Surf, Sand and Community Service: Life Lessons with Patricia Baum

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Contact Patricia Baum for voice-over: teampaty@gmail.com

Patricia Baum, an ordinary woman leading an extraordinary life in Mexico, shares her journey from being a surfer in Oregon to owning a surf shop in Todos Santos, Mexico. In addition to running her business, she's also been a property manager, T-shirt designer, environmental advocate, and founder of a bilingual library. Her most recent venture is voice-over, with a focus on audiobooks.

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Transcript

[00:01] Jan Johnson: Are you looking for an inspiring listen? Something to motivate you? You've come to the right place. Welcome to Women of the Northwest, where we have conversations with ordinary women leading extraordinary lives. Motivating, inspiring, compelling. Hello. Hello, listeners. Welcome to Women of the Northwest. Being a surfer in Oregon led to a move to Todos Santos, Mexico, where Patricia Bowne's journey led to a number of fascinating paths. Owner of a surf shop, property management, T shirt designer, starter of a recycling program and a community library. Patricia has her master's in environmental education and did her thesis on a guide to sea turtles. That's not all. She writes screenplays and poetry and is writing a book about a woman who travels in Scotland. Her new venture is voiceover with the desire to record audiobooks for others. Folks, you are in for a treat today. Welcome to Women of the Northwest. My guest today is Patricia Baum. Welcome, Patricia.

[01:12] Patricia Baum: Thank you. Thank you for inviting me. I'm very honored to be here. This is exciting.

[01:17] Jan Johnson: A couple weeks ago at the writers festival here in Astoria, and now we're recording from Mexico.

[01:28] Patricia Baum: Yeah.

[01:29] Jan Johnson: Where she is a dual citizen between the United States and Mexico. So tell us, how did you get down to Mexico? Give us your kind of a. The story, your journey.

[01:41] Patricia Baum: Okay. Well, I was like surfing, not very well on the Oregon coast and mostly in the sort of Cannon beach area. And I met this really great old school surfer, Bill Fackerell, and he had a surf shop and so I bought one of his boards. And then he came to Mexico for a month with his family. And when he got back, he told me, God, Todo Santos is so great. You know, the people are friendly, the water's warm, there's good waves, good food. So I decided to come down myself and check it out. So I did. I drove my Volvo down with two friends in 1995 for a month. And we also, we took our time getting to Todos Santos. But once we got to Todos Santos, I sort of knew that this was a place that, you know, was really special. And I wasn't even really thinking that I might like, live move here. But when I got back, I just started to put the wheels in motion to try to move here, which I was a little naive in many ways. I didn't really understand completely the immigration laws and. Which, I mean, I guess I just sort of learned along the way. But luckily I was kind of hosted by someone who helped me get my working first working documents. And then I went from there. I became a partner in a surf shop and it was really fun. My partner wasn't so honest, but she ended up leaving me the surf shop and going back to the States after we had a hurricane where most of the people in town got hepatitis A. But because I'd had a vaccine, I didn't get it. And so everyone was kind of freaking out. But I was belle, so I was ready to stay and meet the challenge. So I inherited the Todo Santo surf shop and then I moved it to the beach, which was just fantastic. I got an opportunity to buy a camper on the beach for a hundred bucks. So I did. But it wasn't without, you know, there was a guy named Chiyo. We became friends later who used to come and harass me periodically. Said that it was his camper, that he had the title to it, that I needed to pay him, you know. So, I mean, it just. There's a very. You have to go through a lot, especially back in the day, to get to sort of become respected and for people to.

[04:24] Jan Johnson: Yeah. And I think part of that is any community that you're in. But were you a Spanish speaker?

