The Coyote's Bicycle (7 page)

The normally dry hillsides of the Tijuana River Valley were dusted in new shoots of green. In a month or two, wildflowers would flash across the earth. The distance between this desert tableland and the people designing its fate in Washington couldn't have been farther. But McCue could see influence-peddling and well-honed statecraft behind rocks and boulders. He parked on the edge of a bluff—a thin strip of the highlands that belonged to the United States. As we stepped out of the truck, an osprey caught an updraft into the sky. Small mammals scurried into the scrub. You could point a finger at the general source of the Tijuana River in the Laguna Mountains and another where the water spilled into the sea. Everything was visible and still this was an opaque and strange place to be. Despite the rambling hills of cholla cactus and chaparral, the ocean vista and the soaring quiet, I experienced a sensation of being both remote and surveilled. For good reason—McCue and I were, in fact, being
watched. Border Patrol agents crisscrossed the state and county parks that constituted this public space. They drove trucks, jeeps, and quads. They put the glass to everything that moved. On the way up, an agent in a white-and-green truck flagged us down. McCue produced a business card and exchanged small talk. He flashed an advocate's smile. The agent drove a small distance away, but continued to observe.

I assumed this had to do with the national terror alert level. It was set at yellow,
elevated
, as it had been for the past five years. And as on most days, nobody really knew why. No indication in the environment seemed to separate the yellow threat from a blue,
guarded
, or even a green,
low
—the two designations that were never applied. Yellow carried implications, however. Citizens were to be “alert for suspicious activity,” more so than they might have been at blue. Authorities were charged with a “closer” monitoring of international borders. The ranks of Border Patrol agents doubled during the George W. Bush administration, and Customs and Border Protection grew to be the largest law-enforcement agency in the nation—so there was an extreme amount of monitoring capability. Which explains how it was that, as McCue and I were alert to the suspicious activity of the lizards and hawks in the county park, an agent watched us through binoculars. It explains
how
the agent had the time and resources to observe regular citizens in a park, but not
why
. And this, because
CBP
was also one of the least open or transparent agencies in the government, was something we'd never know.

That lack of information—regarding the cause, source, location, or duration of the threat, combined with the obfuscating stance of the authorities—created a gap filled by speculation as easily as a footprint in the wetlands filled with water. In his 2009 memoir, former secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge confirmed that political pressures were applied to the terror alert level. The department's own website stated that alerts had psychological consequences. But many
believed the heightened alerts also gave rise to border-enforcement excess. And the circularity there was troubling: politics instigated heightened threat levels, which spurred overreaching enforcement, which led to abuses and drew media attention, sparking civil outrage, causing increased threat levels. Yellow, orange, red. The same mercurial process was transforming the landscape McCue and I encountered on the hilltop. In Washington, immigration policy had been conflated with the War on Terror, resulting in the construction of a new, higher border fence that was slowly progressing west. We could see its shiny steel—a bright and writhing tapeworm on the back of a camel.

Back in 1980, a collective of grassroots environmentalists and scientists secured a historic victory in keeping the American side of the Tijuana River open and the valley free from major development. There had been plans for a marina, an amusement park, track homes, and even a nuclear power plant. The environmental achievement allowed for the establishment of state and county parks, as well as open space designations such as the Tijuana Sloughs National Wildlife Refuge. And so the Tijuana River Valley remained one of the last unbroken wetland systems in the state of California, and it was key in keeping featherweight species like the clapper rail from extinction.

But in 2002, Representative Duncan Hunter added a rider to the Homeland Security Bill that called for the construction of a “triple fence” along the San Diego corridor—an edifice that required filling in canyons to build a paved road across them. This promised to cause a number of environmental problems for both the wetland below and the native species that lived there. Wildcoast, Ben McCue's employer, allied itself with a coalition of local and national organizations, including the Sierra Club, in opposition to the massive fence. They brought a lawsuit. The California Coastal Commission sided with conservationists and denied permits for the construction. But
in 2005, a piece of legislation was slipped into the Real ID Act, a bill intended to bring uniformity to driver's licenses, which allowed Homeland Security to waive any law that stood in the way of the fence. It was a legislative Trojan horse. Among others, laws ambushed by the Real ID Act included the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air Act, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, the National Historic Preservation Act, the Coastal Zone Management Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act.

