“Holy shit!” Weston said when I’d made it across. “You almost died!”
“I know!” I said. But the adrenaline pumped so thickly through my veins that death could only feel like a joke.
Once outside Tijuana, the road turned into a two-lane highway, freshly paved, smooth and beautiful all the way through Rosarito. This beach town caters to college kids who want to party, in beach clubs with thatched-roof bars and tattooed DJs. The hills above Rosarito and the cliffs over the ocean are dotted with pretty houses, similar to ones you’d see in San Diego or Orange County, but here, tucked between the mansions, you can see shacks and tiny box homes, some resembling a turned-over Dumpster. But even many of these seem to sit right above the surf, with laundry hung out to dry and a few plastic chairs to enjoy the view.
Our plan for the day was to make it halfway to Ensenada, a city sixty miles down the coast, where a few friends had rented a beach house for the weekend. They had invited us to crash with them. By the time we were riding out of Rosarito, I had worked off the adrenaline rush, and my muscles had turned shaky and then very tired. South of town, the landscape gave way to brown and gold hills against the ocean with white stucco houses haphazardly dotted up the hillsides. Folks here enjoyed the exact same climate as San Diego, but with a tenth of the trees. That’s because most of Southern California’s trees are imported and kept alive by imported water. It took me years to figure out why Los Angeles looked so verdant, and yet so strange. Tijuana and Rosarito showed me the answer. In its natural state, the land is nearly treeless. Save for the oaks that hide in canyons, Southern California is a man-made garden. Finally, we were seeing what the land is supposed to look like.
We met up with our friends by golden hour, and they were an excited welcoming committee. They poured us margaritas and we cooked dinner and told the story of cycling through Tijuana. “Those roads are crazy, you guys are crazy,” one friend said, inspecting our heavy bikes and gear. “Everything you have is on these bikes? That’s all you have?”
“Yep. This is it, trying to simplify. Take only what I need,” Weston said.
“Wow.”
We felt cool and rugged, but the adrenaline come-down had us asleep on the couch by 9 p.m., while our friends played beer pong just feet away.
The next day, we woke up early, said our goodbyes, and headed out. We cycled south along the beautiful two-lane road, passing by the several toll booths that paid for the paved road. The path looked similar to the coastal route above Santa Barbara, and it felt familiar and comforting. Maybe Mexico wouldn’t be as wild as we thought.
* * *
—
BY MIDAFTERNOON, we made it to my old roommate’s dad’s house in Ensenada. This was the last stop in the chain of homes we had been offered by friends, the southernmost point of connections with the familiar. It was a nice house that sat above town on a hill overlooking the main drag of restaurants and tourist shops. We had the place to ourselves. We stayed a week, eating tacos and practicing our dismal Spanish, thinking it would help us adjust to Mexico before heading south into the Baja Peninsula, the thousand-mile stretch of scattered towns and hateful sunshine. We were at the last stop sign before the wilderness.
In my blog-reading, I had found several detailed accounts of cycling Baja. “Bring lots of water.” “Hammocks won’t work because there aren’t trees.” “Tarantulas.” “There is no shoulder so trucks will get very close and blow you off the road.” Yikes.
The Baja Peninsula is a long leg of land, like Florida, but thinner—and almost twice as long. She is as dry as a million-year drought. Crispy mountains run down her spine, splaying out in the direction of the two coasts. The desert is unbroken and natural water is scarce. The unforgiving land prevents many people from calling the peninsula home. And yet archaeologists have discovered caves with paintings of deer, dated at 10,000 years old. Humans have been scrappy, tough bastards for so long.
Baja is the sinister cousin of Southern California, with similar sunshine, waves, and mountains—but California has water, bled from the snowmelt of faraway mountains. We funnel it into our valleys and turn California into a garden. Baja, on the other hand, is surrounded by ocean, and doesn’t have distant mountains to catch moisture. This turns the peninsula into a thorny, rocky, angry thighbone with almost zero fresh water. Baja would be our first true test. Were we cyclists, adventurers, or just fragile tourists?
On the third day, after reading every blog, I made a shopping list. Beans to cook. Lots of water. I bought ten extra tire tubes, which is too many. Cans of tuna and almonds and peanut butter.