[04:30] Patricia Baum: I was a rudimentary Spanish speaker and I very quickly became a more fluent Spanish speaker. And now I'm a completely fluent Spanish speaker. But that's the key, because you can't. If you can't communicate with people, forget it. Or if you've got to rely on someone, oh, no, I can't talk to you right now. I don't have my translator. No, that's ****. So I worked really, really hard and got fluent. And I was also helping run a property management company. So we had to deal with a lot of trades people and just, you know, different negotiating, different repairs and upgrades on the houses. And so that was really good for me and just met a lot of really great people. Toto Santos is full of really fantastic people. So that helped and they were patient and. But then once I moved out to the beach and had the surf shop out there, it was just fantastic. I had brought a dog down with me. Wild. She was an Australian kelpie on a note about bringing dogs down. Don't bring a dog down. They're not suited for the climate or for the. You know, there's so many dogs here that you can just. You don't need to bring a dog. Anyway, she didn't live that long because she wasn't adapted. But I got other dogs. I got Fae and I got Lagitata, Momo, and eventually Chocolata and Mr. Choppy. And so I've had a lot. But anyway, so, but, you know, I lived on the beach, and I had a surf shop, and I would rent boards to people and boogie boards. And then I hooked up with all the local surfers, and they would give lessons for me because I wasn't really that good. And then I started designing T shirts, and that was really fun. But then I just. The garbage. After a Sunday, the garbage was just overwhelming. So I finally started to do, like, garbage. Well, I did garbage cleanups every Monday morning. But it's. I started to do recycling. And then I went to the middle school and started working with young people. And then I got them involved in Saturday programs at the beach and taught ocean safety, helped the lifeguards get organized, and also got the cars off the beach because cars were able to drive up and down the beach. And so one New Year's Day, I think, in 2002, I just said, you know what? I'm done. We're going to just block the cars. And it was really hard. People were yelling and screaming at us. But finally they realized that that's what needed to happen. So it did. And now there's no more cars driving up and down the beach, especially, like, on the beach where people were swimming.

[07:34] Jan Johnson: So something like that, you know, making a change like that, you had to be established in the community for a while to be able to have the.

[07:45] Patricia Baum: Yeah, and I got one of the, you know. Yeah, I got one of the Hidatarios. They're sort of like the leaders of the community to actually block the entrance with his truck. So it was, you know, not just me putting my and my family's life on the line. It was actually someone from town. So, you know, it took a while, but people caught on. And then around 99, I started a library. I tried to just get my sort of more English books into the Spanish books Library, which was part of the Mexican government cultural presentation for the town. But they. I got a letter back from the head of the libraries in Mexico City that said, no, we can't have English books in our library. So then I started a bilingual library. And it was just in a closet. Some friends let me just use the closet in their office. And so we started like that. And now it's a really nice bilingual library that has its own great building. And it's got 9,000 books, probably 10,000 by now. Wow. And. Yeah.

[09:08] Jan Johnson: And then runs the library then.

[09:11] Patricia Baum: Well, volunteers run it. The Palapa Society of Todos Santos runs it now. They sort of took it over and they had it in one of the buildings before they got this brand new building. So then the people that built this brand new building for them also built like a beautiful library building. So it's got its own space and beautiful shelving. And I was the director for the last three years, but I just decided that really a Mexican. Young Mexican.

[09:52] Jan Johnson: Yeah.

[09:52] Patricia Baum: Librarian needed to be installed. And so that's what we have now. Danielle Daniela Orosca Orozco is the librarian. So I'm really happy. I also helped the town of Pescadero start a little library. We had. I was working with the mayor, who was a great guy, but we were trying to. There was a building available. Well, there was a building, but they had let this guy like stay in it and his family, and so he wouldn't. He didn't want to leave. So finally they had to buy him a lot and buy him materials so he could construct his own house. But that library is still going on and it's a pretty much only Spanish speaking library. But it's across from the middle school so the kids can use it and there's computers there. And it's part of the Mexican.

[10:49] Jan Johnson: Started little free libraries along the communities.

