David K
Honored Nomad
Posts: 65165
Registered: 8-30-2002
Location: San Diego County
Member Is Offline
Mood: Have Baja Fever
|
|
A Gardner Baja Habla, by Choral Pepper
A chapter from the unpublished BAJA MISSIONS, MYSTERIES, MYTHS for your reading enjoyment...
A GARDNER BAJA HABLA
Rarely did Erle Stanley Gardener initiate a Baja trek with a particular goal in mind. Adventure was his goal. He preferred to just let it happen.
And to Gardner, it always did. So it was in l961, while drifting through a narrow barranca [canyon] in a helicopter, that a fantastic vision of
gigantic figures suddenly appeared through its plexi-glass windows. Recessed midway on the wall of an eroded cave shelter in the canyon?s
1000-foot-deep wall, the rock paintings would have been visible only from a helicopter. The barranca was too narrow to accommodate a plane and,
recessed as the murals were, they were imperceptible from either the plateau atop the canyon or from its floor. As Gardner hovered through the long
serpentine canyon, other mural sites appeared. Suspecting that he had made a remarkable discovery, he dispatched a plane to Los Angeles to invite
LIFE photographer Nat Farbman and archaeologist Dr. Clement Meighan from U.C.L.A. to fly down and evaluate the remarkable discovery. Both men returned
on the plane. Time was too limited for a weighty appraisal and the site too inaccessible for further study so Gardner ruminated on it for a couple of
years before undertaking what he termed as the ?expedition to end all expeditions!.?
And that is where I entered the picture.
A number of my articles about prehistoric rock art throughout the world had been published and I was well aware of Gardner?s discovery in Baja, so you
can imagine my excitement when a call came to my desk. ?This is Erle Stanley Gardner, young lady. I am one of your readers and I want to meet you.?
?I want to meet you, too,? I said.
? I?ll be at your office in ...hmmm...one hour and six minutes.?
?I?ll be here,? I promised.
He was and I was, and that was the beginning of an adventurous friendship. It ultimately included a number of Baja expeditions, which Gardner lumped
together in his book Off the Beaten Track in Baja and I covered in two lengthy series for Desert Magazine. All of our expeditions were memorable, but
my initiation as a member of the Gardner exploration team was especially so.
The long slow drive south of Mulege to Bahia Concepcion may be driven today on a paved two-lane road in about twenty minutes, but in the mid-1960?s it
took three hours, if all went well. Bound in places by sand dunes that slid into the bay and elsewhere by rocky, mountainous terrain, it presented a
veritable jungle of growth distinctive to Baja. Stunted tarote, a form of elephant tree, graceful white-skinned depua and Baja?s gigantic cardon trees
mingled with equally strange forms of cacti that crawled, stretched, reached and twisted across the ever-changing terrain.
Its cacti threaten off-highway motorists, even today. It must have taken thousands of years for those devils to adapt to their arid environment, in
spite of Baja?s rich soil that fosters their tremendous size. The trickiest and meanest of all is the ?trap? cactus. Not all of its roots go
underground, if any of them do, and the exposed roots entwine themselves in a rough circle on the surface of the ground. When concealed, as they
usually are by sand or debris of other desert growth, the roots serve as a trigger-spring to the main bush. An inadvertent step on one of those
hidden roots sets the whole fiery plant in action
As we ascended the ?Pass of Death? on the old Baja road, we fell behind a truck struggling slowly uphill. The Mexican driver, traditionally courteous,
refused to draw aside to let us pass.
Ricardo Costillo, a Mexican member of our crew, honked at each turnoff, to no avail. When the hill grew steeper, the reason became clear.
A man carrying a rock jumped from the truck?s platform. Squeezing himself against the rocky wall of the precipitous trail, he followed beside his
brakeless truck?s rear wheel so he could place the rock behind it in the event an axle broke and the truck careened in reverse. Our sense of security
went into shock during this interlude. We hoped very hard that if any cars were in front of the truck, they were far enough in advance to avoid the
onslaught of the brakeless truck on its fiendish downgrade race on the opposite side of the summit.
After negotiating the pass with my eyes closed, I was relieved to open them and catch a glimpse of our camp cook, young Jorge Yee, signaling us to
follow a pair of faint tracks cut by one of our advance trucks. We trailed the tracks for about a mile and then an astonishing illusion passed before
us. The gutted body of an old blue Ford crept slowly along a path cleared through the cacti. No wheels, no motor, no power. Nothing. Just an old
rusty body moving along the ground. Ricardo stopped our car. Nobody said a word. Then slowly the body turned to reveal J.W. Black, a mainstay of
Gardner?s expeditions, steering a Gardner dune buggy we called the ?grasshopper? Behind it he towed the rusty body. This was the means by which our
resourceful ground crew ?plowed? a landing strip so Captain Francisco Munoz, Gardner?s friend and favorite pilot, could join us.. And when Munoz soon
joined us, it proved to be a pretty good one, too.
