gringos who are really well off and the average Mexican is HUGE, there is almost no bridging that gap, so we have contemplated the history, what led up to such a big inequity of resources, how it is currently sustained etc. No easy answers, people have always hoarded wealth, and it may just be human nature to have it be every dog for himself, at all levels.

We came south from Gypsy Beach, San Quintin, a pleasant little spot, site of the former Vacation of Terror (where 20 years ago, Mark, Steve and I spent: 1 night in jail, and on night 2, had the tide come in on the truck, had to walk miles in the dark through streaming sandy tide to the mainland, then spent all the next day saving the truck, got an 80 dollar speeding ticket and Montezuma’s revenge, saw the Terminator and Dr. Zhivago, all in 3 days); San Quintin is a major agricultural area, lots of covered tomatoes. We had a nice stroll through the dunes and big flat beaches, saw a pilot whale or two, ate some tasty fish tacos, showered etc. Life was good; the wind dried all our stuff hanging on the fence and we received the hospitality of Laura in Laura’s Zopilote Mojado restaurant/ camping area.

Now, this may be hard to believe, but the night before getting to the above beach, we were snowed on, 2 inches, in the Sierra San Pedro Martir, a National Park, at about 10,000’, where we stayed 4 days and saw actual California condors flying, and where we visited a 2 meter telescope and talked about infinity et al with the main technical guy there. We stood at the portal to infinity, wind thrashing up there, gazing from 1 side of the Baja to the other, commanding views, a high country very similar to Mt. Lemmon or the Chiricahua mountains in AZ. That snowy morning my hands were frozen, the wind whipped and I had to chain up to get out to the main road, our stuff got soaked in rain and slush and snow, but who can say they got snowed on in Baja? That was better than cool; it was freezing. And condors too! In the world of voodoo, we were the sacrificial gringos who got wet, soaked and frozen cold to bring water to the desert. The skies were washed clean, revealing crisp views and panoramas of pines descending into pithaya agria and garambullo desert. We stopped in a cottonwood grove that was just beautiful against puffy clouds and blue skies.

Preceding this we spent the evening at Puerto Santo Tomas, with a poor fishing village (shacks made of pallets and tar paper) on one side and rich gringo homes (brick, aluminum roofed, fenced in, locked, solar panels, green grass etc) on the other and a great beach below us with fun rock formations and as always more sea shells to peruse and decide whether to get or not. Seashells have always been the best. On the way here we went through some wine country with nice big valleys and the prerequisite chateaus, quite scenic, with olive groves and all. We found a trash container and then, over the hill, was all the trash that had just been dumped out of it, a whole ravine full of trash, it was so absurd we had to laugh. Why do we not litter in a land where littering is the way it’s done?  Why do I save water in Tucson only to have new immigrants use it to water grass and make golf courses? With no sense of people being in something together, there is no reason for some behavior other than to make us feel good. So we try to be congruent with our ethics. We seem to do right but it seems to make no difference in a world where all are for themselves. The commons are thrashed due to lack any larger cooperation for ideals larger than our immediate needs.

We stayed outside Ensenada one night before this at an unremarkable and inflated beachfront locale where we met a German guy from Savary Island, BC, who had made himself a restaurant and hostel all from stuff he scavenged off the beach. We served him coffee and he held forth on the details of his own movie as we sat by the sea wall amongst the trash and shells.

The day before we crossed the border into Tecate, Mexico, a very nice border town in some higher up coastal zone hills near San Diego. Kim found the killer bakery (una panederia) and we chatted with a nice policeman outside about the way things are in this world. We took our pastries to the plaza and sat in front of a statue of Benito Juarez, former president of Mexico, a Mexicanized, acculturated Zapotec Indian. The quote below him in so many words said: peace comes by acknowledging the rights of strangers/ aliens, i.e. make everyone the in-group and then there is no out-group.

