An ex-Hollywood stunt man visiting La Paz in Baja California Sur insisted, “The locals lied to me. They said that here it gets so hot you can fry eggs on the sidewalk.”
“It’s true,” I argued.
“Ha!” he countered. “I tried and they were burned to a crisp before they hit the cement!”
Exaggeration?
Only slightly. The weather in Baja California Sur is divided into three seasons: hot, hotter and hottest. During the hottest season (May through October) plastic buckets have been known to melt, rubber tires have been known to melt, visiting tourists have been known to melt. Fish swimming the shallower parts of the Bay of La Paz surface upside-down totally boiled.
During the hottest part of the hottest season life in La Baja comes to a standstill except on the beaches where tourists come to get sunburned. Like other nocturnal species, bajeño natives come out after dark. As temperatures dip to a chilly eighty-five or ninety degrees Fahrenheit they laugh, joke, swish their feet in the salt water, put on sweaters. They eat, drink and tell stories.
Many of the stories are about Baja curiosities: gray whales, lost treasures, sweaty tourists, arrogant sea lions. Others are about Earl Flynn, the flamboyant Hollywood actor who frequently appeared with a yachtful of celebrities to entertain and be entertained in what he called “a desert Paradise” and about sailfish and sharks that seem to grow in size and ferocity each time they’re mentioned.
A local notario (notary public) delights in describing a politician campaigning for office loudly extolling his virtues from a podium set up on the beach. A rancorous grunting interrupted his diatribe as a huge sea lion crushed the podium and dumped it and the politician into the Bay. (Many bajeños would like to do the same thing to politicians but being better natured than sea lions they ignore them as much as possible.)
Centuries ago sea lions commandeered the jutting rocky superstructure of an island now called Espiritu Santo a few kilometers from the entrance to the Bay of La Paz. They ruled tranquilly and with little interference from Baja locals who regarded them as residents with habits and privileges like those of other bajeños: fishing, procreating, gathering at night to enjoy the moonlight. Foreign invaders gadgetted into wetsuits and snorkel tubes have made the sea lions’ lives more complicated but they, like older locals, accommodate, confident in their solidarity with the way things were that this fad, like others, soon will pass.
What is not likely to pass, even with global warming, is the weather. The weather is a Baja topic of conversation not because it changes but because the few changes, called “hurricanes,” are quite dramatic.
Hurricane watching in Baja is both science and folklore. Weather experts dominate TV, radio and internet with minute by minute wind velocity, directional variances and path progress. Stores sell hundreds of rolls of tape that bajeños strip across windows to prevent breakage. Dogs howl and roosters bawl warnings. Everything that can be lashed down is lashed down, particularly in the marinas where a yacht breaking loose from its moorings can crash into others creating a domino effect of shattered hulls, broken bows and submerged cabins.
Nothing in nature can make one fell less helpless than a hurricane. They seem to last forever as the winds whirl circularly around the slowly moving center of the storm. Pieces from ripped apart roofs, palm fronds, street debris bang against walls and windows. Electric lines crack and go flying. Waves crashing against the Malecon fling coral, pieces of piers and gigantic seaweeds across streets, patios, walkways and as they recede pull furniture, billboards, bicycles into sea. The winds high-pitched screams almost break one’s eardrums. Everything around one seems to whirl away leaving one suspended, lifeless, in the fury of the storm.
When finally the winds diminish and the waves cease to roil the bajeños emerge from hiding to access damage. The reports are varied and often somewhat conflictive: no electricity until lines are repaired, streets blocked by fallen ficus, school attendance suspended. No matter how ferocious a hurricane might have seemed there were others worse: old-timers claim that a merchant schooner was discovered sixty kilometers inland after a hurricane ripped across the peninsula north of Lòpez Mateos. An eight-foot-long shark was found wallowing in mountain mud west of Mulegè. A wardrobe closet filled with expensive women’s clothing washed up on the El Sargento beach.
But hurricanes, however dangerous and destructive, strike infrequently. Many blow themselves out before they hit land; others veer northward to disrupt life in Oaxaca or Michoacan. The heat, by contrast, is constant.
In the once famous copper mining town of Santa Rosalìa old-timers claim that the only time one could be comfortable was standing in front of the smelters, since the heat they gave off was less oppressive than that coming from the sun. (According to La Baja storytellers everything was hotter, larger, farther, deeper and more beautiful “back then” than it is today.)
Santa Rosalìa old-timers swear that evil-doers from La Baja aren’t sent to the Hell when they die. I asked a retired mathematics teacher why and he explained that years ago the Devil, while touring his fiery domains, noticed that the sufferers in one small corner of the Inferno were laughing, drinking and playing beach volleyball. The diablito he dispatched to check on the dissidents returned with the information that they were from Baja California Sur and found the accommodations delightful, even with the sizzling sulfur flames turned to their highest.
Puzzled—and annoyed—the Devil headed for La Baja and popped up on the desert near Ciudad Constituciòn. There was no shade (there still is no shade), no water, no animals, no people. The sharp rocks burned his cloven hoofs and the devilish potion he carried with him to renew his strength evaporated. Feeling himself begin to shrivel in the unrelenting heat he stumbled into a tiny adobe and flung himself on the packed dirt floor.
“How can you stand it here?” he demanded of the old couple who brought him a gourd of tepid water.
“We find it quite refreshing,” the old couple replied. “Until the weather gets really hot.”
At that the Devil leaped to his feet, slammed the earth with his trident and returned to Hell never to set foot in La Baja gain.
(Some localites insist that he fomented a plan with the Keepers of the North to send deceased bajeños to eternal damnation beneath the ice flows of the Arctic but others maintain that the afterlife picnicking continues, sometimes with the Devil as a featured guest.)
If so the bajeños undoubtedly evoke the best of Baja while entertaining him. Though they’ve been known to drink jamaica and beer bajeños prefer a marvelous potion called damiana, a sweet liqueur with aphrodisiac qualities. (It also can cure diseases, lengthen one’s life span and enable one to see things non-drinkers cannot see.) They eat raw chocolate clams on the half shell (raw chocolate clams also are an aphrodisiac) and raw sashimi tuna sliced thin and adorned with chilis and soy sauce. How they might obtain those delicacies in the Devil’s kingdom I can’t explain, although as one distinguished Baja don told me:
“The line between Heaven and Hell actually is very thin.”
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Robert Joe Stout is journalist and freelance writer living in Oaxaca, Mexico. His Hidden Dangers (Sunbury, 2014) details obstacles facing Mexico and the United States on various fronts, including drug commerce and immigration. His most recent book of poetry is Monkey Screams (FutureCycle Press). Read more here.
Photo: Raúl Mendoza Salgado