Later we discovered that the discarded rusty body was an important native landmark, indicating what, we couldn?t determine, so the men carefully
returned it to the original spot from whence its spirit had departed the old road.
My first glimpse of Bahia Concepcion, as we approached it from a cliff side turn, inspired the same awed sensation, as did my first sight of Bora Bora
in Tahiti. Its water must contain copper dioxide to attain such a vibrant blue.
At the bottom of the incline beside the bay, Ricardo spied a mountain of boulders covered with petroglyphs. Their age was hard to determine, but some
of these boulders had been split by a cataclysm of nature after the ancient artists had chiseled their designs, probably one of Baja?s treacherous
storms called chubascos.. The pecked incisions depicted typical Indian sun signs, rakes, kite-shaped figures and curvilinear abstractions, plus a few
sharks and tropical fish native to the Gulf of California.
Petroglyphs such as these had no more connection with the pictographs that motivated our forthcoming expeditions than they had with the early tribes
who rendered those paintings in the canyons. Petroglyphs were ?pecked,? or incised into canyon walls or boulders while pictographs were painted onto
stone surfaces. The two techniques represented two different cultures, two different peoples. You might say, ?pictors? didn?t ?peck?, and
?peckers?didn?t ?pict.?
While some of us lingered to photograph petroglyphs, the others continued on to the beach property of a Mexican goat rancher named Manuelo, a Gardner
friend of long standing and upon whose property we were going to establish our headquarter camp.
Along with Manuelo?s goats, our beach supported a small colony of fishermen. Piles of frilly pink murex and enormous conch shells were brought ashore
each evening to be shipped to Florida! On a wooden shelf suspended between two trees, the fishermen smoked the meat of the murex and left it to dry.
The murex shell is a fancy ruffled one with a black or pink interior and is found only in tropical waters. Mexicans eat the meat from its pink-tinted
shells, but never from the black ones. The reason for this I couldn?t fathom, but meat from the pink ones tastes something like a tough scallop.
Another taste treat in the neighborhood was found at Manuelo?s candy factory. Under a ramada beside his thatched hut, which provided living quarters,
he manufactured the world?s greatest panocha fudge. Made of goat milk, a native cactus ingredient and sugar obtained by boiling the sap of sugar
cane, its creamy texture was acquired by beating the mixture with an ingenious series of wooden paddles mounted onto a hub like blades of a fan and
propelled by a small gasoline engine.
The candy cooked in an old fashioned washtub and kids (baby goats) collected just like the human kind to lick the pan, sometimes while the panocha was
still in it. Manuelo did a big trade with occasional truckers who delivered the finished product to markets in Mulege and points north.
Also of interest at Manuelo?s goat ranch was a prize Nubian goat named Negro. This goat had survived a most traumatic experience. At a time when
Manuelo lamented the demise of a former billy goat necessary for breeding, an accommodating gringo friend, whose name we won?t mention, promised to
buy him a super goat stud up north and send it down. Bringing livestock across the border, however, turned out to be more complicated than imagined.
But the friend had promised. So what he did was sedate the goat, stuff it into the trunk of his car, and smuggle it across the border. That was the
goat named Negro.
When it awakened in its confined quarters, it rebelled to such an extent that it ripped one of the horns right out of its skull, leaving a boneless
section that normally would have proven fatal. After passing well beyond the border, the gringo transferred the suffering goat to a friendly trucker
who managed to keep it alive during the long, hard drive to Manuelo?s. Once there, Manuelo proved himself as ingenious at mending skulls as he was at
beating candy. He simply soldered the hole in the skull, stuck in the stub of broken horn and sawed off its opposite to an equal length so the goat
wouldn?t injure the repair job by trying to use it. With time, the soldered horn miraculously began to grow, thus assuring Manuelo?s goat propagation
for the future.
About a mile below Manuelo?s ranch was El Coyote Sud, possibly the most beautiful beach in Baja. Its palms leaned in all the right directions and its
sand was soft as silk. The homey smell of tortillas and beans heating over charcoal fires emanated from picturesque grass shacks here and there along
the shore where native occupants spread out fishing nets or dragged in their primitive boats after a day at sea.
Bahia Concepcion?s lovely beaches today harbor thriving fishing camps frequented by ?gringos,? but when we were sharing it with only Manuelo?s goats
it had hardly changed since 1719 when Padre Ugarte built the first sea-going vessel to be constructed in Lower California and set forth into the
mysterious sea.