On our fourth night in Ensenada, after reading all the blogs and buying gallons of water and watching Back to the Future on VHS, Weston and I found a pool hall on a back road far from the tourist zone. The place had twenty tables. The ceiling was low and black, and people at the bar were smoking. A few exposed lightbulbs hung from the ceiling over the tables, and one of them had a green chandelier, intact from a more ornate time. From the moment we walked in, we were under the watch of the locals. Clearly this place was not a spot where tourists often showed up, which made it perfect. We bought Tecate beers and started playing pool.
Weston and I had now been together a month. I felt safe with him. He cooked and fixed tires and could do anything with duct tape. He never complained, unless it was about society at large. We’d become the type of comrades who can spend the day in silence, existing together, thinking independently, then spring into conversation out of seeming nowhere.
“I like the heat,” Weston said, as we worked our way around the table.
“What heat?” I said.
“The heat of the desert. But I don’t like the cold nights. What do the blogs say about what’s ahead?”
“That we need to bring lots of water. And that there isn’t any shoulder on the road, but that the truck drivers are nice, and the people in RVs aren’t.”
“Like Big Sur. Those fuckers. Old white Republicans.” After his shot, Weston gave a nod to some guys at the bar that were watching us.
“I can’t believe how many dead dogs we’ve already seen,” I said. “The blogs say to expect more. Remember that huge bloated elk in Oregon we biked past? It looked like a hippo.”
“No, I didn’t see it.”
“You were probably high.”
“Is that judgment I hear in your voice?” Weston asked, smiling.
“No. No. I love cigarettes, but I don’t think I fiend for them the way you fiend for weed.”
“I’m not addicted,” Weston replied. “I feel called to it. When I smoke, it’s like saying my prayers. Makes me present. There’s a difference. One is a need. The other is a desire. A commitment.”
“Thou doth protest too much,” I said, laughing. It was my turn to shoot.
“Well, I’m no more addicted to this than you are to your phone. That little computer represents the world we’re leaving. Friends back home and screens. This flower is my connection to the present. To the unknown. To not planning. To letting life and this trip happen. Whatever.” Weston chuckled, feeling like he was getting too intense. “I’ll run out in this desert if I’m not careful. Might have to wait for Cabo or La Paz or wherever at the end. You’ll see, it’s a practice. Not a need.”
“Touché,” I said, not sure what I meant by it, but wanting to concede.
Later that night, our last in Ensenada, we watched Jurassic Park on VHS. Pushing the tape into the player felt nostalgic and comforting. The movie did, too. After five days spent avoiding the unknown, we were antsy to hit the road early.
* * *
—
THE NEXT MORNING, a Thursday, brought blue skies. People were heading to work and the city was waking up, and none of those people knew we were headed south to Patagonia.
We cycled out of town and the landscape abruptly turned rugged and rural. Tomato plantations stretche
d across the desert coast. Rows and rows of plants, of white tarps like tubes protecting the plants from bugs or birds or dry heat. These farms were massive operations. They resembled what I could only imagine as terraforming, the apocalyptic future hope of colonizing Mars. The land looked dead and hostile, yet rows of planted green bushes bordered huge fields of tomatoes, as if to block them from view. As if to make the craziness look more lovely. The white plastic greenhouse alien structures numbered in the thousands. Trucks carried millions of tomatoes out onto Highway 1—headed to California, to the port of Tijuana, to the world.
Highway 1 is the main thoroughfare of Baja, crisscrossing down the long desert arm all the way to Cabo. It is almost always paved, except for certain short stretches of construction, maybe a mile at a time, where the road is diverted to the lumpy ribbed dirt on the shoulder, and biking becomes an organ-jostling nightmare. Every giant semitruck and busted, rusted work truck, every sleek American RV, and a host of ancient vehicles takes this same road, basically the only road, each one zooming past us on our bikes. The potholes take their toll, and the side of the road is littered with rusty nails, bits of metal, wires, coils, and even more roadkill than we saw in Tijuana.