The night before Tecate we found a great little campground in the USA, in a big oak grove surrounded by high desert, and we were there because our propane tank valve broke and there was no fixing it in San Felipe and we had to run back to Mexicali and Calexico to get the small green propane bottles in a WalMart. We then drove through this great area of California that is totally backwater, next to the border, high up, oaky, junipers etc and we came upon this campground where we slept under quiet and solemn oaks as coyotes yippi yi ki yehed.

On our way back up to Calexico, on the sandy flats adjacent to the Colorado River, where all the sand used to be in the Grand Canyon, we stopped and met an old Cocopah Indian woman with whom we hit it off with and from whom Kim bought a necklace, and to whom Kim gave a pair of glasses. Inocencia then gave Kim a necklace of her choice. That’s how barter goes. I asked this woman how old some of the pictures were in her personal museum and she said “500 years old”, oh my. We liked her a lot and if we go back, we’ll buy the book about her too, get her more cigarette money, as he said. She was all wrinkles, smoking Delicados, making beaded collars, in a camp of Indians next to the Rio Hardy. She said when she was young the river flowed and the wildlife and fish were everywhere. Aldo Leopold in A Sand County Almanac corroborates this. Now, for reasons of big agriculture and huge US and Mexican population in the river’s drainage, the water is all spoken for and more is taken from the Colorado than goes into it. This leaves the Cocopah with a stagnant ditch, the spoils of the conquered.

This area is as big an environmental tragedy as you could imagine. A huge, world-class former premier wildlife area full of water now a dry, dusty, stagnant wasteland of poverty on the edge of nothingness. And more shocking, no one really knows or cares. Imagine the Yellowstone ecosystem just gone, dust, that would be equivalent.

Before this we had gone down to San Felipe on the Sea of Cortez side, and explored much of the Colorado River Delta country, even crossing the Colorado River in Mexico, over a bridge showing the river to be completely dry. No Colorado River there, I guess it got all used it all up! Who could be using all that water? How many swimming pools, golf courses and green lawns in the desert to do that?

We found a great little restaurant near here in Coahuila where we ordered the specials, carne asada and steak milanesa, very tasty, served by an ample waitress with green jewelry. In San Felipe it was ugly American-ville, totally, no doubt, with crappy little tourist camping areas and big fat expensive hotels, luxury boats, all recreation-oriented, lots of drinking, motor sports, fire works on the beach at night, and generally not our cup of tea, especially for $20.00 a night for Neolithic services in a dirt park with trash. I suppose some, even many, maybe the majority want to go to the tourist areas, but we find them disgusting. We are clearly against the grain of why tourist people come to Mexico, a couple of rebels who go not for the mainstream but prefer the side-stream, the eddies, the backwaters. I mean why come to Mexico to hang out with a bunch of knuckleheaded white people to blow off fire works, drink, fish and burn tons of gasoline? The whole American lifestyle seems to me shallow, the high ideals of freedom, individual liberty, equality, have degenerated into rampant materialism and consumerism; whatever it was the Founders had in mind, we have lost it almost totally as a nation. It seems like a nation of juveniles with no parents around. What does the US stand for now? What ideals can we put in front of poor Mexicans and Africans and actually say with sincerity is the truth? Shit I don’t know; I suspect that it is not really the US or any entity other than ourselves, it is human nature to be greedy, to hoard, to vilify the stranger, to fight for resources. If it wasn’t the US it would be somebody else and in reality, that somebody else is us. Excuse my ranting please.

We spent 4 days in the Pinacate Biosphere Reserve, a volcanic area at the head of the Sea of Cortez, which is the crème de la barren desert, exquisitely bare out there, life hanging on by spines and threads of exposed and unquenched dry roots; we love it there; there was not anybody anywhere except us (pretty much the same in the Sierra San Pedro Martir). I explored the old hidden Emilia tinacos (pools where the extinct Sand Papagos found sustenance, below the lava tubes where they emerged from the earth created by I’itoi, a prime god of theirs), of which only 2 pools were barely left, it was DRY, maybe hadn’t rained since we were there last, 2 years ago. But up higher on the main volcano it has rained and the plants were green: barren desert update, it can not rain in any particular locale for years and years, like life is coming to an end, but it hangs on against all odds, that is the way things are there in one of the hottest, toughest deserts anywhere. In many of the places we visited it has really, actually not rained for a year or more. And we sacrificed ourselves one night in the mountains to have a good rain all through the central Baja, mud, mud everywhere.

