Slow Baja - Eve Ewing Shares Tales From Her 70 Years Of Baja Exploration.

Episode Date: July 9, 2021

In our second conversation with Eve Ewing, she shares more stories from her 70 years of Baja adventures. From her 1950's flights to count whales with her father, legendary Oceanographer Gifford Ewing, to riding mules in the '60s on the grueling Meling-Alford Expedition Eve has been there and done that and still remembers the story! Enjoy this rambling conversation with my friend and Baja-legend, Eve Ewing. For more on the cave paintings of Baja, click here. For more on Eve's last mule ride in Baja, click here. For more on Eve's father, Gifford Ewing, click here.

Hey, this is Michael Emery. Thanks for tuning into the Slow Baja. This podcast is powered by Tequila Fortaleza, handmade in small batches, and hands down, my favorite tequila. Hey, I want to tell you about your new must-have accessory for your next Baja trip. Benchmark Maps has released a beautiful,

beautiful Baja California Road and Recreation Atlas. It's a 72-page, large-format book detailed maps and recreation guides that makes the perfect planning tool for exploring Baja. Pick yours up at Benchmarkmaps.com. So quickly, how are things with Macintosh? Well, he seems great. He said he just turned 70 last week and looks great. He said he was in San Diego visiting friends.

He lives in La Mision, right? La Mision, yeah. Yeah. So he seems vibrant and terrific and ready to take another long walk or a long kayak or something. I must have been a very interesting interview. I'm really glad you got to see him talk to him. Well, I've decided. He's one of the classics.

What? Yeah. I've decided much with my opinion on you since our last visit. I'm going to be like Johnny Carson and have recurring guests. You'll be a regular guest whenever I can get you. on here and we'll just tell stories. You've got so many stories. I'm so enamored. I'm going to put these guys on. So enamored that you would make time for me on no notice at all. Oh, that's okay. I just happened to be here. Well, e-viewing, it's a delight for me to be back here with you,

microphone in hand. Let's refresh my memory and the Slow Baja listeners. You've been in California quite a while. Since 1945. When I was young, we lived on a dairy farm in New York State. New York State. And so that's where I learned, oh, shoot, so sugar, I'm sorry, I don't have your water bowl filled. The coyotes obviously drank out of his water bowl last night. You keep talking, I'll fill that water bowl. Oh, well, you don't need to do that.

You need your own. Now, we could start all over again if you want. I'm sorry. Well, I've got an editor. Okay. Take this back to we were touching on you came in 1945. Yes. Into beautiful La Jolla, California.

Yeah, my dad was in the Navy, and he got transferred out here after he nearly died off of Port Smith, Maine. They gave him a converted yacht, because he knew how to navigate, gave him a converted yacht, that he, then his job was to try and sink German submarines. That's how desperate we were for people that could know how to do run a ship and navigate and stuff like that. But he nearly died of pneumonia in the freezing cold winter. And in those days before antibiotics, if you had pneumonia usually by the third time, you just plain died. And he nearly did. But he pulled through.

And the Navy sent him to San Diego because they didn't want to lose him. And he was quite a mind. Yes, he was. Can you spend a few minutes just reminding us about, I hate to shine the bright spotlight on, but just remind Slow Baja. You've got a glint in your eye and a smile has come over your face and you're giggling. But tell us all about your dad. He was extraordinary. Yes, he was.

He had a BA in English, I guess, from Yale and a master's degree in biology. degree in biology or something like that. And then he came when we came out west, he got his PhD at Scripps. And the oldest oceanographic institute building in the United States is on the Scripps campus. And they tried to tear it down a few years ago and everybody in the community and the oceanographic said,

no, no, no, this one we're gonna save. But I can remember going up to the third floor and hearing my dad give his, I saw him defend his thesis at Scripps. And then he was a physical oceanographer. And what interested him was the formations of the bays and the water and different things. But his good friends were fish, Carl Hubs, yes. And Ray Gilmore and Ted Walker, the three ichthyologists of Scripps. that were famous.

And he took them down to look at the whales because the whales. He was a pilot. He was a pilot. And what he did was to study a lot of the ocean from the plane. And so he took them down. And that's where the consensus of the California gray whale was done from my father's airplane for about 10 years. Yeah. So it was that aspect.

We're just after a census year here. So tell me about what it was like to fly down over the calving grounds of Baja and conduct a census from your father's airplane. Who was in the plane? I know you told me you were in the plane in our last conversation. Put us in the seat next to you and tell us what that was like. Well, I was in the back back because I just got to slip in on that one. Then there was Earl Stanley Gardner who was. He wrote a few things about Baja.

Yes, yes, and one is the inland whale. Perry Mason is his fame, but Bahá's his love. The inland whale, I think they call. And next to him was Laura Hubbs, and next to then my father up front, and Carl Hubs, and he was such a wonderful character. Because what they did was to fly over Scammon's Lagoon every year on the same day, weather permitting, and go over the same leads and then count the whales. And so that the error would be roughly the same.

