BajaNews - 7-17-2006 at 09:25 PM
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0CE2D8153FF...
March 3, 1991
By WILLIAM FINNEGAN
When I was a teenager, Baja California was, for my friends and me, a big, gritty frontier that ran south forever. We drove down from Los Angeles in
unreliable vans, camped in scrubby pastures and on obscure desert beaches, ate $1 lobsters, and surfed. Surf spots were named for the kilometer posts
on the highway, which showed the distance back to the border. The farther south one pushed, the more exciting things got. The first time I surfed
K181, I was 14 years old and firmly convinced that we had reached the far edge of the known world.
There was always some place called "the tip," shimmering in the extreme distance, circa K5000. Old Baja hands described a tropical oasis, with coral
reefs, great waves and a real town. Of course, the road to get there was a deathtrap. Our poor old vans would never survive it, and neither, most
likely, would we. And so Cabo San Lucas remained, for me, a mythical destination, a place I figured I would never see.
Twenty years later, reduced to surfing Fire Island on summer weekends, I got a call from my homeboy, Bryan Di Salvatore. Bryan lives in Missoula,
Mont., now. He said he wanted to go surfing. Cabo San Lucas was mentioned. We took several seconds to think it over, then agreed to meet at Los
Angeles International and to let Aeromexico do the hard part.
The thousand-mile flight took less time than crossing the border at Tijuana used to do. We flew over a lot of desert, then landed in slightly lusher
desert -- so much for the tropical tip. It was midday, hot and dry. The peaks of the Sierra San Lazaro rose in the west. We rented a funky little car
at the funky little airport (where we saw a disturbing number of surfboards, harbingers of crowded waves) and set off for the coast.
It was still 30 miles to Cabo San Lucas itself, but our research (that is, our flurry of phone calls to anyone we knew who knew lower Baja) had
produced a surprise: it seemed that the best surf broke on the inland side of the peninsula. The Pacific side also got waves, of course, but south
swells often slipped into the Gulf of California and the 50 southernmost miles of the Baja Gulf coast were nicely angled to meet them. We headed for
the Gulf.
We passed goats and a scatter of dim shops and grotty garages and then a heavily-painted bus passed us, going at least 60, with Radio Mariachi
blasting and the driver waving his hands in conversation with a passenger. "Cuidado [ careful ] ," Bryan muttered, adding something funny and obscene.
I sighed. This was the Mexico I remembered: dusty, dangerous, sweet, profane.
But at San Jose del Cabo, where we struck the coast, a Mexico I didn't remember materialized, in the form of a golf course, condominiums and a string
of resort hotels. We were still 20 miles from the tip. We turned and headed north on a dirt road that crawled through a chain of jagged arroyos.
We were looking for a spot called Shipwrecks. Four fishermen playing cards in a palm-frond lean-to shrugged when we asked for directions. One pointed
north. We pushed on, through land that grew rapidly emptier. I counted five kinds of cactus: organ pipe, cholla, prickly pear, fishhook, cordon. We
caught only brief glimpses of the sea.
Bryan and I had spent several lifetimes doing this sort of thing together. We had scoured the boondocks of Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, Bali, Java, Sumatra,
looking for empty waves. We once drove straight across the center of Australia in a '65 Falcon station wagon, four surfboards and a jerrycan strapped
to the roof.
This was different, though. Then we had months, years -- as long as the money held out (and then there were jobs: dishwashing, bartending). Now we had
a week. And adult-type lives to get back to. We were, therefore, slightly frantic.
We never did find Shipwrecks that day. We ended up racing back to San Jose del Cabo, spotting some surfers in the water south of town, and joining
them. This break, we were told, was called Costa Azul. There were too many surfers for the few waves that came through, but it was blissful to be in
the ocean. We surfed till past sundown. The other people in the water -- all fellow gringos -- seemed to be an easygoing lot.
But then, staggering up the beach at dusk, we discovered a message painted in huge letters on a seawall: SOLAMENTE LOCALES. Locals only. We wondered
who the locals might be, and whether any gringos qualified.
