COVERED IN LIGHTS

Originally Published Feb. 2024 in Western Outdoor Publications

“I remember when the bay was pretty much completely dark at night,” my wife is fond of saying when she look around the bay some nights.

“But now look.  The lights go completely around the bay and growing all the time.”

She’s right.  She usually is.  Even she’ll tell me that!

Where we live in La Paz about 100 miles north of the hustle and bustle that is Cabo San Lucas, our little city has grown up.  Whether for better or worse, I don’t know.

But, as we stand on the shore of the beach at night before we head home from the office, there sure are a lot of twinkling lights around the bay.  Not just along the shore, but headed up the hills and inland.

Not just lights from homes and businesses. 

Cars.  Streetlights.

Too many.

It wasn’t always like that.  Even a few years ago, it wasn’t like that.

And, although I know it’s an optical illusion, growing…no multiplying before my eyes.  I shake my head to clear my vision.

There’s no denying that the natural blanket of darkness is fighting a losing battle to Edison illumination.

When I first arrived in Baja..

Thirty years ago I lived on the beach.

And I thought I was living the dream.

I was hired as the divemaster, fishing guide, kayak guide and, at times, the chef, of a little boutique hotel on the East Cape.

It only had 8 total rooms.  And about 500 acres of Baja shoreline and desert.

Ten miles down a dirt road from anywhere.  There was nothing but Baja sun, soil, dust and the Sea of Cortez anywhere nearby.

Water came from a well in the rocky soil.  Electricity from a generator. 

I had a little backpacking tent out on the sand.  I had found a wooden pallet and pitched my tent on my make-shift platform.

I ran 5 huge extension cords from the main house 40 yards out to my place on the beach.  It was enough to power a small light and my trusty Sony Cassette player.

I had 6 cassettes that had survived an afternoon I had stupidly left on the dashboard of my van that had not melted.

Jimmy Buffett. A James Taylor. The Eagles. An Aerosmith. A Ted Nugent and a Led Zeppelin.   In totality, maybe 40 or so songs that were the extent of my Baja playlist.  No radio signal way out there. 

In the days well before iPods or streaming devices…yes…there was a time before those existed…this was my Baja soundtrack.

No phones.  No TV’s.  No DVD players.

I cooked on a camp stove.

I erected one of those collapsible sun shades over more pallets.  It was my “beach store” and “rental hut.”

I hung wetsuits and stacked fishing rods in it.  I piled the kayaks outside.  A couple of battered scratched plastic Corona Beer chairs I had scrounged completed my staging area.

I lived in my s-shirt, boardshorts and weathered straw lifeguard hat.

For my first 4 months I never wore shoes.  For 6 months, I never touched cash or wrote a check.  I caught, grew or bartered for whatever I needed.

It was downright glorious.

But, the nights were the most spectacular.

After the few lights at the little hotel had been doused.  And the handful of clients had been put to bed, it was “showtime. “

I would pull one of the plastic chairs out onto the sand. Out into the darkness.  With only the sounds of the small waves lapping at the shore, I would lean back on that chair.

And I would look up.

And it was breathtaking.

More stars than I had ever seen in my life.  Big ones.  Little ones. Blinking ones. 

I could see whole parts of the Milky Way and more constellations than I could ever count. Ursa…there’s the Dipper…Orion’s belt…or is that Gemini?

…and shooting stars.  There’s one…then another.  And another.

Blazing trails across the blackness that wasn’t quite so black. Trails that lingered for seconds before another arced across.

And I would stare and stare and watch the celestials move across the night sky.

It was magnificent.

And it felt at once so large and encompassing and yet humbling and simplifying in it’s enormity.  From horizon to horizon.

Often, even at my feet, in the lapping waves. . . twinkling orbs of bioluminescent plankton…the ocean’s own neon adding to the light show.

I couldn’t help feeling part of it.  And at the center of the vastness of the ethos.  Privileged.  Honored.  Blessed.

And feeling a priceless gratefulness to be there at that moment in time.

Fast forward 30 years.

And now, I look at twinkling lights that dot the bay.  Growing before my eyes.  For better or worse, I can’t say.

But, I do know that these don’t make me feel like those nights on a lonely dark beach when I got to be part of the galaxy.  I miss that. 

That’s my story…

Jonathan