The Coyote's Bicycle (4 page)

Days later, when Solo stepped off the red, white, and blue bus from Mexico City—wearing trousers, a worn linen shirt, huarache sandals, and a cowboy hat—he was nearly knocked over by the hustle of the bus station. He took in the gleaming floors and bright ticket counters. He saw women in uniforms. He saw the people in fine clothing. And at some point, Solo noticed a short, dark man in square black sunglasses, standing still among all the travelers hurrying to and fro. This figure wore a loose-fitting T-shirt untucked over baggy canvas pants, and spotless black tennis shoes with bold white stripes. The man made a low whistle.

“Pablito,” Solo said, “you are a
cholo
now!”

2

It took a flood. My interest in the world's most crossed international border zone—a sprawling complex not thirty minutes' drive from my doorstep—was piqued only after it lay under a blanket of water. When Americans talk about a flood of marijuana or cocaine or methamphetamines or migrants or violence pouring over the boundary with Mexico, it's for rhetorical effect. With the use of the word
flood
, journalists and politicians mean to say “a larger than normal volume” of something. To put this idea into perspective, our southern border is nearly two thousand dusky, desert miles long—two-thirds the length of the United States, half the span of the Great Wall of China, almost a third of the circumference of the moon. Its parched landscape of surging mountains and mesas could absorb all the drugs of Colombia and, for that matter, all of its rain forests too. It is a place one can walk into and keep on walking into.

But on a micro-level, the canyon lands of the Southwest do struggle under bursts of rainfall over short periods of time. So what the metaphor makers have missed is that ours is a region prone not only to drought but to real deluge as well—unexpected walls of water that come quick and serious. The winter flood that caught my attention brought several forty-foot Dumpsters' worth of used tires floating
with it. The receding waters of the Tijuana River left tires hanging from branches like kids' tree swings. American-made rubber clogged drainage ditches, got stuck under bridges. Black, steel-belted donuts were strewn throughout a half-dozen American horse ranches. But the odd thing about this situation was: it wasn't all that unusual.

Some estimate the flood cycle at seventeen years. But heavy rains do sometimes fall in consecutive years, even in a string of them. Clogged culverts, riffraff stuck under bridges, sluices and ditches that go unmaintained—all have allowed relatively minor rains to turn into disasters. In worst-case scenarios, reservoirs and dams fail. It doesn't always happen in the same manner or at the same portion of the waterway or, for that matter, in the same country. It always makes for a surreal scene. In 1895, the cast-iron obelisk called Monument 255, a pillar commissioned by Congress to mark the international boundary at San Ysidro, was caught by currents, washed away, and buried. In 1916 and 1927, storm water caused the often dry Tijuana River to swell to a mile wide, the Far West's replica of the Mississippi. The Mexican customs house was destroyed twice. The region's first church was pushed off its foundation. The bridge to San Diego collapsed three times. Tijuana's original horse track, and its famous multistory mountain of manure, were simply washed away—the manure hillock receding whole like an island in the rear view of an ocean liner. In a Mexican neighborhood butted against the boundary, a flash flood caused a landslide that carried several houses down with it. One of them was full of paper money. Neighbors jumped into the brown river to rescue the notes. In the United States, a commune of farmers called the Little Landers was completely wiped out. One hundred families were left homeless in a matter of hours. There were bloating dead horses and cows and snakes. A dairyman complained of having to milk his surviving cows under water. A raft of wooden casks filled with Mexican wine once washed clear into the San Diego Bay. Local boat crews were seen fishing
them out of the brackish water. An observer noted, “The casks were well made, so I bet there was plenty of good wine left inside.”

In 2008, an assignment to cover yet another incident involving flood and debris brought me to the Tijuana River Valley and the borderline. I was asked to document the recurring nuisance of these mysterious car tires and how it was that they so consistently ended up in the Pacific Ocean. At the heart of the reporting was the fact that, even though the tires came floating into the United States from Mexico, they weren't Mexican tires at all. California's drivers had paid good money to have their used tires properly disposed of—recycled even. These tires had gone through the legal channels. But there they were, scads of animated and willful Dunlops with the directional sense of snow geese.