Blearily, we found a hotel, one of the string along the beach at San Jose del Cabo. In our room, which went for 100,000 pesos ($40) a night, the air
conditioner roared. The surf roared louder, though, especially after midnight, when the tide began to rise.
At daybreak, we were back at Costa Azul. The wind was onshore, which was unfortunate, but the waves were chest-high. By the time we paddled in, we
were both exhausted and sunburned. It seemed neither of us had managed to stay in shape for surfing simply by thinking about it a lot. In fact, three
atrociously fit Mexicans had paddled rings around us all morning. One of them -- a startlingly good surfer -- had been poor company: charging around,
grimly taking many times his share of waves. Obviously a top-dog local.
After rehydrating at a cantina on the hillside above Costa Azul, we headed for Cabo San Lucas. The highway curved south through rocky hills dotted
with white stucco second homes, their shuttered windows staring blindly out to sea. Sometime in the 1970's, a paved highway running the length of Baja
had been finished. Clearly, many Americans, including many owners of recreational vehicles (we passed several trailer courts), now found the trip
manageable. Others -- such as the guests at the luxury resorts we spotted, tile roofs shining amid the irrigated greenery on private coves and
headlands -- apparently flew in. We passed a number of hotels under construction -- the tourist industry was plainly the mainstay of the local
economy.
The tip appeared: a high dark spine of rock curving out to sea, ending in a natural arch and a set of offshore spires. Nestled in the bay it formed
was the town of Cabo San Lucas, which looked to be perfectly designed for what it once was: a hiding-place for English pirates preying on the Spanish
fleet. These days, it's a tourist town. We turned off the highway into a sea of hotels, boutiques, dive shops, bars and charter-fishing storefronts.
There was a yacht harbor, a cruise-ship dock, a supermarket and an Italian restaurant with a satellite dish and a sign advertising Monday Night
Football.
We made our way toward the tip, passing an abandoned fish cannery and taking a steep road up to the Hotel Finisterra, a sprawling palace ingeniously
built in a saddle just before the peninsula rears and takes its final plunge into the ocean. The Finisterra retains some of the glamour of the days
before the highway, and before mass travel, when Cabo San Lucas was a Hollywood getaway. Sitting in the hotel's Whale Watcher's Bar, which is carved
into the cliff and faces south across the empty Pacific, it was easy to imagine Hepburn and Tracy there, rounding off a day of marlin-fishing with
martinis. Waves were thundering on the beach below the hotel. We decided to look again for Shipwrecks.
This time we pushed farther up the coast, through the rough arroyos past Punta Gorda. Suddenly, we found ourselves in a backwoods Baja that I had
begun to think was extinct. Adobe ranchos huddled in the gullies, surrounded by traditional palo de arco fencing. Windmills on the mesas pumped water
for plots of corn, lettuce and peppers. Two boys on a horse pulled over to let us pass -- one had a riata around his waist, the other a machete stuck
in his belt. In a farmyard, a mother and daughter looked up from their work at a cheese press. Burros and cattle lurched off the road. There were
canebreaks at the bottoms of the larger arroyos, and great pink boulders scattered on the beaches.
The wind was still onshore, but the swell was strong, and we eventually found a bay we figured was Shipwrecks. The surf was messy, but inviting. We
paddled out and rode long, bumpy, head-high waves over a sweeping rock reef. Sitting on the bluff afterward, drinking strangely wonderful beers and
watching big blue swells wrap around the point, we knew we had found an honest-to-God surf spot. With the right wind, tide and swell, Shipwrecks
looked like it could really, as we say, pump. And it wasn't tucked up under some tourist resort.
