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.

Source: Gardner, 1948, pp. 114‒20, and Viva Baja, www.choralpepper.com/page2.html

35 6. WHY WE WERE THERE

36 What was Ron aiming for? I remember his saying he was headed for a town called Rosario. Presumably we would be safe there from imminent nuclear disaster: • 1945: July 16 — U.S. explodes the world's first atomic bomb, the Trinity test, at Alamogordo, New Mexico • 1945: August 6 and 8 — Little Boy, a uranium bomb, is dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, where 80,000 to 140,000 people are killed, and Fat Man, a plutonium bomb, is dropped on Nagasaki, where about 74,000 people are killed • 1946: April — The Navaho, begun by a major American aviation corporation my father worked for, was the prototype of a guided missile that could fly 500 miles at 77,000 feet and was the first aircraft to reach greater than supersonic speeds at MACH 3. Renamed the X-10, it was the first jet aircraft to fly a complete mission guided by computer Photo sources: top, U.S. Air Force, 2011. www.af.mil/index.asp; bottom, U.S. Air Force 1352nd Photographic Group, Lookout Mountain Station. 37 • 1948: April and May — U.S. conducts Atomic tests at Eniwetok Atoll

Joe 1, August 29, 1949

• 1949: August 29 — Soviet Union detonates its first atomic bomb, Joe 1, at Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan. A copy of the Fat Man bomb, it had a yield of 21 kilotons

• 1950: summer — When my father resumed work on the X-10, the military gave it a thermonuclear warhead and turned it into Eniwetok Atoll, April 15, 1948 an H-bomb

Photo sources: left, U.S. Air Force 1352nd Photographic Group, Lookout Mountain Station; right, Nuclear Weapons Archive, http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Russia/Sovwpnprog.html. 38 Troops, ships, planes . . .

So The National Geographic Magazine titled its August 1942 map of Baja in an issue devoted to preparation for war.

The map shows no roads, probably as a defensive measure from fear of Japanese invasion. Similarly, in describing Baja’s history of mining for gold and other minerals, the article suppressed the name of Santa Rosalía’s copper mine: “One great copper mine flourishes, but the censors have requested us not to give its name or location.”

It does, however mention Rosario, in a passage about trapping gophers for the San Diego Natural History Museum.

Sources: Simpich, 1942, map, p. 258; text p. 260. 39 • Many maps before 1949 don’t show Rosario, it was so small and seemingly insignificant.

• Some modern maps show a Rosarito, a small resort town on the Pacific coast, 15 miles below Tijuana. Ron couldn’t have been headed there. On the paved road from Tijuana to Ensenada, we would have passed it the first day out.

• Santa Rosalillita couldn’t have been the goal. It’s a tiny fishing camp on the Pacific coast that only people searching for the perfect wave head toward.

• And he couldn’t have been looking for the El Rosario that’s 38 miles southwest of what’s now La Paz International Airport, because this would have put us more than 900 miles below the border and on the opposite side of the peninsula. We weren’t in Baja long enough to have traveled that far.

40 My father’s Packard was probably never able to go faster than 10 miles an hour in Baja:

• Since we probably traveled no more than about 30 miles a day, Santa Rosalía, on the Sea of Cortez, was probably not his goal. Santa Rosalía had been known since 1885 for its French copper mines, for importing laborers and exploiting them as they worked the mines. Clouds of soot poured from its foundry smokestack, hanging constantly over the town in the 1940s.

41 Is it hard to imagine that had Ron ended here, I would have grown up in the streets of the mining town of Santa Rosalia? (At least until he died in 1961.)

The copper mines were shut down in the 1970s. Today, it has no more than about 10,000 residents, although it’s a landing for tourists crossing the gulf on the ferry from Guaymas.

Source: Gardner, 1948, p. 96.

42 Source: Administración Portuaria Integral de Baja California Sur S.A. de C.V, La Paz, Baja California Sur, 2011.

43 7. FINDING ROSARIO

44 On Erle Stanley Gardner’s 1948 map, Rosario, near the Pacific, is at the main road’s abrupt left turn inland, toward El Marmol. Santa Rosalia, where we did not go, is many miles farther south and on the Gulf.