Our campsite on Manuelo?s beach wasn?t as photogenic as El Coyote Sud, but it had a charm of its own with his goats wandering in and out and the camp
following of dogs we soon acquired. A grotesque stump on the shoreline afforded perches for a covey of turkey buzzards that kept us under
conscientious surveillance, providing an animated garbage service. Another generation of those same buzzards now accommodates habitues of Manuelo?s
fishing camp and the restaurant he maintains on his beach.
Setting up camp Gardner-style was an art perfected by Sam Hicks, Gardner?s ranch foreman, and mastered by J.W. and Ricardo. Uncle Erle had his large
tent with a cot. Jean Bethel, his secretary and soon his wife, and I each had smaller ones with cots upon which we placed our sleeping bags, and then
there was a cook tent used for permanent camps. The men slept in sleeping bags under the stars. Extra drivers and guides often were recruited along
the way from various Mexican friends whom Sam and Ricardo had acquired on previous trips.
The stars hadn?t been hanging in their heavens very long that night before one by one we called it a night. Everything was so infinitely quiet that I
hardly realized night had come and gone when the lure of coffee brewing in its big pot on the outdoor grille permeated the clear, cool desert dawn.
From sounds outside my tent I detected that something was amiss. It was. The ground crew had been struggling with the one of the trucks. In spite of
J.W. Black?s mechanical ingenuity, the truck could not be depended upon without replacing the defective part.
?We?d better have an ?habla,? Uncle Erle said. An ?habla? was Gardnerese for ?talk,? but nothing so simple as that could describe the outcome of an
Erle Stanley Gardner ?habla.?
This one resulted in an abrupt about face. The men knew Mulege could not supply the part. It was thus decided that one of the party would fly to
Tijuana from Mulege on a scheduled flight that afternoon to pick up the part and then return to Mulege two days later. Meanwhile, we had three
unplanned days including the better part of a whole one, but not for long.
Never at a loss for ideas, Gardner jammed on his hat and said, ?Good! Jean, Choral and I will go take a look at Scammon's Lagoon while the rest of
you drive to San Ignacio and set up a camp there. Munoz tucked us into his small plane and away we flew.
In no time at all we were overlooking the naked Vizcaino desert where skinny claws of luminous water scrounge into its salt terrain. Knowing the
history that had occurred in this mystic place made me savor all the more the sight in the clear water below. A favorite breeding place for the great
gray whale, the lagoon is so cunningly concealed by dunes built up by currents and prevailing winds that whalers of old, even when searching, failed
to find it. All except one, a Yankee whaler named Charles Scammon for whom it was named. In 1875, Scammon wrote a book, The American Whale Fishery,
which today is all but impossible to find. Gardner, however, had acquired a copy and Scammon's story is worth retelling.
The development of the petroleum industry with its production of modern lubricants put whalers out of business and also saved the whales, but in the
19th century whaling was a highly competitive profession. So when a lookout atop the mast of Scammon's whaler spied several whale spouts erupting from
sand dunes that lay ashore of Baja, he alerted Scammon. After two days and two nights of investigation in a small cutter, his men finally uncovered
the channel leading to the hidden lagoon.
Thus Scammon acquired his own private whale hunting ground. It wasn't all easy. Whales are highly intelligent. The men managed to take two without
incident, but when they went out the third day, the whales tried to avoid the boats. The men pressed relentlessly on until one incensed whale turned
to attack. Others followed. They were so agile, so vicious and powerful that henceforth the gray whale became known as "devilfish."
After a few more encounters, Scammon's men refused to man the boats. Here they were in a veritable whaler's paradise, with whales blowing all around
them, but with injured men and damaged boats.
At length a new scheme was devised. The boats would anchor in shallow water by the edge of the channel where the whales could not get at them, but as
the whales drifted past in the deep channel, the men would fire a "bomb lance" into the whale, hoping to reach a vital point.
Within record time Scammon had filled his boat and exhausted his supply of bomb lances. It was more than twelve days, however, before wind and tide
conditions allowed them to drag their boats' keels above the sand bar and escape from the lagoon.
When Scammon's boat loaded with whale oil and whalebone returned to his San Francisco port he swore his crew to secrecy. After several subsequent
trips, however, the competition suspected that his success was due to more than sheer luck. Eventually they followed. The Scammon Lagoon slaughter
began.
Gradually the whales caught on to the fact that these grounds were no longer safe. They changed their migration pattern from the Arctic to Korea, but
by then they were so decimated that had they not been saved by new sources of oil, they would now be as rare as the buffalo. Decades passed and then
one season the gray whale dared to return to its old and favored breeding ground.
