A Photo Story with Words by Penny Pickett (Assisted by David Kier)
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A Photo Story with Words By Penny Pickett (Assisted by David Kier) This is the story of a trip my family took in July 1949 from our house in Downey, California, a Los Angeles suburb, to Baja California. My father packed the trunk of his 1947 Packard with blankets, jerry cans of gasoline and water, and cartons of canned food, Sterno, and a handful of cooking and eating utensils and cardboard suitcases full of our clothing. He was 34, my mother was 30, and I was not quite 9; the fox terrier, Butch, was about 10. I’ve had to supplement my vivid memories of this trip with his 35 mm pictures and other information about Baja. My father died in 1961, age 45; my mother, now 92, chooses not to remember it. This photo story supplements my short story about the trip, called “Out of Country.” Like this story, that one combines detail from my memory, his photos, and secondary information, some made up for the story. He was a very private man, seldom discussed his reasons with anyone, and left no diaries about what he had in mind. I’ve always understood that he took us on this trip to find a place safer to live in than he believed Southern California to be. I believe Rosario was the paradise he hoped existed in Baja. Unable to find it, he took us to Hawaii and then to Mexico with the same result. He was headed to Tahiti when he died. Washington, D.C., April 3, 2014 2 — H. G. Wells, The World Set Free (Sandy, Utah: Quiet Vision Publishing, [1914] 2000), p. 49. 3 The maps 1942 National Geographic map of Baja, 39 1. Starting out 5 1947 Aschmann map of Baja highways, 6 2. The car 9 1948 Shell map of Mexico, 18 3. The road 12 4. What we saw 21 5. The mountains 31 1948 Erle Stanley Gardner endpaper map of Baja, 54 6. Why we were there 35 1950 Asociación Mexicana de Turismo map 7. Finding Rosario 41 of Mexico, 30 8. Rosario today 52 9. A little history 59 1956 Gerhard & Gulick map: Rosario area, 48 10. The present 66 1956 Gerhard & Gulick map: Rosario detail, 53 11. What if 79 2006 Hand drawn map: Arroyo del Rosario, 54 2010 NASA satellite image of Baja, 19 References 83 4 1. STARTING OUT 5 My father packed my mother, me, and Butch, our 10-year-old fox terrier, into his 1947 Packard to drive us from Los Angeles either (as far as I understand it now) to his idea of paradise or away from his idea of the coming apocalypse— the beginnings of worldwide nuclear armament and the rise of McCarthyism. My short story “Out of Country,” telling as much as I know of his rationale, describes our few days’ loop through the heat, sand, and isolation of the Baja California peninsula in search of a town called Rosario that existed on few maps. Here, maps and photos, many his, tell as much as I know of the rest. Map source: Aschmann’s 1947 map of Baja highways: Fig. 5 in Pasqualetti, 1997. 6 Photo source: Ron Pickett, 1949. 7 Ensenada’s harbor today In 1950, Ensenada’s population was 18,140; in 2010, it was 279,765. It had been Baja’s capital from 1882 to 1915. The capital was moved for protection from the Revolutionary forces. Besides some schools and technical institutes, Ensenada is today primarily host to water sport and fishing enthusiasts. It is a deep-water port for standard shipping routes along the western coasts of North and South America and across the Pacific to Japan and Hong Kong. Photo source: Picture Ninja, 2010. www.pictureninja.com/pages/mexico/image-ensenada- harbor.htm. 8 2. THE CAR 9 The hunters and fishermen who were Baja’s primary visitors in the 1950s advised others to equip themselves with trucks or at least four-wheel- drive vehicles like this one. Roads throughout the peninsula were dirt tracks, some barely drivable, mule tracks, or the remains of the 17th century trails the Jesuits walked in establishing their missions. Certainly no one would have advised my father to try to drive his 1947 Packard, a car well-known for being elegantly low-slung. Photo source: Ray Haller, p. 30, in Hancock and others, 1953. 10 The 1947 Packard, showroom new Photo source: Packard Motor Co. 11 3. THE ROAD 12 According to Homer Aschmann, the cultural geologist, and his impeccable studies of Baja, “until after the middle of [the 1800s] there is no report of wheeled vehicles or roads for them anywhere in the peninsula. Transport was exclusively along mule trails . in rugged, subsequently abandoned regions . they can still be followed.” He was writing in 1978. Sources: text, Pasqualetti, 1997; photos: left, Ray Haller, p. 65, in Hancock and others, 1953); right, vivabaja.com. 13 Some Baja roads took the form seen in this 1942 photo: “Here is a fair example of the tough going every motorist encounters between Ensenada and the southern tip of the peninsula.” Sources: photo and text, Simpich, 1942, p. 265. 