I hope everyone is enjoying life to the max. Here's what I've been up to: I moved to Arizona, Phoenix area, in '77 after Nancy (Isaac) and I divorced. I had left the family funeral business. Too psychologically straining dealing with the survivors. The dead were the easy part; they never complained. Not so now though, with AIDS, hepatitis C, flesh-eating bacteria and Ebola monkeys.
I worked for a large mechanical contractor as shop superintendent leading projects at Luke AFB, Palo Verde nuclear power plant and some r&d with agricultural equipment manufacturers. While at Luke, I was in on developing some of the early modular clean rooms. While in Arizona, I hiked/backpacked/rode horses all over the west including: Grand Canyon (4x), Zion (3x), Bryce, Yellowstone and Yosemite. Many of those trips were with Sean, my only child, who lives in Santa Cruz, and is recently divorced. (He works for Zero Motorcycles, rides bicycles and surfs). I started going to Mexico back then, first to Puerto Penasco at the north end of the Sea of Cortez and then exploring farther south on the mainland till leasing a palapa on the beach near Mazatlan for a couple of years. At that point I was sure I was going to retire in Mexico.
I moved to Fair Haven in '85, remarried, and worked for a variety of mechanical contractors in the Rochester and Syracuse areas. I developed a strong relationship with Clestra Cleanrooms (French owned, US facility in N Syracuse) and led projects from NY to CA. I started EDF Services in Rochester in '91 and sold it in '93.
Took the next 15 months traveling and goofing off. I climbed the highest peaks on six Caribbean islands, sailed, snorkeled, fished, chased women, etc. My dad and I spent three weeks ('96) traveling Ireland visiting cousins and places from his youth. One highlight of the trip was the Bushmills Distillery. (During marching season. Whole other story.)
Got to Gilroy CA late '98 where Sean was living. He had been at Specialized Bicycles since '04. Once I was introduced to mountain biking I was hooked. What a great way to explore the back country and meet new people! In the following 15 years I logged 40K miles with over 800 miles of altitude gain. All on dirt. I had great support from Specialized, especially their R&D people and owner Mike Synard. I competed in many cross country races including the Sea Otter Classic, 3x, best finish 11th.
I spent a lot of time in the early 80's on the mainland exploring the Gulf, Caribbean and Pacific coasts and started coming to Baja in '91 when the gang violence in Sinaloa went over the top. I had spent a couple of winters in Todos Santos ('08-9) and contemplated starting a mt. biking operation there. I had driven the peninsula over a dozen times looking for my spot. Three years ago as I was searching (almost settled in Mulege), I stumbled into my current location. Always thought I'd end up less than fifty yards from a beach and a bar. Got lucky finding this spot, saved my skin and liver! There are peaks as high as 7,000 ft in the mountains above me and my area is described as an arid forest, but I've measured over thirty inches of rain each of the last two summers, the rainy season. The drive down the peninsula is an adventure of discovery. Too many little settlements on both coasts to visit and remote missions in the mountains at the end of washed out roads. There are many bicyclists that do the ride. They are crazy! The roads are quite good and the drivers are very courteous but there's no shoulder. I tried it for a few miles, too scary.
I get down to the Sea of Cortez frequently (45 minutes from home) and occasionally fish, but most of my free time is spent hiking in the mountains with the dogs and working on the house and grounds. I have a hectare fenced to keep the cattle and horses out. I cleared the land and built the house, much of it from native materials, solo. I'm currently working on interior finishes and clearing ground for an orchard. Yeah, it's a ways back on a rough road and I'm off grid, so I have solar panels and my water is from a spring, but I'm glad I made the move. When I go to Los Barrilles, I don't even bother to roll up the windows, and I have no locks on my gate or doors. I have no regrets other than the fact that building a house cuts seriously into biking time.
Civilization is not that far away. Cabo has gone off the charts. There are more than 50K people now. It's more like San Diego than Mexico, only more expensive. There are two dozen tower cranes disgorging concrete into twenty story hotels at any given time. Penthouse suites routinely go for 10K a night and the airport is overflowing with private jets. There is an outstanding micro brewery, Ramuri, that's one of my stops the 3-4 times a year I go there. I prefer San Jose del Cabo for culture and the Baja Brewing Co. produces some fine ales. La Paz (pop. 200K) is about 60 miles and besides a historic downtown and malecon there's Walmart, Sears, and Home Depot. I regret that circumstances keep me from joining the reunion. It's a two-day trip out of here to the east coast as nothing leaves Los Cabos till afternoon. I'm also breaking in two new puppies which includes too many hour and half trips, one way, to the vets. And they both get carsick. Not real excuses but I'm so settled in here that I routinely blow off even short trips to Los Barrilles. I do fly to San Diego or San Jose every six months to renew my visa. San Diego is usually an overnighter, SJ is to visit Sean and friends in the Bay Area.
