She drove towards Los Barriles, leaving San José, crossing the large arroyo that housed a temporary bridge. Temporary for the reason that it was washed away every year as the river torrent took its place during hurricane season in September and October.

But this was late November.

She drove, leaving the barely paved roads of the town to travel across the rutted dust tracks that entered the desert landscape. The cacti lined her route, cardon – the giants, mesquite, chirinola, lechuguilla, nopal – a flat paddle-like growth, barrel cactus, chollas, the jumping cactus – it will always manage to spike – a pitaya, the blossoming elephant trees – the torote, the agave plants, the aloe vera with their stem ending in a spear of yellow flower, and the brilliant red flowers of the fishhook cactus, nestled like a fruit. It was a colourful desert.

The rancheros allowed, encouraged even, their donkeys and cattle to roam free across land and track. The track represented no barrier for them: it was all just land to the animals.

The expanse of the mountain range, in the distance, and the desert were endless during her drive towards the coastal track alongside the Sea of Cortez.

The turkey vultures hovered waiting for a kill, the ospreys doing their own work for food.

After a seventeen-mile drive, the sea, straight ahead, appeared to roll onto a shore where the pelicans were the only life. She followed the coastal track to the north at the ocean, for a short distance; one or two settlement areas started to appear on the desert side of the track.

Then the epiphany. She drove down a narrow arroyo, the volume of the ocean increased in this high-sided ravine, she could hear the angels singing. And there it was, relentlessly rolling in front of her, for her alone.

She got out of her truck, walked barefoot along the softness of the sand which stretched as far as her eyes could take her, left and right. Whales were breaching, their water blows sprayed into the blue, blue everywhere. This was pure: this was pure essence.

She wanted to live here. She would spend the winter months in the perfect climate of this deserted, desert Eden.

Live with the turtles and the whales and the birds and the manta ray and the skipjacks and the sierra; with a wind that seemed to blow all that wasn’t needed away.

She built her house on the dunes above this stretch of beach which was called Shipwrecks. It was 1985.

Her house she named Casa Lomita.

It was just twenty-four steps down to the beach and the ocean.

*

It was nearly ten years later that she was driving into the town of San José.