As the Tijuana River enters the United States from Mexico, its northwesterly run elbows straight west toward the ocean. The valley that holds the river then spreads out like a fan. Saltwater marsh rolls away from the channel flat and green. Recessed in the tidal lands, snaking waterways meander through oxbows and torpid shallows up to the banks of a small town called Imperial Beach. A few farms and ranches occupy the southern shore of the riverbank. Then, across Monument Road, tan, chalky palisades surge three hundred feet from the valley floor and stagger parallel to the river and wetlands. From the ranches below, this escarpment looks like a fortification of sorts—not all, but most of the high ground was ceded to Mexico in 1848.

It was hard to believe, driving along Monument Road, that one of Mexico's fastest-growing cities simmered just on the other side of this rise. The country beyond the windshield looked every bit of rural California: towering green juniper served as windbreaks along property lines, sycamores shaded ranch houses. Beefy trucks towed horse trailers. It was so American there was no need for the frequent flags.

I rode shotgun in environmentalist Ben McCue's
SUV
. The thirty-year-old looked just about what the last name would suggest: curly blond hair, a sprinkle of freckles, a lean Irishman. McCue liked to be awed by natural or extra-normal events; he liked to be bowled over by volume and numbers and synchronicity. For the oddities produced by this strange valley, his temperament was a perfect fit. Luckily for my story, he also knew a lot about wayward car tires.

“When I bought my last set of new tires,” he said as we eased through a curve in the tree-shaded road, “I paid an environmental fee of $1.75 for each one. By state law, that buck seventy-five is supposed to follow that specific tire through its life span and aid in its eventual recycling or disposal. But I also paid the shop a ‘disposal fee' of $2.50 for each of the used tires I left with them. I could have taken the worn tires home with me and skipped the shop's disposal fee, but they would have just taken up space and I would have had to throw them out anyhow. I could have driven on that set a few more miles, but for safety, I let them go. There are over thirty million registered motorcycles, cars, and trucks on California's roads, nearly a vehicle for every person in the state. But neither the state nor the shops have the capacity to recycle or dispose of all of those tires.”

“So where do they go?” I asked.

“You'll see,” he said with smirk. “A lot of them go to Mexico.”

McCue and I had met in Spain years before. He was studying at a north coast university. I was covering the European leg of a professional surfing tour for American sports magazines. The pay was so low that I traveled in a class with students, backpackers, and bearded men who slept in parking lots. McCue's roommate, Zach Plopper, happened to be a professional surfer from California, and on account of that connection the three of us formed a rollicking fan club of Spanish food, wine, and waves. We surfed windblown beaches on the North Atlantic. We each carried an empty wine bottle to be refilled by local vintners. I drove a hot-wired silver Peugeot with no
registration or known owner. It had just been handed down surfer to surfer, year after year. On departure, I left the Peugeot with an Aussie surfer in France. Instead of keys, I handed over the screwdriver that opened the door. Following that season, McCue and I lost touch. I learned that he'd found work as an environmentalist on the boundary about the time I received a series of magazine assignments concerning pollution and development issues in Mexico. McCue's was an easy call to make.

“What usually happens is that the tires I paid a disposal fee to get rid of are sold to a tire-hauling middleman who takes them across the border. The tires I left with the dealer weren't bad, they just wouldn't have been safe for much longer. But that gap, between safe and impossible, is what Baja California drives on. The middlemen sell their load to tire shops called
llanteras
. Most likely, my tires were put on a car owned by a regular Mexican driver for a fraction of the cost of a new set.”

There was actually a guru of this used tire business. According to a 2009 study led by Paul Ganster, director of the Institute for Regional Studies of the Californias at San Diego State University, the state of Baja California accepts about 750,000 used tires as legal imports per year, but a significant volume is also imported “informally.” This usually means tires are slipped into Mexico through the noncommercial lanes on flatbeds or in vans and personal trucks. Another eighty thousand tires cross the border attached to vehicles destined for the scrap heap. To add to the mess, tires hauled from Oregon, Nevada, and Arizona that are never unloaded in California never get counted. All of these tires don't carry the drivers of Baja as far as they might, either. Owing to the quality of the roads, tires have to be replaced frequently. The state of Baja has no real way to deal with what are now “waste tires.” The stacks that appear in open lots and along waterways like the Tijuana River are called “legacy piles.” These often catch on fire and emit acrid black smoke for weeks; water collects in their wells and
mosquitoes take up residence. Tires don't like to be buried in the dump, either. Because they don't biochemically degrade, tires almost magically shimmy up as layers of landfill settle around them over time. When it rains, those waste tires float, most often downstream.

