The Speed of Rancho Santa Inés

Travel Stories: The saying goes: Bad roads, good people. Good roads, bad people. On a sleepy Mexican ranch, C.M. Mayo finds out what the Transpeninsular Highway brought to one stretch of Baja California.

A German film crew recently had come to make a movie about the mission. “They filmed what happened two hundred years ago when they sent the priests home. Then some others came and they took the Indians to Alta California. They put them all in chains. The actors wore soldiers’ uniforms from then, very different from today!” He raised his eyebrows and smiled, and shook his head. “They had a book and they were reading the history from that book, two hundred years ago! Oh, how can they know about this place and I live here!”

Oscar, I realized, was much more interesting than some old lumps of adobe.

“¡Todo rápido!” Everything goes fast now, Oscar said, fast! He wanted to tell me how things were before the highway was built. Before, he said, a car might pass by once a week, maybe once every 10 days. “You could lie down and go to sleep in the middle of the road and nothing would happen to you!”

He threw back his head and roared.

Oscar may have looked slick—the big white cowboy hat, the flashy belt buckle—but he hadn’t owned a pair of shoes, he said, until he was 14 years old. One day, a mounted salesman arrived with his burro train from the sierras, selling shoes. Oscar had a bitch he liked, so they made a trade. “She was a good dog,” he said as he stroked Palomito’s curly white scruff. “But I really wanted those shoes. My first shoes.”

When they needed to go to Ensenada they went on burro. “It took us two or three weeks. And sometimes I would go to Santa Rosalía. I would eat at the ranches on the way for free.”

There was no doctor. “You would ask yourself, am I sick? And you’d have to say, no, I’m not sick. Because if you are, well,”—he pointed to the yard—“there’s the cemetery!”

He leaned over to the sugar bowl and raised a spoonful. “My father didn’t know sugar until he was sixteen,” he said, letting the sugar cascade back into the bowl. “‘How can this be sweet?’ my father said. ‘It looks like salt!’ He only knew honey.”

“And bullets…” he said. “We only had a very few,” poquitas, poquitas. “They were very expensive, my father would keep them wrapped very carefully in a handkerchief. We had to save our bullets for deer, because that was food. If you were going to shoot a deer, you’d better aim well, kill it on the first try. You couldn’t shoot coyotes or mountain lions, nothing like that.” He laughed scornfully. “Not like today. Today bullets are cheap, they just go around shooting at whatever.”

I mentioned the bullet hole I’d seen on the “golden spike” monument down the road at San Ignacito.

“I was on the road crew,” he said proudly. He’d worked as a tractor driver for the local section.

He’d been there at San Ignacito when the road crews met. “There was a big party. They gave us lots of barbecue, and trailers and trailers full of beer.” The governor arrived with newspaper reporters to cover the ceremony. “There were a thousand people!” Oscar said, eyes wide. “I had never seen so many people in one place at the same time.” That was in 1973.

The highway opened vistas for Oscar. Working on the road crew, he met people from other parts of Mexico. And instead of herding goats, he was able now to make a living from tourism. Every week Rancho Santa Inés had a handful of guests, not just Americans and Mexicans, but Italians, Frenchmen, Germans, Canadians, even Japanese.

Now there were a lot of people passing through on the highway, Oscar said, all kinds of people. There had been a number of hold-ups, several bad accidents. Like most Baja Californians, Oscar was wary of mainland Mexicans. Some of them were good people, he allowed, but they had different customs. Many were drunks. Some of them would fight with guns and knives. “Here in Baja California,” he said sternly, “we fight with our hands.”

Bad roads, good people, goes the saying, good roads, bad people.

Now there was the hotel, the gas station, the trailer park. And added to all that, as of three years ago, they had TV, Televisa from Mexico City.

“Everything goes so fast!” Oscar said again. His eyes nearly disappeared in the creases of his grin. “Fast!”



C.M. Mayo is the author of the travel memoir, "Miraculous Air: Journey of a Thousand Miles through Baja California, the Other Mexico."


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