A Landscape Designed By Doctor Seuss

We passed through the little town of El Rosario. School girls crossed the highway in their blue uniforms. The road turns inland and the desert becomes a landscape designed by Doctor Seuss, with the elephant trees and curly-topped cirios sprouting all over among the boulders. The road is narrow and winds up to the tops of ridges where the ocean is visible on the horizon. Some places you hold your breath because the side of the road drops off so precipitously. Beat up old big rigs come careening along the other way and you're sure you can't possibly both fit on the road, and the air pushes you sideways as they pass. Once we cracked side view mirrors against an RV coming the other way. Down below, the cacti look like an army assembled on the desert floor. We dropped down into a valley and came to the town of Catavina which is little more than a hotel and a gas station. We ate huevos rancheros and bought some more Tecates for the drive. I'd read about some cave paintings that were supposed to be in the area and we explored dirt roads and asked at farmhouses until we found the caves. There were suns and moons painted on the ceiling of the cave, and one of the boulders had a skullface look to it, like Munch's Scream. A window was eroded into a wall of rock and I climbed up into it to have my picture taken. The, we headed down the highway again.