Mi Madre
by Mike Ferrentino

The dirt road to San Javier starts just south of Loreto and meanders eastward, upward, and inland for more than 30 kilometers. Starting out as a broad and washboard swath, typical of all non-paved Baja roads, it traces a floodplain for a few kilometers before beginning a snakelike switchback ascent to a 300-year-old church and a few scattered buildings that make up the village of San Javier. Along the way, ranches blister in the sun -- weather-beaten and bone-bleached hovels that would immediately be dismissed as abandoned in the America to the north -- while the livestock that justify their existence roam widely across the sparse, thorny, rocky, steep surroundings, foraging for any sustenance to flesh out their skeletal bodies. Other roads branch into and out of this one, their potholed and dusty vectors lacing the peninsula together via a desolate necklace of vehicle wrenching, slow-motion routes of connection. My mother lives in Lereto. When I visit her, this is where I ride.

Crawling along in the jeep, my mother looks at me intently for a second, then asks, "You would ride up this?" I think of the tree-lined loam of the trails where I live, trails entirely free from the errant possibility of being greased by a Sunday afternoon celebrant of any one of a million saints' birthdays in a beat-up Nissan pickup with worn-out tie-rod ends, trails that are the antithesis of this rocky and venomously thorned destroyer of anything man-made, and I think of trying to express to my mother that, given my druthers, no, I wouldn't be riding here if I had a choice. But rather than try to express any of that, and in so doing somehow make her feel like I don't approve of this new adventure in life that she's living, I merely nod and say, "Yes."

"But it's so steep," she says. And right there I feel a wave of both despair and crushing love wash over me. I am the fruit of her loins. From the infinity of this universe, she and my father melded together and from that union I was brought into the world, reluctantly, to hear her say it. She has wiped my runny baby ass and my snotty kid nose; she has seen me learn how to walk; she has been on this earth twice as long as me and has overseen every minute of my life, even when I've been as remote and diffident and distant as physically possible, jamming thousands of miles between us in an attempt to find out who I am outside the context of being my parent's child. In spite of her probably knowing me better than I, there are blank spaces where we cannot connect. This is one of them. There is no way to explain to her that it's not that steep. To her it requires a low gear in a big truck, therefore, it's inhumanely steep and nobody in their right mind would ride up it. Trying to explain beyond this, to phrase so she'll understand -- things like weaving through trees on a big ring singletrack downhill or cleaning a loose rocky granny ring climb -- leaves me stalled. Flummoxed. We are from different planets. She's Mac, and I'm PC. There is no common language here. As one of the Sunday celebrants of the birthday of the innumerable saints fishtails sideways past us into a downhill corner, wheels skipping crazily as the battered truck drifts all the way across the apex of the turn, my mother says with more than a little concern, "And it's very dangerous, too."

In spite of all the praise given Route 1 for laying its tarmac arrow down the length of the Baja peninsula, bringing prosperity and fresh vegetables to all, Baja remains a harsh and untamed land. There is a swath of towns, electrified, thus refrigerated and supplied with the basics of civilization, that hug the highway, clinging to their life and that highway sort of like a mosquito to a good vein. Away from that ribbon of black pavement, even a few short kilometers, the land reverts to its savage nature.

Existence here is a constant struggle. Beyond what lies in the ocean, there is little to eat. There is no water. Everything has thorns. The people eking out a survival away from the obvious lure of the highway and its tourists do so in a state of leathery toughness, living at the end of bumpy tracks without names. Life does not afford the time to create buff singletrack for whitey to come down and rail on his or her expensive toys. If there is a trail, it has, or had, a purpose that was intimately rooted in the necessities of survival. People choosing to live here before the highway is a testament to either the hardiness of the human spirit or the blind, stupid perseverance of the same, in spite of nature's best attempts to extinguish it. That my mother chooses to live here now, long after the challenges of raising her three children have been met, after enough heartbreak and struggle to fill three lives, after reaching the point in life where we all secretly hope it will suddenly get easier, fills me with pride and at the same time, makes me silently want to echo the same sentiment she aims at me and my habit of mountain bikes: "And it's very dangerous, too."

My mother moved to Loreto three years ago. No fan of the migratory Winnebago-bound snowbirds who follow the weather north to south and congregate in huge gringo flocks wherever there's a convenient piece of beach to uglify, circling the wagons both physically and metaphorically to preserve the milieu of the Caucasian retiree from any cultural ingress the natives might forge, she and her boyfriend built a house and started the labor of learning Spanish. When the herds of Winnebagos move north in late spring, away from the encroaching heat, following an ironic parallel to the travels of the Humpback whale (whales in the ocean, whales on the highway), my mother stays down for the summer, accompanying the sudden ghost town through its seasonal odyssey of rocks cracking beneath the baking sun and stray dogs fighting half-heatedly for scraps of dusty shade.

More irony. All through my childhood, I imagined my tall and reserved father as strong. Mom was the one who loved and gave, but dad was the one who I looked to for approval. Mom, because of loving and giving, was soft. Only now, halfway through my 30s, am I beginning to learn how much strength it takes to love, to give. It's easy to pull away from the world, but to love unconditionally, regardless of the consequences, that takes a mountain of strength. Much of that realization is encased in the image of my mother, this gentle and soft woman who in no way understands my need for bicycle-related flagellation, making a life in this land of cacti and sunstroke. Not only living down here with the dust storms and the tinny corrides blaring incessantly from car-mounted loudspeakers, but loving it. Loving every harsh and godforsaken second of it.

From San Javier the road splits north, and dust, gravel, and washboards run to Comonndu, which could pass for a ghost town five days out of seven; from there, one can rattle on to La Purisima, or Santo Domingo, where there may or may not be cold beer. Tourist brochures have no meaning. There are no azure beaches or air-conditioned bungalows, just expanses of sand and rock. It is desolate and lonely and heartbreakingly beautiful. This is where I will ride. And when I return to the sanctity of Loreto, to where my mother lives, I know there will be food and drink and a concerned expression. A hand will reach out to touch my sunburn, and I will choke down my maddeningly Capricorn impulse to swat it away like I have reflexively for more than three decades. As I lie on the cool tile floor to stretch the knots out of an ever stiffening back, my mother will convey in her look of concern all that she does not an cannot understand about why I ride bikes, and my returned stare will express all of my bafflement as to how she can survive in such a brutal environment.

From there, we go on learning the well-worn paths of each other's well-known quirks. Telling jokes that the other doesn't always get. Looking in horror as one of us orders a margarita the wrong way in our respective eyes.. Knowing exactly what the other is about to say but not knowing why. And my mother, through her example, always tolerating and encouraging me to become what I need to even if she doesn't understand why I choose to follow these paths (as if I do), always teaching me how to love.