The Bay of Los Angeles

The drive from the border to Punta Prieta took six hours. After we left El Rosario, Kevin and Dad slept most of the way. A few miles after turning east on Highway 22, I approached several cars stopped behind barricades in the road up ahead.

“Dad, wake up, what’s going on? They’re carrying machine guns and uh,  they’re not wearing uniforms,” I said, jabbing my dad.

“I don’t know but pull over, that guy with the baseball hat wants you there. Do you see him signaling,” my dad said looking at me alert and shifting his eyes quickly.

“Do you think they’re bandits?” I asked.

“No, look at the truck across the road; they’re Federales. I’ve been told they don’t always wear uniforms.”

I took a deep breath. My heart was racing and my forehead began beading sweat. Kevin woke up in the back seat and was silent. I swallowed hard and pulled onto the shoulder next to a short, dark-skinned man in jeans and a soiled cotton shirt. He glared at us with crooked, yellow teeth and a spoke in broken English, “Where are you headed?”

“The Bay of Los Angeles,” dad replied.

“Are you bringing any weapons?”

“None,” dad replied

“Any drugs,”

“No sir.”

Without identifying himself he said, “please step out of the car.”

Three men approached the car and started poking around. One was wearing an olive army shirt with a badge attached to his belt.

“Anything in the boat?” the same man asked, looking at dad.

“Nothing but fishing gear,” dad replied.

The man walked slowly around the car.

Dad pulled Kevin to his side.

The man shouted something in Spanish to the men searching the car.

“It’s okay, you may go,” he said, looking more tired than irritated.

“Whoaa, that was weird. I thought we were gonna get hijacked or something,” I said

Dad was shaking his head.

“That was something alright. I can see why this place gets a bad reputation?” he said, turning back to look at the blinking lights and barricade.

Then he turned to face me. “The sign said 66 kilometers to The Bay of Los Angeles. What’s that in miles?” he asked, waiting for Kevin or me to reply.

“No clue,” I said.

“Me neither,” Kevin said, from the back seat.

“Take the Kilo’s and divide by 1.6 which is tough without a calculator, so just divide the Kilo’s by two and then add a little. 66 divided by 2 equals 33 plus say 7 miles or so would make it roughly 40 miles to be in ball park.”

“How do you estimate a-little?” Kevin asked.

“Just a rough guess,” dad replied.

“Cool.”

I kept driving. It was my new role in the family. In late June of 2004, I was seventeen and happy to be behind the wheel. We drove an ‘86 Mercury Marquis. It was a silver work-horse that wasn’t losing a drop of oil even with close to 200,000 miles on the odometer and we were towing a heavy, corroding, 15-foot, aluminum fishing boat with a 100 horse-power Johnson outboard motor. It jerked the car with every start and stop.

At home, we kept it on the side of the driveway which elicited several complaints from the suburbanites we called neighbors. No problem, dad was a former top-sergeant in the Marines, now managing a restaurant and knew how to deal with complaints. He’d say, “just smile, make an adjustment, and re-serve,” so we smiled, moved the boat 2-inches to the left, and waved at everyone that drove by.

“Have you ever seen anything this barren?” he asked, staring out the window at the dry, Baja landscape.

“I don’t know, maybe the north end of Death Valley, like we saw on our first trip. Now that was desolate,” I answered.

“Dave, pull over,” he said.

“Why?”

“I want to teach you both a lesson.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Common, just pull over, that’s an order son,” he said, smiling.

“Yes sir!” I said, saluting

We got out. The wind was coming out of the west and whistled in quick spurts across the scorched rocky plain.

“What time would you say it is?” he asked.

“No clue,” I replied

“Me neither,” said Kevin.

“You do it like this,” he said, facing south.

“Make a mental note of the position of the sun,” he said, holding up his thumb.

“Since we’re in the northern hemisphere, we face south towards the equator because that’s the line the sun follows. Anytime the sun is in the center of the sky, its noon. That’s where high-noon came from.

“But this assumes you’re in the middle of your time zone. For instance in Phoenix, high-noon is actually at 1:30 PM in the summer, because there’s an hour added by daylight savings and another thirty minutes added because the city is about that time distance away from the center of the time zone.

Now you have to estimate the number of hours in the day. Since it’s summer, it should be around fourteen. So, just like we converted kilo’s to miles, we’ll estimate hours by dividing the sky into fourteen equal segments. You can do that by using your fist, hand over hand starting at the eastern horizon to the zenith flattening the arc out as necessary to get to 7 which is noon or halfway. Then from the zenith work down to the western horizon with each fist representing an hour.”

He held his hand up and moved them down to the left.

“My guess is around 3:30,” he said with confidence.

I looked at my cell phone. It showed 3:15.

Kevin and I both did it. It was simple and fun.

Dad did things like that all the time.

We were back on the road and I brought something up I’d been considering for some time. I swallowed hard, knowing what I was about to say would be a turning point in our relationship, that I would go from being his son, to becoming a man in his eyes, a coming of age announcement of sorts.

“Dad, I’m thinking about joining the marines when I get out of school,” I said, looking straight ahead.

“Why?”

“What do you mean why?” I asked.

“You heard me,” he said, looking down.

“Coming from you, that seems like an odd response,” I said.

“I just want to be sure if you go it’s for the right reason,”

“What was your reason,” I replied.

“I was drafted, but I would have probably gone-in anyway just for the steady work because my grades weren’t that good.”

“Did you like it?”

“Yea, everything but the war part.”

“Aside from the obvious, what do you mean?”

“I was never quite sure who the enemy was. In Vietnam, Kennedy and Johnson screamed about communism and started a war. Nixon sent in more troops and expanded it, but I’m not sure the reason was communism, or just the fear that the oligarchy in the south who was our partner, would fail. We deal with communist countries every day. Russia is still communist, but as their own people decided, it’s a system that doesn’t work.”

“Vietnam obviously turned communist but they’re no more a threat to taking over the world than McDonalds Hamburgers.”

“Wanna book a tour to the Hanoi Hilton? Google, Travelocity, or the Cu Chi tunnels outside of Saigon? Hell, I understand the tour guides are all former Viet Cong guerrillas. The north won, and yet here we are, thirty years later, setting up bus tours to Hue and Khe Shan just as easily as you can visit, Normandy or Waterloo.”

“If the enemy is truly a bunch of tyrants that commit atrocities, why weren’t we in Rwanda? Why aren’t we in North Korea or Iran or Libya?

“I don’t know the answers to those questions, but I do know that in one week, I lost 17 boys fighting over ground that had been exchanged six times with the enemy. We took the objective, and then moved out a month later. I don’t need to describe the horrors I saw and experienced.

“I’m willing to fight, but I’m also much more skeptical of the powers to be, no matter if they’re red, blue, black or white.

“Put another Hitler out there who’s rolling across free countries and herding entire religions into Cattle-Cars, I’m in, but beyond that, the leaders I’m supposed to follow had better have their facts straight.”

“You want to serve your country, join the Red Cross, build a better intel system or a find a cure for the common cold.”

“So I come back to my question; what’s your reason?”

“I thought it’s what you would have wanted,” I said.

He smiled and looked at me, “Son, all I want is to go fishing with you your brother in the Sea of Cortez.”

He grabbed my neck and messed-up my hair and I was relieved and happy.

We rounded a bend and the tropical blue coastline spread like a cyan-green, silk ribbon as far as we could see, melting into the deep azure blue of the channel, between the Isle of La Guardia which stood as a sentinel, and the Bay of Los Angeles at our feet.