Chapter 7
Sometime the winter before Elizabeth was born, Rebecca, came into our world. She, along with Maggie, helped wake me up. Even before Elizabeth was born, I needed some help on the physical plane, cleaning, shopping, cooking were all beyond me, I was still held back in life, frozen with grief. Susan suggested someone, a woman who worked for her at her store. Rebecca came into our lives with the intensity of a tornado. She opened all the windows and doors, turned up the music, pulled the furniture away from the walls and let the vacuum cleaner rip. She brought energy and light back into our lives.
I stayed in my bedroom nursing the baby those first months that she came. By the end of the summer, she was holding the baby and I was mowing the lawn. The lawn, that huge big expanse of field that was my front yard really wasn’t a lawn yet. I worked a lot of anger and frustration out on that field making it into a real lawn. When she was finished, Rebecca would drive us to the grocery store where I could do my weekly shopping and we could all get treats for working so hard.
I didn’t drive after the accident. I didn’t drive again for five years. That did not stop me from wanting to go to Mexico that winter after E was born. Cameron would turn four in March and I wanted to be anywhere else but home. I dreaded his fourth birthday. I knew that it had nothing to do with Thomas dying but I couldn’t convince my body. I couldn’t somehow imagine Cameron getting older than Thomas. Besides that I loved Mexico and it was always very healing for me. So we flew down to Loreto. Loreto was where we had first met Nancy. Where maybe I could find no trace of the independent and happy soul I had been just a few short years before.
We stayed in the Hotel Davis which was just a short walk to the beach and not in the hotel where we had lived with Nancy. Here two babies once again frolicked in the calm water’s of the Sea of Cortez. Then it was Thomas and Cameron, now it was Cameron and Elizabeth. My head was still spinning. I was just looking at the photos from that trip years ago with Cam and Elizabeth. There is a photo of Cam coming out of the water with his bath suit on. When I saw it just now, I jumped - I have a photo of Thomas with the same bathing suit on, hunter green with white strips on the side, coming out of the water, same beach at about the same age. Maybe that was what made me rush north again to Mulege, to rent another place and celebrate Cam’s birthday there and not Loreto.
Mulege (Moo-la-hay) is a sweet little town on one of the two navigable rivers in Baja. We rented a nice little apartment on Madero a block down from the main square. There was has a wonderful old mission up the river through the palm groves. It was about a mile and a half walk from the bridge in town, and we walked it often, Bethy in the backpack and Cam running circles around me. The mission dates from the 1770’s. The massive building was built out of hand cut stone. It is a very powerful place. The mission sits high above the river and I never tired of looking out at the legacy of those first padres; the date, fig, banana, olive and orange groves below that still line the river.
Beth, the baby, had tourista, montazuma’s revenge or in plain talk – diarrhea. I wasn’t too worried. We have all had it at different times on our Mexico travels. I was still breast feeding her and thought she would be fine. One evening in our favorite restaurant across the street from the apartment, the woman who worked there came to the table, I didn’t know that she owned the restaurant then. Pardona mi, she said in shy Spanish. Pardon me. My Spanish was very limited; but I soon figured out that she was trying to tell me that my child was very ill. Inferma. Finally she took the baby and I into the back room. She took E and started sucking on her head. She was pointing out to me that her soft spot was depressed and that meant dehydration I now know. She gave me medicine and told me to come back the next day. The next day she sucked on her head again and for the next 5 days. Elizabeth was fine by then. I am sure the medicine helped too but I know that Josephina saved her life. Why is death always so close to life? She and I became fast friends and even though we did not speak the same language, she told me many things. She said she was a bruja, this could mean healer, witch, or magician. I have since heard the word used in many ways.
Dona Josephina was a powerful woman. She reminded me of the leaders in the Gurdjieff group that I had belonged to. I remember once when I was with one of the leaders of that San Francisco group, she said that she had to help me. What do you mean by that, I asked. Well, she said, it is my duty. You are nothing, she went on to say. You are in the beginning group and you know nothing but you have the special ability to recognize us, to sense and know that we have being. You recognize us and so we have to let you hang out with us. Do not be confused though, you are not us, you do not yet have greater being, you still will have to work very hard but very few know us in the way you do. I guess in that way I must have recognized Josephina.
Cameron’s fourth birthday went fine. It was just us. We decorated our apartment with balloons and streamers. I wrapped lots of small toys for Cameron in yellow tissue paper. It was the first time we played the Lotteria game, which is like bingo; you match a picture that is turned up on a card with a picture on your card and mark it. The cool thing of course was that it was in Spanish, it was an easy way to learn some basic vocabulary. We are still playing this game today, not that exact one of course, we have gone through several.