But Carl was amazing. President Eisenhower's heart specialist, I can't think of what his name was now, wanted to get the heartbeat of a whale. So he contacted Carl Hubbs at Scripps. and Hubs just very clearly said well he says whatever you do you don't want to corner a female about to have a calf or has a calf up a lead in one of those shallow leads because she ain't she's not going to put up with that so did he listen of course not so he gets

hires a boat fisherman's lagoon they go into scamming's lagoon and he corners of whale up a lead you know does all the things he's not supposed to do she turned around and came and just about sliced their boat into. She threw her tail and just went, pung, just like, just like, just like that. And then, and then Carl was, he was just an irrepressible spirit, very famous from Scripps. And if he couldn't figure out exactly where he was, he'd say, Laura, God damn it, we're the maps, where are the maps, Laura, God damn it, we're the maps. And then they'd have to figure they were. And meanwhile, I would see Earl Stanley Gardner very slowly turning around the voice on his hearing aid so he didn't have to hear Carl,

stop screaming, God damn it, Laura, where the maps. And he told this wonderful story that night at dinner in Los Angeles Bay around the table. He said, well, he said, you know, one time he said, you know, I have a very ordinary look about me. Gardner you're talking about. What? Earl Stanley Gardner. That was his line. He was very ordinary, Luke.

Very. He said, I'm a very ordinary looking man. In fact, I've been told several times that I could work for the FBI because people can't really remember what I look like. And that's a kind of person that they always wanted to have. So he said, well, one day I went in, I had a new dentist and I went into after I'd been in a couple of times. Every time I went into the dental office, I noticed that my picture was right up there where

everybody could see my x-ray, teeth and stuff, x-rays, it said, Earl Stanley Gardner. And so he asked the doctor, he said, you know, every time I come in, my picture is always in the same place. And he said, oh, Mr. Gardner, I have to confess, you're the first celebrity I have. And I just couldn't not put your picture up there. I'm so sorry. And he said, that's okay. And then, and then, but he said, let me tell you a funny story about that. A very pretty young secretary came in one day and I was working on her teeth and with her mouth open and she said well exactly that girl Stanley Gardner he said yes she said oh wow well is is he is he you know

big and tall and she he obviously was thinking of the TV series you know big and tall and handsome and he said well no no he's and this is the dentist telling this story to Gardner. Oh, he said he's kind of short. Oh, sure face goes down. Well, I bet he's got beautiful eyes. You know, Raymond Burr had those big, big eyes. And he said, well, no, they're kind of small and a little bit close together. Now, this is Earl Stanley Gardner telling us at dinner, the story about himself that proceeded in the downlight. So finally, she just gets more and more deflated. And she said, oh, well, I'll bet he has this tremendous presence about him. And he said, well, no, he's the most ordinary little old man you'd ever seen in your life, you know.

And this is the story he was telling about himself. Like all really good writers, he was basically a terrific observer. You didn't get that much out of Gardner himself. He saw everything around him, but gave out little. That very, very, very observant man. He always had a little notebook, and he'd whip it out, kind of like Colombo. Only, you know, if somebody said something interesting, it was going to go in his next book, you see, that kind of thing. So as a young woman, you had a pretty extraordinary introduction to a capital A adventure in Baja.

You're flying around with luminaries. Your father's a noted scientist. He's a pilot. He's not hanging around with uninteresting folk, let's say. And tell me about what it was like flying in those days. Are you flying in the 50s, early 50s, late 40s? Yes, early 50s. And in fact, one of his favorite stories,

he started with a super cup that he could land in the water. And then from then on, Okay, so when he had a super cub, one time when he was just by himself with, I think, no, he was just by himself. And I think he'd been surveying. He studied the movement of the sand dunes and scammons and the rate of movement because all sand dunes are, and my father's an oceanographer. So all sand dunes are a slow motion moving wave that moves with the wind to slowly moving. Okay. So I guess he'd been down looking at that.

Anyway, he's on his way back to L.A. Bay, but he flew over the section of the Pacific Coast there. He looked down there's an airplane, down in the sand. And a man waving his arms, waving his arms, waving his arms, he's got these two black Labrador dogs. So, Dad managed, it was a calm day, and he managed to land his plane. And I don't know what you do when you land in a little super cub. Maybe you lead it like a dog to the beach. I don't know how he did because I wasn't there. But he got out and he told it.

And this guy said, oh, my God, thank God, you're here, you're here. I didn't know what to do. I run out of fuel. And I just had to land. And so just calm down now, calm down. And the first thing they did was, Dad, you didn't look at the gauge to check for the fuel. You took a stick because you weren't going to want to trust. your gauges in the middle of nowhere. So he took a stick and the guy had a fair amount of gas left.

And he said, look, you've got enough gas to get to Ensenado or whatever. And so let's get you off. There's enough daylight here and check the oil and everything. Now here, and he said, now look, I land on the sand and stuff like that all the time. This is what I do. I'm an oceanographer and this is what it now. This is what you need. need to do. And so he said, you've got to go right between, right next to the surf, but not where the sand is packed at its hardest, not up any higher because the wheels get stuck in the sand. And I want you to start way, way back as far as you can get. Before you hit that dog leg, you said, before you hit that dog leg, you're going to have to be in the air. And he said, and

Dad said and calculated, says, yes, you've got enough runway to do that. Well, the guy was kind of arrogant. He did not. Oh, and the other thing you need to do is take air out of your tires. So he wouldn't take the air out of his tires. He didn't back up to the far, far end of the beach. And he got in his plane with his two Labrador dogs and just took off. Well, he was a little bit too up high and got stuck in the sand.

hadn't taken any air out of the tires. And so when he got to the dog leg, he wasn't in the air. He just went over, ass over, over, T-Kettle into the water. So Tad runs. He said, well, I'm not going to give myself a heart attack running into there. But when he got there, he saw, up came one Labrador. Up came another Labrador. And became the pilot.