And…. before this we were 2 nights in Tucson with our final prepping, having just returned from a week in the Sierra Madre to our village La Mesa de Abajo and weaving new threads among our friends there and with Mike Gray, the AFSC trip leader who we know and admire, and shoot even before this it was nearly a week coming down the dry side of the Sierra Nevada in snow and the infernal wind, Death Valley, where we saw DJ again, a nice fellow we met 6 years ago on our Luna de Miel, and through Flagstaff to visit Rosemary and Ethan, and that is about the short of it, an outline and notice that the show still goes on and we head to Mulege (in honor of Kim’s homeless friend Jim in Sonoma, we are going for Jim, Kim keeps a line open to the heart and the supernatural) and have just 1 week left before having to return to the USA, work a touch and then 2 weeks to visit my Mom in NJ, leaving the day after Kim’s birthday. That is a great run-on sentence!

This is the subtext of our movie as it stands now. The little red truck has taken a beating on very rough dirt and gravel roads and performed well, things have overall been fun, challenging, transformational and we have each been reading books which augment our understanding of the Spanish speaking, Mexican world, 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez for Kim and for me Cycles of Conquest: The Impact of Spain, Mexico and the US on the Indians of the Southwest 1533-1960 by Edward H. Spicer.

Kim packs now 11/20, the truck is small, hard to pack, lots of stuff even for low materialism white folks. Every time you want something it is always hidden behind other stuff. Kim has given away lots. I told the guys at San Borja Mission that if they could keep Kim there long enough, they could get all that was in the truck. Kim has left a nice care package for the cleaning lady and her son here in Motel Las Ballenas in Guerrero Negro, at the gateway to the Vizcaino Peninsula; and now, FCA25 clear.

As I write we are in San Ignacio, a quaint little place that sits inside a giant palm grove, I wait for the e-mail to send, and then we stay or go on, allowing the game to come to us, serendipity may decide.

Attentamente, Frederico y Kim 11/20/07

11/21/07
We came to Mulege and found a quite nice place by the river, surrounded by palms, near the sea, a swimming pool, a great pool, with a sometimes hot shower, Kim can run along the river and to town for 3 klicks or more, there’s date palms everywhere, fresh dates lying on the ground ready to eat; we bought a date pie and date empanadas in San Ignagio that were outrageously good and lest you may think that all is just soooo good and great, let me tell you that I had another encounter with a Mexican toilet today, sat down and the seat was drenched wet with who knows what, and me in my nice clean favorite shorts, so that adds to the legacy of Mexican toilets, that no seat ever fits, all seats are loose and falling off, the size of the seat never matches the bowl, the seats are always way too small so an average gringo can barely squeeze on there, and then there is more, that I’ll spare you delicate reader, these charms and characteristics which add to the overall atmosphere of the Mexican experience. At first this all takes some getting used to but if you can camp out and endure hardships and inconveniences, this is not so different; you just have to step up and take care of your business, and behind a cactus is preferable for this boy.

We met a head honcho, Alpha gringo last night, a local player, a big fish in a small pond, who does much charity work, Rotary Club, provides a free dental clinic, flies in doctors, does good works, and so I saw that all gringos in big fancy houses are not all just turned into themselves but some are focused in service work and so my perspective is stretched from its cynical stance of the corruptness of riches to seeing that there are those who do good works with their resources and so I must readjust my perspective.

Kim and I spoke this morning of how egalitarian Bushmen people, who share all, still have issues with jealousy and people noting who has what, who is more lazy, more productive, and that they have trance dances to clear the table after people all accuse each other of this and that, so the upshot, is that people can’t help but notice disconformities in who has what, who does what, but that perhaps in a world of individuals, of “citizens”, when there is no face to face community, no social control, no social pressure, people can disappear into their back yard barbeques and never relate, never deal with the poor, the needy and in this world of individuals, there is no accountability to the community…just a thought. When you can pay others to do your dirty work, there can no accountability to anything. This being in Mexico stimulates questions that only by being in the Third World can arise, like why do they pay twice as much for a can of corn when they make substantially less? Why is it that poverty tends to get poorer while having more money gets all the breaks, all the good interest rates, the loans, why when you’re down, is it easier to fall even further while when the game is good, all is easy? 