When we got home from Mexico that summer, my goal was to “get the lawn in shape”, that is what I had written in my journal. I also see that I often wrote that I was depressed. I still was having a very hard time adjusting. I didn’t know the enormity of what I was trying to do. I was hard on myself, why wasn’t I getting over this sooner, I pushed. Once I had chosen life, I didn’t want it colored by this tragedy, I didn’t want my children’s lives color by this, but of course they were. I mowed that field into a lawn, I dug a huge garden, I planted trees, I watered and I tried to work out the energy that was stuck in me. I tried to work away the huge hole; I tried to stave off the huge fear that something else like that was going to happen at any moment.
You would think that losing your child like this would make you closer to your surviving children, but surprisingly this did not seem to be true for me. I love my children, no doubt about it, but a part of me was dead too, that innocence I knew with Thomas before he died would never come again. Sometimes I think that I never got as close to C and E. That Thomas’s death held something back in me, didn’t allow me to be too close and what was I thinking, that somehow if they died I wouldn’t hurt as much? But it wasn’t about thinking. I wasn’t really thinking I was just trying to survive.
I filled our lives with flowers. I have wonderful photographs of the yard at the red roof house, which is what Cameron always called it, it had a red tiled roof, hence the red roof house. There were long planter boxes along the edge of the porch filled with trailing lobelia in two colors of blue, white and red geraniums and deep purple petunias. In front of the porch where you continue on into the doors, I made brick stoops and between them grew lupines, poppies and red and pink snapdragons. The garden had huge sunflowers, towering cosmos and it was there I grew my first hollyhocks. I have loved them ever since. Huge flowers all summer growing upward along tall stems. The ones I grew there were a deep wine color and some that were pink and frilly inside. They were beautiful, especially how the two colors grew together. I planted a large area of bearded iris, gladiolus and daisies near the driveway and sweet peas near the garage.
As the days shortened that fall and the garden died I was planning our next trip to Mexico. There is something about Mexico that is healing for me and always has been. I am drawn to Mexico as one is drawn to a lover. Maggie said that in many of my past lives I had been an American and Central American Native. I didn’t try to explain it, I just knew I need to spend some time down there every winter I could. It was like I had some kind of battery in me that got a yearly charge by being there.
I made a plan to drive down with the kid’s dad and have Christmas in Baja together. I still did not drive and felt very sentimental about the surviving children and the holidays. So to Mexico we all went. Just south of Mulege, was our favorite bay, the Bahia de Conception. In the last few years we were shocked at how many more people came every down every year and lived on the beach. They don’t camp, at least they don’t camp in the way we are use to, with a small tent tied to a 3 sided palapa and using a firepit for cooking, they have huge motor homes, trailers and fifth-wheels. At Santispic Beach, the first and largest beach you come to at the beginning of the Bay of Conception, almost all the sites were filled with big wheels of some kind. They had their doors closed, the air conditioners on and their generators blaring. There was even, gasp, a circle of them, just like the wagons on wagons trains of the 1800’s, circle up your machine partner. I wrote in my journal, “I’m not going to meet Don Juan at this beach unless he is now living in a Winnebago”.
We drove further south past Loreto. We had never driven this far down Baja before. When we got to Cabo San Lucas, I was distressed to find that there was no access to the beaches there. The beach was lined with huge hotels and they had fences to the water. Sure you could walk on the beach theoretically as in Mexico the government has a federal zone and owns the land to the high tide, you were discouraged from using it by the guards of the hotels and there was definitely no place to camp. Finally someone told us about Shipwreck Beach a few miles north. One of the only places left to make a rustic camp in the area. This was almost 20 years ago. I have not been back, but have heard about the development there. I am sure I would be shocked; I thought it was bad when we were there.
Shipwreck Beach was awesome then. It was a ways off the main road on dirt roads that were in very poor shape, it was not easy to access and our van almost got stuck several times. It was worth it though. We had a prime spot on a grassy hill with the beach a short walk down. The place was named for the ship that was wrecked off the coast, you could sort of see it at low tide. It was a favorite spot for divers, in fact the only reference to Ship Wreck Beach that I can find in the guide book today is that Cabo Acuadeportes will take you on a guided two tank scuba dive to Ship Wreck Beach for $75. US.
We were quite a bit further down the beach from the shipwreck and our beach was a perfect spot for children. Several larger rocks further out took the brunt of any waves and right next to the beach it was calm and there were wonderful little tide pools and stretches of white sand. It was very safe for the kids. We didn’t have snorkel equipment, but by just looking in the pools we could see schools of bright blue little fish, striped fish, flat fish, tiny tiny silver fish and long needle nose ones. Cam and Beth were ecstatic. So was I. I had never seen anything like it. What a Christmas present.
