“The Baja peninsula is not kind to humans.”
—John Steinbeck
When I announced that we had just passed the road to Abreojos, a well-known surf spot about six hundred miles down the Baja peninsula, Ian woke from his day-long nap. “Easiest trip yet,” he said, then fell back asleep with dreams of an abalone dinner dancing in his head.
Ian Warner is one of my oldest friends. We first met in 1970 when my family moved next door to his house in Malibu Colony. Even as a child he was radical. At age six, I watched him run through a large, sliding glass door. Although it exploded and showered Ian with broken glass, he walked away without a scratch.
Growing up on the beach, less than a hundred yards from Malibu’s Surfrider Beach, Ian Warner grew into one of the best Malibu surfers of my generation.
At age sixteen, he embarked on the pro tour sponsored by Hawaii’s prestigious Town and Country surfboards. While he had some good showings, like placing in the Malibu Pro and defeating Australian Ian Cairns at Sunset Beach, his pro surfing career was brief. After Ian lost his sponsor and returned home to Malibu, things did not go well. Ian worked odd jobs and lived in his car or on friends’ couches. While my old friend was struggling, I was in college and grad school.
Every year, after my spring semester finished, we took an extended trip to Baja’s fabled Rattlesnake Point, one of the best, summertime rights in the world. In those days, getting there meant a serious offroad expedition, and staying for more than a few days required planning and self-sufficiency. We had been among the fortunate ones. Every summer we got to surf a pointbreak, longer and more perfect than Rincon or Malibu, with just our friends. The waves had been so good on our last trip in 1989 that I didn’t want to return, and seven years had passed since we had last been to Rattlesnakes.
When I bought a new, four-wheel drive truck in California in 1996, I decided to go down to Rattlesnakes one last time. Gringos were now buying up the point, building houses, and the end of an era was near. I was supposed to take a friend from the North Shore, but he was a bit high strung and prone to conflict in the water. I worried about him in the desert because, as anyone who has spent more than a month camping in Baja knows, the place brings out the best and the worst in people.
I decided to go to Rattlesnakes alone.
Ian must have heard through the coconut wireless that I was going to Baja and called me out of the blue.
“When are you leaving?”
“Ten days.”
“Can I go?”
“Do you have money?”
“No.”
“Okay, but no drugs of any kind.”
“I don’t want to see any drugs for a while.”
“Okay, here’s the deal. Pick up the truck from Valley Dodge, take it to get new tires at Dirty Parts in Inglewood, and then pick me up at LAX—American—3 p.m. Friday. A big Southern Hemi is supposed to hit on Tuesday. If we hustle, we can leave early Sunday morning.”
After Ian picked me up at the airport, we spent the next day collecting tents, coolers, block ice, cots, tarps, sleeping bags, surfboards, fishing gear, car parts, and food. At 3 a.m. Sunday morning, we were tying down the last of our eight surfboards, when a spotlight hit me in the eyes, and an LAPD black-and-white rolled up on us. Before the cop could ask me anything, I said, “Going to Baja. I want to get through TJ while the federales are still sleeping.” The cops said nothing and drove on.
The brand new Dodge Ram 2500 drove like a Cadillac compared to my old, battered and bent GMC Suburban. We cruised down Interstate 5 at 80 mph, breezed through the border before dawn and stopped for coffee and gas in Ensenada. The military Puestos de Control (checkpoint) at Maneadaro where, in previous years, we had had our truck disassembled by Mexican federales (federal police) in search of armas y drogas (arms and drugs), was not open. We zoomed past the vineyards of San Vicente and the roadside oyster and clam stands in San Quintín. When we stopped for gas in El Rosario, where Baja really begins, we were making record time.
Until the 1970s, there was not a paved highway past El Rosario. Although Mexico’s Carretera Transpeninsular 1 (Transpeninsular Highway 1) is paved, the many crosses by the side of the road serve as a reminder of its perils. The narrow, two-lane highway has no guard rails, shoulders are rare, and passing cars can be a life or death decision. Over the years, I had many close calls and even lost a side mirror when a muy macho driver passed a slow-moving vehicle and almost hit me head-on. Nothing scared me more than the Mexican truck drivers in their roaring Dina diesel semis who had no qualms about putting their big rigs over the center line on blind curves.
There were always, Hironymous Bosch-like images on the two-day drive to Rattlesnake Point: giant Turkey vultures gnawing on rotten guts of a dead horse, red flames flickering through the ribs of a burning burro, a malnourished horse trying to walk on a broken leg. I once descended into an arroyo (canyon or riverbed), and the road was covered with tomatoes and partially blocked by a twisted truck and the flattened car it had just run over. Some motorists stopped and were trying to help, but I doubt any of the car’s occupants were alive. Even if they were, the closest hospital was hours away, and ambulances were nonexistent.
Soon we were passing through the heat of Catavina and reached the first military drug checkpoint. A bored, teenaged Mexican soldier with a Heckler & Koch G3 assault rifle approached my window.
“¿Que onda?” I asked and then offered him a Marlboro Red. He took the cigarette, put it in the pocket of his BDU, and surveyed my truck that was the same make, model, and color as the Mexican military trucks parked by the side of the road.
“¿A dónde vas?”
“San Ignacio.”
“¿Tienes drogas o armas?”
“No hay.”
“Vamos.”
The hum of 33” BF Goodrich All-Terrains on the blacktop lulled Ian back to sleep as we crossed the 28th parallel, and by 5 p.m. we were less than one hundred miles from cold beers at Hotel La Pinta in San Ignacio. When I announced that we had just passed the turnoff to Abreojos, Ian momentarily woke from his day-long nap and said, “Easiest trip yet!” “Baja’s like the South of France compared to Cambodia,” I replied, but Ian was asleep again.
Less than twenty miles from our destination, I climbed out of an arroyo, and when I crested the steep hill at 60 mph, I saw a red Ford Ranger pickup truck. This would not have been so alarming had it not been in my lane, flanked by the white Ford F-150 pickup truck it was passing. We were fifty yards apart and closing fast. Time suddenly slowed down as my mind turned into a supercomputer and in a millisecond inventoried my options. None of them were good. To my right and left were sloping, soft shoulders and desert filled with big rocks and Cardón Gigante, Mexican Giant Cactus.
I knew that if I suddenly swerved off the road to make way for the red Ford, I would probably roll. My lizard brain concluded that a collision was inevitable and that my truck was now a disposable survival tool.
I steered slightly to the right to give the red truck as much room as I could and then mashed the gas pedal to the firewall. If nothing else, in this game of truck billiards, I was going to be the white ball. Maybe the driver of the red truck had nerves of steel and could thread the needle.
He did not.
When my adversary in this desert duel heard my V8 downshift, then roar, and saw that the big, green Dodge was holding the course, forward at full, he locked up his brakes. The red Ford’s oversized tires made a loud, throaty, bellowing sound like a large, wounded animal. As the violent scream of my engine and the bark of his tires built to an inevitable head-on crescendo, Ian woke from his slumber in time to see the red truck, feet from impact.
“Pete, LOOK!” was all he managed to get out before we were both silenced by the deafening explosion of my front left tire and the simultaneous metallic snap of something large in the Dodge’s front end, only to be immediately replaced by the crystalline tympany of a breaking glass. After my side mirror exploded, pieces of it hit me in the face like birdshot. As I instinctively ducked to avoid the glass, the red Ford’s side mirror whizzed past my head, smashed into the cab’s back window, and landed in my back seat.
I would later learn that when my Dodge plowed through the smaller truck, it cork- screwed once in the air, then drove up the side of the white Ford it was passing. Just as the truck’s fiberglass shell cracked and was about to collapse, the white Ford descended the steep hill, and the red Ford launched into the air like stunt driver Joie Chitwood.
Although I heard the loud booms of the red Ford rolling end over end, I had more pressing concerns. I was now driving with one tire, what felt like a broken axle and was struggling with both hands and all my might to keep my remaining front tire from making the hard left that it wanted to make. We half slid and half drove across the center dividing line, then bounced and careened our way through the desert, leaving a giant cloud of dust in our wake. When we finally ground to a halt, I could feel warm blood running down my face. I couldn’t see, because one eye was full of blood, and the other was full of broken glass.
Over the sound of Marvin Gaye crooning, Ian asked, “Pete, Pete, Are you okay?” “I think so. Check my cuts,” I said, as I wiped the blood and glass out of my eyes and off my face. Ian inspected my cuts and he said, “No, nothing too bad.” We were both surprised to be uninjured and alive. I exclaimed, “Ya! We made it! OK! We gotta long night ahead. That other motherfucker is probably dead. We’re going to jail, but at some point I’ll get to make a phone call. Now, you stay with the truck. I’ve got to go try to help the other driver.”
The door wouldn’t open, so I climbed out the window of my demolished truck and ran through the desert to the highway. As I sprinted towards the top of the hill, I noticed that my bumper and axle had hoed what looked like a long, crop row in the road. When I came over the top of the hill, I could see the red Ford, one hundred yards away, sitting in a pool of gasoline on its partially collapsed roof. I prepared to pull a body out of the truck, but as I got closer, I saw a shimmering apparition, backlit by the setting sun.
It was my adversary in this desert duel, Manuel Rousseau Rojas, shaking the glass out of his hair. The stocky Mexican was holding his lasso, and his pancho was covered with broken glass. I approached Rojas and thought that he was in shock but realized that he was stumble drunk.
The white Ford pickup pulled up next to me and stopped. Except for a tire track from its gas cap to the top of its now cracked camper shell and some oil on the windshield, it was unscathed. I shuddered when I saw four children were in the back of his truck. The driver jumped out and said, “My name is Dr. Valenzuela.” There was no time to mourn the loss of my truck or discuss the close call we had just survived. Dr. Valenzuela drove back up to the top of the hill, parked, and carried the shredded remnants of my tire and put them on the road. “If we can make fuego (fire), to warn the cars is better. The other driver está muy borracho (very drunk). Here is my phone number.”
I ran to my truck, got a tin of Coleman lantern fuel, ran back to the road, liberally doused the tire, put down the can, and flicked a lit match in the direction of the tire. Once it got above the tire, the fumes from the white gas ignited with an explosive “poof.”
The next few hours were a blur as I manned the road with a flashlight and kept stoking the fire. At about 9 p.m., a new, Jeep Cherokee pulled up, and four federales dressed in immaculate western wear spilled out. The leader wore pressed white jeans, a satin baseball jacket, exotic cowboy boots, and had a Colt .357 Python stuffed into the back of his pants. He questioned me about the accident while the three other feds spoke with Rojas, who they seemed to know. Later, I would find out that my adversary was a well-known, regional baseball pitcher.
The federales vanished as quickly as they came. After two more hours of directing traffic, a police black-and-white and a tow truck appeared. I had never imagined welcoming the sight of Mexican cops, but I did. As Ian and I climbed into the backseat, one of the cops said, “We take you to the station in Santa Rosalia now.”
“No, you’re taking us to La Pinta Hotel in San Ignacio. I’m going to bed, it’s been a long night.”
“We go to the station, paperwork.”
“No, we go to the hotel.”
Suddenly, there was a loud skidding sound that distracted the cops. After the tow truck hooked up my Dodge and tried to pull away, my wheels would not turn. The tow truck dragged my truck a few feet, then stopped, and the driver jumped out with a big wrench in hand, climbed under my truck, and wrenched until my drive shaft hit the road with a loud clang. As the tow truck drove away, a trail of sparks followed it all the way to San Ignacio. In the end, the police drove us to the hotel, but told us to report to the station in Santa Rosalia the next morning at 10 a.m.
By the time Ian and I were given the key to our room, it was 1 a.m. I was still covered with broken glass, and my left arm and face looked as if they had been shot by a .410 shotgun. I took a shower and tried to get the broken glass out of my ears and hair. Finally, I fell into a deep sleep. I woke early the next morning and walked past the oasis town’s small lake to the police wrecking yard and stared at my destroyed truck.