Source: Gardner, 1948, endpapers.

45 • A town named Rosario shows on Aschman’s 1947 map and on the 1948 map on the endpapers of The Land of Shorter Shadows, Gardner’s first book about his adventures in Baja. • A 1978 map shows what appears to be the same Rosario, midway between Tijuana and the end of what, in 1947, was Baja’s main road, at Bahia de Sebastián Viscaino on the Pacific coast. • On these maps, Rosario would have been about 190 miles south of Tijuana. At 30 miles a day, my father might have gotten us there in his Packard in six days. He might have found it had he approached it from the east, as the truck is doing here. Today’s guides sometimes call it El Rosario but have little to say for it: a cluster of modest homes, two motels, two Pemex stations, a few taquerίas and cafés, chiefly the one run by Doña Anita. Still, it’s the largest town for 221 miles on south.

I grew up somewhere else.

Photo source: Cabo Bob’s Los Cabos, The Baja Highway, 2006. http://cabobob.com/02Qntn/09mtnhwy.htm 46 Maybe it was Rosario my father was headed for then. Maybe, if he could have found it, I might have spent the remainder of my childhood, my teenage years, the rest of my life, here in Rosario.

Photo source: North, 1907, p. 53.

47 • He had to have had maps like Aschman’s and Gardner’s, given what he tried to do. He might have read Gardner’s book (he owned several Perry Mason mysteries).

• Had we come by sea, he might have found entry to Rosario from any of three fishing camps: at Punta Baja, about 3 miles southwest, or at an abandoned camp, Cajiloa, 38 miles farther down the coast, or yet another 8 miles farther south, at Puerto de San Carlos, once a supply point for mines in the interior. Trails crossing the arroyos northward would have taken him directly into Rosario—on Arroyo del Rosario.

• Had he driven there, as he tried to do, we would have found the “small agricultural village . . . between tall cliffs in the broad Arroyo del Rosario, a permanent stream, 3 miles from the Pacific.” Source: Gerhard and Gulick, [1956] 1958, map 5 and p. 95. 48 Little changed in the 11 years 1907 to 1918. Here, though, Rosario is clearly seen to be lying in a valley, as Gerhard and Gulick intimated, with mountains rising to the east and a slope from the west downward into town in the foreground.

Photo source: Goldbaum, 1971, p. 36. 49 Rosario had clearly been a going concern since early in the 20th century, with trucks and a Model T passing in the road. Forty years later, in 1958, it was described as “divided into two settlements: Rosario de Arriba (through which the main road passes) on the north side of the arroyo, and Rosario de Abajo (reached by a side road), 1.6 miles downstream on the left bank. A continuation of this road extends down and across the arroyo to a freshwater pond and sand beach, 3 miles from Rosario de Abajo.” Source: photo, Arroyo, 1992), p. 44; text, Gerhard and Gulick, [1956] 1958, p. 95. 50 So Rosario did, in fact, exist:

It might have been this incline Ron’s Packard could not descend for the number and size of uncleared boulders. Entering Rosario from the north: “The road begins to get a little rough around Socorro. It winds through and around low coastal hills, across and along rocky arroyos and follows the ocean for several miles. It twists gradually up a canyon to the top of a mesa and then down all at once into Rosario. The Auto Club calls this last incline a 15% grade but more than once we felt that if we dropped anything it would hit the windshield Sources: photo, Hancock and others, 1953, instead of the floor.” Haller, p. 53; text, pp. 54 and 57‒58. Leaving Rosario to the east and then turning south: “Leaving El Rosario on our first trip we started out on the wrong road. We discovered our mistake within a short distance and as we retraced our steps we recalled that someone had told us that this would happen more than once . . . . it did.

“The main road south from El Rosario crosses a wide wash and passes through dense trees and then up a long canyon.” 51 Ron’s only photos of the road to Rosario:

Coming from the north here on the mesa, he started his Packard down the 15% grade (photo right), but the canyon’s steep decline was so filled with large boulders that he had to abandon the attempt to descend and back the car back up to the mesa. In a different car, he might have, like Hancock and his companions, come “down all at once into Rosario.”

