A few weeks on the Baja Sea
Author’s note. The official name according to charts is either Sea of Cortez or Gulf of California. We are choosing to use Baja Sea here as this body of water and land has existed long before any one person discovered it and named it. John Steinbeck in “The Log from the Sea of Cortez” has a digression on naming. He suggests that names stick because of something intrinsic, not because they are assigned. Baja fits that for us.
The Baja is a different sort of place. We were on the outside in November and the inside is proving to be consistently different. La Paz and Los Cabos are more like other places we’ve been, but once you head north of La Paz the land and sea take on new forms.
There are islands of fantastical shapes and colors. They are tall, windswept, full of smooth curves and hard rocks. The water takes on dramatic colors – blue where deep, green as it shallows, ethereal over white sand.
The land is dry but not dead. There are bushes, cacti, birds, lizards, animals, and insects. Some things are thriving despite the lack of rain while others are clearly waiting for those brief periods when water comes. The rocks come in all sorts of shades and textures from smooth, almost puffy, red to jagged brown.
There are large mountains. Tall and sharply defined against the blue sky. Pyramids. Buttes. Valleys. Broad and expansive. Nooks and caves low and high.
Sealife of a spectacular variety and quantity. Blue whales. Rays. Turtles. Sharks. Vibrant reefs.
Stretches of empty coastline punctuated with small villages. Fisherman working the coast, starting the morning netting bait fish before going off to their fishing grounds. The afternoon return trip loaded with fish being offloaded on the beach.
And then the sense of history. People have lived on this land stretching back 12,000 years. Back then it was a temperate forest scape. But as it dried people persisted and adjusted. They found ways to live and, perhaps, thrive. They left behind tools and artwork. Their handprints preserved in ancient paints.
