CUL-DE-SAC

 The U.S.-Mexico Border is an overbearing presence in San Diego because of the fence that separates SD and TJ. The first time I saw the fence it reminded me of being in Berlin, prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Today, our separation from Tijuana has become even greater, thanks to federal policy that insisted on securing the border by turning what was a single fence into a double and triple fence. The most dramatic effect I saw has been in Friendship Park.

Double fencing has gone up at Friendship Park

Friendship Park is the very southwestern corner of the United States: A patch of green on a bluff above the Pacific Ocean where people would meet at the border. You used to be able to walk right up to the chain-link barrier and talk with people on the other side. From the U.S. side you could see the TJ Bull Ring and the people visiting the Tijuana beach.

In 1971, First Lady Pat Nixon dedicated Friendship Park and shook hands through the fence with many Mexicans. Today, international friendship may remain but it finds no expression in the park. Today double fencing keeps the two nationalities well away from each other.

Prior to the 1990s, Mexicans in search of higher wages would pour across the flimsy border fence into San Diego until the Clinton Administration boosted the staffing of Border Patrol and started “Operation Gatekeeper.” A decade later, the terror attack of 911 gave xenophobic border politicians an excuse to insist on even more border security as they made the absurd argument that Al Qaeda would use the porous Mexican border as a way to enter the U.S. to cause further death and mayhem.

So now, Friendship Park is not very friendly. And I don’t know when or if that will change.

Below is a blog post I wrote prior to the double-fencing of the border at the park. I look at it to refresh my own memory of what kind of a place it used to be.  

 Good Neighbors at Border Fields State Park (5 yrs ago)

          Have you ever been to the southwestern corner of the United States? I’m not talking about San Diego or even Imperial Beach. I’m talking about those few acres of land that sidle up to Mexico and eventually give way to a bluff, a beach and the Pacific Ocean.

     I saw this place a couple of weeks ago. It’s called Friendship Park, a part of Border Fields State Park. It’s a pleasant grassy area along the coast just south of the Tijuana River Estuary. Along the southern edge of the park there is a fence, and beyond that, Tijuana. It’s the kind of place where you can remain in the United States yet feel like you’re in Mexico.

      In the park, you can walk up to the wire-mesh border fence and talk to people on the other side. On the day I was there a couple of Mormon missionaries in Mexico chatted through the fence with a family of tourists. While the American side is fairly isolated and out-of-the-way, Tijuana’s “Playas” region on the other side bustles with people who’ve come to enjoy the seaside. The city’s bullring looms just a few yards from the border.

     The border fence marches down the bluff, crosses the beach and goes about a hundred yards out to sea. The beach section of fence is a row of rusting metal posts with gaps wide enough for a child to squeeze through. Mexican children tease their parents by squeezing through to the U.S. side, giggling and dancing around before they wriggle back through, as if they want to be able tell their friends they visited America that day. A Border Patrol vehicle sits on top of the bluff, its occupant keeping careful watch on the scene below.

     This place brings to mind the Robert Frost poem, which says there is something that doesn’t love a wall. Yet we Americans are like the farmer in that poem who responds by saying, “Good fences make good neighbors.”   

     In fact, if the Border Patrol moves ahead with current plans, there will soon be a triple fence running through Border Field State Park, and chatting through the barrier could become a thing of the past. My advice? Take a trip to the southwestern corner of the U.S. before that happens and take a look around. It might be your last chance to get at least a feeling of what it would be like if San Diego and Tijuana were one city.

Last week I began a new assignment at KPBS, the public radio station where I’ve worked for 13 years. I started working as the San Diego host of Morning Edition.

This means getting up at 430 a.m., being at work at 500 a.m. and doing my first newscast at 530. It’s been a challenge to my lifestyle. But it’s returned me to the intimate relationship I used to have with listeners when I was the host of a talk show called These Days. This relationship is so intimate, in fact, that one of my co-workers told me that when his morning radio alarm goes off, in his bedroom, he’s there with his wife and with me.

