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.

I have good news! The blog that will succeed Cul-de-sac is up and running. It’s open. It’s in process. It’s called On-Ramp and it began officially today. So please pay it many visits and leave behind your smart and surly comments. The subjects (so far) include legalizing marijuana, burning the Koran, building the World Trade towers and stalking Mike Aguirre.

See you there!

Okay. I know I said the rebirth of Cul-de-sac as On-Ramp would happen “later this month.”  But freeway construction projects take time and we’ve gotten a bit delayed. So now that August is about to be September I’ll only say On-Ramp will begin very soon.

You’ll know it’s begun by the tangible current in the air you can’t quite describe. There will be more brilliant sunsets and greater generosity among your fellow citizens. Either that or I’ll post another note once we have a website and a firm date.

This blog hasn’t been in business for very long. But it has prospered and is about to move to a more fashionable address. Later this month, Cul-de-sac will be renamed “On-ramp” and will become a blog at KPBS.org.

That means it will be more of a collaborative effort. I will have editors to please and a large body of journalistic work, done by KPBS reporters and producers, to consider and play off of. But On-ramp will still be a blog by me. It’ll be my continued effort to write a mix of commentary and reportage that tells good stories and trades in big ideas.

One thing that will surely change will be the greater importance of you. My gentle readers will be asked to help carry on an endless conversation on the topics of the day.

Everybody talks about the interactivity of the Internet. But I learned the art of journalistic interactivity by spending ten years as a talk radio host at KPBS. We want On-ramp to be a kind of talk show on the Internet, which we’ll do with your help… yours and that of many more readers who will materialize thanks the greater exposure of that fashionable address I mentioned above.

But why On-ramp?

I sent out a staff email to ask co-workers what they thought would make a good blog name and I immediately regretted it. I’d forgotten how easily amused people are when they think about my last name. One suggestion was the highly derivative “Fudge Report.” One member of the KPBS newsroom invested a huge amount of creative energy in the search for a blog name. He compiled a list of ideas that included:

Food for Fudge. First-person Fudge. Random Fudge. Fudge at Large. Free Fudge. Fudge Rocker. Fudgesicle.

Strange to say we didn’t choose any of them. A select committee and I settled on On-ramp because it sounded cool and punchy. It evoked freeway images that speak to daily life in San Diego. For me it also suggested that readers would enter a fast-moving traffic of stories and ideas. I have wondered whether the blog needs some kind of tag line.

“On-ramp — to a freeway of ideas!” What do you think? Too corny?

I’m told our Internet construction engineer will need a couple of weeks to build the blog site. (Does he need to order concrete and rebar?) So it’ll be up and running soon enough. It’s website will be KPBS.org – slash – somethingoruther.

In the meantime I’ll still be at tfudge.com, writing Cul-de-sac about our home in San Diego, where roads comes to an end. Hopefully using the on-ramp will get us further down the line.

I used to live in Minneapolis where there was a bar called Stand Up Frank’s. People used to say Stand Up Frank’s poured the strongest drink in town, and the bar had few if any chairs. Hence the name. Ironically, Stand Up Frank’s was onto something when it came to human health.

I learned this while attending a presentation at the Hillcrest offices of Active Living Research. Two Australian academics had come to San Diego to speak about the perils of a sedentary life, especially when the problem is sitting too much. Another irony: their talk took place in a small conference room that contained about half as many chairs as there were people in attendance. So a lot of us had to stand, just like those hard drinkers at Stand Up Frank’s.

The Aussies were Neville Owen, of the University of Queensland, and David Dunstan, of the Baker DID Heart & Diabetes Institute in Melbourne. Owen was 50ish, tall and thin with a bald head and a trim, white beard. Dunstan was younger and shorter. He had a sharp-ended nose and was fairly plump for a man involved in the study of active living. Both of them spoke in a way that did not disappoint. No polished Oxbridge tones. Just nice broad Aus-try-lian eck-sents.

The upshot of their research is that we sit down way more than is good for us.

“If you commute in your car, an hour or two a day at each end of the day,” said Owen, “you sit at your computer at work and then you go home and watch three or four hours of television, out of 16 hours you can sit for almost 14 if you really work at it. That’s a huge amount of sitting!”

