The Coyote's Bicycle (10 page)

“People in the valley are quite reserved and skeptical at first,” she said on the telephone. “I would go visit on occasion so that I could reach them immediately if there was an emergency.”

That emergency potential was rich. The Pacific Ocean offered any number of unexpected stories, be it disabled vessels, smugglers, or natural phenomena—like giant waves, creatures, or sea rise. Amazing things washed up and, often, familiar things washed away. But then there were the immigration patterns, the specter of terrorists crossing from Mexico, and, in recent years, the largest buildup of border security in the history of the United States. Driving past horse ranches, community plots, organic farms, and wild wetlands, one expects the weather stories; the international intrigue seemed, well, so foreign.

A thin strip of bleached country asphalt divides the Gomez property. Thirty acres of flat agricultural land extend north in a patchwork of fields that halts at a wall of dark thickets on the riverbank. The remaining eight acres rise with the border highlands to the south of Monument Road. Zúñiga passed the Kimzey place and then the Martíns' farm, a parcel that had once belonged to a Japanese family that was said to have been interned during World War II. As she rounded the bend in the road at Smuggler's Gulch, Zúñiga caught the old Monterey cypress and pine trees that framed the Gomezes' stucco farmhouse. A barn, with its tin roof caving in, slumped like an auto wreck on the western edge of the farm. Zúñiga passed a small plot of dark brown earth that was sometimes topped with bright orange pumpkins, sometimes with deep red strawberries. Here, she turned off onto a dirt lane and parked next to a little plywood shack that served as the farm stall when the berries arrived. Stepping out into the ocean air, Zúñiga noticed something that she hadn't caught during her last visit. Was it a rummage sale? No. But maybe it was something close. “There were bicycles all over the property,” she said. “Upright and in rows, everywhere.”

Zúñiga found the farmer, Jesse Gomez, a man in his fifties. He wore knee-high rubber waders, jeans, and a canvas camouflage jacket.

“Hey Jesse, are you starting a bike collection?” she asked.

The taciturn man paused; his sleepy brown eyes were so light they appeared almost a dark yellow. He looked up at the highlands across the street. Then, in his slow drawl, he told her what he knew—which wasn't much more than what she could see for herself: bicycles, just about everywhere.

“The first few bikes, that was exciting,” he said when I later caught up with him. “But then it's like, ‘Oh, we gotta go pick 'em up.'”

A cobbled track cuts the green hill, covered in manzanita and wild sage, all belonging to the farm. Gomez kept the gate open to give recreational horse riders and Border Patrol access to the mesa above. Sometime around 2007, however, as Gomez lay in bed, he began to hear what sounded “sometimes like cascading water, and sometimes almost like horses trotting.” The sound seemed to be roiling down the hill, his house in its path. Soon enough, he realized what it was.

“There'd be fifteen riders at a time—two, three times a night.”

Gomez's son, David, wandered over. He said the traffic set a family routine. “We'd get up for work in the morning, and we'd see shiny spots on the hill. I'd go up and collect at least twenty bikes a day.”

The family heard motor vehicles in the night too, and they figured that some of the cyclists were getting picked up. They'd just ditch their bikes on the property and hop into a van. But in the daytime, Jesse and David would also see people who “just looked illegal” pedaling bikes. Once, Jesse watched a familiar cycling club ride Monument Road to the beach, a passing whir of color. On their way back out of the valley, he spotted a lone rider in work clothes turn from a dirt lane out of one of the canyons, and then merge into the pack as they sprinted off toward the I-5 freeway. Some of the migrants might have been picked up by people on horseback, as had happened in the past with foot crossers. But there were obviously migrants who
rode out to the river as well, leaving bikes on the banks before wading through the wetlands and into the north.

“It was like an explosion,” Gomez said.

Jesse and David didn't hunt bikes off of their own property and they didn't sell the ones they found. The wheels just presented themselves, to a point of annoyance. A bearded Border Field State Park ranger once stopped by in a pickup and off-loaded bikes he'd found, as if their place were the depot. Then again, Jesse Gomez did come upon his neighbor, Terry Tynan, who looked to be scavenging on the Gomez hillside. “Matter of fact, I had to kick him off the property,” Gomez said.

