The Surprising Ways An Off-Grid Beach Life Restored My Soul
I was made for this.
Francesca Zama | Unsplash Moving to Mexico wasn’t Plan A, B, or C. It was Plan “I’m hemorrhaging money and the only way to stop the bleeding is to move somewhere my nervous system and bank account can catch their breath.”
So I loaded up my almost-paid-off 2013 Buick, and with the love of my life nestled in her doggie bed, crossed the southern border with no real strategy except ‘don’t get sick and find shrimp tacos’ (can report: 1 out of 2).
While I officially live in Puerto Peñasco on the northeast corner of the Sea of Cortez, the house I rent is treinta minutos south on a beach so expansive, so private, and so beautiful that I take daily sunrise walks to make sure I’m not imagining it. And it’s empty.
Though people live here, most don’t full-time. So it feels like my own private beach where seagulls, pelicans, cranes, and the occasional curious coyote witness my walking meditations, sandbar exploring, and obsessive shell collecting (along with the conversation that goes with it).
Dean Drobot / Shutterstock
Ooh you’re pretty. Ahh I love this one. Oh you’re definitely coming home with me!
I don’t know what it is about walking a quiet beach to see what the sea has left behind — crabs still in their homes, fish on their last exhale, blobs of jelly fish too risky to touch, each tide coming in a game of Tag (You’re it!), each tide going out leaving a cornucopia of various colored shells behind…
But my belief in magic has been restored. Along with saving me thousands in billed therapy hours.
Only a ten-minute walk from the beach, over the dunes and through the sand to mi casa we go…
Some of the houses here have electricity. Some, like mine, do not and are “off grid,” running on batteries juiced up by solar panels. Make no mistake — the sun is in charge here. And I worship it at the altar of every plug.
Ancient civilizations saw the sun as a god, and honestly, I get it now. When Earth spins me away from it and I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Sun my batteries to keep.
With the added blessing of no utility bill. Speaking of bills, the lack of them has had such a profound effect on my mental health that I’ve stopped waking up in the middle of the night in a financial sweat.
Water costs around $30 each month. Propane costs $100 but lasts several months. Wi-Fi is included in the rent, which is a whopping 20,000 pesos. Or 1,000 American dollars if you still use those.
Run down, outdated appliances, mold in the walls, questionable carpet history, loud neighbors … That’s what you might be looking at in the States for 1k a month.
But aquí? Think beautifully furnished 1,500 square foot Spanish hacienda with palapas on every patio and windows on all sides to let the ocean breeze travel through.
And it’s not just a house. Because it lacks the “overhead” of what I used to pay in American rent, these four stucco walls don’t suffocate me or witness weekly meltdowns with every payment due. Instead, the space once taken up by stress is now filled with me, creative, hardworking, restful, playful, peaceful me.
Living more, surviving on less
Whatever new task I undertake in the land of “tacos rule/schedules drool” is yet one more opportunity to realize what I’m made of and made for. My Gen-X roots have been prepping me since childhood for exactly this.
Turns out, I’m no different than the barefoot, sunburned, semi-feral, weather-be-whatever kid who ran her way through every next adventure. Only now, instead of coming home when the streetlights turn on and drinking from a garden hose, I’m driving a Razor at midnight to make sure the starter works in emergencies and hauling gallons of water like I’m training for an Olympic weightlifting event.
Where I used to name the squirrels in the front yard, now I name the coyotes who follow me around like I owe them money (did Columbia House Record Club send you?). Oh, and just yesterday I learned how to hotwire a generator.
Other shifts from the five-month-ago American me to today’s Gringa: My hair looks and feels better than ever on a water-conservation diet and $4 conditioner.
asife / Shutterstock
My closet contains only the clothes and shoes I could fit in my car when I moved here, yet I never run out of things to wear. My stomach and organs are happy with their processed-free intake that puts the truth back in “all natural.”
And with a $3 price tag on 18 eggs, 75 cents for an avocado, and the occasional crab tostada from the nearby oyster farm, my wallet’s happy too. This isn’t to say I haven’t had my share of setbacks.
Though I did find the shrimp tacos I was looking for, I also had a crippling bout of Montezuma’s Revenge that landed me in a Mexican hospital. The ambulance ride so bumpy, with no belt to keep me from bouncing on the gurney, the EMT was unsuccessful in her five attempts to put an IV in, and I arrived bruised and bloody to the doctor who promised he would “impregnate” me with medicine to stop the vomiting.
Moral of the story?
This was my worst fear moving to Mexico, so not only did I get it out of the way, I survived and now have a funny story to tell.
The free ambulance ride being the cherry on top of that story. No matter the día, I’m all in on this quest to revive every part of me that disassociated from the American dream turned nightmare I was living— or I should say dying — within.
Gone are the $200 grocery bills, the boatload of streaming services to spend an hour figuring out what to watch, the 2 a.m. voices that warned financial ruin was imminent, the long lines and wait times for everything, the dental cleanings only a credit card could afford, and the unnecessary doctor visits to refill a prescription I’ve been taking for years.
- Now I load up my grocery cart with every color in the produce aisle and still spend under ten bucks.
- With only two of my previous six streaming services available in Mexico, I not only spend less but, like my Gen-X childhood with only three channels total, have plenty to watch.
- Sometimes I still wake up at 2 a.m. but only because of the crashing waves against the shore, the yips of the coyotes, or the full moon shining in my bedroom window — all of which act as a warm embrace and lull me back into deep, restful sleep.
- No long lines here. No wait times. For anything.
- I finally made it to the dentist, who, with the help of his assistant, gave me one of the best cleanings I’ve ever had for $60, including x-rays.
- No need for an extra doctor visit to refill my prescriptions. No extra lab work or appointment required. I simply bring an empty bottle of my thyroid medication to the farmacia, show it to the person behind the counter, and voila — a 90-day supply for $7.
Okay, sure, each pill was double the dose I needed. But no problema when I have a cutting board and scissors at home to Walter White each pill in half. Also no problema: no mail, no Amazon.
It took only a week living here to realize how much better life is without either. There is something wildly poetic about existing away from tracking codes.
Even Google can’t pin me down and claims I’m somewhere in the blue sea whenever I follow a sandbar out to where the pelicans hold their morning meetings. When I moved to Mexico, I thought I was running away from an America I could no longer keep up with.
I thought I was the problem — giving up and crying Tío. Now I see the only thing I gave up was my pair of running shoes, the soles worn out from a race I don’t remember signing up for.
As a Gen-Xer, I was built for this life I’m creating now — an off-grid middle finger to “the way to do things,” where I call the shots instead of anxiety planning every day for me.
With the quiet reminder as I figure stuff out, that I’ve got this. One sun-charged day at a time.
Suzanna Quintana is the founder of the Online Sanctuary for Healing After Narcissistic Abuse and the author of the Amazon bestselling book, You're Still That Girl: Get Over Your Abusive Ex for Good.