11/24
We stayed three nights total at Maria’s in Mulege, the first night we just pulled in and camped and on our first day, on our first trip to town, in the first store we got to, there was snorkel gear and we got it. Now we could open up the unseen world beneath the waves. That was exciting! Whatever it cost I knew that even just one time would bring so many good memories, and it is so fascinating to see all those colored fish swimming around, that it was a no-brainer. Continuing our stroll around charming Mulege we found a nice restaurant where Kim got the killer baked fish with garlic and me the combination plate and life was good, fat city, as the pot goes down, shoot, just keep on spending; we’re Americans after all! We drove all over town, checking this and that, too windy to snorkel so back to our palapa for the night.

Mulege is a good example of a refined coexistence of gringo residents and tourists and a Mexican servant population. The quaint factor is cranked way up and all is geared to a fine and friendly fleecing of money from the big fish. When it is made comfortable, the wallet opens more easily. This is versus high pressure sales and insistent begging, which tend to put a clamp on the wallet. As usual there is the section of town, of big fancy houses, pure gringo, and then the other side of the tracks, not unremarkable I suppose as that is how people learned it in the USA; that’s how it’s always been everywhere once we started to domesticate plants and moved into permanent villages. Being here is great for triangulating a perspective back onto life in the US; it provides a unique, alternate view that enriches and deepens, reflects different images and shadows, that you would not see other than from here.

The next day it was Playa Escondida and some great snorkeling, pufferfish, banded yellow fish, striped orange fish, ones with yellow, green and blue, big flat ones, stingrays, iridescent little blue ones, ones with big fins, little fins, long ones, fat ones, fast ones, ones that hide in coral, giant schools of minnows flickering in the light, giant schools of other ones flitting this way and that and, one octopus. Once you stop and float, they all relax and come around you, checking you out; they go about doing their stuff, eating algae off rocks, defending their turf, eating each other and going around on various unknown fish errands and business. We went out twice. And then there are pelicans and terns and frigate birds diving in and eating our little fishy friends! Oh my, maybe the fish need a union.

We also saw at Playa Escondida professional beach bums with 50 gallon drums of water next to their palapas, guitar, kayak, beach chair, table, hammock, deeply tanned; that’s the life, you get your spot amidst a bunch of other gringos scattered down the beach and proceed to fish, clam, drink, smoke and hang out till the money runs out.

We checked out the old Mission in Mulege and contemplated more the differences that make a difference, how cultural flavors make the tastes of life so strange and compelling, so bitter, so sweet and attractive. We hit it off with Maria, a very nice but deeply self-centered woman whose own movie, whose own story was always the first thing on her tongue. She was the kind who is very hard to talk to because she never seems to hear what you say and is always interrupting you and is formulating her reply even as you are making your point. It is a kind of diffuse sense of conversing, never satisfying to the second fiddles in her orchestra. Nevertheless she had quite a nice place, a beautiful swimming pool, showers, bath and big date grove with dates just all over the place for the taking. Her domain was hit by a hurricane last year. Much of lower Mulege was also hit, and under 6, 10 or more feet of water, flooded from broken dams above and the river pushed back inland by a full moon storm tide.

11/25
We went down to Playa Armenta after Maria’s for 1 night and had a beachy palapa experience, a few more snorkeling expeditions, peering warily off into deep water, strong currents, in a true wilderness, in the food chain literally, a bit unnerving but exhilarating nevertheless. We made a beachhead and then came a few RVs, people heading to Cabo San Lucas, the ultimate gringo destination. Sitting on the beach watching the birds feed and fly in the early morning or late evening sure is tranquil and interesting. Pelicans can drop straight down feet first, feet splayed out, plummeting for a fish; it is quite a curious move; they do what it takes to get after those fish. 