[10:53] Patricia Baum: Yeah. And now. And during COVID when I wasn't here, they started little free libraries. So that really helped during COVID And so there was three of them. I think there's four now. And they would just stock them up, stuck them up, stuck them up. And that's what I did too. And that was actually really pretty fun because all of the kind of weird books that maybe wouldn't go into the library just went right into the little free libraries. And then people would say, God, look what I found. You know, there was some, like, rare books in there. But it's all good. You know, it's just getting the books into the hands of the people. Yeah.

[11:30] Jan Johnson: What size of a community is your town?

[11:34] Patricia Baum: Well, when I came there, it was about 3,000, but now it's probably about 8 to 10,000. And there's a lot of what they call extraneiros that might not live down there full time. So it kind of has a high season from like November to May, and then people kind of come and go.

[11:59] Jan Johnson: What part of Mexico is it in?

[12:01] Patricia Baum: It's in Southern Baja. It's in. It's kind of between Cabo and La Paz. It's about equal distance from Cabo or La Paz. Like you have to decide, okay, should we go to Cabo or La Paz? But actually La Paz is kind of better because it's got more options for if you need like sewing supplies or shaders or, you know, whatever. So.

[12:31] Jan Johnson: Yeah, that's a. Yeah, that's a nice size community, I think, you know. I mean.

[12:36] Patricia Baum: Yeah, yeah, it's perfect.

[12:38] Jan Johnson: Not too big and not, you know, not crazy drivers or.

[12:43] Patricia Baum: Yeah, yeah, we have some crazy drivers, but it's okay. And we have whales passing. Gray whales passing by my migrating. And so from like November through maybe February, you can just sit up, sit out on the beach and just see whales. It's really great. Wow. Really, really great. Yeah, yeah. And also it provides there the fishermen, the local fishermen. There's two fishing cooperatives. And so they also are able to do some eco tourism, which is great because ecotourism is just a much less sort of rigorous and stressful. Like, the fishermen have to go out a hundred miles a day, you know, every day. They have to go out in their pongas, which are just little 20 to 30ft, little open boats. They have to go out in the open ocean a hundred miles out to get fish. And so the ecotourism is a good alternative. And so. And the whales are pretty close in, too. You don't have to go way out there. They sort of seem to hug the shores a little bit, or maybe they're probably all over, but we see them, you know, pretty close in, which is great.

[14:05] Jan Johnson: What have been some of the challenges of living down there?

[14:09] Patricia Baum: Well, probably the main challenge is just sort of getting the community to accept you and to get to. Well, it wasn't that hard for me to get into the schools, but I started working in first in the, like, the middle school, and then I would do, like, stuff in the grade school, I started just doing recycling. And I worked at one particular middle school where I would just do, like, a program where I'd go to the school once a week and work with the same classroom. I worked with the same teacher for like 10 or 12 years in a row because he was really great. And then I took one group where I went through the three grades with them and just made the program kind of evolve so it would be more relevant to their. As they were growing up a bit, those middle schoolers that they grow up a lot in those three years, you know, and that's a really good time to kind of influence kids, especially with habits, like habits in their home where they could start, you know, recycling and conserving water and maybe even doing some community service neighborhoods, you know, which. Mexico isn't necessarily a place where people have a lot of civic engagement just because there aren't a lot of Small scale community projects. The ones that are. If they're done by the government, they're usually just sort of one offs, you know. So you get all excited about something and then it just, it was just a one off, you know. So what I tried to do is have some. What's called Sig minento, like continuation, so kids could, you know, okay, well, next year we're going to, you know, we're going to do this. And we went on a lot of field trips. Always we'd go to Cabo Pulmo, which is a place over in the Sea of Cortez that's a national park. And it also has one of the only living reefs in the area. So you can go snorkeling just right off the beach. You don't have to like scuba dive. And there's because it's been a national park for so long where fishing has been prohibited for like 30 years. There's just tons of huge, beautiful fish all over the place. Like it's like an aquarium. So we would go to. And then also there's an island off, off of La Paz called the Isla de Espiritu Santo. And we did a couple of two night trips over there where a boat takes you out to the island and leaves you off. I mean, you got to do a lot of planning because you have to have everything. But we did that a couple times and it was just fantastic. The second time we had like a yoga teacher with us and she'd do. She and her partner would do yoga with us in the morning. And then we were just basically water and prepare food and you know, just ha. And we were always. My projects always involved like journaling and drawing and, you know, just kind of trying to appreciate things and also have some kind of memory of it where you have like your journal, you know, that you were writing or whatever. And we, we'd shoot little videos and take lots of photos. So that was always fun.

