American Sabbatical 56: 11/27/96

Thanksgiving in Baja..

Coming down into San Diego after our sojourn in the Anza Borrego John and I followed a sundog through the conical peaks of the outer city. The solitary rainbow spot was riding in thin clouds on the level with and about 30 degrees north of the setting sun, and it rode all the way down to the horizon. It was John’s first sundog, and the first time I’d ever seen just one, rather than a straddling pair. I hoped that it was a sign. Maybe it was. Within seconds of our arrival in Encanto the household was full of snarls and doorslams, the neighbor dogs began yapping, and the growling highway echoed up the canyons.

Traveling through the lives of old friends makes you confront your personal history, and you encounter places you’ve come through, and the might-have-beens. Some of the battles raging around us in San Diego were hostilities we’ve won through, and maybe we had some advice to share, but mostly all we could do was be there. Our brief sample of the far southwest leads us to believe that too much sunshine and manana might be dangerous for the parts of us that like to live on the edge, or loll in the sun. Emigres to the farthest shore have had a reputation for restless self-indulgence since the days of Fremont, and here were some Californians we might have become, if we hadn’t run aground in eastern Maine, and fought through it.

Hannah has a schoolmate, whose parents have become friends of John and Alyce, and the whole family is working as extras in the filming of TITANIC in Rosarito, just south of Tijuana. They had invited the bunch of us down to their condo on the beach in Puerto Nuevo for Thanksgiving, and we were bringing the feast and fixings.

It took us all day Wednesday to put the pieces together, and by the time we had the ingredients crammed into the VW van it was obvious that we had to take Red Owl with us to carry the extra bodies. The Owl was stripped (we had emptied her for servicing), so the thought of a customs search didn’t daunt us, and it would be good to test her new brakes against some Mexican obstacles. John and I had picked up a fresh bird Tuesday night, but uncertain about keeping it good for two days, we’d jammed it into the freezer, and it was rock-solid when we loaded it up Wednesday night. Three coolers full of veggies and perishables, canned goods by the gallon, bags of thisandthat, the Webber grill, charcoal, lawn chairs, camping materials (just in case), and the frozen bird. We waddled down the canyon out of Encanto as the sun started warming the air Thanksgiving morning.

Neither Peggy nor I had ever been south of the border, and chasing after a crazed VW camper may not be the best way to get the feel of a new country. It’s the way a lot of gringos have done it, though, and other caravans of yankee campers were lined up at the border ahead of us. We swung out for Mexican insurance ($22.20 for four days) and a peso change, then joined the holiday surge.

The cultural divide cuts like a knife between the US and Mexico. Lowrent California is full of junkcars, tattered palms, and faded stucco, but the backside of Tijuana is a quantum drop below that. Shoddy and abandoned concrete and galvanized construction, trash and graffiti, and thick air pollution strike your eyes. It looks like a battered outpost in the Bronx. Highway Uno skirts the border for a ways, and it looks like the Marne come to Bed Sty. A 20-foot corrugated steel barrier, spray-painted in political and personal slogans, separates the joys of Tijuana from a bulldozed noman’s land of red clay with Border Patrol Bronco’s parked here and there, and the occasional surveillance vehicle with its conning-tower top filled with nightscopes and intelligence arrays. Us and Them.

Then the 1 turns south through the hillside barrios of the border city, and you are engulfed by an alien atmosphere. The very smell in the air changes. Not unpleasantly. It’s reminiscent of a sultry downtown summer in the late 50’s: unmuffled hydrocarbons with a hint of salsa, and dust. The roads are full of pedestrians, even the highways. This country moves by bus, you can flag one down anywhere. And the Mexicans are all decently dressed. If this is poverty, it isn’t in rags. But the infrastructure is astonishingly rundown. It makes New York look spiffy. We had expected colorful relief and flowery displays, but this bit of urban Mexico was drab and disillusioned. To strangers the impression of dirt, disorder, and decay is striking, but everyone we spoke with remarked on how much better things are looking, or said they hadn’t noticed the eyesores.

We continued along the coast, with dry scrub hillsides to our left, and hotel condos lining the headlands to our right. White lines of surf trimmed the blue-green water and the cloudless air was a balmy 70 degrees. We’ve been pursuing September all the way from Maine, and here it was to perfection. Under lock and key. Each of these vacation spas was enclosed by high walls, and gated with full security. We turned in under the portico of a crenelated fortress in white stucco, called the Grand Baja. Welcome to Nirvana at Puerto Nuevo.