We biked in the beating sun and the heat began to feel different from California’s. Maybe it was the absence of trees. Maybe it was the heat-scorched dusty roads. On the unpaved portions, the trucks would kick up blizzards of brown dust, which would cake our bodies and lips, and force us to close our eyes and hold our breath until it was safe to breathe again. Travel felt different now. This felt like navigating a developing country. This reminded me of my time in Africa. I was no longer home. And this, or something a lot like it, was what we could expect for the next fourteen months.
The dust-blown, nail-dodging, pothole-hitting routine became the norm for a few days. And then as the cruel sun finished its business, the worry would set in. Where to sleep? The rule of hiding from the road felt even more imperative here, because we would be trying to camp on people’s farms. On Mexican ranchers’ farms. I had never met a Mexican rancher, but somehow a stereotype had formed in my imagination. They were mean.
We looked for boulders to set up behind, for trees or cacti to hang our hammocks from. The only trees grew in riverbeds, and often in thickets. When we could find them, they were great for hiding in. We needed trees with strong branches or trunks to hold us up, and at a perfect distance of eight to twelve feet across. Too close and we’d sleep like a closed clam, which is impossible. Too far and the ropes wouldn’t reach.
The idea was to be invisible: no one should see us leave the road, or be able to see our camp from a distance. And so, as the sun went down, we would ride with our eyes peeled for the right spot, hoping that whoever was riding in the front saw it, too.
Then, a possibility. A bridge with a dry riverbed, some oak trees crowding by the edge waiting for the rainy season, maybe even a patch of green grass living off secret water below the sand. Or a pile of boulders with a sandy nook between them, just a few feet from the highway, but hidden from sight. We would set up, hang our hammocks, and crawl in with twilight still glowing. The thrill of trespassing every day, moving like tramps and ghosts, made us feel like cowboys delivering letters to an outpost a thousand miles away and a hundred years ago. A few mornings in and two hundred miles down Baja, we woke to unbelievable cold. The afternoon before, without noticing, we had moved away from the ocean and its moderating influence. I could see my breath in the morning light as I peeked out of my sleeping bag and the taco of my hammock. I shuffled in my hammock to signal to Weston that I was awake. He was, too. “You get out first,” he said.
“No, you. Make a fire,” I said.
“Fuck, no,” he said.
I acquiesced and slid like a worm out of my hammock in my sleeping bag, and stood in the cold. This is hard. I knew it would be hard. But my muscles hurt. And it’s cold. I hate this.
“We need to dress quick and hit the road to get our blood going,” Weston said.
“I’m the one out of my hammock. Come on,” I said.
We ate a few cookies and I drank coffee made in my water bottle from instant Nescafé powder and cold water, then we took off.
As I rode, I noticed my bicycle was taking the road well, its tires new and wide. We’d hit gravel bits and dirt bits, but mostly we rode on asphalt. But the asphalt wasn’t the smooth black kind. It was the bumpy gray kind, and tightly packed with small stones. Weston’s bike didn’t do so well, its tires too thin, too bald. He would shake terribly and eventually an item—a shoe, say—would get knocked loose from his belongings and bounce away behind him, or the whole pack would slide off. In the beginning, he had stopped to fix his old bike and jury-rigged cargo without complaining. It was part of his message and mission, to show that a cheap old bike could make it if you were willing to be patient and work with it. Now he would curse as he fixed things.
The cold morning quickly turned oven-hot. The sun was heavy on us, pushing my skin like an iron. I wore sunscreen but, as the hours went on, I worried I wasn’t reapplying enough. My skin was red. I put on long sleeves and accepted the sweat just to avoid the burn.
We spent the day bumping and shaking our way through dusty towns and unpaved roads. The semitrucks left grooves in the dirt road, like ripples in water. This made biking terrible. Our hands went numb from the battering.
The towns we biked through mostly seemed to be hubs of the tomato plantations and places where workers lived. Cinder blocks were piled up and made into a store or a house. We went through lots of these towns, many without any sign of their names. But I mapped the route on Google Maps, so the names scrolled past as we did. Camalú. Colonia Lomas de San Ramón. Colonia Nueva Era.
