Baja

Baja is the land of less. Once you're south of Ensenada, there is less of nearly everything. There are fewer people. There is less commerce. Communities are smaller. There are virtually no paved roads save route 1.

The few things that occur in excess in Baja include cacti and sunshine - both of which dominate my waking hours every day. For long lonely stretches of route 1 there is little else. Day after day the sun splits the sky, scorching the desert ground where cacti thrive, infinite in their color and shapes. There are red barrels and chollas, galloping cacti and succulent organ pipes. The great Cardon, which can live for four hundred years, stretch their arms sixty feet into the sky, reaching for rain that never comes. Of the more than 100 species of cactus that are found on the peninsula, 75 percent exist nowhere else on the planet.

With the reduction in surrounding comes a reduction in need. My own life matches Baja's meager mood. After 9 months of pushing for ever-lighter more efficient motion, what I have is whittled even further. I carry only front panniers - and precious little in them. Behind me rests a single small seal bag; it keeps my sleeping gear and camera out of the dust. Formal cycling clothing no longer holds any allure for me. Gone are padded shorts and stylish jerseys. I have stopped wearing socks altogether. Instead I just let the sun burn my legs down to my ankles. My two choicest articles of clothing are a twelve year-old pair of Umbro soccer shorts and an ancient blue Patagonia undershirt. The former allows for constant lovely breezes - the latter's long-sleeves affords me some measure of protection from the sun's brutal constancy. Thoughts of water, food, and respite from the sun dominate each set of twenty-four hours. Most of my energy is spent serving the interest of securing these three things, potable water in particular. I cannot remember a time when I either wanted water more or was more dubious about my ability to get it.

It is during my fourth day of riding south down the peninsula that Baja shows me how spartan she is. I take a decent break in San Quinten, eating my standard Mexican fare of a double order of cheese quesadillas from an appropriately disheveled roadside taqueria, washing away the salsa's burn with a coke. Coke is a consistently cheaper alternative here to bottled water, and provides a welcome rush of sugar and caffeine to my bloodstream. Refreshed, I strike out on the litter-strewn highway with a vague idea of how far it is to San Rosarita. I expect to pass through some small communities along the way, as I have along the state's entire northern Pacific coast. I absent-mindedly notice that I have three quarters of a bottle of water and some juice. Surely that will be fine.

For many miles, the highway runs alongside cultivated agricultural lands - tomato, wine grape, mushroom, and cabbage country. Here and there are groups of people laboring in the fields, but mostly it is empty and lonely. The terrain begins to change as route 1 bends inland. There is no water anymore, no muddy irrigation ditches. There are no more homes, no mangy dogs, no fences. In time there is nothing but the omnipresent sunshine and cacti. The only signs of people having been here at all are the road itself and an occasional mound of glass or trash alongside it. I push south into more nothing. Running parallel to me, twenty-five miles to the east, is a decapitated ridgeline. Its mountains would be giants if the top half of them weren't missing.

For a variety of reasons, I haven't always known where I am on the map while I've been in Mexico. It's entirely possible to come into and pass through a community without ever seeing what it's called. It seems signs just aren't that important here. Even official government buildings are indicated with hand-lettered markings on the sides of cinderblock walls. Often the marks are faded and not facing the principal road. In Quinten there had been such a range of replies when I'd asked locals how far it was to the next pueblo - it had amused me. But now I take no pleasure in recalling their vague replies considering that I no longer had any idea how much distance lay between me and my next water, my next food, my next shade from the sun...

The desert terrain becomes steeper as the day grows hotter. I have finished my juice and before long my sole bottle of water has dwindled to a few ounces. I distract myself by watching the terrain, trying to pay attention to the subtle color changes of the rock that lines the twisting road. But my gaze takes me to the trash along the banks and ditches. There are the usual empty chip bags and cigarette boxes, balls of foil, plastic 6-pack holders from sets of cans. But more conspicuous than any of those things are the discarded drink containers. They are everywhere: plastic water bottles of every sort, Coke and Pepsi cans, green and brown beer bottles, the whitish-plastic kiddy bottles that hold artificial juice, milk jugs and wine bottles. They taunt me from the ditches. Some of them have an inch or more liquid left at the bottom; their thankless owners weren't even thirsty enough to bother finishing them. I have images of lazy tourists and careless locals mindlessly flipping their drink bottles out car windows, wasting in a land of want.

Water is one of those things we spend the majority of our time oblivious to, becoming attuned to its value only in its absence. We Americans can scarcely imagine the preciousness of the water we use so liberally. That we use to wash ourselves and our clothes, even our cars. We do not stop to consider the potability of water that flows from our taps, be they kitchen or bath or utility sink. We drink from the same hose that waters the lawn, and we can safely fill water bottles from virtually any source whether public or private. Not so in Mexico. Here, drinkable water is the exception rather than the norm. And In the absence of water - filling every space where water is not - is dust. Within hours of entering Baja at Tijuana, I realized that dust was to would be an enduring memory of my time on the peninsula. Only two days ago, I showered under freezing water at a Pemex fueling station, to dispense of wash away the dust I'd collected the preceding three days as I rode. The indulgence was free and I was delighted, but I would have savored it more consciously if I had known I would not shower again until La Paz, two weeks to my south.