On April 1, 2008,
DHS
secretary Michael Chertoff invoked the waiver, and construction began. McCue and I could see contractors filling Smuggler's Gulch with 1.7 million cubic yards of dirt. McCue's cause, it appeared, had been lost without any identifiable link between this land and real incidents of international terrorism.

This wasn't, however, the only sight. In the span from downtown Tijuana to the ocean, seven narrow canyons divide the palisades into buttes and mesas. The various incarnations of the border wall—the old rusty brown one and tall shiny new one—rise and fall with every incline and descent. This creates a visual effect that has led many to compare the border wall to a roller coaster careening away toward the inland mountains. Every little nook and hill under its track has a story.

It was on the tops of these bluffs that survey teams from both Mexico and the United States met in 1850 to execute the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and draw the boundary line. But the treaty, which ended the Mexican-American War, did not specify exact coordinates. Some language indicated the line should be set at the original division between Alta California and Baja California, in a rich valley fourteen miles south of Tijuana. But the Mexican representatives wanted to retain some portion of San Diego Bay for commerce. The Guadalupe Hidalgo Treaty transferred more than half of Mexico's territory to the United States—a landmass that includes the states of California, Arizona, and New Mexico, as well
as parts of Texas, Nevada, Colorado, and Utah. In comparison, the bay seemed a trifle. The American camp refused, however, arguing that San Diego Bay had always been a part of Alta California, which was now theirs.

The parties haggled. Finally, they settled on alternative treaty directions that designated a seventy-year-old map, made by Spanish pilot Juan Pantoja y Arriaga, as the initial point of reference. The treaty then gave directions to mark the border one marine league south of the southernmost tip of San Diego Bay, as indicated by the Pantoja map. Two problems arose immediately. The old map didn't match the topography the surveyors encountered. The bottom portion of San Diego Bay was a shape-shifting wetland that changed through the seasons and sometimes connected to the Tijuana River. Then the parties couldn't agree on the actual distance of a marine league. In the spirit of expediency, they split the difference between the conflicting lengths—a happenstance negotiation that put the uniformed commissioners, topographers, and surveyors on the elevated bluff that would become Monument Mesa. Buffeted by a sea breeze, with full views of the bay and the river, the men designated the initial point. It was October 10, 1850. A journalist from a London newspaper sent to cover the western demarcation of the epic border survey noted that the Mexican delegation displayed a “remarkable degree of gravity”—some described them as weepy—as they gazed north into the 525,000 square miles of country lost to Mexico at the close of a war that lasted one year, nine months, one week, and one day. The Americans on the other hand were drunk with victory.

My favorite image of the border is a lithographic plate based on an illustration made by Boundary Commissioner John Russell Bartlett in 1852. Having missed the founding phase of the survey, Bartlett traveled back to the inaugural point at the Pacific. He encountered the eight-ton white marble obelisk Congress commissioned from a stonemason in New York. It had been shipped by sail
around Patagonia's Tierra del Fuego, up the Humboldt Current to San Francisco, and down to San Diego, then dragged across the sloughs and erected on the mesa by captain Edmund L. F. Hardcastle. Until then, the boundary was celebrated only with a pile of stones. Bartlett discovered the new monument framed by a grove of Shaw's agave in bloom. This particular species shoots a panicle, a spear that looks something like a giant asparagus, six feet up. The tip then flowers in yellow and pink. Beyond the monument and the agave spears, Bartlett illustrated a placid ocean and the hummocks of the Coronado Islands. In his diary, he wrote that the white obelisk “is seen from a great distance on land as well as by vessels at sea.”

