The Middle Days Effect

One autumn morning at the sheltered northern end of the Sea of Cortez on an empty section of Baja beach, two of my best friends and I were awakened by the waxing glow of the sun about to crest the horizon. Soon it would peek over the mountains on the Mexican mainland across the water and we would feel its furnal radiance, a reminder of the scorching day ahead. But for now the sand was cool, the air was still, and we rubbed the few hours’ sleep from our eyes with the languidity of reptiles at first frost.

It had been another late night of driving, navigation done by paper atlas, sleeping bags thrown on the sand with bivys to guard against the damp, beach chairs and a cooler, duffels scattered, a tripod left as sentinel. It was still early days on this road trip, just a hint of stubble on our chins, but already the edges were roughening.

We fueled our vehicle at a backyard tank in a nearby village and headed west across the interior. In the U.S., there’s so much pavement it frames the landscape, but in Baja, it’s the opposite. A mile from macadam and you’re, like, oh right, earth and dirt and rocks–as it was, is, and ever shall be. Endemic boojum trees, Seussian in name and stature, stood like lonely, skinny telephone poles, their branchlets shaggy green pipe cleaners. Rounding out the scene: creosote bushes, cholla cactus, and ocotillos, all in shades of brown, and sere mountains, and a wan sky.

It was a day of wandering, too hot for hikes, too dry for swimming, no trails for riding, a day for letting what was behind us fall away and before us come near. In the afternoon, we rattled up to the Misión San Francisco Borja, established in 1762 to convert the Cochimí people, who by 1818 had packed up and left, apparently unconvinced by the padres. A young boy guided us up the bell tower, member of a family that for eight generations has overseen what’s left of the structure. The tower’s shadows were sweet relief from the heat, its view elevated, but we had itchy feet and soon moved on.

Fall has always been road trip season for me, in part because that’s when the desert is at its best, but also because of the lack of crowds and Indian summer and cool nights and no bugs and that ineffable mix of melancholy and excitement you feel when the air changes and days get shorter. And the best part of a road trip, in Baja or otherwise, comes when you cross into the sweet spot of it: when you’ve forgotten all the hindrances of normal life, when the end of the trip is still too far away to see, and when you’re just starting to settle into the rhythm of new latitudes, new routines, inside jokes, playlists, and the forging of new memories.

David Strayer, a professor of cognition and neuroscience at the University of Utah (and avowed desert rat), thinks of that sweet spot as the day three effect. He views it through the influence of nature during backcountry travel, but I believe it’s true of road trips, too. “We’d be foolish to ignore it,” he told Florence Williams for her book, The Nature Fix. “By the fourth day, you’re more relaxed, you notice details. In the wilderness, there’s a novelty effect for the first few days…but then the novelty wears off…so now your attention is not grabbed. There’s a capacity to use other parts of your brain.” He likens it to athletes in the flow state, with less thinking, more sensing. And this, to me, is precisely where the magic of the road trip begins: not when you leave, but when you’re there.

The road left San Borja and headed west across the peninsula, corrugated with such washboard that one of the back windows vibrated out of the truck. Shadows grew long and we flipped down the visors to block the sinking sun. And then someone said I bet we could make it to the Pacific before it’s gone, wouldn’t that be cool, sunrise and sunset on both sides of Baja? and we gunned it, heaps of gear moshing in back, music too loud to think, only one goal, to race the sun, and then we were on sand, berming a chicane across the beach, and tumbling out the doors with engine still running and the music blasting, kicking flip-flops into the cool grains, high fiving and hugging and hooting as we watched the last bit of golden red orb slip beneath the waves. We had ourselves a moment, we made ourselves a moment, and then we got back in the truck and drove on, because it was a road trip and there was another beach out there with our name on it, across Baja, somewhere in the growing dark.