[17:59] Jan Johnson: I want to go back to the recycling a little bit. So in a little community like that, were they not recycling before or if you started that, how did you. Where did the things end up that you were recycled or how did that process work?

[18:13] Patricia Baum: Yeah, so no one was really recycling except for maybe people reuse a lot of things here, which is fantastic because there's a real culture that you probably don't want to throw certain things away because you might need them. So there was a lot of reuse of like glass bottles and things like that, especially ones with screw tops. But really there wasn't Any plastics recycling or cardboard or paper. So what I did first was, luckily I had sort of another group that was doing recycling that had also done some research. And there was someone in La Paz who was recycling one, number one, plastic and number two. And so that was the easiest type of plastic to recycle because there was a place for it to go. And so basically, you really don't want to start a recycling program without having a destination for this stuff, because then you're just piling it up, you know, and you might as well just pile it up in your home, you know. So, I mean, I started it in my driveway. And so like once a week people could come bring stuff. But then, because I was working with a group in the sixth grade, I decided to do the recycling project at the school. And it was great. It was fantastic. So this sixth grade class was in charge of the recycling project. And so every Friday people could come bring their stuff and the kids would sort it. And I had the principal on board. And also I had a couple really good volunteers. I had a student from the university who, when you graduate, you need to do like 40 hours of community service in order to get your diploma. So he did his community service with us, and he was just fantastic. And then I had another just local guy who just volunteered and would come enthusiastically every Friday. It's hard when you have to do it again and again and again and you're, you know. And then a local merchant who has a hardware store, he loaned us his big box truck to put to. To deliver the plastic to La Paz, the plastic in the cardboard. But we had. We had really good methodology where we would get these free plastic gunny sacks and we'd put the stomp down plastic in there and then we'd like sew them up. So it was kind of primitive, but then we got these larger containers and that's what. My husband's still involved in recycling in Cascadero. So they have these larger containers that are sort of like, you see cement brought in it. Like a ton of cement. Yeah. And so. But I only got those at the very end. And then also, so the glass went to a different place. If it was clear glass. There's a glass blowing factory in Cabo. And so you could take your glass there. And it was great because they had shelves of seconds that were actually. Some of the things were just beautiful that you could get to pick out a couple of seconds if you brought some glass. And so we do that like on the way to the airport, you know. Yeah. And yeah, so, and then I. One of the, One of the little turtle coloring and not coloring. I don't want to say that, but I made a turtle book. I printed it on the back of a recycled sheets of paper. And, and it was. And that was. Then I had it bound, you know, and I would give that away. But someone that, a very respected turtle person saw that and said, oh, no, we can give you paper. You know, we can actually give you paper to print this on. And I said, no, we don't really want paper. We have paper, you know, so sometimes people just don't completely understand what you're trying to do. But it was always hard to get materials, and that's what led me to. I ended up going and getting my master's at the University of Guadalajara in environmental education. And my thesis was a guide to sea turtles that I. My sort of. The kind of. The motive for my thesis was that young people need regional materials to be able to relate to that. You know what I mean? You can't just say, oh, this is a Mexican turtle guide. No, this was a turtle guide to Baja California. And so that was really important to me, and I had to sort of justify that. So. But it was good, you know, I, I, it wasn't a stretch, you know, it wasn't a big stretch. And luckily there was a lot of, like, anticipated, you know, like, there were many established things. That's part of the theory of constructivism, you know, that you've got to have something to stick the stuff onto, you know? Right. Like your, Your personal experiences or whatever.