So he got him back on the land. And so now Dad knew he called. couldn't take the two dogs and the person. So I think what he did was take the two dogs first and drop them off to L.A. Bay or somebody. And then he came back to pick up the guy. No longer arrogant. Yeah, no, it's folks at the bottom of the ocean. In fact, and so when his dad got him to, I don't know where he took him, Sandy Egg, I don't know, maybe he took him back to L.A. Bay with the dog.

I don't know. I don't remember the story that well. darn it. But here's the fun part about it. When Dad dropped him all, I guess he did. I probably took him back to Lindbergfield. And he said, oh, he said, I have to be in New York tomorrow. I have to be back. I cannot miss this appointment. So dad did fly him back to Lindbergfield. That's what it was. And I guess had other people figure out the dog problem. Anyway, so he got to Lindbergfield and he said, And he said, well, Dr. Ewing, thank you so much. You saved my life.

And he said, well, why were you in such a hurry to get back? Oh, he also didn't, hadn't made a flight plan. The biggest no-no of all, no flight plan. And this was his supposed vacation. And he said, well, look, he said, after what I tell you, you're probably never going to want to fly with me again. But he says, I'm an American Airlines pilot. And I'm due to go to New York.

Tomorrow they're going to teach me how to fly the new jets. You know, in those days it was all DC-6-4, whatever, so they were propeller things. And my father looked at him and he said, young man, on the contrary, I would be honored to fly with you again because now I know what you know that you didn't know before. So dad was very gracious about that. But every time he got on an American airline, pilot or an airplane, he checked to see who the pilot was. Well, things were a little different in Baja in those days.

There were a lot of adventurous fellows flying around. Yeah. And what was that like, that fraternity of pilots, when you would fly and see somebody else's plane there. That must have been so exciting. Yeah, well, in Los Angeles Bay, the airfield was sort of in the middle of town. It was the main road in town in front of the hotel. And I can remember one time that was...

Well, at one time, we were trying to land, and at this point, my father had a converted Grumman Widgeon, which was an amphibious, big amphibious plane, two big engines, and converted Grumman Widgeon. They converted Grumman Widgeons in a place in Portland, near Portland, Oregon, so he picked up one of those. And then he could land in Scammon's Lagoon when they were counting the whales. He could land, and then he wanted to...

go and measure the sand dunes. He could go and find his markers and all kinds of things like that. Here we were trying to land one evening and we had to get down and dad couldn't get the gear to go down. The gear is pilot talked to the wheels. Sure, yeah. And so he gave me a broom handle and he said, Eve, I want you to unscrew that plate right there and take this broom handle and force the wheels down until they lock. I mean, my eyes were as big as grapefruit. I was scared to death. Dad just, he managed to stay cool through all this kind of thing. And if the winds were really blowing badly, and he had given Antero Diaz a shortwave radio.

So let's talk about that. You told me that a little bit about that the last time, and I saw the radio in person in February. I was there. When you saw Chbosco. Yeah. Antoine. And Teros.

So I'm not sure how. how many sons Antaro had, but I met Entero. I wonder if I... Oh, then that is Chubasco. I think his youngest son was Chubasco. Yeah. So he was glad to know that you were still alive. Oh, well, I'm glad to know that he's still alive.

I'm so glad to know. And I really want to get down there sometime and talk to them about the turtles and the dinners and what things were like when people like your dad would just fly in and land right on the main road and it was a party. Yeah. And as I said, the airfield was in the middle of town. Sugar, sugar, he's deaf. He won't. It's all right.

He's okay. Okay. No, he might kick stuff on your camera, man. She's. That right there. So what I was getting to is the fraternity of pilots, and your father gave the first shortwave, land-based shortwave radio to Antaro Diaz, who, Papa Diaz, who ran the hotel in Bahia de la Sanchez. It was essentially the.

mayor and the fixer and he was the guy. Who he was was the assayer for the Las Flores gold mine, which was that big, big gold mine, just south of town a little bit. And they had a little short railroad that went up part of Cerro Manila to wherever the gold mine stuff was going on. I guess, I don't know whether it may be, anyway, somewhere up in there. And he, and so he just stayed there after the gold. mine thing petered out and whatever.

And he was very smart man and a decent guy. And what he would say to my dad, his way of telling my father, the winds are really gusty. You might not be able to land.

He'd say, gee, if you'd be real careful, he said, you'd be real careful because if you're not real careful, the wind's blowing hard, I'm going to get my chicken coop. Because he wanted to make a chicken coop out of a plane. In it, it crashed. And he finally did get one years ago.

Yeah, yeah. Now, of course, the field is out at El Gringo. It's far a little further out of town. But they were great friends. And I believe for a long time, my father's photograph was there with standing. In fact, I think I was standing next to him. But Charles Lindbergh went down there at some point, I believe. and so of course that was a famous thing to have happened.

Tell us a little bit about the turtle dinner. Oh, the turtle dinners. Let's acknowledge nobody eats turtle anymore or it's not a thing. But he had a feral, and what they would do is they would go out and catch the turtles and then bring them in and put them in this warehouse shelter until they got a truckload full. I don't know how many of that would be. And then Sammy, Sammy Diaz, who at 12 years old, 12 years old, drove the turtle truck to Ensenada, to the turtle factory. Big steak bed truck, right?

