Originally posted by Osprey
King, good job. You're not the only Nomad who thinks of this place as though it was a woman. I bet many others do too.
Warning Label
When I saw it, when I realized what had got me, what was causing me such incredible pain, I could not believe my eyes. The plant, called mala mujer,
Bad Woman, luxuriant, lovely looking thing, would look at home in the garden or on the patio. My calf barely brushed it as I walked through the desert
near my home. Mala mujer. Perhaps this whole place should carry such a warning label and a new name to match. Maybe this part of Mexico could be
called mujer mysteriosa, Mysterious Woman; a thing that has indescribable beauty while sometimes meting out profound pain and heartbreak.
I have a sense of the place that embraces not just the spiky land but both seas, the sky above, the immeasurable history. A cruel place indeed for
early travelers – their boats dashed and ruined on the rocky shoals, their feet cut and bleeding from the crippling scrapes and gouges of dagger
plants and nettles. No Cibola here – they would gladly have settled for a wet tinaja, a tiny waterhole.
The early ones might have seen her as a woman. Her moods, her give and take, are not subtle. Modern day visitors need time to learn her moods.
They are lulled into false security, feel less threatened than the adventurers, the settlers and explorers. Yesterday a rogue wave snatched a family
of these new tenderfoots from the beach, a few yards from the sybarite’s pleasure palace on the shore at land’s end. Killed them all.
She is often rough and dismissive with fawning, moonstruck pilgrims – they run north before the chafing winds of misadventure with empty purses and
infected bowels. Many suitors will not be put off. Broken axles and bleeding hearts lie in the dust as testimony to their unrequited fidelity. She
killed all the Indians, the ones with the darkest skin. They found the place full of food they could not gather. Once they were isolated the end
came quickly for these early tourists.
La Mujer still holds the power to embrace, to heal. She mellows with age. Now she lets the dark skinned ones live but she makes them work like
dogs. She allows me some latitude; I know many of her secrets and I can avoid her nags and nettles because I am no longer fooled by her deceptive
hues and shapes and textures. I just have to remind myself that in Baja California nothing is what it appears to be.
When they talk about my end, how she took me down, I hope they’ll say, by whatever name they may give her, that she let me go quietly into the night;
full of her beauty and passion, sated, at peace, knowing I had wooed her, held her if only for a very short while. They may say of me that my fate
was sealed when she let me feel that irresistible sweet spot between serenity and danger. |