The end of our fourth day biking was signaled by the sun getting close to the ocean. We needed a canyon or grove of oaks to camp beneath, but every spot we found was too close to human beings. Too close to a farm or a shack or a busy walking path. We couldn’t hide. We couldn’t find a hotel, either. Well, I found one, but when I asked if they had a vacancy, the blank-eyed woman at the counter said, without looking up, “No.” But the moment we got back on the road, as I swerved to miss a nail, and Weston swerved to miss me, his front wheel bent in half. He tumbled hard from the bike. Weston was fine, he always is, but the wheel was beyond repair. He couldn’t even roll the bike. He had to carry it on his shoulder. There was nothing to do but walk ourselves back to a gas station near that mean-spirited hotel.
Of course, I thought. We just make it into the desert, finally into the hard part of the trip. And we’re failing. I’m completely roasted from the sun. My skin hurts and my legs hurt, and already we have nowhere to sleep. We can’t even make it halfway down Baja. What if Weston’s bike is impossible to replace? The only bikes I’ve seen down here are recycled mountain bikes. And where are we going to sleep? Is this a bad neighborhood? “God, help us. Please help us. Show us a place to sleep, or send us help.”
We sat at the gas station for thirty minutes, hoping to hitchhike with any truck that could fit our bikes. But drivers shook their heads or pretended not to hear us. One guy listened to Weston for a minute, but when Weston slipped into English, he drove off. Weston went back to fooling with his tire. I watched some ants, wondering how they lived in a world without water. Then I smelled weed. Weston had rolled a joint.
“I just realized this is my last one,” he said.
“Well, this situation sucks, so I suppose it’s as good a time as any. Can’t you get seriously in trouble with weed in Mexico?”
“Yeah. But people are obviously ignoring us. And I can hide it quick.”
“I think maybe we should walk back toward town. This place is dead. And there’s more people actually walking on the street.”
“Okay. Lemme finish this.”
The sun was very low now. As we walked in the deep gold that comes just before twilight, more vehicle
s and walkers crowded onto the road. The shacks and homes along this stretch of road all looked built in a hurry. Weston was frustrated but holding his tongue. He had bought the cheapest bicycle he could, to prove that this trip could be done on a real budget. Now we were paying the real price, a mounting pile of inconveniences. I was mad at him, and he knew it.
Suddenly, we heard someone speak English behind us. “Where are you going? Need some help?” in a thick Mexican accent. We turned around to see a short man with a broad smile and a baby face walking behind us. He wore dirty jeans and a loose-fitting T-shirt.
“Do you know where a hotel is?” I asked.
“The only one is right here but they are full. They have only three rooms because the others are broken,” he said.
“Oh. There are no others?”
“No,” he said. “But you are travelers?”
“Yes, we’re biking down to South America,” I said, hoping it would impress him.
“You are welcome in my home. I like helping people. And I see this bicycle is broken. We can wait for the shop right here to open tomorrow, and then I take you in the morning on my way to work.” He motioned his hand to a street just out of sight, implying that just out of view was a bike shop.
This was our first invitation into the home of a stranger. I thought about my mom’s warnings. Her e-mails of beheadings. I think I would’ve been hesitant with a lot of men, for fear of theft or worse. But Miguel had a sweet face and excellent English. And I had just prayed for a place to stay. Was this the universe answering? It never made sense that God would be so transactional—“prayer works” implies the harder you pray, the more you get what you ask for.
But this prayer had worked, hadn’t it?
We said yes, and Miguel walked us off the road down into the neighborhood. Leading away from the one paved road was a grid of dirt roads. Only they weren’t dirt. Our bike tires sunk immediately into soft white sand. As soft as powder. The bikes couldn’t roll at all, and loaded down with all the weight of our bags and panniers, they simply dug into the earth like a shovel. Which is when Miguel, without hesitation, took Weston’s bike and hoisted it onto his shoulders. People stared at us as if Area 51 had released its aliens: two gringos flanking the small Mexican man like a pelican V formation. Kids began trailing us, laughing and talking too fast to be understood. They stared at our strange bikes, so much shinier than the rusted and duct-taped mountain bikes they had.
To Shake the Sleeping Self Page 8
