Kino Bay, Sonora, Mexico
Perry and Carolyn retired in the Spring of 2004. Some dear friends helped us load everything we owned (about 60 boxes of books, three sailboards, household goods and tools, and very little furniture) into a U-Haul truck. It was so neatly packed that it was an impresssive sight to behold.
Then we all went to a local watering hole for afternoon nachos and drinks. Afterward, we thanked our friends and hugged them profusely for a long day of hard work shoe-horning everything into the truck. We said our goodbyes in the parking lot of the restaurant.
We were ready to leave in the morning, headed to a storage unit in Green Valley, Arizona that we’d rented over the phone. Then Perry noticed the tires on the truck seemed to be bulging ominously. A sign in bold letters beside the door read, “Maximum Weight: 11,000 lbs.” That surely sounded like more than enough for what little we owned. But still...
In the late afternoon, we drove to the closest truck stop to find a scale big enough to weigh the truck so we’d have peace of mind on our long road trip. It was another unnecessary thing we didn’t need to worry about. We paid $8 to the cashier, and drove onto the scale. When we went back to retrieve our weight slip, it read 16,000 lbs!
We were more than a bit shocked, and drove carefully back to the U-Haul place to rent a bigger truck. But all theirs were gone. After several phone calls we found one across town and gave them our credit card info. We left the truck at our now-empty house and drove our car over to get the new truck. I drove while Carolyn made phone calls to arrange with a moving company to cart everything out of one truck, and into the other. They could do it, but they had another moving job first thing in the morning and weren’t sure when they’d arrive. We’d meet them in front of the home of some other friends who had a long lot and a very long curb. We’d back the trucks up to each other to make it as easy as possible. Carolyn spent the day with last minute details and I waited with the trucks until the crew arrived in the early afternoon.
They were three of the biggest Native American guys I’ve ever seen and they were already exhausted from the earlier job, that included moving a grand piano (really!). I couldn’t help but think of that classic Laurel and Hardy movie, although these guys looked a lot more competent. I primed them with ice-cold Cokes to get their energy levels back up, and they started the long process of loading the new, and much larger, truck – which ended up looking only about half full, but drove a lot better.
We paid the movers $300 for an afternoon of heavy work, and later, when I dropped off the first truck, I signed a credit card slip for about $175 for the priviledge of storing everything in the truck overnight. We were almost $500 poorer but now we had a truck that could carry the load safely. We figured we’ll eventually share this story with the friends who helped us load up in the first place, but not just yet. Maybe someday, when it’s funny.
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We arrived in Green Valley (about 20 miles south of Tucson) after a couple of days on the road and we hired an outfit called the “Packrats” to unpack the truck. Then it was off to our new (if somewhat old) house on the beach in Bahia de Kino, Sonora, Mexico. We had packed the van with the things we’d need when we arrived in Kino in June. The winter clothes could wait for a while.
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Temperatures in Kino were consistently in the high 90s each day, with a wet breeze blowing in from the Sea in the afternoon, and we had no electricity. Any kind of artificial cooling was not an option. We wore shorts and t-shirts and went barefoot to stay cool as a hot steady breeze blew through the house and moisture collected on the tattered screens to run in rivulets to the floor. We’d take long walks along the beach in the crisp morning light. And each day, in the late afternoon, we’d dive into the Sea of Cortez just outside our door to wash the sweat off, followed by a cold shower before dinner. We’d linger in the warm waters of this fertile Sea, transfixed while the setting sun painted glorious colors across the sky as it dropped below the jagged horizon of Isla Tiburón. At night, we’d toss our cushions and bedroll on the floor in front of the door, spritz ourselves from a spray water bottle, and sleep to the sound of the ocean right at our feet – or so it seemed.
Life was good in a simple and carefree, ‘sandrat,’ beachcomber kind of way.
The house was part of an estate. It had been mostly unoccupied for a decade and poorly maintained longer than that – a recipe for problems in a saltwater environment. We’d seen the house only briefly, six months ago on a visit when we found that it was available. The utility of the house itself was questionable. It needed to be completely rewired. Badly deteriorated insulation hung from heavily corroded lines leading to the nearest power pole. The coolers had been corroded beyond usability by the salt air. There were leaks in the carport’s concrete roof and large chunks of plaster had fallen to the floor. And there were serious structural problems with most of the concrete columns and beams along the sea porch. But the estate would sell it for the price of the land. It seemed like just our kind of place, and we called the lawyer from a pay phone on the street.
We knew the house was only marginally livable when we bought it, so we tried to arrive as prepared as possible. We’d figure the rest out after we got there. We carted the cooler and the camp stove into the house, Carolyn dug out the candles we’d bought in Hermosillo, and we set up housekeeping. We’d be ‘camping out’ inside until we got reconnected to the power grid.
Since we’re not wealthy enough to afford another house (or two, or three) elsewhere, this would be our only home (not counting an REI puptent we keep in our old van). To our eyes, this simple, neglected concrete house was the essence of beauty. The toilet flushed, more or less, and the roof didn’t leak all that much, so we weren’t really roughing out – in the strictest sense of the phrase. And being right on the beach at an affordable price didn’t hurt, either. We’d happily make do with what we had. This next adventure in our lives would be a ‘romantic interlude.’ It’s amazing what you’ll put up with if you just phase it right.
There was much to do. Our days were soon filled with activity: arranging for Victor the electrician to work us into his very busy schedule (can you find the fingernail moon in this picture?), for Gordo the welder to fix the ‘reja’ (the large rolling front gate), for Fernando the door man to get our old, corroded sliding glass doors to work and to repair our screens to keep some of the bugs out. We’d sort out the water heater later, but it wasn’t an issue in the heat of summer.
Eventually we got the house in livable order. Victor installed a higher quality copper supply line and untangled the other wires leading to our house. To our surprise, the very old Admiral refrigerator worked just fine, and so did the old Frigidaire electric stove. And now we even had lights at night (instead of candles), and fans to help move the hot air around a bit. Gordo, an impish grin upon his face, got the reja working. And Fernando made the doors glide as they had when they were new.
We reveled in the luxury of simple gifts.
Now we had a little time to relax, except for long days spent drawing plans to incorporate our latest ideas for remodeling the house – an ongoing process that will continue until concrete is poured for the new footings.
It was time to attend the annual gathering of the “Summer Survivors.” Most of the ‘gringo’ community (maybe the sensible contingent) leaves Kino by June to escape the building heat. The hard core holdouts have a party to make light of the blistering heat of the coming summer – kind of like whistling past the graveyard.
The local Mexican community, by contrast, heads for the beach in large numbers starting with the Easter weekend, one of the biggest holidays of the year. They look forward to summer at the beach to cool off from the heat of Hermosillo, Nogales, and other inland towns. The shore is dotted with encampments, and whole families spend the entire day in the water, followed by laughing and singing around a campfire late into the evening.
The local joke goes like this:
“Where are you staying at the beach this weekend?”
“At the Hotel ‘Camarena (Hotel ‘Sandbed’)!’”
We were there only for the beginning of the summer season, then it was time to leave on a 12,000 mile odyssey across most of the eastern US and up into Canada.
But that’s another story... — PRW