Bartlett has been described as bookish. Many in the commission found him an absentminded and foolhardy dawdler. This could be due to the fact that he used the appointment to fart around the American West like Don Quixote—once stalling survey work for forty-four days so he could return a maiden, who'd been captured by Apaches and traded off, to her small Mexican pueblo. His dedication to the art of illustration, however, was not a priggish hobby but an official element of the commission's charter. Scientific information concerning the almost unexplored territory was to be recorded and collected, and sketches of native people and species were to be made as the surveyors carved out the line. The compilation of illustrated birds, reptiles, and plants that emerged from the field is a chronicle both elegant and otherworldly. One plate depicts white-robed Tohono O'odham people harvesting bulging red cactus fruit from giant nopal limbs by the use of long, forked sticks. Alien, stylized landscapes at the precipice of change: I found the endeavor to hand-draw the wilderness a thoughtful and forward-looking gesture on the part of what was otherwise an infighting gang of scapegrace rascals. The marking of the two-thousand-mile border was an achievement every bit as profound as the dredging of the Panama Canal or the spanning of the Golden Gate. But the men attached to the Boundary Commission went on to
become the direct inspiration for Western cinema's most notorious thieves, rapists, and murderers. Some became Confederates. Some rose in the ranks of the Union. Some were hanged, some scalped—most deserved it. Things went afoul from the outset.

Nearly all of this history is invisible—buried, paved over, or fenced off.

Grizzly bear still roamed Southern California when the Arguello Adobe, the Mexican-California ranch house that anchored the original Rancho Tijuana, was erected on a small rise overlooking the bay. Assembled of handmade bricks, whitewashed, and laced with bougainvillea, the compound was the only structure between the Spanish presidio at San Diego and the frontier city that would rise to the south. It was once attacked by Indians—saved only with a concession of beef—and served the Arguello descendants from the Mission Period through the gold rush and California statehood. During World War II American soldiers commandeered it for a lookout. But then, in 1951, a year after the last Arguello descendant died, the historic casa was bulldozed during construction of the I-5 freeway. The native Kumeyaay village marked at the south end of San Diego Bay by Don Juan Pantoja's 1782 map is now the province of third-rate strip malls cornered by discount gas stations. Charles Howard's sprawling thoroughbred ranch, where Seabiscuit trained, is now freeway-adjacent and obscured by subdivisions of asphalt-roofed track homes. Even the eight-ton marble obelisk—inscribed in both Spanish and English and, as Bartlett noted, visible by land and sea—has been permanently gated into Mexico by Homeland Security's eighteen-foot-tall steel fence. In the early 1900s, the monument drew as many as one hundred thousand visitors a year. Now, you can touch the American monument only by traveling to Mexico.

In crime writer Joseph Wambaugh's narrative nonfiction account,
Lines and Shadows
, the border canyons are given menacing
characters. The book profiled a real team of San Diego police officers who dressed as poor
campesinos
and cased the boundary for criminals. Their aim was to capture a gang of bandits that preyed on migrants when they were at their most vulnerable, just as they crossed. The true tale highlights a unique period in border enforcement. In the early 1980s, the Border Patrol was a fraction of its current size. Undocumented migration was yet to become a partisan political issue, and the boundary was porous. This maverick
SDPD
squad may have been the last of a breed as well. Some of them were Vietnam vets, many of them Latinos. They filled in for a Border Patrol agency prohibited from working the boundary at night. Much of the action took place in a basin Wambaugh called Deadman's Canyon. In one scene, the undercover officers are beset by a covey of bandits. The wily
campesinos
pull their guns. “Suddenly [another] group of thugs poured out of the shacks on the hillside, heaving rocks.” It dawns on the cops that they are outnumbered. Then, in this canyon that serves as a natural amphitheater, something odd happens. The regular people of the Mexican neighborhood adjacent to the fence come out of their own shanties in droves. They howl at the rock throwers. They begin to march toward the thugs, who quickly melt back into the barrio night. As the officers cuff their criminals on the American side, the regular people of the shanties cheer the officers. They applaud. “There were lots of weird things happening in these canyons,” Wambaugh writes, “but this was one of the weirdest.”