It's not a little pickup truck. Yeah, whatever. No, Sammy took the truck and would take the load. The other thing they did was they would serve Borego sheep for dinner. And Antaro told us that night, he said, you know, he said, you know, he said, most embarrassing thing that happened to me, I went out to get a mountain sheep for the restaurant and for our freaks the use, the family. And I went out there and, oh, there was one right by the waterhole, so I took my rifle out. I shot him. And before I could, before I could even

get there, he said, up, he popped. I said, my God, I got him. What, what do you mean? He popped up. So, took his gun again. He shot him again. And he was just about to put his rifle down and go and pick up the sheep. And up popped the same sheep.

He said, what the hell? And so this happened five times. He couldn't figure out what. So finally he went over there when no more sheep. were popping up and what he was embarrassed to find is that he had killed five Berego sheep at the waterhole it wasn't just one his gun was nothing wrong with his gun nothing wrong with his aim it's just so embarrassing so we used to have oh and then and then Tu Tu Tuava was a famous fish that was delicious

there and we'd have to Tu Tua turtle turtle turtle turtle turtle was a turtle party every Saturday or was it just during a season? But they'd have it, you mean that they would have a... The Big Turtle Roast. The Big Turtle Roast, you know, I don't remember, I don't remember that much about that. I really don't. The other thing he would do is take us out to any of his friends that fly,

flying, fly-in pilots that would come visit, to Isleraza. Lerasa is one of those midriff, midriff islands that the birds nested on. So they'd go out and they'd gather all of these eggs and they'd have, for Easter breakfast, they'd have this enormous scrambled egg breakfast for everybody in town. All these things that are now protected and disappearing and disappeared. Well, in those days it was pretty subsistence, so I'm not sure what the greatest effect on it all was, but those were those days. Those were those days.

Those days, not these days. No, in these days there are too many people and not enough game and that kind of thing. Right. So I'd like to transition from what it was like when you were flying around in those sort of adventures, and I think you'd... That's how I found out about the Melling Expedition. Dad had just flown in. I think he had either maybe Carl Hubbs or Ravis or Ravis. Gilmore, one of the whale counters with him, flew into LA Bay for the evening and here were

these people that had ridden mules down from Takadi. And some of them had just had it. The winds, it was one of those years where they got the Vientos del Norte, the North winds chased them. Kathy and her, Kathy said, one of the people on the trip, she said, either you raised your coat up so the wind wouldn't howl down the back. back of your neck and then the back of your waist would get cold and then you'd pull your jacket down and that was it he said for a month the wind never stopped until they got to L.A. Bay and trying to cook and plan trying to cook a meal at night you have 10 people and some guides and all these animals and you have to make dinner and you have to make tortillas and the smoke

is flying everywhere and you can't keep the fire going shit it was just hard and tired. So what I remember from your telling me this tale is that basically everybody got off the expedition. Well, a lot of people did not. Well, let's see who did. Joanne, his wife or girlfriend. Well, there was Joanne Alford stayed, Reed Moran, the botanist from the Natural History Museum,

who wanted to collect plants from the highest peaks in the peninsula. And he did and found San Diego Chaparral on the Presvergen. volcano for Pete's sake. We hiked up that was that was one fun part of that expedition. We took mules part way up that lava mountain tied them up and then we just hiked in those days by then we were really in pretty good shape. I bet. And Reed collected you know manzanita and chemise and juniper and all this stuff you find in San Diego County. He found the southern limits for all kinds of plant species that had nobody knew they were

that far down. And that's when they realized the mountains of Baja were isolated islands left over from the Pleistocene, where pine trees and juniper, it used to be everywhere, slowly just moved up the mountains to the tiny little spot near the top where they'd get enough rain. Amazing. Amazing. So there wasn't a lot of rain on that expedition? The Melling family begged Andy, don't go down this year. In 1961? 63-64. 63-64, sorry.

And begdandy, don't, whatever you do, don't go on the trip this year. It hasn't rained for four years. And it was true. And the only way that they could do the expedition, they had spent so much time preparing for it, they really couldn't wait another year. Joanne had taken time off from work. She was Miss Queen's Space Aeronautics

Kind of a glamour gal, right? Yeah, kind of a little, little glamour gal. Very, very cute little gal who'd never seen the front end, back end of a mule, but she and Andy fell in love. She got somehow up at the gap anyway. So we had our geologist, Scott Macbeth, who collected rock samples, Reed Moran, who had a couple of big plant presses, and at night we would have to dry his plants out that he collected,

sort of sitting around the fire. he'd dry his plants out and put him back in the presses and stuff. And so there was Scott Macbeth, and the people that left were a guy named McFarland. And the two photographers from Brooks Institute left, the movie photographer and the still photographer left. And I don't remember who the other people were, but everybody that, so it was just, Reed, Scott and myself, Wayne Lang, Kathy Barton, Andy, and we still had all these animals. But because it was a drought here, that means you couldn't hobble your animals because a hobbled mule can go a long ways in one night. And on top of that, you couldn't let them, for the first three weeks,

they would always be trying to go home. Finally, they gave up about trying to go home. So at night, when they pulled into a camp, and they would never camp at a waterhole if they could help it, because all of the grass around, all the mesquites, everything had been eaten around the waterhole. Mailman. It's a male man.

Sugar bear went on one of my next to my last meal trip, rode in back of my put a special pad in back of the mule. My mule was a great big strapping mule macho and he knew his meal in the morning he'd go and stand by his meal and sugar bear would ride right up there with you.