Another enigma of this strange place is the way that currents and prevailing winds deposit maritime refuge on Malarrimo Beach from just about
everywhere in the world. It is called the "dump yard of the Pacific" with good reason. One of our Desert readers had found on its low dunes a clay urn
which museum experts had identified as 16th century and of European origin.
When Gardner was there on an earlier trip to research for his book Hunting the Desert Whale, his crew found glass floats from Japan, parts of Japanese
aircraft, an elaborately carved cross bow possibly from Fiji, exotic packing cases from the Orient and hordes of purple sun-baked bottles.
A pair of sharks swimming in a stretch of water were so clearly etched against the white salt underneath that they appeared outlined in black, as if
painted by Matisse.. The first whale I saw came in two parts. It required a double take to figuratively attach its stern to its bow. Then a spout
foamed above the waves where the lagoon met open water and my nose all but pushed a hole through the plane's window.
Fortunately, the tide was low enough for Munoz to make a landing on the hard wet sand fringing the dunes. For Gardner, it was d?j? vu when he spied a
redwood log lying in the same place he had photographed it for his book on the previous visit. Enormous whale vertebrae discs lay everywhere, forming
bleached patterns against the shadowless white sand. A hull of a boat, light tubes, catsup bottles, a wine jug replete with a nonsensical note, each
item produced shouts of discovery from us.
But the time passed too fast. Scammon's Lagoon, strange, empty and white, casts a hypnotic spell, as if time and life are both extinct. It's like no
other place on earth. I still hope someday to return to walk barefoot through its dunes, find treasure in its sands, or just sit and speculate on
eternity.
It's a great place for eternity. There seems to be more of it there than anywhere else.
When the tide threatened to come in, "Capitan Munoz" ordered us back in the plane and we took off for San Ignacio to await the rest of our crew ? and
another adventure.
{of interest: http://ChoralPepper.com }
[Edited on 3-22-2004 by David K]
|
|
|
Debra
Super Nomad
Posts: 2101
Registered: 10-31-2002
Location: Port Orchard Wa./Bahia de Los Angeles BC
Member Is Offline
|
|
Thanks for sharing David...
I recognized parts of it from her Desert Mag. series, parts were totally new.
She was a great lady, I sure wish I had been able to spend more time getting to know her.
|
|
|
Mexray
Super Nomad
Posts: 1016
Registered: 8-30-2002
Location: California Delta
Member Is Offline
Mood: Baja Time
|
|
Wow, what one would have given to be invited on one of those ESG outtings! That was camping in 'style'...thanks for the peak...
According to my clock...anytime is \'BAJA TIME\' & as Jimmy Buffett says,
\"It doesn\'t use numbers or moving hands It always just says now...\"
|
|
|
David K
Honored Nomad
Posts: 65165
Registered: 8-30-2002
Location: San Diego County
Member Is Offline
Mood: Have Baja Fever
|
|
Even after traveling the world as a syndicated travel writer, Choral loved Baja the most. Baja has a 'magic' that holds you, deep in your heart...
|
|
|
Baja Bernie
`Normal` Nomad Correspondent
Posts: 2962
Registered: 8-31-2003
Location: Sunset Beach
Member Is Offline
Mood: Just dancing through life
|
|
David,
You were truly blessed when the family gave you custody of her writings. Thanks you so much for not hoarding them and instead sharing them.
Gracias y Paz
|
|
|
David K
Honored Nomad
Posts: 65165
Registered: 8-30-2002
Location: San Diego County
Member Is Offline
Mood: Have Baja Fever
|
|
Thanks Bernie. When I am writing about Baja, I sense she is looking over my shoulder!
Actually, Choral herself gave me the manuscript to do what I wanted. She suggested I post chapters on the Internet, if I wanted.
I want to publish it so everyone has access, not just us Internet Baja people! Dr. Jackson (AA) offered to assist me with the project. Jackson,
Pepper, and I had many emails regarding the book right up to her death.
Her two (adult) children presented me with the painting you saw in the photo of Choral I posted, as well as her Baja books and the Desert Magazine/
Baja with Erle Stanley Gardner collection. This was Choral's wish.
I sent both of them the link to the web page www.choralpepper.com and they both approved and sent me some very kind words...
|
|
|
David K
Honored Nomad
Posts: 65165
Registered: 8-30-2002
Location: San Diego County
Member Is Offline
Mood: Have Baja Fever
|
|
Worth another look...
This chapter in Choral's book explains how she came to know and travel with Erle Stanley Gardner.
|
|
|
|
![[*]](images/xmbforum/default_icon.gif){kind=icon}
