A Sonora Desert Oasis with Children

April 18, 2007, Mexico
Wednesday?

I can hear Nora’s high pitched tuneless song. If I turn to look out the window, I can see the girls burying their bikinied Barbie in the sand. Two century plants are in bloom at the edge of the yard; brilliant yellow orioles, fleet hummingbirds and mobs of bees work busily among the agave blossoms high on fifteen foot stalks.

When Maria sings to Anita, “There’s nothing to be done, not a thing I can do,” I feel her fatalistic love. We are stuck, trapped now, helpless in our love for these tiny vulnerable beings who bounce and careen around the desert yard as fluidly as balls on a pool table.

Yesterday, Tuesday, we took the children on a little walk through town, ending up at the cultural center. I found a children’s library in one corner of the building. A woman pecked away at a manual typewriter on the front desk. She unlocked a cabinet door to hand us a few pieces of computer paper for coloring. Mia drew pictures with magic markers while I badly sounded out picture books in Spanish. The three school-age children at our table watched patiently. The boy tried out the word “castle,” then blushed. They handed us their pictures as they left.

Friday, April 20, 2007

Another run to the beach. The expansive blocks of pale gold sand and dark blue are a minimalist tonic. I take deep breaths of the clean air. I could call these waves playful as I dodge the fast carpet of foam running towards my feet. But I know there is no safe contact with the water here.

I recognize this stretch of beach. The lagoon there, a rocky steep hill towering before me – we climbed that hill years ago, exclaimed at the view. And the waves then, as I remember them, were tumbling eighteen-wheelers, a cascade of cement mixers, every few seconds. The heavy walls of water fell a few yards from our faces. We stood on a cliff of sand, separated from the crush by a steep short slope of hard pack sand.

Last night the children cooed over Emma, a dachshund in the restaurant. After dinner we walked to an ice cream stand – “Mia, can you see the surprise? It is the bright, bright green of a really crazy apple,” Serena riddled. The funny thing is, there were two green buildings on the block. In this tiny village, (recently designated as officially "Magic" by the Mexican government, much to the snorting of the ex-pat gringos,) brilliant sensations greet you on every corner. Strawberry creams, avocado with a strawberry ice chaser, pistachio, cherry ice cream. Phenomenally good. As good as Florentine gelato. What do the girls need for their vacation? A hammock to swing in, gentle dogs and tolerant cats, water to splash and drink. Ice cream.

Brent and Serena have a talent for making people feel good. We have known them for years, but this trip I study how they practice this craft. Much ebullient and generous laughter at the jokes of others. Repeating a phrase you have said, making it sound suddenly clever. Patience for the whims of children, the moodiness of guests out of their element. A casual attitude about clutter. Generosity of spirit, specifically extending even to use of their own bedroom, their own bed for afternoon naps. In conversation, responding to the suggestions of others with an enthusiastic “yes!” even if the point is tangential. And delicious dinners, cups of tea and bottles of beer don’t hurt either. Good friends.

Baja for Beginners from The New York Times.

Run to the Ocean

Monday, April 16

This morning, after a rough night with restless sleepers, I find depression has come down, even with the morning sun and an easy breeze. The girls are tired and dissatisfied with their breakfast cereal; I teach Mia to curse when I tell Eleanor, “okay, if you’re going to bitch, I can bitch right along with you.” “Bitchy baby, bitchy baby!” chants Mia happily so I need to correct her for my own mistake. Randy is hung-over and helpless. My only excuse is five days without a heart rate increase or endorphin rush. “I’m going out for half an hour,” I tell him. “I need to stop going crazy.” To the girls, “Mommy’s going to work out. I’ll be a better mommy when I come back.”

Our casita is at the top of a hill. We can see the ocean from every west window, a blue border between the bumpy carpet of palms, eucalyptus, laurel trees, rooflines at eye level and the sky above.

I skid down the steep dirt road toward the water, leaving behind Nora’s wails as Daddy holds her in his arms. Her desperate cries don’t fade from my ears. I hear their high-pitched echo in the high crowing of roosters, in dog yelps, in hollow dove calls, in the whine of a construction table saw. My breathing is not labored yet; I push, reaching for gasps to drown out the memory of her screams.

Brent has pointed out mango trees with their grape-like clusters of infant fruit, pistachio trees, pomegranate and the splayed fan of bird of paradise. I recognize them as I run.