“That $2.50 I paid to have my used tires disposed of only covered the gas money to get them to Mexico,” McCue said, “but the Tijuana River will bring them back for free. And that $1.75 environmental fee, it was added to a fund that grows by about $40 million a year with nowhere to go.”

“This valley is forgotten,” hollered Dick Tynan. He'd stepped down from his tractor. The machine coughed one last belch of smoke, sputtered, and died, but Tynan was still yelling above its roar. “We've picked up five hundred tires already. Some spots are this deep in it,” he said, pointing to his waist.

From Monument Road, McCue had turned onto a dirt lane and into the Kimzey Ranch, a historic parcel at the foot of Smuggler's Gulch. Adjacent to the hundred-year-old ranch house was a barn with its doors thrown open. This is where we found Dick and his son Terry. As Dick parked the tractor, Terry migrated over from some outbuildings. Together, they looked like facsimiles of the same man at different ages—white T-shirts and blue jeans, ample bellies, slack shoulders, breast pockets taut with packages of Marlboro Lights. Their postures gave the impression that they'd been molded from river clay. Both had burned necks and stubble on their faces; Dick's was white and Terry's salt-and-pepper. Dick wore his hair loose—a white Beatles cut from that period just before the band turned hippie. The bangs framed piercing blue eyes. Terry's were shaded by a stained baseball cap that read
INTIMIDATOR
. But the nose was the same straight short nose as his father's. They withdrew their Marlboro Lights and tapped the filters on the packages with what looked like a practiced synchronization.

Nearby stood a forty-foot Dumpster that was slowly being filled. McCue pointed out that this was just one of the ranches in the river's path. Once the tires crossed back into the United States, they were immediately designated as toxic waste. Instead of costing $2.50 each to dispose of, the price was now estimated at twenty dollars. This was why Dick and Terry were out collecting the flood tires themselves.

Dick Tynan had married into one of the few remaining horse ranches in the valley. The Kimzey place got its start raising thoroughbreds for the action at Tijuana's Agua Caliente track. This was not a lonely business in the early part of the twentieth century. Until Santa Anita opened near Los Angeles in 1935, the Agua Caliente Handicap had been the premier event in North America. Gambling was the big draw. Even in the trough of the Great Depression first place garnered a purse of $23,000 or, adjusted for inflation, nearly $400,000 today. Dozens of stables and breeding operations occupied the American side. Famous actors and horses passed through on their way to Tijuana's casino and race track. Movie star cowboy Roy Rogers' famous palomino Trigger (originally called Golden Cloud) was acquired from the rodeo grounds right down the street. Actor Jay Silverheels, who played Tonto in
The Lone Ranger
television series from 1949-1957, boarded race horses in the valley. At the eastern end of the floodplain, San Francisco automobile magnate Charles S. Howard built a stable that housed, among other champions, Seabiscuit, arguably the most celebrated thoroughbred in American racing history.

Now, ranches like the Kimzey place got by renting stalls to urban horse owners who liked to take slow rides through the wetlands, down the beach, and up the mesas. Many of the renters, however, were tired of getting flooded out. Horses had even drowned on the Kimzey place. In this way, environmental issues had become a major concern for the mostly conservative ranchers. As a leader in a local river valley
association, Dick had worked with Ben McCue on a number of these problems. (Later Dick would tell me, “The original horsemen in the valley thought the surfers [professional environmentalists] were assholes, but we've linked up on the environment deal and it's been all right.”) Each flood seemingly brought their interests closer into alignment. So when McCue and I rolled up, there were no greetings, really, just grievances couched as lists and updates. When Dick said this valley was forgotten, I understood that he meant in the eyes of city government. But we all knew it went deeper.