There are things a man does to escape his life. Some drink, some chase women, some pretend everything is fine until they drop dead in a recliner watching the news. My organic father and I? We took off to Mexico. Two grown men, both retired, both trying to avoid our wives in equal but distinct ways—he, out of obligation; me, out of survival.
I drove from Bend, Oregon, down to Long Beach, where he was waiting, his bags packed and his sense of direction nonexistent. We bought Mexican insurance at some back-alley hole-in-the-wall that looked like it also sold heroin, then hit the road, no maps, no itinerary, just two gringos in a car, racing toward some vague idea of freedom.
To get to beauty, though, you have to drive through the shit.
Tijuana is an absolute toilet. Not a nice public restroom, not a functional gas station bathroom, but the kind of toilet that’s been backed up for weeks, used by every vagrant within a five-mile radius. It’s humanity at its worst. Trash fires, stray dogs, buildings that look like they’ve been bombed out since ‘92, and a smell that clings to you like an old regret. The Pacific Ocean, my favorite ocean, my number one, looked different here—uglier, dirtier, like it had given up. I didn’t know an ocean could look defeated, but there it was, sulking like a drunk who just lost his last twenty at the blackjack table.
We kept driving, past Ensenada, which looked like someone took Los Angeles, shook it upside down, and let all the garbage pile up in the streets. Spray paint on every available surface. People walking around with that dead-eyed look, like they were just waiting for their number to be called at the DMV of life. Why the hell would anyone choose to live here? If I was Mexican, I’d be swimming for San Diego.
Somewhere in the outskirts, we picked up two Mormon missionaries—one redheaded kid from Utah who’d forgotten how to speak English after six months of immersion, and his Mexican counterpart, who looked like he’d seen some shit. I pulled over, ex-Mormon instincts kicking in, and they hopped in. The redhead struggled through a sentence, fumbling for words, his brain glitching out between English and Spanish.
“Damn, kid,” I said, “they really beat the gringo out of you, huh?”
They took us to a money exchange place where I gave them the cash and let them do their thing, the logic being that they were the only people within a hundred miles who didn’t want to rob us. Transaction complete, we dropped them back off to go continue their door-to-door salvation hustle, and we pressed on.
The drive south was a wasteland—beautiful in that no one gets out alive kind of way. Roses stretched for miles at one point, a government-run floral monopoly that made me wonder who the hell was buying enough flowers to justify this much effort. Not long after, we hit Guerrero Negro and checked into Hotel Terra Sal, the kind of place that looked like it had seen its fair share of bodies being dragged out in the middle of the night.
We didn’t leave the hotel for food—some places just scream you don’t want to be out here after dark. The town was mostly abandoned, save for a few glassy-eyed stragglers watching us like they were measuring us for a coffin. It was off-season, which meant the whole town was waiting for whales to start shitting out babies again so the tourists could throw money at it. Until then, it was just us, a few stray dogs, and a whole lot of nothing.
At dawn, we gassed up—because everyone kept warning us that the next stretch of road was a death trap. No gas, no food, no bathrooms. Banditos and cows lurking in the darkness. Hit one, get robbed by the other.
They weren’t wrong.
We nearly ran out of gas, had to buy some out of a guy’s 2-liter Coke bottle. The road itself was breathtaking, if you like the kind of beauty that makes you question your own mortality. Massive boulders stacked like the gods were playing Jenga. A sky so empty it made you feel small. But my stomach was not interested in landscapes—it was staging a full-blown mutiny.
By the time we reached a gas station with a bathroom, I barely made it inside before my body betrayed me. There were two stalls: one clogged to the top, a literal mountain of human suffering, and the other missing a seat entirely. No choice. I braced myself against the walls, squatted like an animal, and let nature take its course. The stench was biblical. No wiping necessary—at that point, it was just damage control.
My organic father, being the cheap bastard he is, paid for exactly one gallon of gas, which he bitched about for the next hour.
We reached Mulegé, a little oasis that felt like someone had dropped a fishing village in the middle of nowhere. Chickens pecked at our feet while we ate, and for the first time, we found a place that didn’t make us question our decision-making skills. Good energy. Decent ocean. But not the place.
That moment came later.
We crested a hill, and there it was—Loreto. The ocean turned from deep blue to turquoise to a glassy white against the sand. It was like someone finally turned on the Welcome to Paradise sign. I didn’t even know it existed, and suddenly, it felt like the only place I wanted to be. We found drinks. We found food. We found peace.
We spent the night, then headed to La Paz—another place whispered about by expats and real estate agents. Met a Canadian named Don Johnson, who showed us sprawling houses selling for the price of an American crack den. Seafood that could make you believe in God.
And then it was time to go back.
That morning, we sat at a beach café, toes in the sand, drinking Pacificos and eating something out of a massive goblet filled with shrimp, octopus, and things that probably still had a pulse ten minutes earlier. We laughed. We imagined moving there. Fishing, drinking, bullshitting for the rest of our days.
Then my father asked, “Mind if I drive?”
I handed him the keys, knowing it was a bad idea.
On the way back, he drove like a lunatic, hugging turns with nothing but death on the other side. I bit my tongue, let him have his fun. But then—jerk. A sharp movement. Not like his usual reckless shit.
I looked over, and his forehead was swelling.
Like mutating. Like something out of a horror movie. A massive, bulbous mass of fluid rising above his eyes, pushing them closed. I laughed so hard my ribs hurt.
“What the fuck is happening to your face?”
He pulled over. We found a pharmacy. The lady behind the counter gasped like she was witnessing a biblical plague. She threw Benadryl, steroids, and God knows what else at him, probably assuming he was minutes from death.
Turns out, mercury poisoning from all the seafood mixed with God-knows-what environmental toxin had turned my father into a swollen, lumpy freak.
We laughed about it.
The trip ended.
And what I realized was this: my organic father and I weren’t father and son. We were two guys. Two men escaping their lives, leaning on each other like soldiers in a war neither of us signed up for. People thought we were brothers, and maybe that was more accurate. We were comrades, partners in temporary freedom, bound by blood but held together by something stranger.
One-on-one, he was incredible. But as a father? Missing pieces. Missing warmth. His home was as beige as his soul, his emotions locked behind a cinderblock wall.
But for a while, we had the road. We had Mexico. We had the laughter, the danger, the near-death experiences.
And for a while, that was enough.
