That's My Story

BAHIA DE LOS MUERTOS – Published March 2005- Western Outdoors Magazine Baja Backbeat

Where I work and fish, there’s a beautiful little cove. Filled with the kind of turquoise waters; sienna mountains and that warm sand you see on travel brochures. It’s a spot that Jimmy Buffet would sing about.

Sitting on the beach, it’s always “Five O’Clock Somewhere.” Even the earlier inhabitants thought so as remains of old native Pre-Columbian villages and artifacts have been found there in just about the same spot I’d love to put up a palapa with a hammock. Over the many years that I’ve worked there, it’s always been known as Ensenada de Los Muertos (“Cove of the Dead”). It has kind of a cool ring to it…very pirate-like, don’t you think?

As legend has it there had been a mutiny on a pirate ship plying the Cortez waters and the mutineers lost. They were rewarded with a permanent beach party here marooned with no water, no food and no VISA cards. Some say their bones, or someone’s bones dating back to about that time were found a few decades ago and hence the name. Another legend has it that on the old dirt road skirting the cove, a rusted chest of Cortez pearls were once found by a road crew. I just love this old stuff. It’s Baja.

Well, a few years ago, they changed the name to Bahia de Los Suenos (Dreamer’s Bay). Whoa! Doesn’t sound very Johnny Depp, or Errol Flynn to me or even like something that metal-clad captain Hernando Cortes’ would have used to name something. But they had nothing to do with it. Real estate is the new currency of the realm, not chests of pearls; spices; silks; or cargos of gold although, like most things, gold is very much involved…the fabled “El Dorado” and the “Seven Cities of Gold” to be exact. You see, “Dreamer’s Bay” sure sounds a lot more enticing to prospective home buyers and developers than “Cove of the Dead.” (“Honey, let’s buy a condo at “Cove of the Dead”).

I’ve been in Mexico for awhile now and for at least the past decade it has provided me with a wonderful livelihood, friends, memories and a newly adopted 2nd country that I call home. But I wasn’t there during the days of my predecessors who wrote on these pages and who became icons of the Baja. I wasn’t around with John Steinbeck and Doc Ricketts when he wrote the “Log of the Sea of Cortez” about having to wait for a harbor pilot to help navigate into the Bay of La Paz and watching folks in white suites sip drinks on their fine yachts. I wasn’t there to fish with Ray Cannon and see all those huge totuava in San Felipe or belly up to the bars on the East Cape when beer was often served warm. I wasn’t there to ramble down the old Transpeninsular Highway with crusty Fred Hoctor or catch yellowtail at the Bufadora near Ensenada. I wasn’t even there with my good friend, Gene Kira, during the many times he pulled his tin boat down whatever arroyo-pocked dirt road that looked like it might have had access to the beach and a place to set up camp. I’d have loved to have helped him fix a tire sometime and listen to him tell me stories. I’m a late comer. I’m a “tweener”…in between the “Golden Age” and watching the Baja rocket into the future in fast forward.

But I do remember what I remember. There was a time when Cabo San Lucas actually didn’t have a Burger King and I could see real water from any hotel room. I remember the East Cape and driving down 10 miles of dirt roads from Las Cuevas and having to take the air out of my tires a bit to soften them from the washboard that would rattle the nuts right out’ve…well…everything…people included!

The cows in Cabo Pulmo would routinely eat the single phone wire in town rending it isolated from all phone calls. And no one cared. I remember, Loreto with the smell of tacos mingled with grilled onions from the hot dog carts and walking around the old church and stopping to play a little kick ball with the barefoot kids. San Quintin was still the Old Mill Hotel and Ensenada still had great hotel rooms for $20 bucks and lobster for a whole lot less and there was that smell of old leather coming from alleys that sold everything from saddles to bullwhips (who used those things anyway?) and huarache sandals to holsters.

And now…

Even being a “tweener” I am already missing these things as I watch marinas, condos, malls and complexes rise from the beaches. Real estate offices and “for sale” signs are popping up faster than you can blink and smiling guys with perfect hair and tans driving shiny Jeep Cherokees will be happy to show you’re your piece of paradise. Half my fishing and diving clients now seem to be asking if I can “hook them up” with real estate deals. I’ve seen some of them put down payments on places by simply writing a check or putting it on American Express over a quick weekend of fishing.

Real estate is the new boom and it’s a window that everyone seems to be exploiting. One of the agents for a gigantic project in San Felipe tells me they bring in prospective clients by the busloads on fully-paid weekend junkets to see their “next tropical homesite” complete with community swimming pools; beach access and grid-like lots set out like any suburb in Americana.

In the span of a year, I saw beachfront property near me, quadruple in price. Some other property I found had already been sold 3 times in the span of 3 years, surely at a profit . These aren’t little lots either. These are rancho-sized chunks of the planet. At the new marina in La Paz, condos well-over the half-million dollar mark were sold about as fast as an artist could put a rendering on a real estate brochure. Marinas with more than 300 slips are only months from being completed and many of these slips aren’t for pangas. It seems more than 1/3 of the marina slips are for boats “in excess of 100 feet or longer.” Chew on that one for a moment.

Latte coffee shops; fast food; multi-plex theaters and shopping malls with “food courts” are being built as you read this. I mean, the new market in La Paz has a bakery, juice bar, gourmet olive bar and cheese bar! I remember the day when I would trade some of my caught fish for goat cheese from a ranchero. That same ranchero’s kids now regularly stay indoors playing with their Nintendos.

I’m actually writing this sitting at a small restaurant at Ensenada de Los Muertos. (The pirate in me still prevents me from calling it “Bahia de Los Suenos”). I’m watching a local captain named Old Manuel paddle an old chipped fiberglass boat that can’t be more than 6 feet long. A single wave would swamp him. He looks like a caricature…a cartoon drawing. His boat is the size of a kid’s plastic pool. Manuel looks right out of central casting from Hemingway’s “Old Man and the Sea.” He has one paddle that he uses like a canoe paddle.

Even from here, I can see the stubbled beard that never seems to get longer and never gets cut. His face is lined and textured like a basketball from decades in the sun. Like the tattered straw hat on his head and the gnarled calloused hands I’ve seen close-up on occasion, it all just exists. Manuel fishes for a living and with his single rod and corroded reel the guy catches fish. He paddles out to a spot and catches fish. I have even seen panga skippers key on where Manuel fishes.

As I watch him now paddle in near the beach, with his soiled pants rolled up to his knees and untucked long sleeve shirt common to so many of these beach-farers, I think to myself, “Manuel knew Steinbeck. He knew Cannon and Hoctor and maybe even Kira. If not personally, he knew the times.” And as I watch him pull in with a few nice yellowtail and pargo, I see him go from panga to panga asking for fish scraps for bait or unused sardines no doubt to fry up. Subsistence existence at it’s best.

I wonder what all this development means to him.

Does he know that the beach he is now walking on is worth over a million dollars? Does he know that the smiling perfectly-suntanned guy in the AFTCO fishing shirt (these guys NEVER fish) leading the couple around the beach asking to take a photo of Manuel is a real estate agent? Does he know that if he told them he lives just up the beach on about 300 feet of beachfront in an old shanty under a palm tree, they’d probably give him more money than he would see in his lifetime? I don’t think he really cares. But I wish he did.

I wish a lot of these viejos and vagabundos cared. And that they’d just keep quiet about it. It won’t happen, but I can hope as I sit here typing from a bar that didn’t exist 3 years ago on a spot that pirates, banditos, conquistadores and natives used to walk. And their ghosts still call it “Ensenada de Los Muertos.”