And prolonged bouts of sitting bring a greater risk of diabetes and heart disease. OK, but isn’t sitting a lot alright if you make up for it by going to the gym occasionally to work up a sweat? Apparently not. Owen says the problem of too much sitting is distinct from the problem of getting too little vigorous exercise. He says adults can meet public health guidelines on physical activity, but still live an unhealthy sedentary life. This has given rise to a new concept: The active couch potato.

Let’s talk about watching TV. Dave Dunstan did a study that found each additional hour of television watching — per day — caused an 11 to 18 percent increased risk of mortality, cancer deaths aside. This was true regardless of leisure-time exercise levels. So TV rots your body as well as your brain.

Like most people, I earn my living sitting on my ass. This became clear three years ago when nerve pain, brought on by a traumatic brain injury, made it difficult to sit down on even a well-padded chair for more than five minutes at a time. Suddenly, staring at the computer became a lot more difficult. It was painful to sit down to a meeting or to read. I remember going to a play at the Old Globe Theatre and having to stand through the second act. I told the usher I had back troubles. Explaining nerve pain and its relation to TBI would have taken too long.

Dunstan said the problem with all that sitting is that it has replaced light-intensity physical activity.

“So what does that mean?” he asked, rhetorically. “Well, a lot of people use the term puttering around. It’s walking at non-brisk paces. So, when we’re in the office if we’re walking down to see a colleague, it’s a light intensity walking activity. It’s the type of activity where we move our muscles, but not sufficient to start to raise a sweat.”

Owen said just standing around is a workout we don’t get enough of.

“There are specialized large postural muscles… muscles whose main job is to maintain standing,” he said. “Now, when those muscles are working they are helping the body deal with excess amounts of sugar in the blood… helping the body to deal with blood fats.”

Long story short… if you sit down too much, you lose what you would have gained from standing up.

Capitalism being what it is, research like this has given rise to new products. In this case, a new collection of workplace furnishings. A company called Steelcase now sells lots of adjustable height desks. Put that desk on the high setting and you can take calls and tap at your computer while standing. They also sell the Walkstation, an adjustable height desk with a treadmill built in.

Jim Sallis, director of Active Living Research, uses one of those adjustable height desks. He points out the old human occupations of farm chores, gathering berries and hunting required lots of light-intensity activity. I asked if there are any jobs like that today.

“Well, you could think of a shopkeeper where you stocking shelves and moving around and helping customers. Waiters and waitresses… that’s pretty classic for being on the move all the time,” he said.

He adds that our culture, unfortunately, tells us sitting is better than standing. So how do we create a healthier counter-culture? Should we stop telling people to relax and take a load off? Should we tell them to put a load on??

I guess telling someone “get off your butt” is good advice even if they don’t accomplish anything aside from just standing up.

(Hear the audio version of this story that aired on KPBS)

I got an email from Vicki Estrada a week ago reminding me that it was four years ago that I did my big interview with her… though back then she was still a he. Vicki appeared on my public radio program These Days to talk about about her plan to have a sex change operation. It was the day Vicki went public with a fact that would change her life and the lives of many people who were close to her.

People have often asked me what was the best or most memorable interview I ever did in my nearly ten years as a talk show host. I did thousands of interviews and I had always found that question difficult to answer. But now I realize my interview with Vicki was the one.

I used to write a column for the KPBS website, and a couple of years ago I reflected on my earlier radio interview with Vicki Estrada. The occasion for the column was a second appearance she made on These Days to discuss her sex change and how her life had changed. Here is that column….

Vickie Estrada feels like a natural woman.

Last week, These Days explored some of its history and the history of a person who has made a remarkable change. On Monday, I interviewed Vicki Estrada. Vicki used to be named Steve, and she used to be a man.

My interview with Vicki was historic because Steve Estrada was a guest on These Days two years ago when he announced that he intended to become a woman. Since then he has had sex change surgery and facial “feminization.” He’s even taken voice lessons to make him sound more convincing as a woman.

Steve was a person of high standing in San Diego. He was the president of Estrada Land Planning, a landscape architecture firm. He had been involved in politics for many years as an urban planner and civic visionary. If anyone had a lot to lose, from the stigma of a sex change, it was him.

Now, Vicki says she has not lost anything, aside from the burden of knowing she was living a male life that she didn’t want to continue. Her firm’s clients have continued to do business with her. She remains well-connected to City Hall. While her mother is still getting used to the idea of the sex change, her two kids and her father were supportive of her decision. In fact, her father actually accompanied her to the clinic that did the gender reassignment. (Her two children, by the way, still call her “Papa.”)