After Christmas we decided to take the ferry from Cabo to the mainland and drive home that way. We had not been on the mainland in a long time and not this part ever. After a 24 hour ride we arrive in Puerto Vallarta. It is not the Puerto Vallarta that tourists flock to today, well it is the same place but twenty years ago it was still a sleepy tropical village. I feel in love with it immediately and settled into the Hotel Marisol, an, at one time grand, old hotel on the beach in front of Playa de Muertos in old town Puerto Vallarta. When we got to the mainland the kids dad and I parted ways and the kids and I flew home later. I felt bad for Cam and Beth as I knew they loved both of us. If T had not died I knew we would not be spending any time together at all. We were both weak and said we were doing it for the kid’s. We had never slept together after we made Beth and since he was almost 20 years older than me, he had moved into an almost grandfatherly role, a cranky one at that.
When I got home to Port Townsend that spring I knew it was time to do what I had started to do when Thomas died and that was to leave the kid’s dad. Sell this house I loved, but that we had bought together, sell my property on Long Ridge so I would have money to live since I would never go there again, and finally establish a household I could afford on my own.
A funny thing happened here. When I was looking for a house to buy and escape the bunk beds, I found an old Victorian house for sale in uptown Port Townsend. I thought it was perfect. That was the whole bent of the town, beautiful Victorian Port Townsend. I would be able to walk downtown, as I didn’t drive and I could fix up this beautiful classic building. Well the woman who was selling it would not listen to reason. She would not come to terms. Even the real estate agent said that she was at least $20,000 too high. That does not sound like much, but in those days when the house was worth $50,000 and she wanted $70,000 that is 40% too much. I just couldn’t do it and come out okay financially. Karl’s house came up for $50,000, we bought it and moved in. Almost three years later I was again looking for a house so I could separate from the kid’s dad for a second time, and guess what - that same Victorian was for sale and not only was it $20,000 less this time, they had put in a cement basement and perimeter foundation, and finished the wood floor in the studio. Wow, I was delighted and bought it.
That winter I was Mexico dreaming again. I took a ride down to Bahia de Conception with the Kid’s dad. I know, I was a complete and desperate fool. I still did not drive and thought we could be civil. He agreed not to drink on the trip down. He didn’t and everything went fine. The minute we got to the beach he started drinking, next thing I know he is throwing our stuff out of the motor home, swearing and screaming. He speeds off and we are left on our own, which is actually better than being with an abusive drunk anyway. I set up the tent next to the palaypa and tied it down. We opened the lawn chairs and set them in the shade. We blew up the air mattress that we floated on by day and slept on by night. The kids found their buckets and boats and they were occupied for the next few months by sand and water.
Our tent was less than 10 feet to the edge of the water. I could sit on my bed in the tent and look out at the turquoise blue water lapping on the shore with barren mountains on the other side of the bay in the distance behind. We went to bed by 6:30 PM, after the sun had gone down and the coals from the dinner fire were still glowing. We were up by 6 AM and by 6:30 AM you needed both your sunglasses and bathing suit on, to get ready for a long day in the sun. We made friends of others who were camped there too. There was a family from central California who had a boy Cam’s age and a girl Beth’s. She also had a baby, which I was glad I did not have! She and I became fast friends. She would ride us on her ATV to the little restaurant on the next beach over. It could barely make it with all of us hanging on. The boys would be out with an inflatable boat early in the morning and stay busy all day, you had to go out 20 feet to be 2 feet deep, it was really safe for kids. I have great photos of my two; the sun had bleached their hair blond and turned their skin the color of a nut. Bare foot and smiling we all played on the beach.
There was a woman who pulled in next to us one day in a large fancy motor home. She looked to be about 60. She tried to stay to herself and I noticed her crying sometimes. Finally I went over and stated to make small talk. I’m a bad judge of age and she looked good but she was past 70. She burst into tears, I’m sorry she said, my husband just died. I lost my son, I said. She said oh and opened up to me. She and her husband had just bought this motor home, they had been planning this for years. When he retired they would drive down Baja and really start to enjoy life, well soon after they bought the motor home and before they took a trip, he died of a heart attack. She didn’t know what to do; she had this huge home on wheels, so she decided to drive down Baja herself. She was not a wimpy woman, driving alone at her age down Baja was feisty, but she was having trouble going on from here. They had wanted to try and find the lost mission of Santa Isabel. Story has it that when the Jesuits, who had come to Baja in 1697 and set up the first permanent missions, were expelled in 1767 by the Franciscans, before they were forced onto a ship and headed for San Blas, they sealed their treasure off in a valley. The valley of the mission Santa Isabel fit the description. The mission has never been found, nor has the treasure of the Jesuits.