Right there behind me, right. That's a beautiful sight. And Trudy had her cute little dog. Yeah, I have a photo of that on my phone. You have Lucky on, okay. It's a beautiful shot. And she let me bring sugar because she had Lucky. So take us back to the the Melling expedition,

1963, 1964. It hadn't rained for four years. And your mules, you can't let them go at night to find their own forage. Well, you can't. You can't.

Yes, you can. In fact, that is what you have to do. But first of all, you're not going to try and camp the waterhole because all the food within a day's walk of that waterhole or a day or two walk

from that waterhole would have been just gone. Right. So you'd have to then go in between that waterhole and the next waterhole that your guide says you're going to run into. And that's where we would be camping. And that meant we'd have to carry the water.

We'd have to fill up at the water hole, but then move on to someplace else. And then, yes, that's when Andy would have to turn out all the mules. Just turn them loose. There was nothing to eat, so they had to scound for themselves. There weren't enough mesquites for them to tie a mule. and cut it and cut branches down for it. You know, there was just, so that meant the next day. He and Ramon, his guide, would have to cut tracks and bring out this whole 10, I don't know,

six, eight riding animals and 10 pack animals. So for the Slow Baja listeners who don't know what it means to cut tracks, they track their own mules to recover them every day. Every day. Imagine how slow that must have been. It was. We never got off before 10 o'clock in the morning. And in order, when we got down to the south, like around Mulehay and further south,

when it started to get so hot in May, it can get so hot down there. And so what we'd have to do, Kathy and I'd get up at 4 o'clock in the morning, and we'd make the tortillas and make the tacos for lunch. But we'd get up at 4. I couldn't make a tortilla again to save my life, but for years I knew how to make a tortilla. So Kathy and I got up at four o'clock, long before anybody else did. And the thing about Kathy that was kind of amazing is she was married to a helicopter pilot who was in the Pacific on some big ship.

And so this was amusing herself while her husband was out to sea. And eventually she married Andy Melling, but that's another long story how that got there. But Kathy and Reed would love to stay up in the evening around the campfire with the guitar and sing folk songs and stuff. So they were both night owls, but Kathy would still get up at 4 o'clock in the morning. She said, okay, I'm going to be getting up at 4 o'clock Eve every morning with you, but let me tell you this. Don't anybody speak to me before 10 o'clock in the morning.

But that was the only way we could get off by 8 o'clock. And by then you already wished you'd been on the trail for a couple of hours. Because it's hot. It's hot. Yes. I literally had to stop by 11 o'clock in the morning and then not pack up and start again until about 4 in the afternoon. Now, which one of the women had the... snake on her in the morning and didn't move.

Everybody thought she was sleeping in late, but she had a rattler on her. She did, but that was, that was, no, that was my friend Nan from Scripps Oceanographic. Another trip. Another trip. Another trip. To answer Bregor. So many mule trips to Baja. Can you, can we just transition here and tell me about, can you estimate how many mule trips you've taken to Baja?

I stopped counting after my 50th, mule trip somewhere along. I just stopped counting. Let's put it this way. I sat on my ass for about 50 years, literally, and just all I wanted to see the places that we heard there might be rock art, but we didn't know. And take me back to that moment, was that with the Melling expedition that you first saw rock art? Or had you seen it before? No, I had not seen it before. It was quickly. Well, here we're three quarters of the way through our afternoon chat with

Eve E-viewing in slow Baja and we're getting right on to what became your life's obsession. Yes, yes, my life's obsession. You know we can't wait to drive our old land cruiser down to Baja, and when we go, we go with Baja Bound Insurance. Their website's fast and easy

to use, Baja Bound Insurance, serving Mexico travelers since 1994. Hey, do you have a 4x4? You love off-road racing. you've got to join Slow Baja in the Nora 500. It's Ensenada to Ensenada three great days, October 7th through 10th. Kurt LaDuke, Offroad Hall of Famer, leads the class. If we can do it in our old truck, you can do it. Get your street legal four by four, get into the safari class, and I'll see you in Ensenada. More info at nora.com. That's www.n-N-O-R-R-A-com or on Slow Baja.

It started on the Melling trip, and I can remember when. I even know the day it started. It's one of those moments that just... It still brings tears to my eyes when I think about it. We left... This was the last quarter of... Between Takati and La Paz. And we were in a ranch where the only way we could get out of the...

the valley, we had to, we had hurt, there was nothing for the animals to eat. Can you imagine in the Magnolina Plains where we were going through the dust bowls in the Magnolina Plains and there were goats up in all of the mesquite trees because everything that had been close to the ground had been eaten. So the goats have learned to climb trees by now? Yes. Yes. The goats were in the trees. And the cattle were starving. They were all just starving. Our mules were starving. Some of them did starve. And it was just a really, a really tough time. The Magnolina Plains. But one of the ranchers told Andy, oh, one of the ranchers told Andy, he said, and it was, it was when we, the same day that we ran into a guy with,

What's that famous skin disease that the Molokai Island? Leprosy. Leprosy. We ran into a leper. And there were a few. And Kathy was the first one to, she was up front that day. And the guide and Kathy were up front. And Andy and the Packer were always repacking mules in the back.