14 We found most such roads in this condition or worse. Little changed in road conditions between 1949 and this view in 2010, even with 1973’s advent of the paved central highway. Photo source: James Glover, Baja Road Report, east of San Isidro, www.bajainsider.com, May 10‒12, 2010. 15 Photo source: “Hwy. 1 Kilometer Markers,” Baja Nomad. http://forums.bajanomad.com 16 Photo source: Ron Pickett, 1949. 17 18 Baja: all mountains and desert Source: NASA, 2010. 19 Photo source: Ron Pickett, 1949. 20 . on the main road, one of the better roads, somewhere in Baja in July 1949. “Better” roads meant dirt ruts made by the trucks of the fayuqueros— traveling merchants speeding 40 miles an hour from Ensenada to La Paz to carry to scattered inhabitants a motley supply of canned goods, clothing, fish, cheese, sugar, and mail—leaving a hump in the middle. To preserve a car’s undercarriage, drivers balanced one set of wheels on the hump with the other on the embankment. Erle Stanley Gardner wrote in 1948 that “Two hardy explorers from the Automobile Club of Southern California, venturing some two hundred miles below the border, had reported Sources: photo, Ron Pickett, 1949; text, Gardner, 1948, p. 13. roads . with twelve- to sixteen-inch centers.” 21 4. WHAT WE SAW 22 Photo source: Ron Pickett, 1949. 23 Photo source: Ron Pickett, 1949. 24 Photo source: Ron Pickett, 1949. 25 Photo source: Ron Pickett, 1949. 26 • And we saw cultivated fields fenced with barbed wire but tended apparently by no one • And an abandoned airstrip for a small plane, laid out ornately with white stones • And ocean cliffs littered with broken shells where sea birds dropped them to break them open for the food inside • And coyotes outside the car windows, waking us from sleep at dawn 27 One of the few that had not been shot up, riddled with bullets. Most existing road signs had been placed in 1928 by the Automobile Club of Southern California in its first effort to drive wheeled vehicles south to connect travel over the mining roads to Santa Rosalia. This sign appears to be the remains of a Mexican Ordnance survey of the 1920s or 1930s. Photo source: Ron Pickett, 1949. 28 A mileage marker placed in the 1920s by the Automobile Club of Southern California showing that we’d driven 138 miles south from Ensenada and that El Marmol (where onyx was quarried and trucked to San Diego) was 95 miles further on. More importantly, we were only 30 miles from Rosario and, possibly, my father’s goal. Hamilton Ranch, a long- time farming homestead, had become the well-known destination of hunters for rest, food, and alcohol. Photo source: Ron Pickett, 1949. 29 Drivers to Baja were expected, according to this 1950 Mexican road map, to follow only what was known of El Camino Real. Mexico’s 1950 tourist Rosario does not exist here. A1958 guidebook described this map map’s road as “a real desert road . an unimproved track through the desert, recommended only to the adventurous.” Sources: Map, Asociación Mexicana de Turismo, Mexico: Carta de Comunicaciones Carreteras, Aereas, y Ferrocarriles (Mexico, D.F.: Dept. of Tourism, 1950); text, Gerhard and Gulick, 1958, p. 85. 30 Photo source: Ron Pickett, 1949. 31 5. THE MOUNTAINS 32 Photo source: Ron Pickett, 1949. 33 “Except where the highway is actually cut into a hillside, it runs on top of an artificial ridge . There are almost no places that a car can be stopped safely, and getting off the ridge on which the road rests is difficult and even dangerous. The earliest mule trails and probably their Indian trail predecessors went rather directly from water source to water source. These streams and tanks are concentrated in the rugged uplands .. .” So Aschmann described the 1973 paved road. But in 1949, mountain roads were still unpaved dirt tracks, the remains of the missionaries’ travels throughout the peninsula, even to the San Pedro Mártir Mountains at 10,000 feet. Sources: photo, Ron Pickett, 1949; text, Pasqualetti, 1997, pp. 78‒79. 34 A traveler like Erle Stanley Gardner, who made several lengthy expeditions to Baja in 1948 and later, described driving the unpaved narrow mountain roads as fraught with switchbacks, the impossibility of allowing other vehicles to pass without backing for a quarter of a mile to find a spot wide enough, and the necessity of keeping strict control of the steering wheel while watching the left wheels through the open door as the driver guided them along the edge of steep dropoffs.