My friend said she would watch the kids and that I should take this nice lady on a hike so she could get ready for the lost mission hike. Why don’t you take hike yourself I said. Oh, I am a girly girl and you are the outdoor type. Look I live in a big trailer and you live in a tent. I have a dress on and you have khaki shorts. Okay, okay, maybe I could use a break from the kids, maybe I can do some writing. When we told Golda that I would take her to see the petroglyphs, she was so excited, let’s take an overnight she said, take sleeping bags and sleep in a cave. Okay, right, whatever and that is how a few days later I found myself heading out of camp, across the road and up the dry stream bed with my backpack and sleeping bag. We went behind several small hills with no problem and without climbing much heading for the Sierra Coyote peaks to the west of us, part of the larger Sierra de Guadalupe range. We start up the arroyo and come across a large horizontal rock, there are 100’s of prehistoric petroglyphs and paintings in the arroyo. I heard later that the rock is called “Bell Rock”, and that this place was sacred to the natives, if you strike the rock with a stone or hard stick the rock resonates like a bell. Wish I had know that then, although the petroglyph themselves were amazing enough.
The creators of the petroglyphs and cave paintings are unknown. Harry Crosby, the cave paintings expert of Baja California calls them “the Painters”. The Cochimis, who were the native tribe there when the Spanish arrived, told them that the rock art was created by a race of giants who preceded them. The Sierra de Guadalupe west of Mulege contains the largest number of known prehistoric mural sites in all of Baja. Rabbits, mountain sheep and deer are the animals most commonly found on the rocks, also manta rays which I thought was very cool. Some were just outlines in black and others were red or white. The black color comes from charcoal, the white from volcanic ash and the red is made from crushed lava. Wow.
Once we started climbing it got a little rougher and we went slower. There was much sand and many huge rocks, cactus everywhere; organ pipe cactus and the giant cardon. I have heard Baja called the eight hundred mile cactus garden, over 100 different species of cacti have been identified on the Baja Peninsula – more than anywhere else in the world. Almost three quarters of them are unique only to Baja, I think we saw most of them that day. We saw another strange plant or tree I guess, the elephant tree. This tree has a really thick trunk and heavy limbs, but is not very tall. To conserve water, the tree only has leaves after a rain. When it doesn’t have leaves it looks dead and when it does it looks really silly, huge limbs with little tiny leaves.
I am getting winded walking, lets stop here I say. For the night? Oh no way she says, I want to get at least to that next ridge of caves up there, see? She points. My idea was not to hike your butt off all day, my idea was to hike a ways past the rock drawings, smoke a joint and write for the afternoon. The caves look closer than they are, it was a long strenuous walk. Once there we see the area has many caves, some larger and some smaller. She picks out a cave that faces north and is easy to get to. I see one higher up that is perfectly aligned to see the sunset. See you in the morning I say, I as I head up to it. The cave is awesome, about 20 by 30 feet inside with a nice open ledge, it is flat and full of sand. It feels like no one has ever been here before. There were no footprints, no trash, no cigarette butts, beer caps, the usual evidence of humans. I spread out my sleeping bag near the edge, roll a joint and watch a great sunset. I bring my bag further in the cave and try to fall asleep. I start to wonder if there are scorpions. I haven’t seen many before this but I heard that they are often under rocks. I take my flash light and turn over a fairly good sized rock near my bed, yep sure enough, there’s a scorpion. I freak, I try to smash it with the rock. It went under the sand, I didn’t get it, I don’t know where it is. I put the rock back and stand there for awhile. Finally I just went to bed, too tired to be afraid.
When word got to Josephina, the bruja, that we were staying on the beach, and she came right out, Mulege is not very far north of there. She closed the restaurant and brought her whole family out to the beach to visit. We had a wonderful day. They brought great food of course, guitars and especially their lovely kind selves. She said it was a shame for me to be living on the beach with two small children when she had a house for rent in Mulege. A house for rent? Why was she renting her house I asked. Well since I had seen her last she has opened a new restaurant called the Maranatha on the highway south of town and lives in the bedroom in back. All her children were grown and living on their own, they all nod. Why don’t I come see it? Why not indeed. She said, you come with us and we will show you. Before I even saw the house, before they even left the beach that day, it was all arranged. I would rent month by month for $100. $100. today please, I will pick you up on Wednesday, be ready.
I loved her house. It was on the other side of the bridge from town and close to the mission. The front yard was full of flowers and watering would be my job. She was sorry that there was no furniture in the house as her kids took all the things. The bedroom in back had a double bed and dresser at least and that would be my room. The room I put the kids in was in the front next to mine, they had sleeping pads on the floor. The kitchen was a board on bricks that I made with a one burner propane stove. The kitchen actually was unfinished and there were no windows only openings. The weather was so nice I actually enjoyed not having windows. The house had a big wide covered porch that stayed cool even on the hottest days. It was a huge step up from the beach and I was glad to have a bathroom after a few months of camping. Life sometimes had a way of working out. Mexico has always been good to me.