The next letter was written a year later:
I'm catching up a bit with many of you I haven't checked in with in a while. I do hope that everyone is healthy, happy, and enjoying life to the max. Living in a land where the clock supposedly moves slowly certainly has no effect on the calendar pages. I'm going to take a little more time to keep in touch with my friends. So here's what's been happening around the Laguna Mountains, Sea of Cortez and Los Cabos since Summer.
Ron came down in July and we fished caught some bonita and tuna. We made our usual trip into Cabo San Lucas to Ramuri, a brewpub, for some suds. Sean came down in February and we covered a lot of ground in a week. Yes, Ramuri. Anyone who comes to visit can expect to fish and drink beer! He got to surf in warm water and we took Girly (dog) to the Los Barrilles dog show.
Construction on Camino Facil continues daily at a leisurely pace. I have thought of changing the name to Rancho 420 but I'm going to stick with CF (Easy Street). I have several compost piles and continually work to improve the soil. My vegetable garden has been most productive. The flavor of fare just mere minutes from the earth rewards my effort. I'm currently eating lettuce (4 varieties), carrots, radishes, tomatoes (4), beans, and cucumbers, and have onions and peppers on the way. I swap fruits and veggies with friends in San Bartolo and Los Barrilles. I've got two avocado trees and a lime tree in the ground and am clearing ground for more citrus.
Work on the house continues. Does it ever end? I've started plastering the interior walls and am cutting granite slabs for window sills. I've got to put a second coat of mastic on the roof to cut down on the solar load. That and the shade from my plantings keeps the house comfortable. I'd like to start the tile work in the bathroom before summer is over. Also high on the agenda is construction of my outdoor kitchen. I've been honing my masonry skills. Probably more work than clearing land. The stonework on my patio is coming along nicely. There's a quarry about a mile away and I've been able to get some great raw materials. I dig my sand out of the arroyo and screen it by hand and mix the mortar in a wheelbarrow. Cows are a constant threat to just about anything green and have poached my yard a couple of times. Bitches. I've put up a several hundred feet of barbed wire, stone walls and log fencing. They are like the velociraptors in Jurassic park, always probing for a weak spots’ I've got such a wide variety of projects underway and in the planning stages that there's no chance of boredom! Some recent pics are below. Stay healthy, stay happy
The following is what I wrote about him in my book (some names have been changed). It appears to be utterly mythical, but is almost completely true. The things he claimed to do seemed impossible, but the things we witnessed him do were no less likely. And therein lies myth, in the shimmer between invention and truth.
---
I swear that Jay McLaughlin and I must have been switched at
birth. I looked and spoke like Jay’s father, a rational, deferential
undertaker. Jay, on the other hand, was obviously the heir to the Danny Sparrow
legacy. He thought he could beat you at anything you named, even the thing you
were best at. If you thought you were strong, he was mightier than Paul Bunyan
. If you thought you possessed some appeal to the fairer sex, he had bedded more
women than Don Juan. If you thought you were devout, he was holier than Jesus
himself, even if that seemed to contradict his other claims. He was the
horniest, orn’riest polecat to grace a classroom since Big Mike Fink was a
schoolboy. He was the big-dick-swingin’est, fire-bringin’est Titan to walk
among mortals since Prometheus. If you weren’t aware of it, you could just ask
him.
Two things made Jay different from my dad. First, he
expected you to believe that all of his tall tales were true. Second, some of
them were true, which created a mystique about him that suggested the others
might be as well. I myself witnessed one of his grandest exhibitions. There was
a day when the gymnasium divider was broken and our phys-ed class had to share
the full gym with a girls’ class. Jay wanted to show off in front of the girls,
as might any man possessing the physique and agility of Tarzan. Although rope-climbing
was not on the docket that day, Jay took the first available opportunity to
climb the rope all the way to the ceiling girder from which it hung, some
thirty feet in the air. That was impressive enough to us ordinary mortals who
had been watching, but it was merely the set-up for the real show. Jay was
about to demonstrate that his power was buttressed by a complete lack of fear.
Hand-over-hand, he slid down the girder a few feet and proceeded to do chinups,
eliciting “oohs” and “attaboys” from the co-ed spectators, who started counting
his repetitions. The appreciative response was soon interrupted by the panicky
cries of “get down NOW” from two phys-ed teachers who obviously viewed the
stunt as a wrongful death suit about to begin and their careers about to end.