The approach to the canyon The canyon’s opening to the road down to Rosario

Photo source: Ron Pickett, 1949.

52 How we missed Rosario:

This 1956 map shows what Hancock described in 1953 and what we might have done in 1949.

We had driven south of Socorro and through El Consuelo, on the mesa along the coast (Punta Baja and Bahía del Rosario being only a few miles further along).

When we arrived at the canyon descending to Rosario, we failed to descend or to arrive at and cross to the south bank of Arroyo del Rosario or to make the abrupt left turn there eastward into town. Map source: Gerhard and Gulick [1956], 1958, detail from map 5.

53 Source: vivabaja.com, adapted from Cliff Cross, 1973. 54 8. ROSARIO TODAY

55 The mountains in the background are the slopes upward to the mesa. Together with similar slopes in the east, they constitute Rosario’s valley.

Photo source: Google Earth, 2010. 56 Photo source: Google Earth, 2011. 57 “Downtown” Rosario, 60 years beyond

Photo source: Google Earth, 2011. 58 Downtown Rosario looking north, 2007

In the ensuing years, Rosario, like much of the rest of Baja, has become popular with tourists (as proliferating signs suggest), although it took 100 years to double in population from 1910’s census of 917 to 2010’s scarcely 1,700 inhabitants.

The population rose and fell: 251 (1782), 150 (1824), 41 (1830), 24 (1855), 53 (1872), 372 (1971), 5,000 (1992). Its homes were set in 4,337 acres of cultivated fields and orchards whose laborers were decimated periodically by smallpox and syphilis. Most remarkable here are the mountains to the north in the background: the steep cliffs climb up to the mesa we could not descend. Sources: Photo, Eric’s Adventures and Expeditions, 2007, www.ericrench.com; 29; Goldbaum, 1971, p. 37; Jackson, 1981, 138−43. 59 By the end of WW II, Anita Espinoza (Doña Anita) had become de rigueur a travellers’ font of local knowledge, in addition to serving meals in her restaurant —still a going concern, although she is now a centenarian. The town also houses a small museum that displays photos and autographs of famous visitors as well as Baja artifacts.

Photo source: Google Earth, 2010.

60 Photo source: Ellsberg, 1974, p. 4.

61 “’It is an old custom that when one reaches a hundred years of age he must recite to his guests, on his birthday, all he remembers of his life. Our Patrón, at each birthday for the last three years, has refused his duty. Therefore, DoñaLuzstates privately at the end of each barbecue that he is but ninety-nine; andthatnextyear,becominga hundred, he will recite his life’s history to all who are polite enough to be present.’’” — Walter Nordhoff, The Journey of the Flame (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, [1933] 2002), pp. 4‒5.

Photo source: vidavideos, “Mama Espinoza Family History up to Her Birth,”February 7, 2009. http://www.youtube.com

62 9. A LITTLE HISTORY

63 Dominican priests, the last of the In 1802, some 28 years later, one Catholic orders to establish missions of the springs of water failed, so the in Baja, chose Rosario for their first buildings of the mission at El Rosario site. A soldier, José Velásques, had were abandoned and new ones were identified the location in 1770 as a built nearly 4 miles closer to the likely spot for a mission, perhaps coast; here were more space, more because Cochimi Indians lived in the agricultural land, and better access area. Its native name was variously to external supplies. When the water Viñadaco, Miñaraco, or Viñatacot. at this site failed, the missionaries abandoned it too, turning it over to In 1774, the Dominicans built local residents in 1832, some tracing Nuestra Señora del Santísimo Rosario, their residence there to earlier in the a mission near the Bay of Las Virgenes 1800s. of the Pacific, about 45 miles west of the Mission of San Fernando and Rosario itself was some 2 miles about 69 miles southeast of the point east of the Pacific Ocean, on the south where Mission Santo Domingo was bank of Arroyo del Rosario, which established next year. The mission at empties into the Pacific. El Rosario was set in the middle of agricultural and grazing land, and a Sources: North, 1907, pp. 49‒50; Spanish Missions of Baja large stream of water flowed nearby. California, Mexican Forts, North American Forts 1526‒1956. ww.northamericanforts.com; Ellsberg, 1974, pp. 5, 7, and 16; Goldbaum, 1971, p. 35. 64 Source: Arroyo, 1992, p. 15. 65 1956 2005

