Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! - Jesse Ventura [88]
It’s like much else you encounter in Baja—always the unexpected. Our next port of call will prove no disappointment along those lines.
CHAPTER 11
In the Eye of the Hurricane
“The trouble with history is that the people who really know what happened aren’t talking, and the people who don’t, you can’t shut ’em up.”
—Tom Waits
We’ve been looking forward to seeing Mulegé. It is said to be a charming small town right on the Sea of Cortez, filled with palm, mango and banana trees, a mountain range on the horizon, and the desert on both sides. We’ll find scuba centers, and kayaks, windsurfers, and mountain bikes to rent. I was really starting to miss my wave runners.
Reading Steinbeck’s Log from the Sea of Cortez as we approach, Terry comes to a passage describing how his crew had bypassed Mulegé because they’d heard that “there may be malaria there” and “the port charges are mischievous and ruinous.” Maybe we should take that as an omen.
Mulegé is built around a wide arroyo formed by a river that feeds into the Sea of Cortez. So it has an abundance of water, which makes it an ideal place to grow figs, dates, and other crops. As we are about to learn, though, all that water can be a curse as well as a blessing.
Driving through Mulegé almost makes us physically sick. A couple of months earlier, Hurricane John devastated the little town. About a thousand homes, among a population of only 3,000, have been wiped out. An incredible deluge—twenty-five inches of rain inside of twenty-four hours—poured down from the mountains into the valley. The river rose fifteen feet and flooded pretty much everything and swept it out to sea. Not only did the storm flood the roads but it picked up jeeps as if they were toy cars. It collapsed sturdy brick walls, and left houses in pieces. Now most of the people are living in a tent city while they set out to rebuild. Because the sewer systems are damaged, there is still a threat of diseases like cholera, hepatitis, and dengue.
We find out all this at a gas station from an American who brought down a truckload of supplies to help the people. “But I thought hurricanes like this didn’t usually hit the Baja,” I say. The man shakes his head. “Used to be true,” he tells me. “But this year, there were three of them, although not as bad as the one that hit Mulegé. The weather’s changing. You can’t depend on anything anymore.”
Mulegé is the Baja’s version, on a small scale, of New Orleans after Katrina. It’s a known scientific fact that ocean heat is the main ingredient for forming hurricanes. A new study recently came out showing that hurricanes and typhoons have gotten stronger and longer lasting over the past thirty years, by a factor of about 50 percent! This can be traced directly to a rise in the sea surface temperatures. And that, of course, is all about global warming.
Terry and I had put off seeing Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, for a while. To be truthful, like a lot of Americans, I was living in some denial about the consequences of global warming. I didn’t want to know how bad it might really be. When we finally watched the film, it was every bit as grim a scenario as we’d imagined. The earth’s climate is close to a tipping point, about to become warmer than it’s been in a million years. Temperatures are going up steadily, the glaciers and polar icecaps are melting, the sea levels are rising. And our kids are looking at a very scary future.
Al Gore doesn’t think it’s too late. The United States, with all the fossil fuel we burn in our cars, offices, and homes, sends more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than any other country. Gore says we need to impose an immediate “carbon freeze” on our emissions and, by 2050, reduce these emissions by 90 percent. That obviously means moving to many forms of alternative energy. We also need a carbon tax, and could put aside a portion of revenues from it to help low-income