[23:43] Jan Johnson: So. Yeah, it's the way the brain works.

[23:46] Patricia Baum: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. You can't just stick stuff. It's. It'll just fall off, you know.

[23:50] Jan Johnson: Exactly, exactly.

[23:53] Patricia Baum: So are we missing. Because it's getting. God, it's almost been a half an hour. I know.

[23:58] Jan Johnson: So tell me. So you're an author. Tell me a little bit of what you write or what you do and.

[24:04] Patricia Baum: Okay. Yeah, yeah, sort of. I started out, you know, just kind of. I always journal. Not, not every day. I'm not one of these fanatical, everyday people, but I usually carry something around to write in. But mostly I started out writing screenplays and, you know, my own. The films that I made when I was at film school were sort of early versions of my kind of, you know, ideas. And. But the screenplays that I've written, since none of them have been produced, I would like to see some of them get produced, but I don't know if that'll ever happen. I wrote a Screenplay about Northwest poets that I wrote poetry for. And that was a lot of fun. Then I kind of branched out into starting to write a book. I'm really into kind of. I don't want to say experimental narrative because that just seems a little too flaky, but I really like narrative that is a little non linear and maybe has some different lines. Threads going in it and maybe they converge and maybe they don't. I started writing a book about a woman who travels in Scotland in the Shetlands, and kind of about some of my experiences. But it's sort of. It kind of. I started with one premise, but then I kind of turned it into something else. But we'll see what happens with that. I'm working on it now. I just. I went to Chile a year ago and I made a hard copy of that manuscript and took it with me. And then just. I would just like take it. Like I'd be sitting somewhere in a cafe. I went on this long ferry ride down through Patagonia. And so I would work on it. I would just. And I put blank pages in there so I'd have pages to write on. So I just made all these notes and really I never got back to putting those notes back together. So it's about. I think I have like 11 chapters, but I am going to have to just go back and revisit it and I need to finish it because I have another idea that I want to. That I want to go forward with. So I also really want to start doing audiobooks. And actually I have one that I. Someone I met in Astoria gave me their book and I'm going to do like a little sample reading of like a chapter for them because that's what I really want to do, is do voiceover.

[27:08] Patricia: I wanted to thank you for inviting me to be on your podcast. It's been really great speaking with you. I'm going to read a poem called Sometimes in the Night. It's one of a series of poems that accompany a screenplay I wrote called Washougal 5 about Northwest poets and the legacy of their work and how important it is. It's also about the oil trains that roll through our towns and sit on our tracks and just sort of our lack of awareness about what they are. And sometimes in the night, Sometimes in the night I feel the ears shake. Not a bomb, not a war Just a train, a black train passing through my dreams through this decaying town. We the people cannot speak. We the people cannot smell the smoke yet we the people let the train rumble by and take our promise away on down the tracks into the night.

[28:26] Jan Johnson: Wow, isn't she an inspiration? I may need to do some traveling to Toto Santos to see all the wonderful things Patricia Baum has done. By the way, my new romance book is out in the big wide world. The Way to My Heart has an adoption theme where the main character seeks her birth mom only to discover both a joy too wonderful to express and a reality too difficult to grasp. It's available on Amazon in ebook and print. Look forward to being with you again next time. In your car while you're doing laundry, taking the dog for a walk, wherever you listen. That's all for today. Did you know it's easy to share an episode with your friends when the podcast is open? Look for three dots, click on them and you'll see various options. You can download the episode, play it next or last, go to the show, save the episode, or copy the link. Isn't technology amazing? Hey, I'm looking forward to you joining me next time. I hope you have a great week.