Photo sources: left, Gulick, 1956; right, David Kier, 2005 http://vivabaja.com/missions2/page3.html

66 1949 2005

Photo sources: left, Marquis McDonald, 1949; right David Kier (at Rosario de Abajo, near the south bank of the El Rosario River, GPS 30°02'29.0" 115°44'20.8“), 2005, http://vivabaja.com/missions2/page4.html. 67 Year Event 1774−1832 Dominican order founds and abandons the mission at Rosario

1800 Carlos Espinosa, retired soldier of La Frontera garrison, receives one of the first Rosario land grants

1848 United States turns Baja California over to Mexico under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo

1849−1900 Rosario, an important town larger than Tijuana, is capital of the northern district

1863 Oldest house in Rosario still standing, built by José del Carmen Espinoza Salgado

1910 Anita Grosso is born in Rosario (1931 marries Heraclio Espinosa)

1911−24 Rosario residents flee revolutionary bandits, taking up residence in northern towns

1927 Auto Club of Southern California makes pioneering trip to Rosario and Baja

1941 Pearl Harbor prompts Mexican government to order civilians not to move from their towns

1941−45 Mexico’s 18th Battalion and commander occupy Rosario, along with American forces

1942 Commander in chief of Mexican forces sets up headquarters to defend Baja jointly with the U.S. military

1948−49 Six to 10 American cars stop in Rosario each year

Sources: Ellsberg, 1974; Arroyo, 1992, p. 29.

68 Chronology continued

Year Event 1949−73 Increasing numbers of cars, up to 6,000 a year, stop in Rosario

1961 Plane full of medical professionals crashes on the mesa, establishes Flying Samaritans

1961 Doña Anita starts a medical clinic that falls into decay but is then rebuilt

1966 Archaeologists begin collecting Late Cretaceous dinosaurs (100 million to 65 million years old) at Arroyo del Rosario 1967 Rosario’s first Primary School Francisco I. Madero is inaugurated

1967 Baja 1000, off-road race, passes through Rosario for the first time

1972 Steps are taken to establish a secondary school in Rosario

1973 Paving of Baja’s main highway reaches Rosario

1976 State Secondary School No. 41 opens, renamed Escuela Secundaria Profesor Heraclio Manuel Espinoza Grosso 1978 Rosario gains electricity

2010 Rosario bridge collapses

2011 Army burns 300 acres of marijuana plants growing in Rosario valley, the largest contiguous field ever found

69 10. THE PRESENT

70 The flood of visitors to Baja south, flowing through downtown Rosario, 2010

Testimony to Doña Anita’s remark about the increasing numbers of cars, up to 6,000 a year, stopping in Rosario 1949−73

Photo source: Google Earth, 2010.

71 Overcast skies from rain wipe out Rosario’s view of the mountains that make it a valley. The road may have been paved in 1974, but walking in mud has never been less than a trial

Photo source: Talk Baja Forum, January 10, 2010. www.talkbaja.com.

72 A bridge crossing the Arroyo del Rosario, seen here from the east in the foreground, headed west toward the Pacific. Bridges like this one at Rosario are being built throughout Baja to allow continuous driving during periods of heavy rainfall and flooding.

Photo source: Google Earth, 2010.

73 The Rosario bridge partially collapsed under torrential rains in January 2010.

Photo source: superjose89, “Caida del Puento El Rosario, Baja California,” January 22, 2010. http://youtube.pmXv6wijlg8

74 The rise Doña Anita noted in the annual numbers of visitors, as many as 6,000, driving though Rosario since 1949 is no less remarkable than the disappearance of the fayuqueros, displaced by tractor trailers—seen hampered in this photo by the January 2010 bridge washout at Rosario de Abajo.

Photo source: Clark, 2010.