I stayed in my bedroom nursing the baby those first months that she came. By the end of the summer, she was holding the baby and I was mowing the lawn. The lawn, that huge big expanse of field that was my front yard really wasn’t a lawn yet. I worked a lot of anger and frustration out on that field making it into a real lawn. When she was finished, Rebecca would drive us to the grocery store where I could do my weekly shopping and we could all get treats for working so hard.
I didn’t drive after the accident. I didn’t drive again for five years. That did not stop me from wanting to go to Mexico that winter after E was born. Cameron would turn four in March and I wanted to be anywhere else but home. I dreaded his fourth birthday. I knew that it had nothing to do with Thomas dying but I couldn’t convince my body. I couldn’t somehow imagine Cameron getting older than Thomas. Besides that I loved Mexico and it was always very healing for me. So we flew down to Loreto. Loreto was where we had first met Nancy. Where maybe I could find no trace of the independent and happy soul I had been just a few short years before.
We stayed in the Hotel Davis which was just a short walk to the beach and not in the hotel where we had lived with Nancy. Here two babies once again frolicked in the calm water’s of the Sea of Cortez. Then it was Thomas and Cameron, now it was Cameron and Elizabeth. My head was still spinning. I was just looking at the photos from that trip years ago with Cam and Elizabeth. There is a photo of Cam coming out of the water with his bath suit on. When I saw it just now, I jumped - I have a photo of Thomas with the same bathing suit on, hunter green with white strips on the side, coming out of the water, same beach at about the same age. Maybe that was what made me rush north again to Mulege, to rent another place and celebrate Cam’s birthday there and not Loreto.
Mulege (Moo-la-hay) is a sweet little town on one of the two navigable rivers in Baja. We rented a nice little apartment on Madero a block down from the main square. There was has a wonderful old mission up the river through the palm groves. It was about a mile and a half walk from the bridge in town, and we walked it often, Bethy in the backpack and Cam running circles around me. The mission dates from the 1770’s. The massive building was built out of hand cut stone. It is a very powerful place. The mission sits high above the river and I never tired of looking out at the legacy of those first padres; the date, fig, banana, olive and orange groves below that still line the river.
Beth, the baby, had tourista, montazuma’s revenge or in plain talk – diarrhea. I wasn’t too worried. We have all had it at different times on our Mexico travels. I was still breast feeding her and thought she would be fine. One evening in our favorite restaurant across the street from the apartment, the woman who worked there came to the table, I didn’t know that she owned the restaurant then. Pardona mi, she said in shy Spanish. Pardon me. My Spanish was very limited; but I soon figured out that she was trying to tell me that my child was very ill. Inferma. Finally she took the baby and I into the back room. She took E and started sucking on her head. She was pointing out to me that her soft spot was depressed and that meant dehydration I now know. She gave me medicine and told me to come back the next day. The next day she sucked on her head again and for the next 5 days. Elizabeth was fine by then. I am sure the medicine helped too but I know that Josephina saved her life. Why is death always so close to life? She and I became fast friends and even though we did not speak the same language, she told me many things. She said she was a bruja, this could mean healer, witch, or magician. I have since heard the word used in many ways.
Dona Josephina was a powerful woman. She reminded me of the leaders in the Gurdjieff group that I had belonged to. I remember once when I was with one of the leaders of that San Francisco group, she said that she had to help me. What do you mean by that, I asked. Well, she said, it is my duty. You are nothing, she went on to say. You are in the beginning group and you know nothing but you have the special ability to recognize us, to sense and know that we have being. You recognize us and so we have to let you hang out with us. Do not be confused though, you are not us, you do not yet have greater being, you still will have to work very hard but very few know us in the way you do. I guess in that way I must have recognized Josephina.
Cameron’s fourth birthday went fine. It was just us. We decorated our apartment with balloons and streamers. I wrapped lots of small toys for Cameron in yellow tissue paper. It was the first time we played the Lotteria game, which is like bingo; you match a picture that is turned up on a card with a picture on your card and mark it. The cool thing of course was that it was in Spanish, it was an easy way to learn some basic vocabulary. We are still playing this game today, not that exact one of course, we have gone through several.