The phenomenon did not dissolve the rules of the neighborhood. Picking things up wasn't new. There had always been backpacks and excess clothing tossed aside by passers-through. Plastic shopping bags fluttering on the road's shoulder contained hairbrushes, razors, soap, deodorant, makeup—everyday toiletries essential for long trips. These packages likely belonged to migrants who'd been intercepted. Abandoned items read as clear and simple descriptions of the neighborhood's nighttime traffic. But this latest trend brought something else in its wake: looky-loos, people covetous of anything free, people crazy about bikes.

By the time Zúñiga discovered the bicycles on the Gomez place, the family had already donated a big batch to Father Joe's, a homeless services provider in downtown San Diego. Extended family members had been outfitted with the appropriate bikes. Jesse Gomez's immediate family all liked the beach cruisers. Which was not a problem; they'd been descending into the valley for nearly two years. But the best bicycles—GTs and Treks—had been donated to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. These bikes had been specifically selected for the young Mormon missionaries who rode them house to house spreading the gospel. Gomez was proud of the fact that he could outfit them, because he believed he had benefited from the
missionaries' teachings himself. It was an image I particularly liked, too. Clean-cut young men in white shirts and dark ties coasting along on bikes that had violated the sovereignty of the United States—wheels that had served one pilgrimage now serving another.

Zúñiga's piece was titled “A Vehicle for Quick Crossing.” At the heart of her reporting was this sentence: “No one is sure exactly when the border-bike phenomenon began or why.” These were probably the two most important questions to be found in the front-page story. But they went unanswered. And even the nascent search for clues seemed to become muted and lost amid all the shiny new artifacts in the valley—simple queries drowned in the hubbub emitted by people attracted to the bikes themselves.

“After that newspaper story came out,” Gomez said, “we just got flooded with people looking for bikes, looking for parts, just looking, looking.”

Tall and thin with her gray hair pulled into a tight knot at the nape of her neck, Maria Teresa Fernandez presented a quiet, almost reverential disposition. Her elegantly accented English and way of choosing artistic metaphors extended the impression—it was an aura that served her work as much as it contrasted with the hardscrabble landscape she delved into. After years of watching the boundary between the United States and Mexico with fascination, the heart surgeon's wife found an unlikely calling in documenting life along the gritty frontier through photographs. The terrain of her milieu included the mountainous Otay section, the dense urban center at San Ysidro, and finally the coastal bluffs, and the beach. There was a lot of driving, walking, and hiking involved. Just to get to the border-adjacent state park she visited every weekend required a mile-and-a-half trek through scrub and sand. When the Department of Homeland Security began construction of the new sea fence extending into the Pacific, access to the public American
beach was closed. So every day Fernandez drove into Tijuana, and through town to Playas de Tijuana, where she could walk up and lay a hand on the very same construction.

By the time I met Fernandez, she'd been photographing various aspects of the boundary for a dozen years. She said, “Anything that touches the wall, I want to document.” There was everyday graffiti as well as professional artwork: sculptures made of coffins and white crosses representing the numbers of fallen migrants. The Playas portion was a favored canvas. One artist had simply painted the metal pylons of the fence the same blue as the San Diego sky. Viewed at a distance from the Mexican side, there appeared to be no fence at all.

For the purposes of Fernandez's work, however, the detritus of the clandestine traffic—and the increasing fortifications to prevent it—were even more potent symbols.

“I've been able to see a lot of things, watching this living, growing entity. And I have this need to keep in touch with [the wall] all of the time,” Fernandez explained. “It's as with any relationship—there is a certain point when you think you understand all there is to know about that person. But that point is just the beginning. The relationship continues. And that's how it is with me and the wall, because the wall just grows and grows.”

Certainly, it was true that Fernandez caught the border complex at what she called “a special moment.” In her career, the steel and concrete that constituted the fortifications changed textures and sometimes crumbled. There were barnacles and mussels attached to it at the ocean. She'd found a hole in a thin and rusting steel section and pulled crumbling pieces away so she could stick her camera through and make a photo. But mostly, through the efforts of government contractors with their heavy equipment, the wall only became taller and wider and thicker.

