Leap of faith

Kai takes the plunge

I stand in the driveway of my mother-in-law's house in Los Angeles, while Jon neatly packs the final load into our car.

It's a hundred degrees outside and our old Subaru is riding about two-inches above the ground, it's so weighted down.

I peek through the window at the piles of things inside the car. 

They are not the things that normal people, with normal lives, carry around in their station wagons. 

Two hundred and ninety-five feet of 3/8 inch high test chain, a fifty-five pound Delta anchor, a new heat exchanger and oil cooler to replace the swiss cheese-looking ones on our ancient Perkins, a solar oven for cooking on deck or the beach when its too hot to cook on the boat, a bbq that will flame even in high winds, lengths of rope and hoses, 130 feet of high tension Spectra for making new, stronger, life-lines, a new wildcat for our windless, pounds and pounds of quinoa, red and black Thai rice, boxes of coconut milk and pots and jars of spices and curry pastes, packages and boxes of rice noodles, loads of homeschooling books, Nooks for all, a high-powered microscope, new wetsuits for Kai and myself, a new speargun for Jon...

At least eleven hundred pounds of stuff in here, not counting a driver, the carrying load on the car is 900 pounds... maximum. For this reason, Jon will be making the seventeen hour, notoriously treacherous drive, down the Baja on his own. Later today, somewhere, on the lonely road, that snakes it's way down the middle of the Baja,  past the hairpin turns and death defying drops on either side, where there is no shoulder or guardrail, Jon will be pulled over by the Federales at one of their many checkpoints. They will point their guns at Jon and search through the vehicle and ask (in Spanish) what he is doing.

Jon will tell them he is on his way to Escondido, where he has left his Barco. He will tell them his esposa and nino's are flying down to meet him and all this stuff is for a journey he is taking with his wife and children on their boat. When they ask him where he is going on his boat, Jon say he is heading up into the Sea of Cortez, to find the whale sharks "and then?" they will ask and by this time, they will be interested and smiling and shaking their heads and nodding with approval at the spearguns and miscroscope and Jon will shrug and say "South".  The officials will slap him on the back and they will wave him on. 

Men, everywhere, but most especially in Mexico, are pretty impressed by adventure.

Jon closes the hatch. "Well... that's it". he says.

We are alone for this moment.

Kai and Hunter have already said goodbye, they are  with our friend Marc and his three kids playing mini-golf.

I recognize the butterflies in my stomach. The next time I see Jon, we will be beginning a new chapter in our lives.

No house, no plan for the future, just a car load of cool stuff and a wicked boat and a bunch of navigational charts downloaded on the NavX program on our I-pad.

Jon puts his arms around me.

"Please...don't drive at night" I say. "If you get delayed, just stop for the night and come the next morning."

We learned this years ago, before we had kids. Jon and I had driven across Baja one night from coast to coast. We had a thousand near misses with drunk drivers, with no headlights and cattle wandering in the road. The next morning, when we walked into a cantina, an old gringo looked at us and said, "You're loco if you drive at night down here. Only drunks and criminals out there after sundown. What do you think all those crosses on the roadside are for?"

I look up at Jon. He doesn't answer. He's running through a million check-lists in his head. He has to meet a guy in an hour in Long Beach who has some vital engine part ordered from England for us and then he'll shop for one last pile of gak in the marine stores in San Diego where he will spend the night before a pre-dawn departure.

"I'll see you tomorrow" Jon says, kissing the top of my head.

I wake up at 4:30 the next morning.

Jon will be leaving his hotel now. The drive to Escondido is seventeen hours from San Diego and there's only about eleven hours of daylight these days.

I feel those butterflies in my stomach again.

Cell phones don't work in most of Baja and there is no internet in Escondido.

There will be no way to contact Jon as he travels South and he will have no way of knowing if we got there.

I don't even know if the one motel in Escondido is open-I'll just have to see when I get there.