Jay did comply safely and smoothly, punctuated with flourishes and bows, to
thunderous applause and great relief. As he later told the rest of us, “Getting
down is usually the easy part, but I was already straining, so it wasn’t easy
to look cool while getting down in total control. I didn’t want to spoil the
whole thing by looking like a spaz on the dismount.” “Were you at least a
little scared up there?” “Nah. I had to concentrate every second, so I didn’t
have time to think about whether there were consequences. I gotta say though,
that when I got up there, I did have one regret.” “What was that?” “I wish I
had taken off my shirt before I started, so the girls could have had a better
look.”
With the exception of John F.Kennedy’s death, this was the
most discussed event in my high school experience, but it was more than that.
The tale moved virally beyond our gym class and even beyond the class of 1966.
For this story did the good man teach his fellows, and with apologies to
Shakespeare from within the wheel of life, there would ne’er be a day from that
day to the ending of the world, or at least until several classes had
graduated, but that Jay would be remember’d. He that day who witnessed it with
me became my brother, forever to recall the event whene’er we meet. We are all
old now, and old men forget. Yet all shall be forgot. But we will remember with
advantages the sight we saw that day. And alumni from Houlihan who were not
there will hold their manhoods cheap and their tongues silent whiles any speaks
that watched with us upon McLaughlin Day. His name was John, but he preferred
to be called “Jay.” I can’t remember ever calling him that except around his
parents. He earned a nickname on the first week of sophomore year when he was
unaccountably assigned to honors Spanish. He had absolutely no idea how to
adapt the pronunciation of letters from one language to another, so he simply
looked at all the Spanish words and pronounced them as if they were in
Rochester-accented English. Neither was he able to adjust to the fact that
foreign languages use different grammatical constructions. He couldn’t grasp that
Spanish adjectives were declined by gender and number, and he conjugated
irregular verbs as if they were regular (e.g. “Yo sabo” instead of “Yo
sé”).That long list of deficiencies made him utterly clueless in that Spanish
class. Sometime in that first week, the teacher asked him, “Señor McLaughlin -
¿Cómo estás?” Jay began his answer with “Aaw …” That was a verbal tic. He
started almost every sentence with “Aaw.” He continued, in what we called high
Spanchester, “Eres estar muy estan.” That’s total gibberish. It means something
like “You are to be very they are.” “Eres estar muy estan” became a catch
phrase for the class, and from that moment on, Jay was Jay no longer, but Eres,
or “Err” for short, and when we mimicked his instantly famous answer, we also included
the ubiquitous “Aaw.” That stuck with him and soon expanded far beyond the
circle of our Spanish class.
Err had a way of going viral before that was even a thing.
Err was a colorful character and an athlete, so just about every Houlihan
student knew him. The “Aaw” became a meme that was universally recognized by
everyone in our school, including underclassmen who would never meet him. Err
was on the wrestling team and the entire mat crowd would always greet his
appearance with a long and resounding “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaw.” As an
adult, Err lived the proverbial life less ordinary. In his college years he
dealt drugs, then turned into a police informer when he was caught. That worked
out well for a while, until he set up someone who pleaded “not guilty,” at
which point Err had to testify in open court. That blew his cover and ended his
usefulness to the police, but more important, it forced him into hiding for
years, because he had made a lot of dangerous people angry with his betrayals.
The Emu and I were able to track him down in that period through his father. We
succeeded only because Jay’s dad remembered me and knew I had never been into
drugs, so he realized I couldn’t have been seeking violent revenge, unlike so
many of Jay’s former acquaintances.
Later in life Err resettled where nobody could recognize
him, thousands of miles from the Rochester drug scene. He was a bold man who
never shirked back from danger, so he could always earn a good livelihood by
doing things that prudent men avoided. At one point he made his living by
test-driving dirt bikes in the most extreme, most hazardous conditions. Near
the end of his life, he bought himself a large, remote patch of undeveloped
land in Baja California, in an area inaccessible from paved roads. His property
was in the PineOak Forests ecoregion of Sierra de la Laguna, which somehow
presented characteristics of near-jungle conditions despite the fact that there
were deserts at the lower elevations. On that hardscrabble, overgrown tract, on
land that was worthless but every bit his own, Err hacked out an area where he
could build a retirement home with his own hands, brick-by-brick, until his
mighty heart finally gave out from the effort.
