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7 Rancho Nuevo to Los Pilares The wrath of John Goat herders relief ride The indomitable spirit of Lucio Salvador Meza The great irony of desert landscapes is the extent to which they are shaped by running water. Walking up the dry arroyo toward Tiombó on my previous visit, in the heat of midday , I could hardly have imagined the torrents of runoff capable of eroding such a broad streambed in that land had I not experienced the rage of summer cloudbursts myself. It seems cruel that so much rain should run off a land so thirsty, squandered as it were in a place of need—that rain could actually deliver as much a blow to the subsistence farmers of the Sierra as a drought. But such is the nature of the summer rains and soil so dry it cannot absorb water quickly. The rains finally came again, and they did not come gently. The clouds that build over the Sierra and drop their moisture in torrents are called locally chubascos, but the general term for storm is tormenta, and this seems more appropriate. They are whimsical and erratic; they tease one day with unfulfilled promise, they pound the earth unrelentingly the next. The storm that ended the drought blew in from the South Pacific. In September 2006, Hurricane John ripped up the Baja California Peninsula with a vengeance, held on course by Hurricane Christy farther out in the Pacific. John took out roads in the Sierra, isolated ranches and communities, flooded arroyos that flooded huertas, and wiped out homesteads. One of 2 8 Chapter 2 many casualties, the homestead at Los Pilares was squarely in the path of John’s wrath and lost almost all of its animals. With no road connecting it to anywhere, the three brothers at Los Pilares, goat herders, were having a hard time of it. Bule, Rosita, and I would take mules in this week with supplies. At the moment, however, just two months after Hurricane John’s rampage, tropical storm Paul was leaving its mark. As my plane descended through layers of dark, roiling clouds and approached the runway at Loreto, I looked down on a huge plume of café-con-leche-colored silt billowing into the Gulf. I would learn momentarily that the only highway south out of Loreto, built like a causeway across Arroyo Colonia, gave way two hours earlier to the floodwaters of the arroyo and sent an enormous slug of debris to the sea. At the airport now, the cabbies were milling around, surprisingly unsolicitous , waiting for word that water levels in Arroyo Colonia had receded enough to cross. Shortly a cab driver came to me and said we could leave. Halfway to Loreto we were waved off the highway by the police and directed down a muddy, rain-pooled road toward the Gulf, eventually to plow across Arroyo Colonia near its mouth where the water was running hard but shallower as it spread out. In Loreto the streets were overrun with silt and water, but by the next morning the sky was breaking up with big patches of blue and billowing but mostly harmless clouds, and the brooms were out in force. Loreto was preparing to celebrate the 309th anniversary of its founding, and as I walked the streets looking for coffee, all my greetings were returned emphatically with smiles. In a doorway a young girl, talking with a boy, looked at him with a light in her eye that could have dissipated any thundercloud. • I left Loreto in the dark the evening after tropical storm Paul departed and arrived at Rancho Nuevo around 9:00 p.m. to find Bule and Angelina visiting with neighbors in their open, palm-thatched corredor. The night air was deliciously warm, and Bule and Angelina were lively with chatter and laughter. “Bule” is Raul de los Santos Martinez. He is seventy now, but his gait appears older for having spent most of his life in the saddle rather than on his feet. His legs seem to have a permanent bend in them—better adapted to riding than walking —rendering him totally comfortable and tireless on the back of a mule. Bule was born on a remote ranch south of San Javier and as a young man hired out to herd goats in the mountains . He roamed widely throughout the Sierra and knows the mountains and all its ranches as well as anyone around. Bule didn’t settle down until his late...

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