And we rounded a corner. I was right behind there too. And we scared that man nearly to death because Kathy had a black felt hat. In the wintertime, that was a good thing to have when it was cold, but it wasn't a good thing to have when we got further south and it got hot. And she had a black bandana around her face and a black hat, and she scared the leper to death. The poor guy, and he said he had leprosy and his family brought him food

and they had him isolated out there. And where were we going with that? Well, you were telling about the first time that you saw the paintings. We had to go over the mountain to get what that ranch told us because that young man was a part of the main ranch, but he was off by himself. And they said, well, we heard that there was a thunder squall on the other side of the Sierra Gigantes that had rain down near the coast.

And that was the Pikachu. Boy, I don't have my atlas with me. Anyway, to get up, to get across the Sierra Gigantas, we had to crawl out of this canyon we were in. Get up on the top of a mason, then long near the spine of that. mountain and then down the other side to get to the spot that had the dry hay from a thunderstorm that just dry grass is the word I'm looking for okay we went up the trail that we took our mules up was really a hand-cut Indian trail and you could see the flakes of obsidian flakes up and we were of course on foot

because this was basically a person trail. But we led our meals, and they had cut sort of crude steps so you could get up to the top there. And up at the top, there were sleeping circles and things. And then the trail just kind of went off and on, and you'd come by an old campsite that had a matati. And here were spear points, Komondu style, big spear points, and a matati and a mono or stuff.

and it was just as so somebody had left to go back to camp for, to go back somewhere and pick up something. Except it was a couple hundred years ago when they left. It was a couple of hundred years ago. And that they had left. But that feeling of somebody can come by any minute, any minute somebody is going to come by, was it was very, very poignant,

Because that's exactly what happened. Probably some Indian went from there to, let's say, the San Luis Gonzaga mission, which wasn't too far on the Pacific side, and got measles and never came back. But that haunted me, those empty campsites that just haunted me. And then the first time I saw cave paintings was on that mailing expedition. We didn't know it at the time. We were the first outsiders outside of a local rancher to see Nautividad.

We were trying to get into the great mural painting sites of Cueva Pintata and Fletches. But Andy said the country is so rugged. We have to make up our mind. We either go and see these cave paintings or we go to Cabo San Lucas, but the animals can't do both. They're too hungry. They're too worn out. there's not enough feed, we can't do it.

So everyone decided they wanted to go to Kabul, which meant. At that point, we were on one of the three main El Camino Reals. There was one on the Pacific side. There was one that went like from Elbatechi. Well, he went from San Ignacio to Arroyo Paral, and then you went from there to Mono Alto and up and over. but and then the one on the Gulf side went to from San Ignacio to Rancho Rosarito which had a well or Rosalito I can't remember exactly it had a well and okay and then the third trail went right up

through the spine so if you had a Pacific winter storm come in you could take this Pacific trail on the west flank. If you had a Chubasco come in and bring you wet rains from the summer, you could then often take the lower east route. If you didn't have either, then you'd just go right up over the spine because that's the most likely spot a little bit of rain would have been left.

So there'd be food for your animals. Yeah, and the El Camino Royale went through great petrugl fields like Sanestepin. That was a magnificent petrugly field. And Trudy Angel's guide, main guide, Chema Arce, eventually in recent years, built a ranch up there, and built his house with big slabs of slate, rock, hardly any wood in the house, a couple of houses he built up there. But it went right through a major petroglyth field because the major petroglyph field was near a tinaha that was pretty dependable.

I can't remember where we were going with that. Well, we were talking about you seeing these paintings sites and then how it became your life's obsession, honestly. And you made multiple trips over decades back trying to sort this out. Yes. And when we saw the paintings at Natividad, and of course, here's the joke Carrie Crosby has on me about this, is that our guide knew about nativity, but he thought he was going to be taking us into the royal San Pablo to see the big paintings, Quiva pintata,

quaver Fletches, Quaver Solidat, and that's what he knew. When we said we have to go back, we can't do this. So then he made a left turn. We got to see the Natividad paintings, and there were things. like shaman's pipes on the ground and big spear points. I mean, nobody had messed with the matates all over the place. Nobody had messed. And these wonderful paintings of the deer leaping up and out, up and out, up and out. But this guy didn't know the country that well,

but he knew he could get us to the east flank El Camino Real and get us back to San Ignacio to head south again. But we went right past El Batechi, which is on. the cover of Crosby's first book I guess first couple of books and it is the most beautiful of all the painting sites because it's on surface that didn't erode easily was smooth lava beautiful and it's a processional fact what I'm working on right now is that whole aspect of the great mural art and so many examples was processional art. Honey.

Honey, no barking. No barquey. No more barquee. No barquees. Come on, guys. I know. It's too much fun. So you're talking about the procession in the art.

Yes. Explain that to me. Well, what I've found out when, with Ken Hedges, who was the curator of Museum of Man, took us on several trips of the Museum of Man on Easter field trips. And one was to Sears Point. And he showed us an example of what was called one pole ladder. And he explained that the ladders were like an Axis Mundi, a spirit path that connects the earth and the sky world, the Indian concept.

And so that, he said, is typical of great mural, excuse me, typical of hunter-gatherer art. So I'm down in Baja. And I'm looking at, I don't know, maybe the fifth time I've been down. under the great painting sites in Pintada. And I'm saying to myself, well, where is the ladder? Where is this? You know, and then I saw it. I saw hands and feet of animals and people

touching a vertical crack. That was the Axis Mundi, but it was using a natural rock formation. But it was doing the same thing. And what I found is that the major processional art sites, the ones that have this procession of charging animals like Elbeke, San Gregorio 1, Quava Pantatus South Gallery, the serpent cave, they all are, the final crescendo of this movement, is a vertical crack that goes skyward. Amazing. What is that all about? What is that?

