Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! - Jesse Ventura [63]
So I’m wondering, why is he still a member of the Republican Party? He could have won the election as an independent. I’m privately hoping that he might go that way yet, as the Republicans continue to shun his forward-thinking policies. Stranger things have happened. After all, we’ve fought in the jungle together before.
Coming out of the northern Baja desert, our first sight of the Sea of Cortez comes at San Felipe. The little beach town was first named by a Jesuit Padre who came ashore with four canoes in 1746, and stayed long enough to call the gently curving bay San Felipe de Jesus. Hardly anybody came here before a paved road to a radar station got built after World War Two, and then American fishermen started flocking down to catch totuava, a croaker that gets as big as 250 pounds. The smaller ones were a little too tasty, and the fish ended up an endangered species.
There’s a headland that juts out at the northern end of San Felipe, and below it an estuary and a boatyard. The commercial shrimp boats tie up in an artificial harbor at the southern end. And you see plenty of retired gringos camped along the beaches in their RVs, along with dune-buggies and ATVs racing up and down the sloping sands. We pull over to have some mariscos for lunch—steamed clams and oysters on the half shell.
For about twenty miles beyond San Felipe, we breeze. Past the new condo developments just south of the town, an ugly trash dump right off the highway, and then heading further inland, coming upon the strange, stunning landscape of the desert: the cholla cactus and mesquite and elephant trees.
We were about to be “stunned” by something else. I are in Southeast Asia for seventeen months, and I’ve been a lot of other places—but this is about to become the roughest road I’ve ever traveled.
An excerpt from Terry’s journal: The shortcut the husband tried did not work out so well. The road that was paved ended shortly after San Felipe in a little town. We hit a pretty good stretch of gravel and then it was horrible. The dust was thick and heavy, and the road was washboard with big rocks. There were washouts here and there that we tried to get through.
Oh, the washboarding! That’s where the ground ends up like the hard little waves you look at in the ocean. As your tires go over those waves, it bounces your shocks and shakes you so bad inside your vehicle that at times you think the fillings will come out of your teeth. In some places, big chunks of the road simply aren’t there. I mean, these are huge holes on a dirt track covered with flat rocks. The vados, places where the road gets intersected by dry culverts, come upon you treacherously fast. By the time we’ve inched along for probably another twenty miles, my trailer carrying the wave runners virtually starts to disintegrate.
An excerpt from Terry’s journal: The first thing to go wrong was the trailer. We noticed the red wave runner was crooked and, when we stopped to look at it, we saw the board it sat on was cracking and one of the bolts that held it into a clamp on the side was gone. Earlier, I had watched the wave runner popping up and down on the trailer. I asked to stop and try to find some bungee and rope but husband said, “Nah, we’ll be fine.” That was a mistake!
The uprights that hold them are breaking down, so the wave runners are riding directly on the trailer. These are fiberglass craft whose hulls you don’t want to wreck, because that may be a permanent condition. Here we are, in blisteringly hot sun, unable to drive more than five miles an hour. Every mile or two, we have to stop the car, go back and readjust and re-strap the wave runners. We are using the belts from our pants, our camera bags, every belt we can think of imagine to try to secure them to the trailer.
An excerpt from Terry’s journal: After about five times of straightening the one wave runner, I decided to look for something to tie the board down with and could not find anything, so I took out my brown belt. I had to convince the husband to try it and, lo and behold, it held up pretty well.