HUNTINGTON BEACH : Baja Magic Still Strong for Writer

For Tom Miller, Baja California’s Mexico Highway, also known as La Carretera Transpeninsular Benito Juarez, wasn’t just another strip of asphalt. It became his 1,000-mile oasis.

But Miller, described by Southern California sports and travel writers as “the man who knows Baja best,” travels no more. Miller, 64, of Huntington Beach, has been found to have incurable lung cancer.

Now, on the 20th anniversary of that famous Mexican highway, most of Miller’s traveling isn’t in a Jeep loaded with gas cans headed up some rattlesnake-infested canyon. It’s to a hospital.

“My dad was always looking for stones to roll over and look under,” Miller said Wednesday. “We were raised in the San Diego area and we would always go on Sunday drives camping along the Baja beaches.”

Miller, his cancer diagnosed 18 months ago, shifted his daily regimen from writing and traveling to only dreaming of watching a Mexican sunset--palm trees swaying, gentle Pacific breezes playing off the porch of some hideaway villa.

In his library are copies of his books. “The Baja Book,” which is in its third edition, has sold 189,000 copies and is considered a must for the traveler’s glove compartment. But he also has written other books on Baja, including the “Angler’s Guide to Baja California.”

And just last year, two weeks before doctors said he had cancer, he and his wife, Carol Hoffman, who shares writing duties with him, published “Mexico West Book,” a 420-page road and recreation guide to Mexico’s western states, where the couple drove 25,000 miles over two years.

Novice tourists who attempt the long route from Tijuana down to Cabo San Lucas oten find the journey boring as panoramas of rocky hillsides dotted with cacti give way to more rocky hillsides and cacti.

But for Miller and his wife, the region has always had that magic, which he sometimes describes as the “solitary experience.”

The Millers have selected many parts of Mexico as their personal paradise. They own a condominium near Manzanillo and property near Cabo San Lucas.

“The problem I’ve had with the cancer is that I couldn’t travel. It’s been about a year since we went anywhere. It’s not operable, and it comes from dust particles, the kind of lung cancer associated with breathing asbestos,” Miller said.

He believes, as do his doctors, that the disease had its origins in his work in an Idaho smelter in the late 1940s. He did smoke cigarettes infrequently but quit seven years ago.

He had a recent operation in which doctors inserted a lengthy tube that allows a dosage of painkiller to drip into his spinal column from a tiny pump. He said the cancer cells were attacking the lining of the lungs and nerve cells in the thoracic area.

The treatment has been “a success so far and really I’ve never seen him feel better in over a year,” his wife said.

It is in Miller’s descriptions of the Mexican land and its people that listeners and readers are transported to an isolated cove, a majestic mountain or a great fishing spot.

As an example, he described an early vacation home he once had built southeast of La Paz.

“We used to stay there three months at a time and it had a large thatched roof. Just a palapa. It represents to me the most beautiful spot in Mexico because it had a coral reef right off the beach in front. We used to dive in warm water and fish off the reef. Now that cove is a national park,” Miller said.

“Can you imagine it? It was near the Tropic of Cancer and the water never went below 70 degrees. It was just wonderful. . . .”