I mean, you look at Sangregorio 1, and Harry Crosby catches it so well. I've often said, gosh, Harry, you really got it well. Harry was the first outsider, the famous Harry Crosby, who wrote the great mural, the paintings, rock art of Baja California. And he's now in his 90s. And he lives right over here. Yes. Yes, it does. that the two of you could be that devoted to this subject and be practically neighbors.

Well, I was working at John Cole's bookshop when he came in one day because Barbara Cole, he said, I understand there's a lady that just got back from a milling expedition, and I've just been contracted by the Copley Press to write four books on Baja, one on the King's Highway, one on the rock art, the cave paintings, and the people. So I talked to him, went over to his house the next day, and I talked to him for about six. six hours about all the things, the problems we had, all the things that went wrong, all the things that went right. And he thanked me years later. He said, Eve, the best, the best information you gave me is don't go in the mountains without a local guide. Just don't do that. And he passed

that along to Edie Sunby, Edy Littlefield Sunby and others. Yes. Yes. So that's straight from the horse's mouth, so to speak. Exactly. Because if you don't know, otherwise you're going to be doing stuff like Joanne Alford, who is Andy's partner, when the newspaper interviewed her and they said, well, Ms. Alfred, what are you going to do when you can't find water? Oh, that's easy. You just follow yellow jackets. Oh, my God. Please. I can't tell you how many waterholes I've seen, especially in the wintertime. The yellow jackets are hibernating. You're not going to see a yellowjack. When I read that, I thought, these people are going to. die. So I never answered the ad to join the mailing expedition until my father phoned back from LA Bay and I said, somebody knows what they're doing. They're still alive. And you brought them pounds and pounds of powdered eggs and horseshoes and horseshoe nails, mostly horseshoe nails and horseshoe, yes. And eggs, yeah, powdered eggs. I'm trying to think what else. And he said,

the instructions were bring your saddle, have tapaderos put on it. Taps are leather coverings on the front of the stirrup, so if you need to toy a cactus, you got a chance. And then bring a big canvas tarp and your sleeping bag and a warm jacket and, you know, and that's kind of it. We had no tents in those days. You slept under the stars. Slept under the star, but what he had, what he had,

was enormous big water repellent canvas tarps. And you'd lay one out on the ground. And you'd put your sleeping bags in a row and then you'd fold it like a big blanket over you. A big tortilla. Right. Yeah, like you're a living tortilla. And would your head be on your saddle or your blanket or what?

Sometimes. Sometimes if it was really windy or something. But usually the tarp went over the top of us. And we stayed amazingly. And we were down there for six months. And I think the biggest rainstorm we had was a 10-minute sprinkle. Yeah, tough year. Tough year.

And when we got into Tacho Arce's ranch, Tacho Arce was Harry Crosby's famous guide. He was the local mountain man that I said, don't go in the mountains without a mountain guide. And he had, of course, spent his life in those mountains, knew where all the painting sites and stuff were. or if he didn't he would talk to the local rancher we went into and their kids that have to go out and find the goats would know where the painting sites were and and he said it had not rained on his ranch for six years no appreciable rain for six years now that's the difference between Baja and the mainland what made Baja California different is was the only territory of Mexico that was still hunter-gatherer except for the island of Tiburone where the seri that's it the rest of Mexico was agricultural what the hell is that it's just recently I understand it now it was about maybe 10 years ago we began seeing satellite photos on our TVs at night and satellite photos would show you

where the where the thunderstorms were collecting and isn't it interesting? Not very often in Baja. No. When it did, there were the high peaks. Or sometimes you would see something really strange. You'd see what looked like a stream of water clouds coming down from Sonora and crossing the peninsula a little bit. And what's on that side?

The Sierra San Francisco were the greatest of the grave. paintings are. So what was at the other end of that? Was the highest peak in the Sierra Occidental. And now we know for monsoon rains to come, it takes four days of the temperature and pressure at a certain point. And then when the monsoon hits, it, boom, it comes that fast. Eleni Moore experienced it. She was looking at rock art, and Harry said you could never get a cowboy to camp in the Royal in the summertime. Too dangerous. Yes, because you can have beautiful blue skies right above you.

And then the rain comes. And way up at the top of the mountain, Serro Awa Verdi, the tallest mountain in the Sierra San Francisco, can rain like hell. And then, you know, well. It's how Mexican pebbles get made. How Mexican pebbles get made. All those rocks. tumbling down. Yeah, but it was a very exciting phenomenon that it could happen that fast. Well, but here's the thing. We now know that that monsoonal system, part of which comes from the Gulf of Mexico,

joins up which comes from the Gulf of California, moves northward into the Hopi, Sunni, Pueblo, country and that's how they could grow corn corn has to be grown with summer rain and heat none of which is any place in the California's except a little bit along the Colorado River where the Mojave people which were human-speaking peoples raised a little bit of corn so okay so what happens with Baja you'd see day after day or you'd be sitting on the porch at Casa Diaz and you you'd be looking across the Gulf and all these thunderstorms way over there and lightning and but nothing.

What the hell's going on? What's going on is the Pacific Ocean. That Japanese current that comes down from the Aleutians and slams into Malarimo Beach, which is the big Punta Eugenia left, right, you know, turned, goes out to sea. That's the end of the California current. Boom, that's it. That's where all the ships crashed and piled up and big logs from Oregon. Everything from around the Pacific ends up on the beach.

