Here's Fred Surfing down south in Baja .... at
60-something!

Fred in Baja

Ashadu

DATELINE: 6/5/09

Fred, from the grounds up in Sitka, Alaska, has faithfully eMailed new material:

New boat blues Haiku
by Ashadu

nothing
but
nothing
says
FUCK ME!
like a
BOAT

He also adds this:

 "This pig is sucking money faster than a Phillipino mailorder bride (right before she files for divorce)."

And that pretty much sums it up for us Fred.
Thanks for that,
-RT

The toll road

Familiar points of land

Jutting into the sea

Clash with altered landscapes

Wielding familiar names

Memories of people, adventures, life

Gone…in the rearview mirror.

I’m keeping my eyes on the road

Two hands on the wheel

Going south.

Cataviña

Stopping after driving 18 hours

Surrounded by the silence of the desert

Body ringing with the road

I can hear the air sing

With the friction of the earth’s

Rotation.

Desert Wind

In the soft sand of the dry lake bed

Surrounded by granite boulders

And majestic cirro cacti

Wave a hundred half buried

Piles of toilet paper

Greeting the sunrise

Like Tibetan prayer flags

On vacation.

             ~

Fred "Ashadu" Sears ... November/2006

BANDIDOS

By Fred Sears

“You’re driving to Mexico! Aren’t you afraid of getting robbed?” Everyone who visits by car has probably encountered this question, and it always reveals more about the culture and personality of the person asking, than one wants to acknowledge. I have asked that question a few times of myself, maybe yearly. And this is what I remember from previous trips.

Having awakened at 4 a.m. in Santo Tomas, I had hastily gotten together a cup of coffee and lowered the top of my pop-top camper, loaded the dog in place, and started south through the mountains, heading to the coast. I had finished the half-cup of coffee that I hadn’t spilled on myself, when the first car of the morning pulled up behind me and started blinking his brights. This usually means pull over, which didn’t seem like a good idea in the middle of nowhere in the dark. So I sped up and we played chase for about 15 minutes before we finally got a good straight stretch of road, where I slowed down to get this guy to pass me. As he pulled up alongside, he flicked on his interior lights, leaned over, caught my eye, and pointed up with his forefinger. Bingo! I got it. I had forgotten to latch down one side of my camper top, and had been driving through the Baja dark with the camper top deployed like a parachute, while a Good Samaritan had been trying to flag me down.

The most afraid I have ever been of robbery was the night I spent at El Marmol, the abandoned onyx quarry just north of Catavina. It was January and I was driving from the coast, where I had spent a sleepless night listening to 20-foot surf pound the shoreline below me. The surf had the sound of an artillery barrage, and I was shell shocked by the ceaseless intensity of this sound when dawn broke. As the afternoon wore on, I became more fatigued by my day of driving, and started to look for a place to pull over for the night. El Marmol is away from the highway, and the sound of truck exhaust at night rivals a cat in heat on the scale of annoying sounds. I stretched, walked in the silence of the desert, picked at a cold, cooked-chicken which sufficed for road food, and then hit the sack. Boy, was it quiet! Then I was out. Really out. I vaguely remember pulling up the blankets as the desert chill enveloped me. The next thing I knew, there was this roar like a jet taking off, and I was out of bed, struggling with consciousness, adrenal glands on full boogey. As I figured out my place in the space-time continuum, the only logical explanation was that a car had roared up beside me and I was about to be robbed. I peeked out the window to scope out my assailants, only to see: Nothing. By this time some backup neurons in my brain had kicked in and I was hearing this roar, which was still going on in a different context. Well, maybe it was the sudden blast of heat that clued me in that my propane-powered heater was on for the second time since I had owned the camper. Closer inspection revealed that the thermostat had somehow been budged from OFF to the 50-degree range, and had, unbidden, done its job. I fired up the stove, put on some water, and gave up sleep. Hell, it would take hours just to get my pulse out of fibrillation mode.

I did lose a pair of sandals to a blond gringo kid while surfing Abrejos. I was the only surfer in the water, and probably was made invisible by sitting in the glare of the sun. He was walking the beach, stopped, and spent some time staring, before finally picking up my zoris’ and walking off. I don’t think he meant to steal them. Probably, he has them framed on a wall and tells all his friends, “Dude! It was spooky, I mean, there they were, the same make, the same size, and sitting parallel to each other but at a ninety degree angle to the shoreline. I mean, what are the odds of that occurring in nature? The ocean does really weird things!”

I bring these stories up because I just did get robbed while in Mexico. My wife flew home to discover our toilet leaking, and called the plumber. One hour and three hundred dollars later, it still leaked. Three hundred dollars for an hour, now that’s Robbery!!!!