LET THERE BE LIGHT

It was almost fifty years ago that I first saw the scattering of massive rocks at the tip of Baja California. Last week I saw them again. We were sailing in from Topolabampo to anchor out from Cabo San Lucas at about ten o’clock in the morning, and the sunlight was just right. The early light hadn’t bleached the giant cliffs the way mid-afternoon sun does.

Each of the separate monoliths in the string of rocks must surely have a name, but I don’t know even one of them. The tall, dry pinnacle jutting out of the sea at the end resembles a super-sized California gray whale frozen forever in mid-spy hop. At low tide another rock is just barely visible beyond the big one. My fertile imagination makes it a baby whale peeking out to watch its mother.

But it’s not the rocks that fascinate me; it’s the light. It sometimes seems to come boldly white from inside them and at other times the light is flat, reluctant and gray. Just for the heck of it, I went back to an old box of slides from the 1964 trip down the length of the Baja Peninsula and sadly found that most of them have faded. The rocks are there in the photo; even in the old slides they are spectacular. My friend Gary is twenty-something in the photographs, and seeing him occasionally now reassures me that the light in him is still brilliant. And Cabo San Lucas? In the 60s one little motel was all we found in what has become an impressive resort city.