The desert is an eerily silent place. Desert things know that making noise takes energy, and energy is best preserved. So the only sounds I hear are ones I make - the occasional click of a shifter when I drop a gear, the vague rub of my tires gripping road. My own breaths are deafening - and I can hear the blood coursing through my veins. More than once, resting at the top of a long climb, I swear I can hear the sun shining. The climbing becomes continually steeper until I shift to my smallest chain ring and begin to stand on my pedals. As my effort increases to make the climb, I begin to sweat. It's a still day and climbing at 7 or 8 miles per hour there's not much air moving over my body. It isn't long before I can see my perspiration soaks through the thin nylon shell I wear as protection from the sun. If there was some wind, my body's effort to cool itself by sweating might not be so futile. My own evolution is mocking me. I am merely wasting water I desperately need; it runs down my face in tiny rivers, hanging briefly on the end of my nose before falling in miniature splashes onto my handlebars and frame. Each drip leaves behind a cloudy salt stain where it evaporates.

Trying not to think about craving water when you're craving water is like trying not to hear a snoring bed mate. You fight so hard to not think about the thing that you can think of nothing else. The road is still climbing the heat is stifling. I can do nothing about the water falling out of my body. Nothing except slow down, which would merely prolong the time until I can replace what's lost. The empty bottles lining the roadway are laughing at me now, a whole chorus of them mocking my thirst. It is, it seems, a landscape full of drinks - and I have none; there is nothing in the world I want more. This desert is foreign to me and it is inhospitable. Yet I exist here. The strangeness of this place takes me somewhere in my mind I've never been; it makes me confront parts of me I didn't know were within me. I meet myself like a stranger in a long narrow hallway, visible from a long ways off. We stride inevitably toward one another; uncertain, but resigned to our eventual meeting.

Life is spare here, pared down to the simplest acts of living: moving, breathing, drinking, resting. There is an exhausting authenticity about the whole thing; it reveals to me how much of my life has been spent dealing in the superficial. In Southern California, during the weeks before, I had been pondering sufficiency. There, in the excessive comforts of western American living I felt a deep assurance that there was 'enough': enough money, enough energy, enough rest. Here, those assurances are threatened. I am now a living test of the truth that I've received... do I have the energy and the desire to see myself through the literal and figurative desert of my journey? Is there enough water to sustain me?

Stroke after pedal stroke, my inch of remaining water sloshes back and forth in a see-through bottle baking under the desert sun. I know it is nearly the temperature of the air around it and yet the temptation to slug it back in a selfish gulp is still overwhelming. I am riding across the middle of the peninsula now. I've climbed several thousand feet and left the haze of the Pacific coast well out of sight behind me. The Sea of Cortez lays somewhere out ahead. In between - in the burnt vast void of the Vizcaino Desert - I lose sense of space and distance. The road is flat and the air so clear that I can see several miles in all directions. I keep glancing back to see if a vehicle might be coming. Once or twice every hour, someone drives by. The license plates divide drivers neatly into two groups. The yellow and black Baja plates are the locals. They're usually in packed into dusty Toyota pickup trucks, always with two or three passengers to every legal seat. The other plates are blue and white with red cursive writing - California. They are on $60,000 SUVs and oversized pickup trucks with hulking diesel engines. They almost always pull camping trailers of some form, and are usually decorated with kayaks, zodiaks, fishing boats, and surfboards. The Northerners generally blast by me at about 90 miles per hour - Baja is a long stretch and they seem to want to be where they're going rather than where they are.

I spin deliriously southward, a captive of my own water-starved mind. Realizing that my only source of drinkable water is rolling by me, unaware of my need, I decide to ask for help. I continue riding when being passed, but signal that I am in desperate need of water by holding out a bottle and wagging it back and forth a bit, showing that it is empty. For several hours this activity proves futile, passing drivers don't seem to ease off the accelerator. But my options are nonexistent and I keep trying.

An enormous white Chevy Suburban barrels by me, but flicks its brake lights as it passes, as though the driver is considering what he might do to help. The vehicle slows and pulls momentarily to the side, and a flood of frantic hope overcomes me. But when I close to within 25 yards of the truck, it accelerates back onto the highway. I watch drop-jawed as it shrinks away over a long slow rise in the road. I am utterly deflated. I'd passed through the stages of self-encouragement, self-denial, and self-abuse. The muscles in my legs seize painfully every few strokes, and my head throbs thickly. My effort to move becomes feeble and I limp along, head down, glassy-eyed. I am still contemplating the cruel tease when I come a marking post alongside the roadway. Resting next to it, tucked in its shade, is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. Two plastic bottles of ice cold spring water - blue-hued and factory sealed, and dripping with lovely condensation. I stand and stare, not daring to believe it is real. I reach for one of the bottles slowly, half expecting my hand to pass through it - an apparition. But my hand finds it, and I lift it up. With some difficulty I twist off the top and raise the bottle to my lips. It is real.