Almost an Island: Travels in Baja California
a review by Ron Mader

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Bruce Berger's Almost an Island: Travels in Baja California (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998) is a compelling travel narrative. This is a must-read homage to the mysteries of a land once not paved. Chapters such as "Earth Day with the Governor" highlight the contrasting environmental policies in the westernmost corner of the Borderlands.

Many writers find themselves attracted to a particular place and this is true of the author's obsession with Baja California. The book covers the past three decades -- from the author's first trips on unpaved highways to the global pilgrimmage for the total solar eclipse.

"I see that I have been caught by a cul-de-sac," Berger writes. "Longer than Florida, longer than Italy, Baja California is an eight-hundred-mile dead end."

Berger delights in telling the story of how his obsession developed, aided my his musical talents as a piano player.

The geographical dead-end is filled with both destinations and experiences that the author describes in passionate detail.

He writes of adventures and of the selling of that commodity: "Baja Expeditions, at that point only a year old -- with its original charter scrawled on a cocktail napkin -- still peddled that oxymoron, the planned adventure. To be tended by guides, even mute ones, curtailed spontaneity. Unchosen travelmates often chatter of politics and Thai food and previous adventures while the present adventure passes unattended." (p. 50)

Berger becomes good friends with Baja Expedition's owner Tim Means and becomes an official "hanger on."

If Almost an Island were available on audio tape, it would be a delight to hear the text spoken. Berger's prose has been beautifully crafted. This book is highly recommended.

Excerpts from Almost an Island:

Like many who arrived before the paved highway, I traveled for the sheer adventure of it, wanting to see it all. When I became a partial resident, chance and my own eccentricities took over and I ceased being the general observer. (p. viii)

La Paz, which had produced nothing of global significence since the pearl beds had dried up in the late 1930s, slowly became aware through rumor and news sotries that it was targeted for what was billed as "the eclipse of the century," a blackening of the sun that might draw up toa half million people, four times the city's own population. Furthermore, some of those people might be, in the root sense, lunatics. (p. 101)

Baja California, a thin peninsula for its length, shows a split personality: the gulf side rugged, volcanic, burning with color; the Pacific side flat, fog-bound and cool. I preferred its mania to its depression and generally kept to the gulf side of the mountainous spine. But on the Pacific side, in coastal channels and bladder-shaped lagoons, lay one of the peninsula's great spectacles, the breeding waters of Eschrichtius robustus, the California grey whale, teasingly known as the "desert whale." (p. 67)

Caguama was sea turtle and I had eaten my share of it, caguama steaks as well as soups, during my first years on the peninsula. For Baja Californians it was almost a ritual food, served during all-day family gatherings, a symbol of hospitality. I previously ate it because it was a local speciality and had become a ritual of our visits more than because I liked it... I had no trouble giving it up when the species was so depleted from overharvesting that it was in extreme peril and banned as food. (p. 198)

The end of the missionary era, then, is a historical fault line, a low point in the population of the peninsula. The soldiers brought in by the padres were never very numerous, but with the disappearance of both the padres and Indians, they were the only ones left. The padres, knowing they would have to live with the consequences of their choices, had picked their protectors carefully for vigor, intellect and loyalty, and favored married men who wouldn't compromise the Indian women while trying to convert. While trying to keep the peninsula exclusively religious, the padres thus imported a breeding populations of civilizations whose succeeding generations they could not control. (p. 25)

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Ron Mader lives in Mexico and hosts the award-winning Planeta.com website -- www.planeta.com. Ron is the author of the Exploring Ecotourism Resource Guide and can be contracted for presentations and workshops.

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