I told the owner of the wrecking yard that I needed to hire someone to drive us and our gear to the police station. He took me to a small house, and a big, middleaged man came out to greet us. Raul was a tour guide who owned a van and spoke some English. I agreed to pay for his fuel and give him my Hi-Lift jack, oil, coolant, and spare parts if he would drive us to the station. He agreed, and a half hour later, Ian and I met him at the wrecking yard and began to transfer our gear to his large, Ford Econoline van.
“It is sad,” Raul said, looking at our truck, as I strapped our last boards to his van and took one last look at my totaled Dodge. As we headed down the steep switchbacks into the sweltering, stale, windless heat of the Sea of Cortez, I steeled myself for a long, tiring day with the Mexican police. When I walked into the modern, two-story police station, I saw my adversary, Manuel Rousseau Rojas, smiling and cracking jokes with the cops. “This is no good,” Raul said under his breath. “If that was me I would be crying and begging for my life.” My doubts grew when I learned that my Mexican insurance company’s adjustor was also the police station’s secretary.
A fat, mustached cop came into the room and handed me an accident report written in Spanish and a pen. “Sign,” he said. There were only two cars on the report, and the key witness, Dr. Valenzuela, was not even mentioned. I told Raul to tell the police that I needed to call my insurance company and that we would return after lunch. The Mexican police reluctantly let us go, and Raul drove us to a store where I could make an international call. Instead of calling my insurance company, I called my father, who hunted with some of Baja’s prominent business and political leaders. When my dad picked up the call, it dawned on me for the first time that I could have easily been killed. The words came hard, and I gulped for air inside the hot, little phone box. My dad told me to give him an hour before I went back to the police station. He was “going to make some calls.”
When I got off the phone, Ian was waiting outside. I asked Raul to take us to Iglesia de Santa Bárbara, a prefabricated iron church that was designed by Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel, the designer of the Eiffel Tower. A mining company had shipped it from Europe to Baja and reassembled it in Santa Rosalia in 1897.
Although I am an agnostic, that day I wasn’t. I entered the spartan church, knelt on the velvet-covered board at the foot of the pew, and thanked everyone I could think of. I gave special thanks to my driving teachers, Vince Gallizio and Bob Bondaurant, who taught me that the gas pedal was my friend and the brake was my enemy. Finally, I thanked my martial arts teachers John Perretti and Rickson Gracie, who taught me about timing and commitment. After I walked out of the church, Ian entered, gave his thanks, and Raul drove us back to the station.
In the two hours that we had been gone, the cops in Santa Rosalia had obviously gotten their cage rattled. The police jefe (boss), who had previously acted like he did not speak English, greeted me with a big, fake, gold-toothed grin, and asked, “My friend, there are no problems, why you make problems?” and presented me with a new accident report that now included Dr. Valenzeula. Raul reviewed it for me and said, “This one is better.” I signed the paper, we all shook hands, and when we walked out of the station, I turned to Ian and said, “We’re going to Snakes. I already talked to Raul. He’ll take us. The swell doesn’t hit until tomorrow.” When we stopped for gas in Muelege, we bought a case of beer, put it in one of our coolers, buried it in ice, and put it on the floor between us in the van. I fished out two ice cold Tecates, and Ian and I toasted life.
Postscript
We wound up camping at Rattlesnakes for the next six weeks. Ian now referred to me as “Headless Pete in the driver’s seat” and said that when he saw my bloody face after the accident, he was sure that half of my head was missing and “all that education was splattered against the side of the truck.”
The surf never stopped pumping.
By the time we got back to Los Angeles, I knew that my extended adolescence was over. I decided to marry my girlfriend and finish my first book. When I visited John Milius and Leonard Brady at John’s office on the Sony (formerly MGM) lot, I showed them pictures of the wreck and the weeks of perfect waves we got afterwards. Milius laughed and said, “You had an Odyssean coming of age in the 20th century.”
A Duel in the Desert is part of Sour Milk’s series of survival stories. Other stories in this series include: Row Jimmy, Shut up! Swim! and Riding the Crazy Train.
Great story Peter. You were lucky and sounds like Rob greased the wheels so you could get some olas. Regards, Joe Dunn