Muddy Night & New Seals

We are north of Santa Rosalia on the Baja west coast heading back to the United States from San Pedrito Beach. Night’s caught us before we find a place to park. At a roadblock manned by Indian soldiers with guns I ask if there is a road ahead we can pull off on for the night. The Indian youth who’s come into the RV has begun his search for hidden drugs in our fridge and taken out a bottle of beer he asks if we have enough of that he could use to quench his thirst. He says there is a dirt road a few kilometers on the left that goes to Catavina. After about 2O kilometers we come to the only turnoff either side of Highway 1 since Rosalia. There is no sign. The road is not graded or graveled.

We take it and stop along the side to reconnoiter. Turns out it has rained here and the slick of mud along the side is like grease on hard pack. A pickup headed to the highway stops and the two men say they have a good tow rope they will tie to the rig and pull us up to the middle of the road where it’s dry. The rope the driver takes from the truck bed is one of those plastic yellow ones fishermen use in their nets, about three eighths inch diameter and ten feet long. He gets down on the road and ties it to our frame, his friend ties the other end to their bumper, they get in, gun it, pop the clutch and the rope snaps like a shoelace. They get out and look at the broken ends, hmmm, what the hell?, held the fish that time.

They say this is their only rope, but they’ll push us out. I have my doubts. The RV weighs 23,000 pounds loaded, them about 250 loaded, and the ground we’ll be pushing from is slick. But we don’t want to be ungrateful so while Marilyn drives we push and get a lot of road on our clothes. They are useless so I give them a ten for beer and they drive off on a more holy mission.

We dig up some dry dirt from off the road and cut some brush for traction and use this to inch forward, push, fall, push, fall, Marilyn there at the wheel shouting out orders, me shouting back orders, the Winnebago whining.

After an hour the Mexican guys are back and even more happy, they stop and get out bright eyed and eager to push some more. First thing, they don’t want a woman at the wheel, it’s not our way they say, this is a job for drunk men, so I’m ordered in to drive and Marilyn’s ordered out to stand beside the road and look helpless, hopeful and not speak. They have no idea who they’re talking to. She won’t take that from me or anyone less than Jesus, and sometimes not even him.

After a bit the pickup driver decides I don’t know how to drive and orders me out of the seat and takes over. His idea is that we need more acceleration, that once we redline the rpm's the spinning wheels will dry out the mud and the traction will begin. I tell him to turn it off. He says Mande!? and glowers at me.

Marilyn takes over and says Get out, put the firewood I laid out there under the back tires and some dry dirt. We get out and shovel more dry sand in front of the back wheels and lay the firewood down for a track, then the three of us push while she drives and this time the rig skids sideways, finds some dry roadbed and scoots out. Marilyn disappears over the hill, not wanting to stop till she is on a downgrade.

There’s no way to turn around. I ask if the road is okay the rest of the way in. I’m not thinking straight. He nods. He offers to lead us, says to keep right behind his pickup and he’ll guide us around the wettest patches. I hoof it over to the rig and get in, tell her to follow them. Had I known.

No way we can keep up with them, and there is still no place to turn around. We pass some sort of point of no return and it is a wing and a prayer from then on. In fact already was when we came over a low hill and plunged down a 15% grade that then slung us up an even steeper one along a switchback only a four wheel drive could follow. The Mexican’s backlights are nowhere in sight. We‘re in a black black where light gets heavy after leaving the headlight bulbs and falls to the road ten feet away and dies.

Marilyn steps on it halfway down and we come up out of the bottom wash at about 6O and reach the top fishtailing in mud, make it over and down another longer slope that curves in the middle where I feel us slipping toward the edge and know there is no way we will not skid over the side at this speed and plunge to our deaths. The RV will be stripped in two days and the frame will be cutting-torched and all that will be left is oil stains and our bones, but she makes it and again and we freefall to another running arroyo and splash into the upgrade so fast we bottom out on rocks with huge mashing jolts that rock us, things spanging, cabinet doors exploding contents, everything not locked down set free.

By now I don’t recognize my voice, like trying to reach the high notes of the national anthem. Marilyn snaps Shut up! at me, something I’ve never heard her say.

Now the rig is at a downward angle to the edge, we can see others tracks where they slid to the edge, got stuck and were pulled out so it’s plain to me we won’t make it to the top. But that’s only physics and Marilyn doesn’t operate by physics in a crunch. Fiddlesticks. Hey, sure this is the worst yet but I’ve ridden beside her in San Diego traffic on home health care calls in neighborhoods where cops don’t drive and been through as plainly suicidal maneuverings as this and seen her pull it off. I may as well sit back and enjoy the terror.

