Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! - Jesse Ventura [87]
On the day before the 2002 elections, I appointed my state planning commissioner, Dean Barkley of Minnesota’s Independence Party to complete the remaining two months of Wellstone’s Senate term. The Democrats and Republicans hollered that I’d finally appointed a crony. But I had good reasons. Dean had run for Congress in the past, so it wasn’t a case of my sending someone to Washington who had no experience. He’s the man who got me excited about third-party politics in the first place. Now I had appointed an independent U.S. Senator!
Dean came to me and said, “What do you want me to do?” Normally I would have replied, “Be the independent, don’t play their game.” Had he been going into the Senate for six years, I would never have given him any other advice. But in this instance, for a brief moment in time, Dean would be the swing vote in a Senate that was deadlocked 50-50. Whichever party could sway Dean to their side would prevail. So I wanted him to go to Washington and prove how an independent could bring home the bacon for Minnesota.
So I said, “Play the game, Dean. Get the pork. We need some things done for the people of the state. So get everything you can in exchange for your vote.” That’s just what he did, on a health care reimbursement that had been languishing for several years, and some other things.
Health care is something you think about driving in Baja. I only drive by day, because the two-lane highway is so narrow. There are no shoulders on parts of it, and often you’ve got semis coming right at you. Lots of times the curves aren’t well marked and, should you go airborne, the landings would tend to be very quick and very fast. It’s actually a death-defying experience.
An eerie feeling comes from seeing all of the religious monuments along the side of the road, sometimes as many as three or four to a mile. “Terry, do you think all of these mark places where drivers have had a fatal accident?” I wonder aloud. “You start looking at them all and think, God, I’d be safer driving the triangle in Baghdad! How can there be any population left?!”
Later, we come to learn that, while some of the monuments do indicate a person died there, the majority are simply how the Mexican people honor their dead. Toward dusk, many times they are lit with candles. Yet neither Terry nor I have ever once seen anyone lighting them. We know that families must tend these little sacred spaces—but how? When?
I tell Terry that my goal is to continue driving the Baja until we finally see a burning monument with someone standing beside it.
It’s at Santa Rosalía where the winding Highway 1 finishes its nearly 130-mile journey from the Pacific coast over to the Sea of Cortez side. In San Ignacio, due to the missions, the architecture has a strong Spanish flavor. But when you start down the narrow streets of Santa Rosalía, you’re surprised to see all these French colonial-style houses with the wood frames and the long verandas. There’s even a French bakery. And a church that was designed by the French architect Eiffel himself—the same man the Eiffel Tower is named after! Turns out the church, made from prefab iron panels, was originally shown off by Eiffel as a model for inexpensive, ready-made mission churches. It was shipped in sections to Santa Rosalía, from a warehouse in Belgium, and reassembled here toward the end of the nineteenth century.
All this French influence comes from the fact that a French mining company bought the mineral rights to this area in 1885 after huge copper deposits were discovered nearby. They ended up bringing in a copper-smelting foundry by ship, building an eighteen-mile-long railway, and more than 375 miles of mine tunnels. Not to mention a labor force of Yaquí Amerindians and a couple thousand Chinese and Japanese who were told they’d be able to plant rice. (They nearly all left when they found out that rice wouldn’t grow in central Baja.)
Anyway, the French smelting went on into the mid-1950s, when the company sold all the facilities to the Mexican government. Driving through