Alone now, and still abuzz, I motor the scope over to Jupiter and take in the storms raging on its surface. If I could avoid sleep altogether, I would; no matter how much time you have in Baja, it doesn’t seem enough. I putter with the telescope until two and then I wake up from excitement before first light in time to see Venus rise. Still in my bag, I fumble for the camp stove and portable espresso maker.

I roust the boys with a pan of chilaquiles and my standard road-warrior wakeup–four shots of espresso, two shots of Hershey. In short order, we’re in a nearby village buying gas from someone’s backyard tank (the only fuel source for a hundred miles) and then we’re headed back into the interior. The Gulf of California shrinks in the wide mirrors of the truck, as we push deeper into the desert, farther from liquid life. I wonder if this is how the Apollo astronauts felt as Earth receded and the moon approached. The water behind us is deep, deep blue, but we’re entering a world where the colors are pale, dusty, and bleached. The sky is a thin pastel wash, and even the pavement is light gray, as if it lacks the energy to fight the sun.

We aim south on dirt and head across mountains. When the road isn’t washboarded, it’s broken with stairstep drops, reducing the average speed to six miles an hour. Here is a whole new level of bad, a kind of enforced, unpaved intimacy with the underlying geology. Bedrock, erosion, sedimentation–all right under our wheels.

Being from the United States, where beach camping is almost universally forbidden, I still get a subversive thrill out of being able to roll out a sleeping bag on virtually any beach you see. On this night it is Punta Chivato, on the Sea of Cortes coast. David plays it safe and drops his bag high up in the dunes, but Sinuhe and I sleep close to the high water mark, drawn by the lullaby of tiny waves. In the morning, the tide is just eight paces from our feet, and there to give us our wakeup is a large squid basking in the shallows. It hangs out, squirts water, lounges, and then drifts away, as unhurried, for the moment, as we are.

Time shifts, expands, stretches in odd road-trip ways. Days become a blur of desert, cactus, aqualine waters, delicious fish tacos bought on the side of the road, $90 gasoline stops, vultures sunning their wings on cacti. We swim in the jewel of Baja, Bahia Concepcion, and linger on a narrow isthmus. We hike through vast stands of cordon cactuses sprung green by the rains of a hurricane and scramble up the peaks of Sierra de la Giganta, named for the tribe of legendary women, not for the mountains’ stature.

David is on a pilgrimage from city boy to Mexican desert rat: He has backed into a cholla cactus and had it break off in his rear, but his nervousness over a police shakedown or bandito holdup is receding and every day he makes and breaks his camp faster and neater. Sinuhe

isn’t new to any of this, but unlike David, he is bumming. It’s a running joke between us that at any given time you are either a magnate or a victim. When things are going well, you are a magnate and you’re gleaming. When things go poorly, you are a victim and you’re bumming. Sinuhe has lost a filling in his tooth, and with every passing moment the throbbing gets worse. Sinuhe is a victim.

“Magnate?”

“Yes, victim.”

“I need a dentist.”

It’s Sinuhe’s good luck that we’re pulling into La Paz, a city of several hundred thousand on the Gulf of California and the capital of the southern state of Baja California Sur. Within an hour he’s prone in a dentist’s chair beneath a TV playing Mexican music videos.

Sinuhe is perhaps the bravest of us all. He opens his mouth. Around him, the walls are decorated with photographs of seafood, the kind you might see in a diner on a Massachusetts wharf, and the dentist’s assistant sports heels, a short skirt, and an anklet. A few hours later the tooth is gone, Sinuhe’s jacked on painkillers and antibiotics, and victimhood is drifting away in a Vicodan haze.

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