Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! - Jesse Ventura [59]
“Agggghhhhhh!” is Terry’s first response, but then she starts to laugh. “But you know, in private, when we’d go to the governors’ conferences, the other first ladies were like—yes!”
“Not just them, either. I probably received a half dozen communications, from other governors in both parties, saying thanks for having the courage to say that. Well, when I saw what your job required—basically as the building manager working on behalf of the state—how come everybody else who does that kind of thing draws a salary? In fact, a Republican from Rochester in our legislature stood up and said I was exactly correct: it’s in the law that anyone working at the behest of Minnesota must be paid!”
I was forced to back off on it, because all the controversy was taking away from other things. The media just destroyed me over expressing such a heresy, I guess like going against mom, apple pie, and patriotism. When I’d announced that my official car wouldn’t be the customary luxury sedan, but an SUV with extra-strong shocks “for running over reporters,” I didn’t realize at the time how much that statement would come to mean to me.
We pull off to the side of the road so that Dexter can take a leak and we can stretch our legs. The landscape stretches endlessly in all directions. Millennia ago, this whole part of the Baja was covered by a northern extension of the Sea of Cortez. Mexicali, in fact, lies a foot below sea level. Today Baja is the longest, and narrowest, peninsula on earth. But it used to be connected to mainland Mexico, back when mammoths, bisons, and twenty-three-ton dinosaurs roamed the plains. Over millions of years, the North Pacific plate that Baja is part of kept shifting along the San Andreas Fault. That’s what allowed the Sea of Cortez—also known as the Gulf of California—to form in between, and at one point it extended all the way up to Palm Springs, California. It would have kept on slowly moving northward, except it met up with the Colorado River.
Silt flowing down the Colorado—much of it being rocks and earth once held in the Grand Canyon—created a very nutrient-rich soil over the centuries, despite the fact that the Valle de Mexicali and the San Felipe Desert only get about two inches of rain a year. With irrigation, originally established by American land companies building a canal system and later aided by a Mexican dam, the desert valley today produces an abundance of fruits and vegetables. These are grown on collectively owned agricultural lands known as ejidos.
Over the next hour, we begin passing the nopal farms, where the prickly pear cactus they grow is sold at roadside stands, fresh or pickled. They call the ripe fruits tuna. We stop briefly again to sample a bit of fresh tuna, which is juicy and sweet.
Pretty soon pasture land turns strictly into desert, as we hit the southern limit of the delta’s irrigation system. Quail and dove hunters come to the marshlands around Rio Hardy, and in the river the local Indians fish for carp, largemouth bass, and catfish. Terry and I love to fish the Minnesota lakes, and I am tempted to stop.
“But I’ll bet there’s no muskie down here,” she says, wistfully. There is an old saying among fishermen in Minnesota that it takes ten thousand casts to land a trophy muskie. Terry proved that wrong on our lake, soon after we moved into our new house. She bought a book on how to catch muskies. It was late enough in the fall that we’d already pulled in the docks, getting ready for winter. Well, that’s when the muskies are notorious for cruising the shorelines for food. In the summer, they’re always out in deeper water.
“I remember it was a Sunday afternoon and I was watching football,” I recall, “when you said, ‘I’m going outside to practice my casting.’ Probably an hour and a half went by, and all of a sudden you came running in, your hair all in disarray, and announced: ‘I’ve got a muskie.’ I said, ‘You mean you’ve got him on?’”
“And I said, ‘No! He’s on the front lawn!’”
“So I came running outside and sure enough, there