When we got home from Mexico that summer, my goal was to “get the lawn in shape”, that is what I had written in my journal. I also see that I often wrote that I was depressed. I still was having a very hard time adjusting. I didn’t know the enormity of what I was trying to do. I was hard on myself, why wasn’t I getting over this sooner, I pushed. Once I had chosen life, I didn’t want it colored by this tragedy, I didn’t want my children’s lives color by this, but of course they were. I mowed that field into a lawn, I dug a huge garden, I planted trees, I watered and I tried to work out the energy that was stuck in me. I tried to work away the huge hole; I tried to stave off the huge fear that something else like that was going to happen at any moment.
You would think that losing your child like this would make you closer to your surviving children, but surprisingly this did not seem to be true for me. I love my children, no doubt about it, but a part of me was dead too, that innocence I knew with Thomas before he died would never come again. Sometimes I think that I never got as close to C and E. That Thomas’s death held something back in me, didn’t allow me to be too close and what was I thinking, that somehow if they died I wouldn’t hurt as much? But it wasn’t about thinking. I wasn’t really thinking I was just trying to survive.
I filled our lives with flowers. I have wonderful photographs of the yard at the red roof house, which is what Cameron always called it, it had a red tiled roof, hence the red roof house. There were long planter boxes along the edge of the porch filled with trailing lobelia in two colors of blue, white and red geraniums and deep purple petunias. In front of the porch where you continue on into the doors, I made brick stoops and between them grew lupines, poppies and red and pink snapdragons. The garden had huge sunflowers, towering cosmos and it was there I grew my first hollyhocks. I have loved them ever since. Huge flowers all summer growing upward along tall stems. The ones I grew there were a deep wine color and some that were pink and frilly inside. They were beautiful, especially how the two colors grew together. I planted a large area of bearded iris, gladiolus and daisies near the driveway and sweet peas near the garage.
As the days shortened that fall and the garden died I was planning our next trip to Mexico. There is something about Mexico that is healing for me and always has been. I am drawn to Mexico as one is drawn to a lover. Maggie said that in many of my past lives I had been an American and Central American Native. I didn’t try to explain it, I just knew I need to spend some time down there every winter I could. It was like I had some kind of battery in me that got a yearly charge by being there.
I made a plan to drive down with the kid’s dad and have Christmas in Baja together. I still did not drive and felt very sentimental about the surviving children and the holidays. So to Mexico we all went. Just south of Mulege, was our favorite bay, the Bahia de Conception. In the last few years we were shocked at how many more people came every down every year and lived on the beach. They don’t camp, at least they don’t camp in the way we are use to, with a small tent tied to a 3 sided palapa and using a firepit for cooking, they have huge motor homes, trailers and fifth-wheels. At Santispic Beach, the first and largest beach you come to at the beginning of the Bay of Conception, almost all the sites were filled with big wheels of some kind. They had their doors closed, the air conditioners on and their generators blaring. There was even, gasp, a circle of them, just like the wagons on wagons trains of the 1800’s, circle up your machine partner. I wrote in my journal, “I’m not going to meet Don Juan at this beach unless he is now living in a Winnebago”.
We drove further south past Loreto. We had never driven this far down Baja before. When we got to Cabo San Lucas, I was distressed to find that there was no access to the beaches there. The beach was lined with huge hotels and they had fences to the water. Sure you could walk on the beach theoretically as in Mexico the government has a federal zone and owns the land to the high tide, you were discouraged from using it by the guards of the hotels and there was definitely no place to camp. Finally someone told us about Shipwreck Beach a few miles north. One of the only places left to make a rustic camp in the area. This was almost 20 years ago. I have not been back, but have heard about the development there. I am sure I would be shocked; I thought it was bad when we were there.
Shipwreck Beach was awesome then. It was a ways off the main road on dirt roads that were in very poor shape, it was not easy to access and our van almost got stuck several times. It was worth it though. We had a prime spot on a grassy hill with the beach a short walk down. The place was named for the ship that was wrecked off the coast, you could sort of see it at low tide. It was a favorite spot for divers, in fact the only reference to Ship Wreck Beach that I can find in the guide book today is that Cabo Acuadeportes will take you on a guided two tank scuba dive to Ship Wreck Beach for $75. US.
We were quite a bit further down the beach from the shipwreck and our beach was a perfect spot for children. Several larger rocks further out took the brunt of any waves and right next to the beach it was calm and there were wonderful little tide pools and stretches of white sand. It was very safe for the kids. We didn’t have snorkel equipment, but by just looking in the pools we could see schools of bright blue little fish, striped fish, flat fish, tiny tiny silver fish and long needle nose ones. Cam and Beth were ecstatic. So was I. I had never seen anything like it. What a Christmas present.