We will have no way of getting out to our boat until we can find someone to give us a ride to it.

There is also no way to know how Pura Vida has faired in our absence. The last time we saw her, she was triple roped to a mooring ball, in a natural hurricane hole, halfway up the inside of the Baja. Jon had to leave early for a job so, the kids and I had closed her up and said goodbye. 

She was stripped of her sails and canvass, her dingy was deflated and lashed to the deck, her outboard engine and spare anchor stuffed in the main cabin, along with the paddle board, spare sails and everything else on deck, all her systems where turned off, and solar panels stowed inside. Only one panel was left up to generate enough power to run the automatic bilge.

I run through every scenario in my head, hoping i left everything as I should and she's not half sinking when we get back to her because I forgot to close a sea-cock.

I lay awake in the dark morning, running through the myriad of disasters that could await either Jon or I on this leg of our trip. 

I remember that this is not how one meets adventure. You do not lie around and think about the "what-if'. 

I get up and finish packing the bags.

We say goodbye to Grandma Sara at the airport. Hunter cries. She hates goodbyes.

The plane is full of surfers, apparently there's a cell off the coast churning up some big sets at Todos.

We look out the window and Hunter and Kai point at all the bays below that they recognize.

"There's two harbors..."

" There's Long beach...SanDiego...Ensenada..."

A  surfer dude in front of us peers through the seats.

"Been on this flight a few times?" he grins at Kai.

" No" says Kai, casually. "... we sailed passed all that when we brought our boat down last winter."

"That's rad, man." the Dude is impressed.

"Yeah," Kai looks out his window "...we might go to the Galapagos, next".

I can barely contain how cool I feel.

There is cloud cover over much of the peninsula and as the plane descends, we are shocked by what we see.

The barren, red, Mars-scape that was the baja we knew and loved, has been completely transformed.

Kai and Hunter have their noses pressed to the windows.

"Mom...Look!"

A thousand feet below us, from a stunning, azure blue ocean, rises the island of Coronado. 

The same, rocky volcanic hump that we had anchored beneath (when we got the news that the house had sold) now rises like a shining, green, jewel form the sea.

As the plane swoops past it, I can make out cascades of fuschia and orange flowers draped over the swollen cactus covering the mountainside.

We step off the plane into a blinding, white heat.

Our eyes adjust and we look around... 

The world is an explosion of green.

Maybe we got on the wrong plane and have landed in Thailand.

The temperature is well over a hundred and the humidity hovers somewhere around eighty percent .

The air smells like nectar and swarms with clouds of buzzing, black insects.

Leafy tendrils creep over a chain link fence and spill onto the tarmac.

A yellow butterfly lands on Hunter's hat.

"I love you!" she squeals to no one in particular.

I know what she means. 

The last eight weeks have been a blur of work-intensive, ass- busting effort and we have said goodbye (again) to much that we love dearly. 

We have been asked time and again what, "will we do?" and "aren't you scared out there?" and " what about this..and that..." and countless other questions that one would certainly lie about if the insurance company was asking the same things.

But we also now belong in this, less certain, world.

The world of possibilities and mysteries and experiences...

and occasional dangers. 

The strange and the new calls to us.

I look around me at the towering Sierra de la Gigantes and the now lush desert.

A three-year, suffering, live-stock-killing, drought is over...

and the Baja is alive in a new way.

We make our way through customs and my Spanish isn't good but at least I can get by now.

Other than the surfers, who pile into an armada of smashed and rusted old cars clearly left at the airport for this purpose-we are the sole turistas.

It's slow season, too hot for most people, the fish aren't running and bad press about the narco-drug wars still has the country's tourism trade paralyzed.

I'm lucky there is even one cab to be found out here.

I wake the driver up, tell him where we are going and we climb inside.

The forty minute ride to Escondido is pretty telling about just what else the rains have brought .

Here and there in the gulches beside the crumbling road are huge washouts and strewn boulders loosed by the deluge.

