• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

—Thomas Jefferson, 1798, after the passage of the Sedition Act

Toward evening, I often take Dexter for a walk to the top of a sand dune about a mile from my house. I’ve got a spot up there where I can look due north and see not a trace of anything human. If I look to the left, I see desert and mountains. Off to the right is where the ocean meets the beach. What I most enjoy is tipping my head just enough to hear the ocean out of one ear, and the desert out of the other.

I sometimes stay there with my dog until it’s just about dark. I don’t think much about what’s happening in America when I’m at the dune. No, my focus is more on the simple pleasures, and the unique people I’ve gotten a chance to know in the Baja. I’ve got one friend, named Fernando, who speaks decent English because he’s spent the better part of his adult life hanging out with American surfers. He’s a free spirit; someone who goes without everything that we in the States take for granted. His house is built with reeds and sticks and whatever else he could find, with a dirt floor. He gathers bottles from a local restaurant, so he can use the glass in a staircase he’s building. I love watching Fernando survive with materials most Americans would throw out.

I also love how he met his wife, Crystal. She had just come over from Mexico City to a job in Todos Santos that didn’t work out. She’d started hitchhiking on her way out of town, when Fernando picked her up. When he told me the story I laughed and said, “See? It was destiny, Fernando. You and Crystal were led to each other.” In a way, Fernando reminds me of my father-in-law, because he’s now taken an existing family and is becoming a father to the children. I always admire people who can do that. Fernando seems to really be enjoying the change in his life. And, as long as he’s happy, that makes me happy.

An excerpt from Terry’s journal: I came to Baja in the winter. What was it that made me stay here? Why did I not follow my first instincts and run back to where I came from? Why did I fall in love after a horrendous drive to get here that made me scared, furious, and so tired I felt like I wanted to sleep for days when we arrived? What kept me from jumping out of the vehicle?

It was the vista that dazzled my eyes and touched something inside me that had not yet been reached. I had no idea there was anything left inside of me to be discovered. It was not the last thing I found.

Our home is wide and deep and full of air and sunshine with ocean views to our west and rough, pointy mountains to our east. In between are ranches that reminded me of small-town middle-American family farms owned by the fourth or fifth generation men, women, and children, land that is passed down.

I spent a week unpacking, exploring, meeting my neighbors, and trying to find a reason to leave and go back to my family, grown children, and friends, to my lovely home on the lake.

I am glad I was not successful.

I love the way the beach changes everyday. I love to search the shoreline for different forms of sea life that have lost their battle with the ocean and are tossed up on the sand. The weird pieces of other people’s property that end up here, like tiles, bottles, nets, and even pieces of cars! Garbage to most, interesting to ponder for some.

I love seeing the mother whales and their babies, breaching. I love to track the sea lions and dolphins with my telescope. I am especially thrilled with the fish boils, which are huge schools of sardines that form a giant ball to protect themselves from predator fish hunting them tirelessly from below while pelicans dive bomb them from above. All the while the sea that surrounds them boils and foams and travels up and down the shore until the sardines are just a small group and the predators and the pelicans are sated and spent.

I love the long winding dirt road behind our property that I walk down to the tremendous arroyo lined with rock walls ten stories high.