We get to the top of a hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean. We can’t see it but know it’s there because of distant lights reflecting on patches of surf. We see the tail lights of the Mexicans’ truck flare as they pull in to where those lights are.

The road is wide at the top of the final hill before beginning the final descent to the coast so we park, lock the door, pull the shades, pick up stuff and go to bed. We hear trucks pass and hours later our boys come by yelling happily. What’d they say? Marilyn mumbles. They said Thanks for the ten-dollar bill, I tell her. Oh, they’re so sweet, she says, and goes back to sleep.


Seal Nursery

When I get up the next morning Marilyn and Pebbles are gone. I see a craggy basalt black coast with surf geysering up blowholes scattered around, no beach, and out on a point is what looks like a lighthouse where our friends had parked. They didn’t seem lighthouse types so it must be a bar. I’ll bet Marilyn walked down there to explore. I start down with the hope of finding coffee and Marilyn. I find her first at the second switchback in the road returning with Pebbles. Oh John, you must come see this it’s a seal nursery! What? A seal nursery, I can’t describe it, I’ve never seen anything like it, come on, I came to get you, you have to see this. Do you have the camera?

Marilyn takes me down to a round open dome with a weathered picket fence around it, most of it fallen down. The parts still hanging in there have signs in Spanish saying not to go beyond the fence, which is good because there is nothing beyond the fence except air. It is like a round window in a cathedral dome where once you get into position you are able to look down on the congregation and drop tickets to heaven.

Marilyn shows me where she laid before and we crawl on our bellies till we can look over. This had started as a blowhole and in time widened inside so that it became a circular room with a crescent of sand and waves sloshing in. On the sand, maybe 1OO feet below, are seals lying side by side. One lies diagonally to the others. She is lighter, maybe because she has been out of the water longer and dried off. She looks up at us. She is the midwife, Marilyn says. Those are the expectant and nursing mothers. You see how that one is moving, the baby is in the birth canal. I’ve never seen seals like them before, have you? I say I haven’t. Can you see the newborns riding on the backs of the mothers in the water? I look through the camera viewfinder to focus an eye, hardly able even to see the swimming mothers, and press zoom. Now I can. Some of the newborns have the umbilicus connected, some are held to the mother’s side by a flipper. Marilyn says they’re teaching them to swim. Once the mother begins to breech she slides into the water and delivers there and then bites the umbilicus and teaches the babies to swim.

Pebbles is bellying out to us sensing we are looking at something more important than her. She feels Marilyn’s love and wants it all. The mothers nuzzle their babies in the water and on the beach though most of the nursing mothers are in slumber. One in the water picks her pup up with her teeth and comes ashore and whomps along till she finds a patch of warm sand and tucks the baby in with a flipper to nurse.

The calls the seals make is haunting and amplified by the shape of the cavern, lifted by the swells of air washed in from the sea. There’s some banter going on between a mother and a baby paddling too near the rocks where the waves are washing in. It is trailing a long leash of birth cord.

This is a power spot, Marilyn says, you feel it? I say I do. Something has gotten into me besides fear of this thin rock roof caving in beneath our combined weight. Maybe if I never move again it’ll hold firm. Marilyn is happy, face radiant, she’s in her element. There’s a birthing mood here, she says, you feel it? It’s just like with human mothers. It’s so familiar.

I notice when we talk too loud the midwife seal looks up at us and there is no doubt about what she is saying, it’s in her eyes, her eyebrows or what passes for them. Shut up!

I need coffee. I risk death by inching backward on my stomach and Pebbles takes my warm spot next to Marilyn. After a few feet I get up and head to the tower. There is a man looking out the top window. In and up the circular steps into a café and bar and this shining bright dark mestizo man with gleaming teeth greets me, introducing himself as Hernan Cortez. THE Hernan Cortez I ask in Spanish, and he lights up, says he is a direct descendant to the Spanish conqueror of Mexico. And what is my pleasure? I ask for coffee and some sacrificial virgins and he says they haven’t brought him supplies in weeks. There is plenty to drink at the bar but coffee is what is calling for me. He gets some instant and fixes up a pot, sets down two cups, two spoons and a bowl of brown sugar. We yak about all the drinkers here last night, and the two vaqueros who helped us get here, and about spending the night right up there, he ducks to see through the wraparound window where I’m pointing. His teeth are massively white in his mahogany skin and he shows all of them, he is a happy Hernan.

Marilyn comes up telling Pebbles No, stay! But Hernan says to bring her in, dogs belong, dogs are welcome...