Rocky Point (Puerto Penasco), Mexico

By
Amanda Gradisek

For me, one of the most striking things about moving to the Southwest was where you could get from here. When I drive into downtown Tucson, I see highway signs pointing to Los Angeles and El Paso. That’s crazy! In Ohio, the only signs were for Cleveland or Cincinnati, and neither of those are too exciting—they’re still in the same state…. Inspired by these signs, my friends and I realized that one of the best things about being a graduate student is that you can plan spontaneous trips in the summer. My friend and I decided, while studying at a coffee shop the other day, to put off working on our Master’s exams and instead plan a trip to Rocky Point (Puerto Penasco), Mexico, for the next day. Needless to say, we were shortly on our way with two other friends, off on our very first real trip to Mexico.

When I lived in Ohio, road trips meant driving through the country on I-71, a four-lane highway filled with eighteen-wheelers and dotted with the occasional barn decorated with a peeling confederate flag. From Tucson, one need only drive ten minutes to be in the middle of the green (yes, green) Sonoran desert, and we were soon speeding along on a two lane road clouded with monsoon cloud shadows and lined with cholla, palo verde, saguaro and barrel cacti, yucca, agave, and other strange desert foliage. When I was younger, I thought mountains always looked like those that I worshipped in Glacier, covered in trees, the timber line providing only a rocky cap above 8,000 feet… but in Arizona, where there are very few trees, mountains only a few thousand feet high appear to tower over me, throwing off my ability to judge distance.

A short three and half hours after leaving home, armed with thirty dollars worth of supplemental Mexican car insurance, about six gallons of bottled water, and little else, we found ourselves in Mexico, crossing the border into a land where we have to calculate miles from kilometers, the land flattens into sand dunes, and a shocking economic disparity. When our thirty-dollar hotel room was (shockingly) not ready, we drove down crowded streets, trying to follow the traffic to…the water. Following roads that were literally nothing but sand through neighborhoods that looked like little more than tin shacks in a row, we eventually stumbled on the first of many guard posts in the middle of the road that we soon learned one could pass easily with a friendly wave. A beautiful hotel on the Gulf of California—we parked and confidently walked out onto the white sand, crashing waves, teal blue water, dotted with a few people in the off-season heat, eased by the steady Gulf breeze. The heat, seemingly worse than in our usual Tucson, was magnified by intense humidity, and the water was the temperature of the most idyllic swimming pool. The only thing bluer than the water was the sky.

Four blonde Americans could only take a few hours in the sun at once, so we dragged our sun-battered and salt-watered bodies back to our hotel, which soon flooded from the base of the sink, so we wandered down to the main drag of Rocky Point, where street vendors starved for gringo customers to sell their wares, be they shrimp, pottery, hammocks, purses, sarongs, or bling-bling, competed for the few off-season tourists. We found ourselves at a restaurant with a balcony, the building up on stilts on the rocks. Pelicans found the perfect balance on the wind, appearing to stop the breeze. The sun set over the water giving it a golden haze, and we sipped margaritas, pina coladas, and Coronas over quesadillas. Ah, authentic Mexican cuisine.

While Rocky Point is undeniably not “authentic” Mexico—leaving aside the identity politics and questions of racial “authenticity” until grad school starts up again in a week—we couldn’t help but notice some things about life in Mexico. After my friends gave up their dreams of becoming the proud owners of a hammock that night, we walked along the rock wall that seemed to be the place to hang out that night. My friend looked at us and said, “A lot of people are just sitting around. We could do that.” So we did. After we’d sat for a while, people stopped video taping us. Cars rolled through what appeared to be the cruising route blasting music that reminded me of good old Lorain, Ohio, and we sat for hours, as the heat finally crept away, soaking up the salty breeze. I can’t imagine that many people just sitting in America, talking enjoying. We need our cable and our gadgets and our technology. We never talk in person when we can call, never call when we can email!

The next morning, after getting a strange amount of sleep on the world’s cheapest mattresses, we cruised through the fancy beach house developments. Curiously enough, the signs in this rich area were all in English, and the architecture strange and cumbersome. We returned back to our old stomping grounds of the previous day, worked on our sunburns some more, and watched the tide creep in hundreds of feet in just two hours. With now showers to be seen, we decided to take a dip in “our hotel pool” before hitting the road.

Driving back, the Border Patrol saw four pale complexions and waved us through. Organ Pipe National Monument, though beautiful, is hardly the safest of national lands. But it is beautiful. We followed a storm East through Southern Arizona, and the smell of rain in the desert rushed in through the vents.

That evening, back in town, driving through South Tucson, we realized you need to know more Spanish to go shopping there than in Rocky Point. Ah, what a cultural experience we had in Mexico! We might have done better at the Safeway south of town. But at least we got some sun(burn) and some sea air!