Err did some impressive and daring things, to be sure, but that
wasn’t what made him a legend. The defining characteristic of the man was that
his actual accomplishments, monumental as they might be, were never enough to
satisfy his ego. He claimed to be capable of the impossible, and he never
backed down when proven wrong. When we were juniors Err said he would audition
for the lead in “Oklahoma,” and assured us that the part was all but his. When
it came his turn to perform, he explained that he had a little cold and
consequently had to change his audition selection. He talked through “Why Can’t
a Woman Be More Like a Man,” from “My Fair Lady.” If you have seen the most
famous performance of that song by Rex Harrison, you know that it is basically
not a song at all, but a rhythmic soliloquy, which makes it completely useless
as an audition for any role that requires real singing. If the great Harrison
himself had used that song to audition for our high school version of Oklahoma,
he would have been consigned to a speaking role and told to practice his
American accent. But Err was no Rex Harrison. He didn’t even bother to learn
the words, but read them off his notes, in a monotone, deaf to the rhythm. Err
had as much chance of landing that role, or really any role, as Jack Elam had
of becoming the next James Bond. “Err, what happened to you up there?” “Aaw,
had a cold. Broke my heart that I had to switch songs at the last minute. Aaw,
I never even heard of that song. I had been rehearsing Some Enchanted Evening.”
“Maybe Brother Humbert will give you another change when your head clears.”
“No, he told me he’s already made his casting decisions.” “Well, maybe you can
just sing the other song for us when you feel better.” “Aaw, you bet I will!”
That never happened, but we had to admire the sheer audacity he displayed in carrying
his bluff through to the very end.
In senior year, one of our teachers, a real mensch by holy
man standards, put together a golf tournament for the class. Nearly the entire
golf team was in that class, as well as a few others with low handicaps, but
Err was determined to establish that he was the top gun, so he assumed a cocky
stance and began a dialogue with the organizers. “Aaw, who has the lowest
handicap?” “Dan is a five” “Aaw, give me a three.” “Err, we didn’t even know
you could play golf.” “Aaw, last week I had eight birdies in one round.” He
went on to explain that he didn’t always birdie that many holes, but always
birdied or eagled every par five because there was no green he could not reach
with two of his mighty shots. We figured that his golf stories were spurious,
but he was the strongest, most muscular male we had ever met, and we had seen
him perform miraculous stunts in other athletic endeavors, so there was an
outside chance that he could do what he said. The Emu, our official class commissioner
of all things golf, organized the pairings for the tournament on a high/low
basis, so Err, putatively our best golfer with his three handicap, was paired
with Manny Suarez, a Cuban guy who had never played golf and was thus assigned
the maximum handicap of 36. Before the match began, we gathered on the range,
hoping to watch some of Err’s mightiest drives soar to majestic heights and
reach distances heretofore never considered within the limits of human
capability. We admonished the range-keeper to give Err only balls he could
afford to lose, because the expected drives would probably exceed the limits of
the range. Err grabbed his bucket of balls and strode to the range area. As
soon as he addressed the first ball, his awkward stance betrayed the fact that
he had never played golf at all, let alone at a high level. Instead of keeping
his arms extended, he tried to hit the ball with his elbows bent. His first tee
shot traveled about fifty yards – straight sideways, almost hitting some little
kids on the practice green. “Aaw, I’m rusty. I’ll get into my groove in a
minute.” He didn’t. That first hit on the range turned out to be his longest.
At least it went somewhere. His gross score was 125 that day, resulting in a
net score of 122 after subtracting his 3 handicap. Our tournament results were
based on the net score, giving Err last place by a comfortable margin of thirty
or forty strokes. Manny, the kid who had never played golf before, shot a 121,
so he didn’t even need his handicap to beat Err’s score! In theory, the worst
golfer there shot a better round than the best. What are the odds? But here is
the genius of Err: he never backed down on his claim to be a legitimate
three-handicapper. “Aaw, I just had a bad day. That happens to everyone.” Just
as we had to admire the chutzpah displayed by his “Oklahoma” audition, we had
to tip our golf caps to Err for showing up at that tournament. Err’s cojones
were so big that if Herman Melville had seen him underwater, he would have
named his whale Little Richard in comparison.
In all my years of life no man has ever brought me more pleasure than Err. There was nobody like him. Just thinking of him always brings a smile to my face instantaneously. I can’t say that of any other man, not my dad; not any famous comedian. Whenever I reminisce with my classmates and the subject turns to Jay McLaughlin, I reflexively jut out my chest in Err’s manner, utter an audible “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaw,” and break into a broad grin.
