Osprey
Ultra Nomad
Posts: 3694
Registered: 5-23-2004
Location: Baja Ca. Sur
Member Is Offline
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Back in The Day
When was Back in the Day?
My fishin’ buddy in the states, Tony, is a verifiable atavist, born 100 years (or more) too late. We had some wild fireside differences about the
subject behind some limes and Gusano Rojo.
He described the wild western part of the U.S. like a hunter’s heaven, a fishermen’s Nirvana. He kept dragging me back to the 1600 and 1700s to show
me the grandeur, the empty majesty of a place yet untouched.
He wasn’t talking to the Princess of New York City because I was drinking out of hoof prints and eating trout on a stick at times myself so it wasn’t
city boy against country boy.
So I had standing to nudge him, between shots, back to reality when his picture got too Bambi-like and on we went. I think I would enjoy such chats
with some Nomads out there who, like Tony, would be willing to endure some discomfort for real adventure, a life worth living.
I reminded him that beyond the Great Basin to the west at that time, he was more likely to have the full time job of just staying alive. Not much
opportunity to travel – the Western Amerindians moved south and east at the rate of 100 miles per generation (30 years). I have to leave out the boat
people because they could travel much farther and faster by water but it was more arduous and dangerous than most land travel by foot. So unless he
painted himself into a picture with a horse, the majesty, the grandeur he would enjoy would just be mostly his valley, the foothills and the mountains
around him – he, like many new to the life, to the west might live out his life and not travel over a hundred miles from his brush hut.
In one of our fireside sessions I suggested it might be a “How you gonna keep em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree” kinda thing. Something
about knowing what the west looks like in the movies, TV, google earth or visiting the Tetons, Yellowstone and Yosemite in modern times by bike or car
or bus seems as easy as planning the trip, jumping in the van and you’re there. That’s now. You wanna go back, it’s a very big deal.
How about a trip from California to what is now Baja before there were cars? Try doing the pilgrim thing from north to south in your mind (apologies
to Graham and Mike, The Burro Man).
In a pinch, unless I was too drunk to make an argument I would bring up some trade-offs:
Tony would make a face when I told him I would live now, give up some personal freedom for the Beach Boys. Trade off the gift of solitude for some
things like toilet paper, dentists, bug spray, a new jeep, my 6mm Remington, cold Bud, a passport and a credit card and the time to use them.
We were both born in the 1930s and had all the freedom that era could give us and we lived it to the hilt. As a kid I roamed the Everglades of south
Florida while Tony walked the mounds of the famous Mississipians at Cahokia but he is very hard to convince – he says he’d rather be a loner, a
hunter-gatherer than do his life over in these times.
Must be just our dreams, his of his first bison kill with a spear, mine of memory of my first vanilla milk shake, the hum of the engine in my 49 Chevy
and Surfin’ U.S.A. in the backround. In the main, wouldn’t trade a minute of it.
Maybe all those talks lead me down the path to be a writer, to preserve, for a while the ideal opportunity to live in the here and now, let my mind
and my pen wander all over the universe being amazed at what each era held for one with a different kind of free and easy travel pass.
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DavidE
Ultra Nomad
Posts: 3814
Registered: 12-1-2003
Location: Baja California México
Member Is Offline
Mood: 'At home we demand facts and get them. In Mexico one subsists on rumor and never demands anything.' Charles Flandrau,
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Baja Early Sixties
Sixty miles a day was excellent. Spine shattering, dust choking, flushing eyes.
Water tasted like mud. Coffee tasted so bad I even tried adding limon to it (w-r-o-n-g)
Vegetables? Vegetables? They were cheap but almost non existent. Sta Rosalia, and La Paz had some.
Fishing? I fished day after day after day from shore. Tried everything in the tackle box. Caught some sierra and some cochis, all small.
Want something cold to drink? Hahahahahahah! "Tenemos todo al tiempo amigo"
We had citronella repellent as DEET was stupidly expensive (Cutters). I did have a tiny vial of cutters. The jejenes on santispac tore us a new you
know what. My arms and ankles were scabbed for weeks.
We fell upon the panaderia el boleo like it was a slice of heaven. I purchased three dozen polverones, which lived up to their moniker perfectly the
next day in the jeep.
The Bajacalifornieros made the trip a thousand percent success.
You can turn off Mex 1 anywhere you want and just out of range of the jake brakes you are back in the baja california of 1990, or 1940, or 1540. Drag
out the twinkies and don julio and morph between the two.
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