Americans turn the face of their McMansions to the street; enter any suburban cul de sac and you see the lives of the families who live there before you, separated from the road by no more moat than a grass yard. In Mexico the architecture is about privacy and reserve, borrowed from the Spanish vernacular, Serena says. Thick stone and plastered cement walls, the tops often embedded with broken bottles or decorative spikes, prevent outsider eyes from capturing more than a glimpse of the oasis or austerity within. The expanse of blank, anonymous wall rising next to a narrow sidewalk in town is broken only by a few dark windows encased in iron bars. Crossing these walls, mounds of explosive bougainvillea bloom in papery blossoms of a fuchsia that mixes heart-red with an intense pink.

Perhaps this secrecy is balanced by a cultural openness – palapa roofs without walls, wide smiles and waves and Buenos tardes!

Now I run through the huerta, a low fertile valley nourished by a spring from the blue Sierra de la Laguna mountains to the east. I can hear water running. Behind a barrier formed by a stick fence and a thick bank of bamboo, a stream runs. I run parallel to it. Through the fence I can catch glimpses of the freshet, bolting down a narrow causeway, through someone’s shady paradise of a compound, then escaping under the fence, flowing under a dirt road, out into the fields of low green chile plants bordered with sentinels of high corn stalks.

A dead end. “Donde esta la playa?” Something friendly and unintelligible is replied; I only asked so as to see the pointing gesture. “Gracias!”

The strip of ocean is nearly always in sight. I know I’m getting closer, even in this maze of unmarked streets. Finally, a collection of casitas with a small sign, “Caliente Sol,” I turn a corner and see brush-covered dunes. The quick dirt road softens to sliding sand under my feet.

Soon I can hear the percussion of the waves. As I work to reach them, I remember the summer I carried ten-month-old Mia bound up in a secure carrier on my back up a rocky and glorious trail around Jenny Lake and Leigh Lake in the Wyoming Tetons. Hikers passing us the other way joked with Randy – how did he trick me into carrying the load? We laughed but I felt overjoyed to bear her weight. It was all I wanted: to be carrying my sleeping daughter in this green and piney place of glory. Each step felt like we neared Heaven.

Now I know. Each step was Heaven. And here it is again, before me. The Pacific Ocean. Todos Santos, Baja California Sur, Mexico.

From BCS, Mexico

Sunday, April 15, 2007

Today we took the children to Playa los Cerritos, the Beach of the Little Hills. To reach the beach, you drive south out of Todos Santos on the narrow two-lane Hiway 19 through the desert, past wide and narrow dry washes, these arroyos the only penetrable paths through the densely grown desert. We drove through the tiny oasis town of Pescadaro, shaded by tall palms, passed without knowing over the line of the Tropic of Cancer unmarked somewhere in the desert. Serena recognized the turn-off, an anonymous opening in the brush like so many others. We bump slowly over the rutted dusty road a mile to the beach.

We swam here nine years ago and only met one woman walking her pack of dogs. Serena had greeted her as a friend and told us of her house in the desert. Other than this one woman and a few surfers, black and shiny in wetsuits, silhouetted against the sun, we had the wide expanse to ourselves.

Los Cerritos now had a generator and a bar with a pool table and Internet access, huts for surfboard rental and horses for hire. A live band plays in the late afternoon. Under umbrellas, the bar armchairs have cushions. We spy a sun-bathing couple bearing the familiarity and sheen of celebrity – the blond woman with an enormous Gucci bag wears tiny triangles of fabric over her breasts, the man sports elaborate tattoos. Tommy Lee? No. His successor? I don’t think so. They are accompanied by a child with shoulder length hair, not much taller than Mia, who rides a boogie board smoothly through the surf. “Look Randy,” I called when I saw her, him? “A baby surfer!”

I tell Mia, “That’s the Pacific Ocean! It’s the biggest thing on earth!” I am sure she doubts me; Daddy could easily block her whole sight of the thing with his great big body.

The girls gambol in circles in the shallow surf, shrieking laughter as they splash. They throw rocks, plead to be lifted by their arms, dangled over the incoming waves again and again.

The sand sparkles with flecks of gold. There are also streaks of a finer black sand that sticks on the children’s skin even after we dunk them in the water up to their hips, then fling them high as they scream in delight, lower them again and again.

I wrap shivering Nora in a blanket, feed her some of the sour lime-tinged Mexican Tostitos called Incognito. She opens her mouth like a baby bird. Her fingers are caked with the black sand.

“This is Heaven,” I tell Brent and Serena. I mean it literally. This is all we get. How could a personally rewarding afterworld be any more than this? My dear beautiful children, my lover, and amiable, easy-going friends. Sun, breeze and sand as soft as cloud banks. Heart’s ease.