After Christmas we decided to take the ferry from Cabo to the mainland and drive home that way. We had not been on the mainland in a long time and not this part ever. After a 24 hour ride we arrive in Puerto Vallarta. It is not the Puerto Vallarta that tourists flock to today, well it is the same place but twenty years ago it was still a sleepy tropical village. I feel in love with it immediately and settled into the Hotel Marisol, an, at one time grand, old hotel on the beach in front of Playa de Muertos in old town Puerto Vallarta. When we got to the mainland the kids dad and I parted ways and the kids and I flew home later. I felt bad for Cam and Beth as I knew they loved both of us. If T had not died I knew we would not be spending any time together at all. We were both weak and said we were doing it for the kid’s. We had never slept together after we made Beth and since he was almost 20 years older than me, he had moved into an almost grandfatherly role, a cranky one at that.
When I got home to Port Townsend that spring I knew it was time to do what I had started to do when Thomas died and that was to leave the kid’s dad. Sell this house I loved, but that we had bought together, sell my property on Long Ridge so I would have money to live since I would never go there again, and finally establish a household I could afford on my own.
A funny thing happened here. When I was looking for a house to buy and escape the bunk beds, I found an old Victorian house for sale in uptown Port Townsend. I thought it was perfect. That was the whole bent of the town, beautiful Victorian Port Townsend. I would be able to walk downtown, as I didn’t drive and I could fix up this beautiful classic building. Well the woman who was selling it would not listen to reason. She would not come to terms. Even the real estate agent said that she was at least $20,000 too high. That does not sound like much, but in those days when the house was worth $50,000 and she wanted $70,000 that is 40% too much. I just couldn’t do it and come out okay financially. Karl’s house came up for $50,000, we bought it and moved in. Almost three years later I was again looking for a house so I could separate from the kid’s dad for a second time, and guess what - that same Victorian was for sale and not only was it $20,000 less this time, they had put in a cement basement and perimeter foundation, and finished the wood floor in the studio. Wow, I was delighted and bought it.
That winter I was Mexico dreaming again. I took a ride down to Bahia de Conception with the Kid’s dad. I know, I was a complete and desperate fool. I still did not drive and thought we could be civil. He agreed not to drink on the trip down. He didn’t and everything went fine. The minute we got to the beach he started drinking, next thing I know he is throwing our stuff out of the motor home, swearing and screaming. He speeds off and we are left on our own, which is actually better than being with an abusive drunk anyway. I set up the tent next to the palaypa and tied it down. We opened the lawn chairs and set them in the shade. We blew up the air mattress that we floated on by day and slept on by night. The kids found their buckets and boats and they were occupied for the next few months by sand and water.
Our tent was less than 10 feet to the edge of the water. I could sit on my bed in the tent and look out at the turquoise blue water lapping on the shore with barren mountains on the other side of the bay in the distance behind. We went to bed by 6:30 PM, after the sun had gone down and the coals from the dinner fire were still glowing. We were up by 6 AM and by 6:30 AM you needed both your sunglasses and bathing suit on, to get ready for a long day in the sun. We made friends of others who were camped there too. There was a family from central California who had a boy Cam’s age and a girl Beth’s. She also had a baby, which I was glad I did not have! She and I became fast friends. She would ride us on her ATV to the little restaurant on the next beach over. It could barely make it with all of us hanging on. The boys would be out with an inflatable boat early in the morning and stay busy all day, you had to go out 20 feet to be 2 feet deep, it was really safe for kids. I have great photos of my two; the sun had bleached their hair blond and turned their skin the color of a nut. Bare foot and smiling we all played on the beach.
There was a woman who pulled in next to us one day in a large fancy motor home. She looked to be about 60. She tried to stay to herself and I noticed her crying sometimes. Finally I went over and stated to make small talk. I’m a bad judge of age and she looked good but she was past 70. She burst into tears, I’m sorry she said, my husband just died. I lost my son, I said. She said oh and opened up to me. She and her husband had just bought this motor home, they had been planning this for years. When he retired they would drive down Baja and really start to enjoy life, well soon after they bought the motor home and before they took a trip, he died of a heart attack. She didn’t know what to do; she had this huge home on wheels, so she decided to drive down Baja herself. She was not a wimpy woman, driving alone at her age down Baja was feisty, but she was having trouble going on from here. They had wanted to try and find the lost mission of Santa Isabel. Story has it that when the Jesuits, who had come to Baja in 1697 and set up the first permanent missions, were expelled in 1767 by the Franciscans, before they were forced onto a ship and headed for San Blas, they sealed their treasure off in a valley. The valley of the mission Santa Isabel fit the description. The mission has never been found, nor has the treasure of the Jesuits.
