Baja Midnight
It is as if two timelines slide beneath each other simultaneously, one intermittently faster or…slower…than the other.
After a very busy last few months, my wife and I visited my folks down in a little town called Los Barriles for a few days of R&R.
Los Barriles is on the East Cape of Baja California Sur about an hour north of San Jose del Cabo. Los B, as we have come to call it, boasts one of the finest kiteboarding beaches in the world, flapjacks galore, and a community of locals and expats that seem to co-exist with little tension.
My parents live half the year in Los B, and I have been down a handful of times over the years. While each visit has been distinctive, each has been the same in its time-scrambling nature. The clock ceases to have meaning, yet the languorous day speeds along pell-mell. The products of civilization: alarm clocks and subway rides to work, morph into roosters and ATVs on the beach. It is as if two timelines slide beneath each other simultaneously, one intermittently faster or…slower…than the other.
So we all talk —past and present colliding— sitting on chairs overlooking the ocean, wine in hand.
The walk on the beach starts early as the sun comes up. It’s chilly in the late winter though much warmer than where I have come from. I perambulate, I come back to the house, I have coffee, and have had many thoughts. It is a day’s already or a week’s worth of thoughts…how to improve business, how to get in better shape and live a fuller life; what is it for lunch in the distant day?, when will I open the first bottle of cold wine, how is my father? On the very periphery of mind is the thought about when I will be back here, and further still…will I?
Because I cannot separate who I am from what I do (nor do I want to), I work for a bit. I write and I figure out standard costs and chew on ways to bring the deliciousness of Cab Franc to more people. I talk a lot with my wife and with my cousin — if he is there (as he was this trip). I talk with my wife about our business and the things we will make and do and my cousin about the past. We don’t see each other often enough (though he is one of my favorite people) to have a present (except for a few days a year), and so we inevitably fall back on all of the nutty things our family had been victim of in a 170 years of winemaking.
So we all talk —past and present colliding— sitting on chairs overlooking the ocean, wine in hand.
I did not know Baja Midnight until the other night. It is when your guests come early and leave at 9 o’clock. There is some relationship in there with island time probably, with the dislocation of a stranger disengaged with his own timeline. The sweating hours of Los B in the summer seem to last well past their allotment, and they aren’t that different in the cool pre-spring. They do end too soon, to be sure, and I am back home in California writing this now as those hours past and the hoped-for ones collapse upon each other here at my desk.