Jacknifed trucks and dead cattle are stuck the mud-filled arroyos.

"Flash flood" says our driver in Spanish. "...muy mal" he shakes his head.

I look up at the "thunder bumpers" gathering over the green peaks above us.

"more rain?" I point to the clouds. The driver nods. 

I try not to think what this might mean for Jon.

We get to the motel and the driver lets us out.

I ask him to wait because there is no sign of life.

I don't have a plan if it isn't open but I decide not to worry about that right now.

We enter a dark reception area. An old bitch dog is asleep on the tile, she looks like she must have given birth to at least eight million puppies in her life. She rolls a blind eye to look at us and thumps her tail a few times. It's smokin' hot outside and clearly seista time-not even the dogs like to be disturbed.

I ring the bell and eventually a yawning senorita appears, rubbing her eyes and smiling.

We arrange a price and she picks a key off the board. I notice it is the only one. We will be the sole guests of the Tripui motel tonight. I explain that the kids and I are hungry and she apologizes and says the cantina is closed. The flood did some damage and they are repairing. She gives me two vouchers for a free breakfast the next morning.

'Pero, es cerrado." she tells me, with a sad look.

"Pardon?" I think I have misunderstood. "The cantina is closed? But you just gave me breakfast vouchers..."

"Si" she shrugs and smiles.

Okay. At least they kept part of the bargain-I guess.

The kids are moaning about being famished so we drop our stuff off in the room and decide to hit up the little Modelorama beer store for some Fud. 

Nothing says welcome back to Baja (and adventure) like eating warm slices of processed ham.

On the walk to the store we pass the Tripui trailer park. This is where our friend Tony, the great fisherman lives. 

We had left a few messages and sent some emails to Tony, hoping to reach him before we came down -but we never heard back.

I wonder about this now as we walk through the empty park.

The place is deserted. There's an eerie feeling in the air.

The sky is growing sullen with the clouds over head and I would do anything to have a little "first world" contact with my husband right now.

Just to call him on the cell phone and be reassured that he was doing well and was on his way to us.

As we approach Tony's house, we notice his front door is wide open but no one seems to be around.

No one seems to be anywhere at all, actually. It's just us and the dog because the lady from the motel was picked up by her husband shortly after we arrived.

I think we might be the ONLY people in the entire town of Escondido right now.

Kai hangs back a little, looking around, alert as always.

"Is everything okay , mom?"

"Of course." I say-hoping it is.

I stand outside Tony's open door. "Hola..." I call.

No answer.

Every house in Tripui tailer park is built around an RV. 

These air conditioned, flat screen-wired, vestubles of creature comforts. The residents of Tripui construct very elaborate and beautiful traditional palapa houses with kitchens and mexican tiles and hand carved beams around them but the centerpiece of each home is the RV itself.

I step inside Tony's house and knock on the aluminum side of the camper.

 Kai looks around, ringing his hands.

"we should go, mom" he says.

I call Tony's name again and we hear a rustle from inside the camper.

Tony, tanned and healthy and friendly as always, steps out.

We have just woke him from siesta, so it takes him a minute to recognize us. "Oh, hey there, Casadora..." he says rubbing Hunter's head. " nice to see you guys, again. where's Jon?"...

I tell Tony we are expecting him around seven. That he left at four this morning from San Diego.

Tony looks worried.

"I hope he's okay on that road. I had a hell of a time coming down, the floods washed out the road -my whole place here was filled with mud, took three Mexican ladies three full days just to get it mucked out." Then he shows us where the water-mark is, half way up the wall.

Oh, dear...

The kids and I go back to the motel and have a swim in the pool. The sky turns pink and then blood red and bats flap overhead and a wake of vultures hang like doom in a palm tree by our patio. I gather the kids and get them inside. There's no one around at all and i wonder how Jon will know what room we are in. I decide to leave my pink fuzzy slippers outside our door.