I look at my relationship with Vicki as one that’s also undergone some change. I can’t say that Vicki has ever been a close friend of mine. But the fact that she told the world that she (then he) wanted to be a woman on my show makes me feel that I’ve played a role in the drama.

And who am I? I am a married, straight white male with two kids who tries to be honest and open minded. Yet, accepting transgender people… in fact, accepting the very notion that you can discard the gender you were born with… has been a challenge. I can imagine being attracted to a member of the same sex, but I can’t imagine having an earnest feeling that I’m living in the wrong body.

What I think I’ve learned from Vicki is that it is possible to make such a monumental change yet remain who you are.  Vicki says she is the only transgender person that most of her friends and family actually know. One reason for that is a lot of transgender people go underground. They have the surgery, leave town, and try to start a new life, passing as a member of the opposite sex.

Vicki said she could not leave her old life behind. There were too many people she would miss and too much to give up. As a result she’s had to put up with some people being uncomfortable around her, not knowing what to say, and in some cases being downright mean. I guess if she can accept that, she’s not asking much when she asks us to accept her new life as a woman.

Imagine your bare hands and feet digging deep into piles of harvested wheat in the back of a grain truck. The grains caress you with their texture and their weight. That feeling was a touchstone of my childhood when my brother and I visited my mother’s relatives in June, during the Kansas wheat harvest.

This year I took my family there. It’s a place my children had never seen and I had not seen it in a dozen years. My Kansas relatives live in a Mennonite farming community called Moundridge, about 40 miles north of Wichita. There is something about the place that draws people back. My cousins Ann and Kirsten had moved to Los Angeles and Berkeley but soon returned. Ann and her husband Chip moved into the old Zerger homestead, preserving the architectural landscape of the place… the barns, the tool shed, the dairy shack and the hog pens… even though they don’t farm themselves. The very week of my visit, their son and his fiance left Maine and were moving back to Kansas.

One hundred and fifty years ago my mother’s Swiss-German forebears lived in the Ukraine where they saw their religious freedom slowly erode as the Czars lost patience. These Mennonites had agreed to bring their turkey red wheat and their gift of farming to the kingdom of Catherine the Great. In return, they were left alone and they were not forced to serve in the army. 

That deal eventually fell through and the Swiss Mennonites came to the American great plains where they found political freedom but suffered the oppression of a hard life and savage winters. My great-grandmother Anna Kaufmann lost three boys who froze to death in a blizzard that flew into South Dakota. This, after she’d already seen three of her other children die between Europe and America.

Anna Kaufmann endured. She moved to Kansas, had more children and her culture endured as our relatives refused to serve in Vietnam or World War II. That was not an easy thing in the 1940’s when one common Mennonite name was Goering.

Today, members of my generation typically farm and teach. They live on the flat farmland that’s divided by hedgerows and where temperatures this June, near 100 degrees, were made nearly tolerable by the endless wind. They sleep five hours a night during harvest to get the wheat cut while the dry weather holds. But they stop work all day Sunday even if the crop is about to go to hell. Better the wheat than their everlasting souls.

As my relatives worked in the field my wife Karen fixed dinner to make us useful as my kids Nicholas and Sophie headed out the door to the farmyard where a new litter of kittens, born by a six-toed cat named Cleo, wrestled and played. A path to the pond ran between a metal round top and a cavernous shed where cousin Pat and her husband Bruce store a New Holland tractor, whose GPS system can steer it through a 40-acre field within a three-inch margin of error while planting seeds or spraying weeds.

Before I went back to San Diego, I visited an old folks home in Moundridge where two elderly aunts live. My Aunt Doris suffered a massive stroke and now speaks in occasional sentences which you can’t, most often, understand. I told her stories of my visit, hoping she understood most of it. I gave her a kiss and left the room as I heard her tell me one thing that made perfect sense. “I’m getting better and better,” she said. My other aunt, Elsie, has no trouble talking. She’s vital and active despite being over 90, though I’m not sure she can hear a thing.

The airplane lifts off from the Wichita airport and the kitten we brought with us mews in a black bag we carried on. Kansas is the one place I have lots of family at a time when all other relatives are spread throughout the country. Like I said, the place has a draw. Maybe one of my kids will go to school at Bethel College.