The thought of being in that kind of menage a trois was not creepy. It reminded me how personal radio is. People let you into their homes when they turn on the dial. You are not a body in the same space, but you are a presence and a personal force that can be comforting or maddening. You need to remember to understand that and respect it.  

I used to live next door to a man who listened to public radio. He recalled hearing my voice one morning as he lay in bed. He reached to turn off the radio, but soon realized I was outside his window talking to my son in my backyard. We may sometimes want to turn off the people we live with, but that kind of switch doesn’t exist.

I grew up in the Midwest where the thought of seeing thousands of silver fish wash onto a beach and shutter and squirm as they lay their eggs seemed exotic and wonderful. I’d seen films of it on TV. So when I learned a grunion run was expected during the August full moon I took my children to La Jolla Shores beach to see it happen.

As I drove there I had a feeling it might be a bust. I’d never done this, and nobody I knew had ever spoken of it. But the thought of letting my kids see such a spectacular natural event convinced me to take them to the beach past their bedtime.

It was a bust. We didn’t see a single grunion.

When we arrived, people where drinking beer around fire pits. Were they here to see the grunions? I didn’t think so. They just weren’t in that frame of mind. Finding a place to park was no problem. It wasn’t at all like driving to San Diego Bay to see 4^th of July fireworks where traffic and parking would be hellish because fireworks were a sure thing. This was another bad sign.

We walked north from the main beach to the other side of Scripps Pier to find a part of the beach that was fairly dark. A fisherman told me this would be the best place to look for grunions. But even though we stayed until 11 p.m. (definitely prime time for the grunion run) we didn’t see any. Not one.

I say “not one” because one group of people I spoke with said they saw one grunion. Another group said they saw two. I might have found this encouraging… or at least evidence that I hadn’t imagined the whole thing. Still, I didn’t come here to see a couple of rouge fish taking the road less traveled. I wanted to see throngs of fish in a silvery spasm of egg laying.

By the time we had walked under Scripps Pier it was about ten o’clock and my 7-year-old daughter Sophie said she was tired and wanted to go home. She started to cry and insisted she be held. Nicholas, age 11, held out hope that he might actually see a grunion and kept scanning the beach with his flashlight. But the only small beasts we saw were the sand crabs. That’s what people called them.

The sand crabs were pretty cool. They were blond-colored crustaceans the size of your fingernail, and the beach was alive with them. As the surf receded they would be exposed to the air for a second, before burrowing again under the sand. It made the beach look alive.

As we wandered along, we talked to a man who had caught two shovelhead sharks. These were sharks about four feet long and lay in the sand dying as we stood there. A woman in the group said they were good to eat, something between cod and the kind of shark steak you’d buy at a butcher shop.

Nicholas, a sensitive boy, wondered aloud if sharks feel pain. I told him I was sure they did but they didn’t experience the dread and awareness that humans did. This became a conversation about consciousness and the souls of other creatures that I wasn’t quite prepared for.

The strangest thing I saw that night was just next to the pier. A group of young women in bikinis, who seemed to come out of nowhere, were wading in the dark waves and shrieking with excitement as they were chilled by the cold water and knocked off their feet by the waves.

On the way back to the car I carried Sophie and saw small groups of other people looking for grunion up and down the beach. They walked in groups of four or five with eyes cast down as their flashlight beams made circles in the sand.

Once Nicholas, Sophie and I lost hope of seeing grunion, our spirits were elevated and we talked about the things we had seen that night. My kids and I got in the car, covered with sand. We left the rushing sound of the ocean and drove inland, toward home.

Remember when I said Cul-De-Sac was becoming On-Ramp on the KPBS website? I wasn’t kidding. But now, a year later, that is no longer the case because my On-Ramp blog has been canceled. It’s  long story, but you can read about it here.

This means Cul-De-Sac has returned and I will be blogging again from this corner of the Internet. For those people who actually read On-Ramp, know that Cul-De-Sac will be different. In a sense I’m going back to my old blogging self. The stories here will be more personal and less journalistic

You can take this blog or leave it. I’m just trying to have some fun, writing about my life in the American Cul-De-Sac called San Diego.