Arroyo Acoustics

I’ve been in southern Baja reading Ann Finkbeiner’s accounts of the dismal cold of midwinter and I’ve felt bad. I know what it’s like to shiver in the gray, but Baja happened for me, Sonoran Desert splendor (my home desert), along the whale-happy Sea of Cortez, (the first giant body of salt water I ever touched with my wee two-year-old toes). At 58, I’m visiting again, and Ann, I hope some of its sunshine blows your way. 

The last few winters, my wife and I have come down the Baja coast and listened to the sea. The Pacific was a bit loud where we camped at its edge north of Guerrero Negro, swells pounding like monsters. On the smoother gulf side south of Mulegé, it’s as quiet as a sea can be. Come down the coast further and you get some of both, ocean swells off the Pacific and calmer, deeper waters running up the Gulf of California. 

I interviewed Mickey Muñoz, Southern California surfing great from the 1950s, who lives down here and we went for barefoot runs on the beach every morning at sunrise, in and out of rocks, staying one step ahead of the waves. In his 80s, this is his form of exercise and meditation. He jogs with the sea. 

Sleep is best with the windows open, the desert outside motionless, stars caught up in columnar arms of cactus. That’s when the sound of the sea comes in. When waves are crashing, the sound funnels up arroyos, entering our windows though we are a fifteen-minute walk from the water. You can hear every smack and cascade of pearls. One arroyo will sound for a few hours, and then conditions change, cool air sinks, warm air rises, and another arroyo sends up its own surf sound. 

Day and night, it’s a shell game, and some nights the water is silent. That’s when I am most aware of the sea, as if it were waiting, holding its breath, waves slipping up and back like glass.

I worked on the Sea of Cortez as a naturalist guide for a kayak trip in my twenties, and came down as far as Loreto with my dad in the 70’s when I was in elementary school. I’ve had glimpses of this long desert peninsula throughout my life, not so strange to be here again. Each time I learn more.

First, at two, it was don’t touch a washed up jellyfish, even with your pinkie finger. Next, fourth grade with my dad, wading in turquoise water I discovered live sand dollars. For the trip I guided out of LA Bay on the Gulf side in my twenties, I saw a night where humidity swept off the water, breezes coming out of the desert, and as the sky turned stars fell into the water and it seemed like they would hiss.

This time I learned that the desert is an ear for the sea. Sound flows up the arroyos, gliding across bare, granular sand, ducking under thornscrub mesquites and palo verde trees where it broadcasts as if out of a trumpet. The cooler air in the arroyos is denser and helps move sound waves, making them louder and clearer, temperature inversions bending them back to the ground, reducing energy loss. These rocky drainages are like telescopes for your ears.

On the calmest nights, if I stay awake long enough to listen, I hear a spout. A blowhole opens, sending sea spray thirty feet into the air a mile away. If I listen harder, I can hear the inhale that follows, the stretch of massive organs inside a humpback whale.

That is what I learned in Baja.

Photo by me

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