| 29 June 2006 Hussongs Cantina I am fed up with the water. The rains stopped two days ago, but now it is all flowing downhill. The Potomac is brown as clay, and rolling along through the trees on Roosevelt Island. The Authorities are evacuating people along the stepper banks of a dozen rivers to the north, in Maryland and Pennsylvania. Enough already. The news from Gaza is depressing. The Israelis grabbed several elected officials in the land they had just vacated months ago, more tit-for-tat, and as far as I know the North Korean rocket is still poised on the pad, ready to go. Or is it? I found myself drifting away this morning. I was supposed to be writing a memo about a Joint Staff action item, which filled me not with nostalgia, but rather an uncomfortable sense of déjà vu. I used to work on the Joint Staff, three or maybe three wars ago. They have moved from their old location by the Eighth Corridor entrance to the Pentagon to one of the rehabilitated offices on the other side of the Building. The modular furniture is nicer, but the energy is the same. Grim and implacable, busy. Tense. The Colonel was young. I remember when they were old. Now they look like kids. He had a phone conversation going while he checked his e-mail on two different systems and a civilian aide briefed him in between as I set up the briefing on another computer on the desk. It seems a world away that I scurried with the buff folders between offices in this building, bustling target nominations to the Special Technical Office behind their bank vault a few floors away. I wondered at how it had come to that, becoming a grim functionary of industrial-grade war. It had started somewhere else. A place where the danger was discrete, and the pain low-level, related mostly to ancient mattresses and poor air conditioning, and nothing except death was really that serious. Miramar was the air station. They had just made a movie about it with Tom Cruise, or rather the movie was about the men that flew the airplanes at Miramar. I was already trained in the dark arts when the film was released, but it was pretty cool to see what my buddies did was on the silver screen. Not that I did the flying. I held codes and planned missions, and other things behind the Green Door. It was an apprenticeship, which I didn't know at the time, being trained to understand what our capabilities were, so that later we could observe the bad guys intelligently, and steal from them the things that were important. When we got tired of being in America, there was an alternative. We worry a lot these days about what is coming north from Mexico, but there was a time when it was definitely the other way around. It is so easy to get across the border that I have done it by accident, missing the last exit on I-5 southbound, and then popping into Tijuana. You could be at the bull ring in no time from Miramar, if that is what you wanted. But the pleasure spots of TJ were problematic. It was a rough town, and a corrupt town, and why would you stop there, when Ensenada was just a dozen miles down the road? Mexico gets a lot better the further south you get from the frontier. Baja California is the logical extension of the Golden State, and once past the seething energy of the collision between the two nations, a mellow and pleasant place. If you needed a place to relax, Hussongs Cantina was the place. It is one of the eight or ten places that actually, no kidding, invented the Margarita cocktail. Equal parts tequila, Damiana liquer and lime, served over ice in a salt-rimmed glass. It was supposed to have been first served to Margarita Henkel, daughter of the German Ambassador to Mexico and the Henkel aircraft consortium. It is like the original no-kidding landing places of Columbus in the New World. While I think it might have been Cortez rather than Columbus who bellied up to the bar for the first one, I honor them all. It is appropriate that Hussongs was founded by a German. We owe a lot to the dispossessed of mittleurope, including the fine beer and ubiquitous accordions that you hear in every restaurant along the border. Juan Hussong started out as John, or Johann. When he opened the doors on his bar-restaurant over a century ago, Ensenada was a sleepy little fishing town. By the time I first saw it, it was a rowdy hippy town, filled with gringos and sailors, happy to be out of the country and looking at the glittering blue water. The bar roared all week, and went completely nuts on the weekends. There were vendors who sold flour tacos from a cart outside, and a real jail that you could be thrown into with a genial sort of randomness. No records were kept, and there was no particular stigma in being arrested. You could always bail yourself out, and sometimes it was just a good place for a nap. There was a little man who carried an ominous unit that consisted of a powerful battery and two solenoids. For a nominal charge, you could grasp the two little cylinders and watch the man turn up the volts, turning your hands into claws. The more juice you could take, the more manly you were. At least that is how I think it went. The noise was deafening. Late one of those evenings, it seemed to be a good idea to climb into someone's big Oldsmobile convertible and put the top down in the cool darkness. It seemed reasonable to purchase a big sack of flour tortillas to fortify us against hunger on the road north. There was nothing whatsoever unusual about the driver and co-pilot putting on rubber Halloween masks to help their concentration. Likewise, it seemed a sensible exercise of our skills to launch flour tortillas against likely targets from the backseat as the powerful V-8 automobile hurtled north toward the frontier, skidding on the dirt road. The Mexican farmer, up early to work in the coolness of the morning, did not seem surprised to see the long automobile flash past, driven by Richard Nixon with an enormous pig at his side, waving in frienship. We could not have hit him with a tortilla if we tried at that point. Too little time for target recognition. That would not be true today, not with heads-up display and laser designators. I think it was Jack Kerouac who said it best, or at least he typed the question like this: “Whither do you go, America, in thy shiny car in the night?” To the Border, Jack. From Hussongs. Step on me. Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra |