You don’t wake up one day and just decide you need to escape your life. It’s a slow burn, a creeping realization that you’ve built something you can’t live in. That’s what my father and I had in common—our houses weren’t homes, our wives weren’t lovers, and the idea of sitting in that mess and pretending it was happiness felt about as appealing as drowning in wet cement.
So we ran.
Baja again. Mexico had a way of making things simple. No schedules, no demands, just the ocean and the sun and the illusion that you were the one in control of your own goddamn life. This time, we weren’t even pretending to fish. Sure, we had the gear, but it was an accessory more than an actual plan. The plan was to move, to drive, to put space between us and everything that wanted to sink its claws into our ribs and keep us locked in place.
My father woke up with that determined look in his eye—the kind of look that said he had made up his mind and we were going. Didn’t matter where, just forward.
The only living reef still left in Mexico was down the East Cape, a stretch of land that had been marked for settlements but had since turned into an economic disaster of fraud and false ownership. Rich guys had paid locals to squat for them, to claim land in their name so they could transfer it later, but the government had cracked down, turned the whole place into a federal park. Now, there were million-dollar beachfront mansions just sitting there, rotting, empty, belonging to nobody. A graveyard for dreams built on greed.
We drove past them, letting the dust and sun turn us into something unrecognizable. We found the reef, threw on our snorkel gear, and went under. The water was warm, clear, deceptively calm. Not much of a reef, really—just a stretch of underwater rock that had once been something more, before time and people chipped away at it.
We surfaced, salty, sunburned, peeling like rattlesnakes shedding skin, and made our way to a little café where we sat outside, drinking beer from a bucket, because water was an afterthought. The sun was high, burning the back of my neck, and I watched as a medium-sized roosterfish broke the surface, taking a chunk out of a bait ball right in front of us. We didn’t have our rods. It didn’t matter.
At that point, I was already burning up. My skin had been stripped raw from the last few days of sun, salt, and stupid choices. The Jeep had no roof, no shade, and we were fenced in on both sides by a twelve-foot wire barrier that stretched the length of the road. Nowhere to stop, nowhere to escape the relentless sun. I did the only thing I could—I took off my shirt, wrapped my underwear around my head, threw on my sunglasses, and sat there like a madman, hoping it would keep me from frying alive.
It worked.
We drove on, past the French colony, past the ghost mansions, until we reached a shack in the middle of nowhere. A little hut selling for eighty grand, perched on a hill with an ocean view that would make men dream about abandoning everything. But the reality was simple—there was no way to protect it. If you left, someone else would move in. If you locked it, they’d rip off the doors with a butter knife. The AC unit, the propane tanks, anything of value—it’d be gone before you even made it back to check on it.
It was a nice thought. But that’s all it was.
By the time we got back to Los Barriles, we were already half-dead from sun exposure, salt, and dehydration. So we did what any reasonable men would do.
We drank.
The Buzzard’s Grill was quiet, just the way we liked it. We sat outside, letting the evening sink into our bones, when a couple walked in. They had to be in their fifties. The man was grinning like he had just pulled off the greatest con of his life, and the woman—well, she wasn’t gifted, but she sure as hell didn’t believe in bras. Her nipples were working harder than she was, punching through that thin tank top like two little reminders that gravity is undefeated.
But that wasn’t the weird part.
The weird part was them. The way they acted. Like newlyweds. Like teenagers. Giggling. Touching. Talking in excited bursts about their dune buggy rides and the things they had done that day.
Something wasn’t right.
When the woman finally excused herself to go to the bathroom, I leaned in and asked the man point blank:
“What the fuck is wrong with you two?”
He looked at me like I had just accused him of murder.
“Excuse me?”
My father nodded in agreement, waiting for the answer.
“What is this? The two of you, acting like this, what the fuck is going on here?”
The man laughed. Not in a nervous way, but in the way a man laughs when he knows something you don’t.
“It’s my second marriage,” he said.
That didn’t explain anything.
“The first one… we grew apart. She started off liberal, turned conservative. Loved the Dodgers, now she loves the Yankees. You think you know someone, but you don’t. They change. With age. With kids. With time. And you wake up one day and realize you’re sleeping next to a stranger.”
He took a sip of his beer, watching me.
“But this one? This one’s different. She’s always been the same. What she loves now, she’ll love in twenty years. I won’t wake up one day and find out I don’t recognize her anymore. I learned my lesson.”
We drank heavily that night.
Thinking about home. About the women waiting for us there. About whether it was worth it. About whether an old model was worth repairing, or if we should just cut the brakes and watch it crash.
We woke up in silence the next morning, hungover, staring at each other like we had both walked up to the edge of a cliff and realized neither of us had the balls to jump.
So we did what men do when they don’t know what else to do.
We kept moving.
North this time. More snorkeling, more wandering, more pretending like we were searching for houses when we were really just searching for an answer neither of us had. Bought oysters, clams, chorizo, cooked it all up like we knew what the hell we were doing. Ate until our stomachs turned against us. Woke up in agony, guts wrecked, and spent the next day regretting everything.
But it was good.
Good time. Good father-son time. The kind of time you don’t realize is important until it’s too late.
We never found what we were looking for.
But at least we looked.
