Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! - Jesse Ventura [64]
“Jesse,” Terry says, with a mixture of wonderment and fury, “this is crazy!”
She is right, of course. In the middle of nowhere, cut off from all communication, not carrying any food or water to speak of. You look around and see no remnants of anything human. Or any greenery either. The land holds a kind of glowing yellowish rock, reminding me of sandstone. The dirt is red, and so are the mountains in the near-distance. This is like being on Mars, I think. Or maybe the moon.
I remember an old black man from Georgia, more than a hundred years old, who’d been interviewed when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. Willie Smith wasn’t buying it. He said, in his opinion, they were out in the deserts of Arizona somewhere. After seeing this portion of the Baja, I start to side a little bit with Willie.
And I think to myself, wow, maybe my experience in the Navy SEALS ended up preparing me even to walk on Mars. The way the camper is shaking, I guess we may be on foot any minute now.
Even in our dilemma, it is eerily neat to get out of a car and hear no human sounds at all. I think, my God, we are truly alone. In a place where seeing any living creature, be it a lizard or whatever, is a unique event. After living the life I’ve led on a total schedule 24/7, I feel in some way purified. If there is a Supreme Being, I feel close to it.
But we sure aren’t going to make it halfway down the Baja by nightfall.
On a dark desert highway, cool wind in my hair.
Warm smell of colitas, rising up through the air.
Up ahead in the distance, I saw a shimmering light.
My head grew heavy and my sight grew dim.
I had to stop for the night.
—“Hotel California,” The Eagles
CHAPTER 8
Longing for Light Rail
There are 552,446,061,128,648,601,600,000 (five hundred fifty-two septillion, four hundred forty-six sextillion, four hundred seventy-four quintillion, sixty-one quadrillion, one hundred twenty-eight trillion, six hundred forty-eight billion, six hundred one million, six hundred thousand) possible arrangements of the numbers on a bingo card.
—“Bingo (US),” Wikipedia
Our map indicates that the beach camp of Puertocitos is fifty-some miles below San Felipe. We make it that far, to a cluster of little stone houses and wooden shacks built around a cove. There is also a Pemex gas station, except the pumps apparently haven’t worked in some time. Instead, a fellow is standing there next to them with some big plastic bottles of high-test unleaded “PREMIO” and regular unleaded “MAGNA.” These cost a pretty peso, too.
The road goes from bad to worse after Puertocitos, and Terry starts to get a bit frustrated at our slow travel. “At the next cliff,” she suggests, in all seriousness, “why don’t you unhook the trailer and push it over—wave runners and all.”
I say, “Honey, come on, if we run into anyone along here, I would rather give the wave runners away. Somebody will find a use for them. Out here, they’ll probably take the engine and make a rock-breaker machine out of it. The very next occupied place we see, I promise we’ll drop the wave runners off—and if we never see them again, so be it.”
We drive on in silence. Being shaken to shit, as the phrase goes, is putting it mildly. Finally we come to a place where the first thing that catches our eye is a group of four small wooden shacks, obviously well cared for. Out in front is a huge resurrected whale skeleton, looking like a prehistoric dinosaur. We pull in. A Mexican gentleman comes out who speaks virtually no English, and I speak virtually no Spanish. Somehow we managed to communicate through pantomiming.
Terry’s journal, continued: His name was Augustino and he agreed to keep the trailer and wave runners for us. The husband gave him $50, or 500 pesos, and we took photos of him and the husband and the wave runners and the giant whalebone skeletons he had in his yard, and a photo of his white horse. He was a nice man and lived in a stretch of terrible road in a place