That night, we drove into San Jose del Cabo for dinner. The town is a mile from the coast, on a low hill overlooking an irrigated valley. Less a
tourist town than Cabo San Lucas, San Jose del Cabo's jacaranda-shaded streets are normally quiet. This, however, was Mexican Independence Day. The
main street -- named after Jose Antonio Mijares, a local patriot killed by the United States Marines in 1847, when the Marines took San Jose del Cabo
as part of the American effort to annex Baja California during the Mexican-American War -- was blocked to traffic and filled with food vendors and
carnival booths. Fantastically costumed mariachi bands played in the plaza; excited children ran through the crowds. Although we could see lightning
flashing in the Sierra San Lazaro, it was a balmy evening in town. Brian and I ate chilis rellenos and pitahaya, the sweet fruit of the organ pipe
cactus. One or two drunken revelers eyed us thoughtfully, but then seemed to decide against avenging Jose Antonio Mijares tonight.
Setting off for Shipwrecks at sunrise, we were alarmed to find the first arroyo we crossed full of mud. We gunned it and slid through. But the next
stream bed was wide and the going was worse. Taking it at speed, I fought the wheel, low sun in my eyes, then lost it at a curve, veering off the road
and crashing to a halt halfway up a tree stump. Fifty yards ahead, we could see two vehicles hopelessly stuck. The storm in the mountains had sent
flash floods down the arroyos. It would be many days before the road was passable again.
From one of the stuck cars, three mud-covered figures lurched towards us. They were young gringos -- college kids -- and very drunk. Swearing and
spluttering, they helped lift our car off the stump, then watched bitterly as we slithered it back to high ground and headed back to town.
We decided to try another spot. Known as the Estuary, it was just north of our row of hotels. We parked at the end of the hotel road and made our way
past a large lagoon to the beach. The lagoon's banks were a brilliant green, with palm groves and sugar cane leaning over the water. This much fresh
water this close to the coast is unusual in Baja -- and the lagoon at San Jose del Cabo was, in fact, a mandatory stop for ships in mission times,
when it was called Aguada Segura, "secure watering place." Morning-glory vines trailed over the dune dividing the lagoon from the sea. The surf, which
was good-looking but breaking too close to the beach to ride, began to break farther out as we walked north. At precisely the point where the surf
became ridable, half a dozen surfers were already out carving it up.
We surfed all morning. The waves were excellent -- head-high, hard-breaking -- and the crowd grew steadily. The overmuscled Mexican from the morning
before at Costa Azul was out, his lip curled in a fixed smile-sneer, but virtually all the other 30-odd guys in the water were gringos. And virtually
all of them seemed to be from southern California. It was much like surfing Zuma or Newport Beach: the hustling, the hassling, the arcane exchanges. I
failed to emerge from the bowels of a short, sparkling beast of a wave, and when I surfaced, eyes and ears plugged with sand, an onlooker, paddling
by, tried to console me by barking, "You musta had some b-tchin' visions."
The wind came up, onshore. Bryan and I were, again, exhausted and sun-fried. We retreated to the hotel, where we dozed and read and dozed and agreed
that it was time to try the Pacific coast.
Because the surf on the Pacific side was exposed to the prevailing winds, our plan was to get there early, before the wind came up. I wrecked this
plan by locking the keys in the car in Cabo San Lucas, where we had stopped for supplies. By the time we found a locksmith in the back streets of
town, got the car open and headed up the west coast, the wind was howling.
The Pacific side was wilder in every sense than the Gulf coast. There were no resorts, no golf courses, just cattle ranches, jackrabbits and the odd
small settlement. The only other vehicles on the highway were trucks carrying empty soft-drink bottles. We were, as in days of old, looking for surf
spots by kilometer posts -- except that here the posts counted northward progress. We left the highway and bumped through scrubland and irrigated
orchards, looking in vain for surf, and very nearly got stuck on a sand road near a fishing camp. Some ferocious offroad driving kept us mobile, but
our car was not the same afterward: coughing, knocking, complaining.
We refueled in Todos Santos, a handsome village where the wide dirt streets were lined with pine trees. But the gas station attendant knew nothing
about a certain cove that we thought might be protected from the wind.