It occurred to me, what is it that all these driven, successful folks are doing here? These beaches are lined with RVs, kayaks, sailboats, palapas, all in a row, one after another, of folks glorying in doing not much of anything. To get the resources to live on vacation you have to work, work, work yet the ultimate goal is to sit around and do nothing but recreate. So therefore, doing nothing is desirable, a goal, a wanted end result but it is not acceptable to do nothing if you are homeless or are supposed to be work, work, working. The goal is to not work, but one must work to be able to not work. This is classic escape from the rat wheel, where work is nothing but a means to an end; work has no intrinsic value other than to be able to escape from it. With nothing but clamming and fishing and drinking and reading, playing cards or golf; that is the epitome of not working, permanent vacation.  But this nothingness, in order to be valid, has to be earned and cannot be undertaken prematurely or you cannot be a true member of the do-nothing club. Doing nothing too early makes you a bum or an outcast; you have not accumulated enough resources to live at the helm of nothing with smooth sailing ahead. Of course many desire to sail away into the sunset of nothing and try to shepherd meager resources with this goal in mind, like me, or the beach bums. And furthermore there are those that have nothing already but they don’t desire more nothing, they, those poor of the world, desire lots of something, plenty lots of it. So there you go, how to make sense of that. I suppose the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. Rent a house in the US for $1000.00 or down here in a palm tree paradise in San Ignacio for $200.00, three baths even. That gives $800 for a lot of nothing to go with your carne asada tacos and Tecate.


The upshot: the accumulation of lots of something can be ultimately aiming at the realization of total nothing, and this says a lot about the value of the things that are done on the way to nothing, that they have little intrinsic value and given the choice, people would just as soon not work, work, work at shit jobs managed by others and would prefer to be the captain of their ship sailing on the ocean of their own choice, free. Ah, freedom this is what this all points to, the actualization of one’s own volition. As we look toward the abyss of eternity, in death, as a skull and skeleton, as dust, then the precious time to sail with one’s own hand on the tiller, that time is short, so wait not too long and think not too much of creature comforts, such as an RV with a toilet and a refrigerator. To accumulate all that will waste many years of freedom, lost in notions of safety, security and perfectly arranging this putative time of nothing. The grim reaper cares not for these things. If you want nothing, go get it! Now is your time, be content with your lot, spend those pesos NOW, as tomorrow we die.

Nothing then is really amounts to something, that which you choose, and not which somebody else is going to dictate. Nothing is your own blank slate of an ocean open to sail on, so what floats your boat? That’s your nothing, your choice.

A number of gringos are involved in a free dental clinic, flying doctors, in service work, massage, seeing the poverty and lack of education they identify a need and try to fill it. They come and want to clean up the trash. They want to do something. This presents the same dilemma/ paradox that Mike Gray and other serious service workers eventually see, that maybe you are serving your own sense of what is necessary. How do you know you are serving what the people themselves want and need? Whose compass is being followed? Maybe you are actually changing the recipients for the bad and not the good. Maybe your service is giving them fish but not teaching how to fish. Many folks do what is called the “feel good service” and as long as they feel good about it, then it is good, and there may be no way out of that, as how do you excise yourself out of any service you give?  How can you not be you as well as serve others? The notion of “feel good service” may be a put down by those who feel they own the truth, those who think they known what is good for whom.

Kim says, “ask not whether Mexicans belong in the US but ask if Americans belong in Mexico?”

We busted out of Playa Armenta early and headed up to Santa Rosalia, a really cool ex-copper mining town built up by the French. The architecture is quite different than the rest of Mexico in that it is wood, imported back from Tacoma, WA, when the ore was exported up there for refining. Santa Rosalia was remarkable for the sheer profusion of small shops and stores which give it away as a more traditional kind of place, nothing catering to gringos, there’s no beach, so the flavor was more real, not artificial Mexico flavor that seems to predominate on the vacationland of the Baja coasts. We liked Santa Rosalia a lot and enjoyed the Eiffel designed church, the bakery, even though I saw a big fish filleted out on the table where they were making buns.

