I was barreling through the desert in a rented Nissan March, the Sea of Cortez to my left, the sun glaring aggressively from a row of mountains to my right. My phone played an anthem, something bold and full of promise—what was that and how did it get into my iTunes?
I was weaving in and out of the wake of purple buses that ply the corridor between the airport and the two cabos. Is Route 1 a highway or a local road? Both, like a rural road back home where you can drive 60 mph or you can take a slow left into a driveway.
If only my Marchito were a stick shift, I thought with a sigh of regret. But still, muscle memory had taken over with driving on a poorly marked hilly route fully of trucks and unpredictable tourists. Memories flooded in as I wondered if anti-lock brakes means today’s young adults would never have the experience of rainy-day skidding into the back of a Cadillac at a farmland crossroads in America’s heartland.
Markings come and go on this Baja Sur route, which is eternally in need of maintenance and better signage, but this is second nature to those of a certain age, when the practical and metaphorical roads of life were improvised based on circumstance. Driving somewhere new and fast feels like freedom—harkening back to long-distance trips in the boyfriend’s band’s van, the epic journey from Ohio to Texas, crossing the US or Australia with Turbo in my sun-bleached charcoal Ford Taurus, the three hours from home to the internet café down a muddy red road in Uganda in a Toyota Hilux—I associate driving the unknown with adventure and the unpredictable, and I was nostalgic for times when I had my whole life in front of me.
I spotted a dump truck ahead, glanced at the left lane and saw an opening between a sedan and a Suburban, then navigated around the truck with ease, just as the marina of Cabo arose from the crest of a hill. If driving is freedom, then I must be 30 years younger, my life a series of possibilities, all of them rich, promising, and unique.
The song receded and Siri abruptly reminded me my turn was imminent. The world transformed in an instant, and suddenly I was just another middle-aged white gringa on a clichéd Cabo holiday.