I finally paddled out at a huge lonely beach where the wind was blowing sideshore and the waves turned a tropical aquamarine as they broke. The
conditions were marginal, at best, and the wisdom of Bryan's decision to stay on shore was instantly revealed. I was swept downcoast by a raging
current. Bryan ran along the berm trying to keep me in sight but was quickly left behind. I was being carried toward an unpleasant-looking headland,
where the surf was crashing spectacularly. I struggled to catch a wave, eventually succeeded, and rode it to shore. Bryan found me sitting on the
sand, gasping for breath. He kindly said nothing.
We exchanged our injured car for a healthy one, and settled into a tame routine: surfing Costa Azul or the Estuary in the mornings and evenings, and
otherwise staying out of the sun. The surf dropped. There was a hurricane at sea, we heard -- a chubasco , they call it in Baja -- and each night we
listened for the roar of rising surf. "Won't happen," a young surfer from Santa Cruz, Calif., told us. "The chubasco 's off the window." He meant that
it was ill-positioned to send us waves.
I went into town and, in a big, dim shop, bought a bizarre clay bowl. The bowl formed the body of a long-tailed, pointy-eared ceramic dog with an ear
of corn in his mouth. The shopowner said it was a tepexcuincle, a hairless, vegetarian, indigenous dog. The shopowner's daughter, a self-possessed
child in a school uniform, disputed her father's spelling of the dog's name -- she favored "tepescuintle" -- but agreed that the animal had become
very rare because of its popularity as the main course at traditional Mexican barbecues. She said the dogs survived only in Quintana Roo province, in
the Yucatan. Her father said he had seen one on the highway near La Paz, the capital city of southern Baja. Father and daughter regarded one another
silently. To break the tension, I bought a second tepexcuincle.
That evening, the waves at the Estuary were small but exceedingly sweet. The wind blew lightly offshore. The sun sank into the mountains and the sky
turned yellow, then orange and, finally, a deep plum. The surf was breaking close to shore, and the steep dune loomed above us, with palm trees and
cactus and then three figures on horseback etched black against the sky. The wave foam turned lavender, and the lights from the string of hotels down
the coast began to glitter. Pelicans fished, and frigate birds -- Mexicans call them tijeras , "scissors," for their forked tails -- soared above the
lagoon. It was a magical session, and the magic deepened as a full moon rose from the Gulf, spreading a silver veil over the dark, wind-brushed lines
of the waves.
The crowd the next morning at Costa Azul was horrible. Two, three, four people were on every wave, snarling and threatening. The muscle-bound Mexican
hotshot outdid himself, sprinting around with blood in his eye, stealing waves, savaging them. The pecking order suggested by the graffito, SOLAMENTE
LOCALES -- which hung over the surf at Costa Azul like a billboard -- was being fiercely rearranged. I found myself wondering what I was doing here.
The scene had all the charm of the subway at rush hour.
That afternoon, we drove down to the Hotel Palmilla, one of the gracious old joints south of San Jose del Cabo. I was thinking vaguely of possible
future trips en famille. As we entered the Palmilla's lobby, Bryan suddenly looked at me meaningfully. He nodded toward the reception desk. There,
among half a dozen other workers in immaculate white coats, was the terror of Costa Azul, Mexican surfing's answer to Genghis Khan, also in a white
coat. He saw us looking toward the desk, and nodded deferentially. He did not seem to recognize us, for which I was grateful. We hurried through the
lobby. My face was, for some reason, hot with embarrassment.
I flew back to the United States the next day. Bryan stayed on for a few more days, managing, he reported later, to ride some good waves between
overcrowded sessions. On land, he hung out with some young dudes from Santa Cruz and made lists of their expressions, learning to call a powerful wave
"burly" and a dubious person a "sketcher."
Bryan pronounced himself altogether satisfied with our week at the tip, and yet I notice that his current surf-trip plan is both more substantial and
more obscure than our Baja jaunt. He and his wife have rented a house for two months on a dogleg bay in southern Ireland where the surf is said to
pump. I plan to visit.