The Mexicans can work marvels with stone and cement. Centuries of stucco and masonic craftsmanship make the buildings down here a joy to behold. If the Getty reminded us how much Spanish architecture owes to Rome, the Baja says, "and the Moors, too." It could be North Africa. Romanesque arched windows, and Arab wind scoops. Moorish facades and minaret turrets. Whole Mediterranean villages in a condo-cluster. Adobe and tile may have yielded to ferrocement and fiberglass, but the local contractors still have a gift for meticulous detailing. And the construction is never over. Wherever you go workmen are engaged in some small activity, but the big projects almost never seem to get finished. Rusted steel frames may have been erected months (or years) ago, while a portion of the building is being blocked up today, and another section is mostly finished out and a business going on there. There is construction everywhere, and done jobs nowhere. Along the highway there are astonishing drystacked rubble and flagstone walls, intricately pieced together for miles, unmortared except for a few hundred yards here and there. Each craftsman must be satisfied with his small piece of the work, or he’d be heartbroken by the lack of completion. A thoroughly foreign ethos.

When we arrive a crew of workmen in uniform drab are applying the cobalt to the accents with long-handled rollers. One of them is standing on the rooftop, having removed a row of tiles to walk the gable-edge. When he’s done painting he gets down without replacing the tiles. We see other places in the complex where tiles have been taken up and never replaced. Other workmen are patching cement here and there, with unhurried gestures. Staff is slowly sweeping in the courtyard or servicing the rooms. There seem to be a couple dozen of these employees constantly in sight moving with gentle slowness through the brilliant light.

After a couple of hours the bird is ready for the Webber, stuffing prepared from creative ingredients, gallons of side-dishes potted for the Coleman stoves, and the whole crew about half lit. It takes us about five hours to cook Thanksgiving dinner in tag-team relays, between games of tennis, swimming, drawing and Jacuzzing. John mans the Webber throughout. When the lime-basted bird is finally ripped apart on the balcony we have huge appetites, and everything is delicious. Sweet potatoes and oranges, peas and corn, mashed potatoes, exotic stuffing. It is also our hosts’ son’s birthday and we top off the gorge with chocolate and cheesecakes. The three pies I baked on Wednesday stay packed up for breakfast.

The Macintoshes are cast in third class, steerage, and are amused that the portrayed classism is maintained on and off the set. There is an institutional classism between leading performers and extras, in any case, and this carries down into a superiority of hard core extras vs. the occasional cast of thousands. TITANIC is not low budget. Graham with his Celtic red hair and dependability has been used in more and more scenes, while Bonny and the kids, because of their availability get lots of camera time too, and were full of movie jargon. This has been a home-schooling experience par excellence.

By law the company must provide schooling for the children and limit their daily worktime, and are also providing the funds for daycare while the adults are on the set. Most of the shooting is at night, so the Macintoshes are living like zombies, or like sailors on rotating watches. They all had Thanksgiving off, miraculously, and were delighted to have us haul in some home cooking. Bonny complained about the incompetence of the teacher provided by 20th Century, and Peggy’s eyes lit up. Here’s a career possibility that would be a lark. How about a winter in the Baja as a K-12 teacher?

I’m not sure I’d like it. Between the hierarchical horsemanure on set and the classism in Mexico my hackles would stand up too high. All the silent staff at the hotel with downcast eyes jangles me. And the abyssal disparity between rich (mostly gringo) and poor (invariably native) here insults you at every turn. You can understand why some everyday Americans come to Mexico to lord it. Even moderate northern affluence makes you a prince in Mexico, but the nouveau can be offensive in the extreme. Yahoos playing king. We’re told that parts of the tropical beach on the Sea of Cortez are like spring break year-round. To be sure there are plenty of gringos like Graham who have deep respect for the Mexicans, and an honest desire to share our wealth as best we can, but the deep inequities roil my guts.

After our feast we strolled into Puerto Nuevo, the once fishing village which abuts the hotel on the north. This is the tourist Mexico of bright lights, jumping colors, and strolling musicians. Puerto Nuevo calls itself the Lobster Capital of the World, which gave us joy. Its genesis as an attraction was a restaurant serving the once abundant California lobsters grilled and juicy. The rank scent of singed shellfish seeping out of the back alleys put us off this west coast treat, and we turned down the chance to try lobster burritos. We were turkeyed to the gills, in any case.

We eyeballed the streetmarket booths full of bright-colored fabrics, terracottas, and gewgaws. I particularly love the polychromed wooden animals, psychedelic monsters, and mythic critters, but there were no velvet Elvises, to our chagrin. We did some gifting, and tried to strike the right balance between ripoff and rollover. You are expected to haggle, but our hearts could hardly be in it when we could see the relative poverty around us. So we’d bargain down 20% and go away smiling. I could almost enjoy dickering, after years of discomfort on the toymaker’s streetcorner. But I found myself uncertain how to respond to the volunteer car-parkers directing people into empty public spaces and expecting a gratuity. Bonny said, "Why not pay them?", and I couldn’t answer.