Kai and Hunter eat their Fud in cold tortillas and I open a terrible bottle of overpriced red wine.

They watch Avatar in Spanish on the TV and I flip through the tour guide book with it's cartoon map of the Baja and try to figure out where Jon might be on the road.

It's dark-he should have been here an hour and a half ago.

There's a knock at the door and everyone jumps up.

It's Tony. He's concerned when we tell him that Jon hasn't shown up yet. He's also worried that the kids haven't eaten a proper meal all day, so he invites us for breakfast the next morning...

"I hope he doesn't drive at night" he says, as he leaves.

So do I.

I put the kids to bed at 10:00 assuring Kai that daddy must have stopped for the night and he will be here tomorrow morning, sometime.

I lie awake knowing that a million bad things could have happened out there on that road. Baja does not have highway patrol or ambulance or cell phone service in most places. I have no way of communicating with anyone from here.  Our car was overloaded with stuff-valuable stuff- if a tire blew Jon would have to unload all that chain and anchor on the road just to get to the spare. Our car would be climbing those crazy cliffs and the tires would be bulging on those corners and it is Sunday and Mexicans like to drink and drive on Sundays.

I know I asked Jon not to drive at night but I also know Jon.

Jon would sooner walk forty miles through the desert than leave us sitting in some strange place, uncertain of whether or not we are OK. 

I put my head under the covers (a trick I learned last winter, when we were coming down the outside of the baja and getting the snot kicked out of us in confused seas) and try to remember what the last thing was he said to me was yesterday...

"I'll see you tomorrow."

I fall asleep.

I dream about storms and giant squid.

I'm woken up to a soft knock on the door.

It's after midnight and Jon stands there, smiling at me.

I know without asking, that the drive was crazy.

That he ran into floods, that buses and trucks were lying in crumpled heaps on the side of the road.

That poor Mexicans poured out of overturned vehicles and wandered around, scratching their heads and holding rags to bleeding foreheads.

I know that semi-trucks whirled around corners in the on-coming lane and there is no such thing as an enforced speed limit and that was all during the daytime.

I know it was much, much worse in the past five hours of darkness- and I know that he won't tell me any of this.

"How was the trip, baby?" I ask.

"Fine" he says. "I brought you a present."

Jon gives me a bright red cube the size of a shoe box that he bought in San Diego.

It picks up our music off our devices and wirelessly plays them through the ultimate speaker system.

I love it. Its yet another addition to our cool new stuff to make our trip even better.

Jon kisses the sleeping kids and we sit outside on the veranda under the Mexican moon, sipping tequila and listening to music.

"Welcome back" I say.

The rest of that week was a nightmare.

Everything that already was broken on the boat and a bunch of other stuff (the fridge! the outboard!) quit on us too.

It was a million degrees and we had only one head and no fridge and the place was infested with crazy mating bugs finally getting their rocks off after three years of dormancy-who can blame them, really... and I dislocated my shoulder again and Jon and the kids broke out in nasty heat rashes and it was a boatload of not very fun work and long long days but slowly, she started to come back together. We had one last trip to La Paz planned -and a four hour drive-to look for extra parts and get a broken engine hoist re-rigged but after such a long week of work with no play time, we were rewarded by our first tropical rain storm. The kids stripped naked and we all stood on deck and howled into the wind and the lightning and were pelted clean by sideways rain and the kids and I convinced Jon to take the next day off so we could re- hike the canyon above Escondido. The following pictures are but a small testimony to the tropical Eden that awaited us. Miles of deserted , uninhabited mountain canyons filled with fresh warm rainwater. Butterflies and dragonflies and tadpoles were our only companions and the kids spent the day finding new faster water slides and higher cliffs to jump from.

Welcome back... absolutely.

heading up the canyon

..to a swimming hole

Nirvana

butterfies

Kai howls at the thunder

waterfalls

Dad goes for it

Hunter takes the plunge

natural water slides and smiles