Recently, she'd passed through two checkpoints to get to the formerly open area at Friendship Park, dedicated by Pat Nixon in 1971
in a gesture of national kinship. The park is centered around the border monument set in place in 1851. This area was where Fernandez had made some of her most successful images—including photos of Mexican Americans picnicking at the beach fence with their Mexican relatives, or lovers, sitting on the other side. One of them depicts a man seated under a colored umbrella laughing so hard he's brought his hands to his ears to stop the words he's hearing. On the opposite side of the steel pylons, a woman's head is upraised and howling too. Whatever was said struck the family as so hilarious, the pylons of the wall virtually disappeared. Yet in 2012, as Fernandez was ushered through a new eighteen-foot-tall steel gate that had been erected around Pat Nixon's park, a Mexican looking through the fence said to her, “Hey, who do you think is more free? You in America, or me over here? You are being guarded by men with guns. I just walked over from the taco cart.”

As a kind of resident artist of the boundary, Fernandez has hosted a number of delegations from other parts of the United States and abroad. A group of German filmmakers came to document the border wall, and Fernandez offered them a tour. They viewed local neighborhoods, artworks by renowned artists, and sites of infamous incidents. Fernandez told stories about her encounters with the crossers and the things they left behind. Once, on the Mexican side, she came upon a migrant camp that looked recently vacated. Searching for images to take, she spotted a bag with a young woman's things tumbling out: lipstick, eyeliner, candies. Inside, she found a girlish diary, and turning to the last page, Fernandez read the line: “As soon as I get to America, I'm going to start losing weight.” On the American side, Fernandez encountered a man in his forties with his young son at his side. They'd come because the man's father, a Mexican citizen now in his eighties, had traveled by bus for two days to stand alone on Tijuana soil and attempt a reunification through the fence. It was the father and son's first meeting in thirty years. The grandson was introduced.

“Do you see what you did for me?” the younger man said to his father. “You taught me to work hard, and look, here is my son—named after you. He goes to school and he speaks English, too.”

For her German guests, Fernandez also explained her idea of the wall as a living thing, adding, finally, “But like any living, breathing animal, I want the wall to die as well.”

The Germans considered this idea. One of them said, “You know, we didn't think the Berlin Wall would ever come down until it came down all at once. The death of a boundary is possible.”

“I hope it happens here, too. In my career,” she said.

It struck me that Fernandez could have done anything with her time. She was a woman of class and means, and the border was neither a pleasant or safe place to be. Not only was Fernandez's fascination with the wall odd, so was her relationship with it. She had dedicated her life to noting and archiving its various nuances. There was a heat and a passion to her work. And yet she wanted the wall to cease to exist as well. It was if she'd been inordinately enthralled by the growth and mutation of a tumor, had devoted her life to chronicling it, but desperately hoped for a cure at the same time. What would she do if this thing were gone? Twelve years of stalking a beast is time enough to fall for it.

In the interim, Fernandez spent her days bent low, clicking the shutter on items like baseball caps in the dirt—likely lost in a sprint. Shoes were stuck in mud, or hung from the wall itself. Rope ladders were tossed aside. Handmade things that fit the bodies who wore them sat like empty shells. Her face to the camera, the lens to the wall, she always looked close.

Maybe this is why the first few times she became aware of cyclists along trails in the distance, this chronicler of small detail didn't stop to let the sight sink in. People on bikes, it's an everyday occurrence. Maybe these riders were dressed like
campesinos
, Fernandez recalled, but . . . She did catch the curious sight of an adult pedaling feverishly
down a track on a child's bike; the revolutions made by the grown-up knees and ankles on the tiny pedals and cranks came to her like an unexpected joke. But it wasn't until Fernandez arrived at Border Field State Park—and found herself on the edge of a significant pile of bicycles accumulated in the dirt parking area—that one of the park's staff ambled up to explain where they'd come from in the same measured, scientific way he might elucidate the sudden appearance of a whale carcass. Her latent memory of crossers on bikes came back to her then. This transnational cycling in plain view, so smooth and forgettable in its arrival, caused her to wonder if the activity was organized or spontaneous to the point of performance. Did its consistency signal something else, something bigger? Migrants, Maria Teresa Fernandez knew through experience, tended to do what worked.