Apr

26

San Felipe Beach in BajaThe hard-hit Baja economy daily takes me to the dumps so that I fulfill a childhood dream to live in a junkyard. It is a three-mile thick, 10-mile long ring around San Felipe that is Shangri-La with distinct subcultures.

"There was no competition three years ago before Mexico followed USA into collapse," a walking scavenger lamented a week ago. Most pickers hike with a pointed stick and flour sack for little treasures: clothes, recyclable cans, and toys. They are the dregs of the dump caste. Better push wheelbarrows or bicycles with saddlebags to stuff with cardboard, fishnets, tarps and rope to construct huts that dot the landscape till the next windstorm. The upper crust drive beat-up pickups with a picnic packing family to cull furniture, metals ($.20/kg), and tires as they go. I'm one of a class on a ’03 125hp Yamaha Breeze ATV to range the archives to pick shorts, joggers and jackets, baskets to carry them in, and discarded pineapple rinds from Pinacolata beach vendors to ferment wine.

The dump is also Mother Nature’s barrel. I saw a Great Blue Heron defend his great stack of 2' filleted fish. Walking backwards, I was a step from a 3' western diamondback rattler searching rats. One afternoon, a mew cut the silence and three little kittens tumbled out of a packing crate. In ensuing days I brought them milk and a first meal of tuna, until they disappeared. I sat hypnotized on a couch at four vultures pecking a dead dog's testicles.

I could do terrible things to people who dump unwanted things by the roadside. And today, I sat down for one reason or another and was stung on the buttock by a scorpion. I looked at the 2'' green critter hanging by the tail, he nailed me a second time, and dropped to the ground with legs kicking at the sky. I don't need good food, I don't enjoy flashy cars, I don't parade nice clothes, and I don’t care if I live in a dump. Rubbish! This is the most fun I’ve had in months, and the best dressed I've been.

Craig Mee comments:

I think of trading when reading the following. (No doubt Bo would have a few things to add)

An excerpt from Vagabonding by Rolf Potts:

For the first time vagabonder, of course, preparation is a down right necessity — if for no other reason to familiarize yourself with the fundamental routines of travel, to learn what wonders and challengers await, and to assuage the fears that inevitable accompany any life-changing new pursuits.The key to preparation is to strike a balance between knowing what is out there and being optimistically ignorant. The gift of the information age, after all, is knowing your options — not your destiny — and those people who plan their travels with the idea of eliminating all uncertainty and unpredictability are missing out on the whole point of leaving home in the first place." *"The goal of preparation, then , is not knowing exactly where youll go but being confident nonetheless that you'll get there. This means that your attitude will be more important than your itinerary, and that the simple willingness to improvise is more vital , in the long run, than research. After all, your very first day on the road — in making travel immediate and real- could very well revolutionize every idea you ever gleamed in the library."

"As John Steinbeck wrote in Travels with Charley, "once a journey is designed, equipped, and put in process, a new factor enters and takes over. A trip, a safari, and exporation, is an entity… no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing and coercion are fruitless. We find that after years of struggle we do not take a trip a trip takes us."


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