And Sand Island, and that's why I wanted to have you talk to Liesel Munoz. She explored and how she nearly died in one of her expeditions. You go talk to Liesel. She's really something else. I can't wait. Well, you've been very generous with your time. We're going to wrap up. Okay.

Another time we'll talk more about the rock arch. We can't. But let me just ask, do you have an estimate of how many trips you made to see Rock Art? Because it really did become your obsession, didn't it? Yes, it did. Do you think you figured it out? I went for years. I would have one or two in the fall and one or two in the spring, sometimes two or three.

Sometimes it'd be a month long. Trying to go into areas that hadn't really been explored to look that much. By mule, usually. By mules, right. and Artura, our head guide, and then we'd get a subcontract, somebody who knew that country fairly well. But back to, just briefly, so what are these spirit paths doing? Where are these animals going that are running up the cliffs? What's going on?

In my opinion, what we've got is a typical early human partner. built between the animal world and the people world. And the humans at this point, they are no longer worshipping animals only, like they were in the Paleolithic in the caves of Europe, where you see giant bison and elephants and rhinoceros and all these creatures, but you don't see any people. Well, all those animals were stronger than the people. Little by little, humans,

humans' intelligence managed to give them some kind of an edge. But so the state that Baja was in was that by then human beings, like a powerful chief, would be he would be the orchestra leader. And in my opinion, what we're looking at is a system of reciprocity. The sheep and the deer were contracted in a way to go up and call down the rain. And if you're an old, powerful shaman, and you used to go up to Awa Verdi and maybe pray for rain, and now you are an old man, and yet you're still powerful, and you still want to help your people. What you're going to do?

Now, I'm making up a story that I have no evidence for, okay? But the research that I have with analogous cultures tells me how these systems of reciprocity work. So the story I tell myself is that the deer and the sheep were contracted to carry the water world back up to the sky world to bring back the rain. Where do we get this from? Susan Cole's famous book from the Hopi, I think it was the Hopi or the SUNY, I don't have that on my fingertip. belief that if you have a taken animal from the water world up to the sky world you can bring back the rain. For example, Russell's book on the mythology of the Yaqui, and there's a story where the Apache came and stole the rain clouds from the Yaqui's. They were historical enemies

from way, way back and prehistoric enemies. And so they were all starving. It had hadn't rained. They're all dying of thirst and nothing's happening. So they send different animals to go back and bring back the rain. Nothing's working. Birds don't, nothing's working. Finally, toad pops up and he says, guess what? I can make it rain. He said, what do you mean you can make it rain? You're just a toad. That's right. I'm an animal, a water animal. If you can get me up there, I'll bring back the rain. And they said, well, why don't you just go do that? He said, Well, I can't get up there. I can't fly. BAT says, hey, guy, I'll take you.

So bat takes toad up to the sky, and they negotiate with the gods, and they bring back the rain. Now, I think what we're looking at is a Baja California version of that ancient belief system. of, in fact, the Papago Indians have a, the man that wrote, I can't think his name, I should have my notes with me, but anyway, a famous story of a Papago chief, and he takes a bowl of water from the spring, and he hikes a little way up the hill, and he pours and empties the bowl down, out on the ground. That is, again, the same, simple. symbolism of carrying the water back up to the sky world. The system of reciprocity is you don't get something for nothing.

If we give you all this rain, what are we getting back, you know? So I think that the Indians, in their desperation for consistency of which they had none of in the weather world in Baja, because it was in between the tropics, in between the temperate zones, and everything pulled back and forth, you get you get flooding rains from the north or flooding rains from the south or nothing from either. So they had a very unpredictable latitudes to work with to try and stabilize. But one thing you can't live without is hope.

So let's have this party every year and we'll all get together and we'll paint these paintings and we'll talk to the gods and we'll get the deer. And imagine the deer and say, well, why in the hell should I? I go up there and help you. You know, you're going to eat me anyway. What the hell is that for? And then the chief, I'm making this fun story up. Well, look, let's negotiate here a minute.

You're old and you're getting arthritic and you don't want to run up and down everywhere. But we, humans, with the proper ritual, will bring you back to life. That's what the Indians believe, that they never killed the game, that they could always, it would always be reborn. So you can say to that old ear, look, going up there and ask for rain, and he'll say, well, what the hell for? I'm old and tired. I don't want to go up there.

But just think about this. We're going to bring you back to life. Wouldn't you like to have something to eat when you get back down here if we bring you back? Now, there's inklings of truth in what I'm saying in the anthology from other cultures and looking at the art itself and what it's trying to tell us and how it relates to the marine mammals. You often see deer and fish together or sheep and fish together. They're taking up the power of the water world with them. Cueva Candeladia.

They're wonderful. The arms of the deer, look in Harry Cawty's piecebook and look up Cueva Candelata. You'll see the arms of that deer is a fish, reaching straight. straight up. And then you see I've got a lot of photographs in some isolated caves where the fish are right under the deer's belly. It's almost like they're, this is the deal, you know, we've got to get the water back up to the water world. So I think it's a system of reciprocity and it's a passionate interconnectedness, a working, a working relationship. of together we'll bring back the rain.

Together we're going to make it work. Together we can do this. Wow. That's a powerful message and we're going to leave it right there. Okay. Eve E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. E. I'm so thrilled that you made some time for me today. And I can't wait to see you again and get some more Baja memories and stories.

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