A visit to Molar City

I am what you might call an American homebody. Though I have visited forty-seven states and plan to visit the remaining three -- Alaska, Hawaii, and North Dakota, I know where you live -- I have ventured beyond the borders of the United States only nine times.

On all but one occasion, I made a short trip, a day trip, to Victoria or Vancouver, Canada. My exotic world travels were limited to two cities in British Columbia.

This week, I branched out and added a country. I visited Los Algodones, Mexico, a postage stamp of a town tucked in the far northeast corner of Baja California. Located about ten miles west of Yuma, Arizona, just south of Interstate 8, it is one of the most accessible and interesting communities on the U.S.-Mexico border.

Known as Molar City, Algodones has one of the highest concentrations of dentists in the world. More than 350 dentists operate in the town of 5,000 people, as well as numerous plastic surgeons, optometrists, and pharmacies. One cannot walk ten feet in the city's downtown without seeing a sign, a building, or a person touting dental services.

Though I passed up a molar extraction and root canal on this visit, I did not pass up many of the shops, restaurants, and cantinas. When in Rome, you order authentic beef tacos and milkshake-sized margaritas and give the street vendors' shiny wares a second look.

I hope to return to this little corner of Mexico sometime when the temperature is below 110 degrees and the city, which had largely shut down for the summer, puts on its winter face. Until then, there are more places to visit and bucket-list items to check.

Remembering a summer

The best summer of my life began on a winter day. Like countless other Oregon college students in 1983, I spent much of that winter looking for interesting summer employment, and on February 11, I found it. That's when I received an offer to work at a boys camp in Maine.

Never mind that I had never traveled east of the Rockies or that the pay barely covered my travel expenses. I wanted to head east in search of adventure. So I did. In June, I boarded a jet (another first), flew to New England, and began an experience I would never forget.



The camp itself was a sight. With more than fifty buildings, including cabins, offices, a dining hall, activity shacks, and a pavilion for movies and stage performances, it was a small city. During the summer, campers and counselors could participate in dozens of activities, including archery, karate, scuba, sailing, waterskiing, and golf.

Then there was the staff. More than eighty counselors, representing 28 states and six countries, including Australia, South Africa, and Britain, came to Maine that summer. So did several hundred boys, ages 6 to 16, who came from some of the wealthiest families in the Northeast.

Most counselors were specialists who led activities and programs. Others, like me, were general counselors who escorted groups of campers from station to station. All of us managed cabins, with one to three other counselors, during the course of the eight-week session.

Though 36 years have passed since that summer, when I participated in several campouts, operated a sailboat for the first time, and finally got up on skis, it remains fresh in my mind. I made friends from around the world, tried a host of new activities, and mentored boys who looked up to their counselors like the big brothers many did not have.

Many of our efforts went unrewarded. Others did not. Later that year, just before Christmas, a New York woman, the mother of a deeply introverted nine-year-old boy, thanked me for teaching her son to ride a bike. Her letter remains one of my most treasured possessions.

This summer I will honor that summer by putting countless memories to thousands of words. I hope to finish a first draft of Camp Lake, set mostly in Maine in 1983, by Labor Day. The fifth and final novel in the Carson Chronicles series is still set for a January 2020 release.