My friend said she would watch the kids and that I should take this nice lady on a hike so she could get ready for the lost mission hike. Why don’t you take hike yourself I said. Oh, I am a girly girl and you are the outdoor type. Look I live in a big trailer and you live in a tent. I have a dress on and you have khaki shorts. Okay, okay, maybe I could use a break from the kids, maybe I can do some writing. When we told Golda that I would take her to see the petroglyphs, she was so excited, let’s take an overnight she said, take sleeping bags and sleep in a cave. Okay, right, whatever and that is how a few days later I found myself heading out of camp, across the road and up the dry stream bed with my backpack and sleeping bag. We went behind several small hills with no problem and without climbing much heading for the Sierra Coyote peaks to the west of us, part of the larger Sierra de Guadalupe range. We start up the arroyo and come across a large horizontal rock, there are 100’s of prehistoric petroglyphs and paintings in the arroyo. I heard later that the rock is called “Bell Rock”, and that this place was sacred to the natives, if you strike the rock with a stone or hard stick the rock resonates like a bell. Wish I had know that then, although the petroglyph themselves were amazing enough.
The creators of the petroglyphs and cave paintings are unknown. Harry Crosby, the cave paintings expert of Baja California calls them “the Painters”. The Cochimis, who were the native tribe there when the Spanish arrived, told them that the rock art was created by a race of giants who preceded them. The Sierra de Guadalupe west of Mulege contains the largest number of known prehistoric mural sites in all of Baja. Rabbits, mountain sheep and deer are the animals most commonly found on the rocks, also manta rays which I thought was very cool. Some were just outlines in black and others were red or white. The black color comes from charcoal, the white from volcanic ash and the red is made from crushed lava. Wow.
Once we started climbing it got a little rougher and we went slower. There was much sand and many huge rocks, cactus everywhere; organ pipe cactus and the giant cardon. I have heard Baja called the eight hundred mile cactus garden, over 100 different species of cacti have been identified on the Baja Peninsula – more than anywhere else in the world. Almost three quarters of them are unique only to Baja, I think we saw most of them that day. We saw another strange plant or tree I guess, the elephant tree. This tree has a really thick trunk and heavy limbs, but is not very tall. To conserve water, the tree only has leaves after a rain. When it doesn’t have leaves it looks dead and when it does it looks really silly, huge limbs with little tiny leaves.
I am getting winded walking, lets stop here I say. For the night? Oh no way she says, I want to get at least to that next ridge of caves up there, see? She points. My idea was not to hike your butt off all day, my idea was to hike a ways past the rock drawings, smoke a joint and write for the afternoon. The caves look closer than they are, it was a long strenuous walk. Once there we see the area has many caves, some larger and some smaller. She picks out a cave that faces north and is easy to get to. I see one higher up that is perfectly aligned to see the sunset. See you in the morning I say, I as I head up to it. The cave is awesome, about 20 by 30 feet inside with a nice open ledge, it is flat and full of sand. It feels like no one has ever been here before. There were no footprints, no trash, no cigarette butts, beer caps, the usual evidence of humans. I spread out my sleeping bag near the edge, roll a joint and watch a great sunset. I bring my bag further in the cave and try to fall asleep. I start to wonder if there are scorpions. I haven’t seen many before this but I heard that they are often under rocks. I take my flash light and turn over a fairly good sized rock near my bed, yep sure enough, there’s a scorpion. I freak, I try to smash it with the rock. It went under the sand, I didn’t get it, I don’t know where it is. I put the rock back and stand there for awhile. Finally I just went to bed, too tired to be afraid.
When word got to Josephina, the bruja, that we were staying on the beach, and she came right out, Mulege is not very far north of there. She closed the restaurant and brought her whole family out to the beach to visit. We had a wonderful day. They brought great food of course, guitars and especially their lovely kind selves. She said it was a shame for me to be living on the beach with two small children when she had a house for rent in Mulege. A house for rent? Why was she renting her house I asked. Well since I had seen her last she has opened a new restaurant called the Maranatha on the highway south of town and lives in the bedroom in back. All her children were grown and living on their own, they all nod. Why don’t I come see it? Why not indeed. She said, you come with us and we will show you. Before I even saw the house, before they even left the beach that day, it was all arranged. I would rent month by month for $100. $100. today please, I will pick you up on Wednesday, be ready.
I loved her house. It was on the other side of the bridge from town and close to the mission. The front yard was full of flowers and watering would be my job. She was sorry that there was no furniture in the house as her kids took all the things. The bedroom in back had a double bed and dresser at least and that would be my room. The room I put the kids in was in the front next to mine, they had sleeping pads on the floor. The kitchen was a board on bricks that I made with a one burner propane stove. The kitchen actually was unfinished and there were no windows only openings. The weather was so nice I actually enjoyed not having windows. The house had a big wide covered porch that stayed cool even on the hottest days. It was a huge step up from the beach and I was glad to have a bathroom after a few months of camping. Life sometimes had a way of working out. Mexico has always been good to me.
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