75 Mexican Army surveys 300 acres of marijuana outside Rosario, July 2011

Photo source: Russia Today, 2011. 76 The Army operation that found and burned the field of marijuana involved 300 military personnel. In Rosario, they arrested 16 men who had worked the plantation as they tried to escape in a bus. The men, from Sinaloa in Mexico, numbered closer to 60 to maintain and harvest not only the crop but also tomatoes grown to hide the marijuana plants.

Soldiers found an electric power plant and a water irrigation facility fed by two desert wells, along with the 120 metric tons of marijuana, contiguous marijuana field ever discovered in whose value was estimated at Mexico, it was four times larger than the previous $150 million.The largest record. Source: Goodson, 2011. 77 Mexican soldiers strip and torch Baja marijuana fields outside Rosario, 2010

Photo source: McClatchyDC, September 15, 2010, http://youtu.be/QizS4pcNkJA. 78 11. WHAT IF

79 An 18th century Dominican mission surviving more than one epidemic that decimated its Spanish and Indian populations alike but only for 60 years, until its adobe structures returned to the earth they’d been molded from…

Built on a stream that twice failed the community, causing it first to move downstream and then, finally, to fail…

Irrigating, nonetheless, 300 acres of an illegal crop, under auspices of an international cartel before government confiscation, only half a year after torrential rains made Rosario impassable… Photo source: Simpich, 1942, p. 263.

80 What if

Rosario had appeared on more maps by 1949?

The canyon’s descent from the mesa on Highway 1 had been neither too rocky nor too steep for Ron’s 1947 Packard?

We had found and stopped in Rosario indefinitely despite its lacking a primary school until I’d turned 27 or electricity until 1978—when I’d turned nearly 40? . . . . . Would Ron’s death in 1961 have made a difference? Would I have stayed or run away? Who would I have become?

I grew up, and went to school, someplace else. The world has not yet blown itself up.

81 Source: Photo courtesy of Steve Sieren © copyright 2011 Steve Sieren, www.sierenphotography.com. 82 Arroyo, Alejandro Espinozo. 1992. Los Rosareños 1774‒1992. Ensenada: Museo de Historia de Ensenada.

Clark, Paco. 2010. “Road Condition: El Rosario Bridge,” Baja Good Life News, January 7.

Ellsberg, Helen. 1974. Dona Anita of El Rosario. Glendale, Calif.: La Siesta Press.

Gardner, Erle Stanley. 1948. The Land of Shorter Shadows. New York: William Morrow & Co.

Gerhard, Peter, and Howard E. Gulick. [1956] 1958. Lower California Guidebook: A Descriptive Traveler’s Guide, rev’d ed. Glendale, Calif.: Arthur H. Clarke Co.

Goldbaum, David. 1971. Towns of Baja California: A 1918 Report. Glendale, Calif.: La Siesta Press.

Goodson, H. Nelson. 2011. “Mexican Military Discovers Plantation with 300 Acres of Marijuana Growing in Baja California.” Hispanic News Network USA Blog, July 15.

Hancock, Ralph, and others. 1953. Baja California: Hunting, Fishing, and Travel in Lower California, Mexico. Los Angeles: Academy Publishers. 83 References (excluding photo credits), cont’d

Jackson, H. 1981. “The 1781−1782 Smallpox Epidemic in Baja, California,” J. Calif. & Great Basin Anth 3(1): 138−43.

North, Arthur Walbridge. 1907. The Mother of California: Being an Historical Sketch of the Little Known Land of Baja California… San Francisco: Paul Elder and Company.

Pasqualetti, Martin J. (ed.). 1997. The Evolving Landscape: Homer Aschmann’s Geography. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press.

Russia Today. 2011. “Largest-Ever Marijuana Field Torched in Mexico,” July 16.

Simpich, Frederick. 1942. “Baja California Wakes Up.” The National Geographic Magazine 82:2 (August): 253−75.

Wells, H. G. [1914] 2000. The World Set Free. Sandy, Utah: Quiet Vision Publishing.

84 Copyright © Penny Pickett, 2014. [email protected]

My mother celebrating her 90th birthday at Cactus Cantina, Washington, D.C.

85