You, the reader, may wonder why I am even here if I appear so cynical about the white guy presence, as I am myself a white guy who aspires to lots of nothing, i.e. freedom. Well, this is really my first time in any sort of tropical beach type of mass-produced vacation place, and we/I have seen that maybe this is not our cup of tea. I didn’t know how it would strike me; I thought we would be alone on an isolated beach and not next to a bunch of intimate enemies. I did not expect opportunistic Mexican tourist parasites to separate my meager something into their meager poverty. I just didn’t know. It has been pretty good when we found ourselves mostly alone, and away from beaches is where the mostly alone is, or in the off-season, or not big holidays; so the answer is that I did not like the Florida Keys as every square inch was designed to fleece me, and I’m sure the Caribbean and Hawaii are the same way, unless you have an in somewhere and can get with the locals and be seen as an equal and not as a bottomless pit of potential money. I guess I prefer the woods and the wilderness then, for my brand of freedom, where the wheat is separated from the chaff, that may be my tribe, and I am just thrown in with another tribe here that I have no allegiance to.

Anyhow, we came back to San Ignacio and got a little motel with no TV (yes!) and we strolled the plaza and met an expatriate guru follower, Northern California woman whom we passed some good talk with and now we go to Campo Rene, to check out the Vizcaino coast area on the Pacific, it sounds good, this is the home stretch. There’s only $300.00 worth of freedom left.

11/28
It is impossible to not notice the sheer number of older Toyota trucks in Mexico. There is rarely a Tacoma; it is all 22R engine models, Hi Luxes, old round fronts, square fronts, newer round fronts, with the square front fender ones being the most popular. Apparently the 1984 –86 were the best models. They rule. A photo exhibit would be fun, beaters, shiny SR5 ones, cattle truck models, delivery truck, dually rear models, rancho style ones, sporty ones, 4 WD ones. Toyota has taken over from Nissan and the Nissan truck was even manufactured in Mexico.

A few notes about the Border Patrol and US Customs. They were generally friendly, nice and polite; they liked La Chuky, our dumpstered doll mascot wired on top of the truck. But some fellows also had an attitude of flaunting their great authority. For example at the agricultural inspection there are no signs saying stay in your vehicle, so we pulled up and started to get out and they started to yell, “stay in your vehicle!” and they acted all put out. It was angering as it is only natural to get out of your car when you stop. It is an unnecessary element of rudeness to have them get so persnickety, especially with no signs saying what to do. In general they were OK, more friendly ones than tight ones, about the same for the Mexican military checkpoints.

I got tired of Mexicans looking to me as a tourist for any opportunity to fleece money. It’s like gringos are a form of cargo cult and every gringo represents untold riches and opportunity just falling out of the sky. And then here at this first campground in the US, electric is metered for each site, showers cost 75 cents on top of the $23.00 camping fee. Internet is per pay use. The fleecing machine is set on high. Any traveler, tourist, voyager, long distance hiker is going to run into it. People have the impulse to want to fleece others who are in need and it is all very transparent and easy to spot, crappy motels for $75.00 just because they can get it. When they are the only game in town, they get to play highway robbery. This is compared to meeting people with generosity and friendship, like trail angels. Those who look to money first are of a different breed. That is not my tribe.

Shoot, this trip is about done. We got used to the cold showers and discomforts, used to the differences in trash management and adapted, made ourselves available to appreciate daily life in Mexico. Our initial sensibilities grew and we became able to sustain more mess, more discord, and see through that as cultural difference, as economic difference, and not as just bad. We are gone from Mexico and have to drive through San Diego, LA and then up to San Francisco and the party is over. It’s too bad that so much time elapses between trips as we get sucked into the rat wheel of paying rent, bills and taxes and can’t get away for lack of money and living check to check. I hope we pull off another long distance hike this Spring; I want 4 months out on the trail and 1000 miles, but that will require time and patience to achieve the resources, but when you have to earn it all, it seems to mean more than if it was just given.