Culebra

Until the mid-seventies the marines were here, speaking their clipped language, that imperialist stutter, firing rounds into the azure of the sea, dropping bombs on the scented hillsides. We are here, rocking gently in the bay, the myopia of everyday life making ordinary things blur into each other and loom large. I came upon a little book in the bilge about the Virgin Islands, "in full color." The colors are the colors of remembered vacations, dreams, cookbooks with faded yet somehow vivid photographs of ham and cakes with soft billows of icing. A confection of experience, old sugar mills framed in bleeding heart vine, tourists beside a chlorine-blue hilltop resort pool, palm fronds pendent across the bright sails of beached dinghies in two-dimensional perfection. It is not only the lack of three dimensions but the silence that, against all odds, perfects. This is what I found out the other day when I dove into the reef. Suspended above the swaying coral--pale purple, yellow, olive--watching the fish move in their separate society, live rounds of ammunition crusted with life, I saw the clear blue underside of a wave. It bowed up like the mystifying sine curve from high school math, and I thought how obvious some things become if you examine them in their natural setting.

Leaving Puerto Vallarta

Wind is everything. When it dies, we become morose. I sit at the tiller, thinking back over my life. “Literature” incites nausea, so I read detective novels and sometimes a really stupid one. Adam does the same thing and later we discuss them. I’ve begun eating rhythmically. Turtles pass by with seagulls riding on their backs. In two days we go thirty miles, arriving in the village of Tehuamixtle, where it would not seem strange to see Tennessee Williams and John Huston with their shirt sleeves rolled up, khaki pants belted at the waist, to hear men talking like they do in movies made in the fifties, sitting under the shade of the restaurant that serves cocktels de camarón in thick glass goblets and shredded marlin on fried tortillas. We walk up the dirt road out of town. A man grills his dinner on the rim of a tire, chickens pecking in the gravel below the porch. The cactus look fresh and green amid the dry brush before the rain begins, and a lost goat bleats somewhere on the hillside.

Towards Puerto Vallarta

San Benito del Oeste

Adam came up with the idea of opening a bar for navy personnel called the Funky Bunk, and one near a hospital called Randy Bandage. We are nearly halfway down the coast of Baja, anchored near a camp where abalone divers and langosteros live for the months of their shifts before returning to their homes on a nearby island, Cedros, where most of them grew up. Three of the divers offered us fresh lobster when the next boat came in, and promised dried abalone. They told us that the elephant seals living on the island are dangerous. One bit a man’s scalp, but he lived.

The elephant seal beach is littered with the rotting bodies of baby seals, killed by the rival patriarch—there are two clans. A seagull plucked at the flesh. The beach smells of salt and decay. Italian students have come here to study the seal population, and their elegant tents are pitched at even intervals among the rocks overlooking our anchorage. They wear beautifully coordinated clothes and clean shoes. They have branded the elephant seals with Italian names using hydrogen peroxide. We walked past the tents to a small graveyard with only four graves, those of two men and two children. And the lighthouse jefe told us a story. In 1933, the architect of the lighthouse, a distinguished man from Spain with a cryptic connection to Pancho Villa, was murdered here by two of his workers. The architect, said this man, whom I knew only as Ramón’s uncle, had been a good architect, but cruel. He abused and insulted his workmen, threatened them--even shot them. One evening the architect and two laborers sat around a card table in the unfinished lighthouse, a bottle of Cuban rum and a pistol on the table between them. What did the architect say? Suddenly one of the laborers seized the pistol, knocking the bottle to the floor, and fired. The architect remains here on the windswept island, unmourned by abalone divers and lobstermen, but remembered by the lighthouse keeper. He has felt the presence of workers buried beneath the floor of the old lighthouse. The widening cracks at the edges of the grave, he said, were made by the hands of dead laborers clawing at the dirt, their anger at the architect unappeased by death. Then he offered us dried abalone, which he brought from the kitchen of his brightly painted compound. A clock radio played in the bedroom. The abalone had been drying in the sun for a long time, under mesh, to keep the birds away.

Wreck of the Catalina

They say this was a ferry that used to service Southern California. Its wreck is home to sea lions and penguins, the smell of fish permeating it. You can hear the sea lions' barks echoing in the hull. They jostle for space, sneezing, strands of fish hanging from their mouths open in sleep.

Seals of approval

Leaving Santa Barbara with a decent 10-knot breeze, we passed "Mr. Clean," the optimistically named vessel that services the oil rigs off the coast, tethered to a large mooring ball upon which several seals were lounging. I took this picture even though I knew it wouldn't really turn out. We are all the time passing seals and sea lions on buoys and various sea balls, and they look up languidly, vaguely interested, more or less welcoming us, or so it seems, and their whiskered faces make me think of blubbery kittens. I love to see how sea life appropriates human technology. Once, sailing in the bay, we passed a bell buoy ringed with cormorants, facing the source of the rhythmic pinging as if in mute adoration of some ancient god.

Whale off Point Arguello

Adam said, "OK, let's think about it. What are we going to do if a whale rams us?"

Monterey/Look what dragged the cat in

I was walking to the bathroom in the evening. Adam was unable to walk, due to his weird foot infection. There was this shape up ahead--a wobbly, mutating blob. What was it? The man from the harbormaster's office who had checked us in the night before (nasty, unwashed, and, in Adam's case, infected) was standing next to it. I asked him what it was. He said it was an otter that had escaped from the aquarium. "All they do is eat and rub themselves," he pointed out. I made Adam limp down to check it out. We marveled at the dexterity with which it rubbed its head, over and over.