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 organize
d 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.
A Los Angeles Times review once claimed that Fernandez’s photographs “form a knot of narratives.” But like the everyday mysteries in her photos, the mystery of the bikes couldn’t be untangled by snap observations alone because, as with the hats and shoes, the people who put them there in the dirt had vanished. Phenomena of the border sprang forth and evolved so fast, few of their riddles were ever solved. The bikes were mysterious. But so was everything else. Fernandez could only return to her central premise—the one thing she knew she could accomplish. Anything that touched the boundary needed to be photographed, documented, cataloged. So Fernandez stepped into the bush and shot the bikes that were set there, “hidden between branches, or in hollows,” as she said, or simply “thrown away.”
I found Greg Abbott on a clear winter morning, walking the sand dunes of Border Field State Park with a tank of herbicide strapped to his back and a spray nozzle in his hand. This was a ritual the state parks ecologist performed during the coldest week of the year, spraying the invasive “highway” ice plant that bloomed and shape-shifted across the dunes like a slow-moving storm.
In his overworked khakis adorned with the patch of the brown bear on a faded field of green, Abbott looked both rugged and intellectual, as if Papa Hemingway had retired from books to take a civil service post in the southernmost corner of the West Coast. He wore a scruffy gray beard, but you could still see the beach boy blond in it. The saucer-like bullring and brightly colored neighborhood of Playas de Tijuana dominated our southern view. We stood a stone’s throw from the mouth of the Tijuana River, where it emptied into the Pacific. Offshore, the Coronado Islands broke the ocean’s blue plain. Behind us, the green, tawny, yellow, and rust colors of the valley ascended from scrub to tablelands rising into Otay Mountain, a crescendo of the last unbroken fresh-to-saltwater system in Southern California.
As we talked, a black-tailed jackrabbit the size of a small beagle leapt from a low bush and made a wide, loping arc around our position. Abbott sighted the rabbit’s evasion technique and suggested we modify our direction in order to keep the animal from bolting into the streets of Mexico. Nodding at the open land around us, he said, “It looks pristine, but it’s not.” I could clearly see the bunkers in Bunker Hill. Somewhere in the vicinity, bovine skeletons eroded from the earth where American soldiers once shot forty head of trespassing Mexican cattle—the first cross-border incident of the twentieth century. Migrant trails snaked the entire reserve. And of course, there were remnant car tires.
“This is an island—an island surrounded by three million people,” Abbott said. “And islands have problems you wouldn’t believe.”
Greg Abbott had been a pioneering surfer and a legendary lifeguard—occupations that fit together only in the beginning. His surfing and world travel kept him from ever wanting to commit to a career-track lifeguard gig. As he came of age, state lifeguards were suddenly classified as “peace officers” and required to carry sidearms. They filled out paperwork and climbed the bureaucracy to soft pensions. That wasn’t Abbott. And yet his heroics saving lives at the beach had earned him injuries that ensured he couldn’t be a “seasonal” forever—that was a kid’s job.
Remembering when he fit that description, Abbott pointed to the spot where he and some other seasonals had once built a shack and a barbecue pit. It was hidden from their superiors by the large sand dunes. The sight of the empty space made him reminiscent. The driftwood shack was so close to the border, Abbott and his cohorts would often dash into Mexico to make saves off Playas de Tijuana. One September, in fact, brought both sweltering heat and a powerful swell that had originated south of New Zealand. The inland heat prodded a record number of Tijuana’s citizens to the beach, an egress timed perfectly for a mass encounter with the treacherous waves. There was no lifeguard service in Mexico. At some stage, while scanning with his binoculars, Abbott spotted a swimmer caught in a rip current on the Mexican side. He grabbed his “can”—a red flotation device—and dashed across the border to make the save. Once he got the swimmer to the sand, a mob of beachgoers cheered. But then Abbott spotted another swimmer in trouble farther south, and after, another. “There were so many people at the beach,” he said, “it was like running through a crowded bar.” He kept following dangers until he “couldn’t see America anymore.”
Then the first sea fence was built, an iron gate extending into the Pacific that split one beach between two nations. Lifeguards called it “the strainer” because ocean currents often trapped swimmers against its pylons, holding them underwater.
As enhanced border fortifications went up in the 1990s, crossings became more dangerous and the lifeguards soon found themselves making increasingly desperate saves. Abbott once watched a group of migrants attempt to negotiate the Tijuana River mouth where it meets the ocean. They were already on US soil but their aim was to get to the town of Imperial Beach on the other side. Depending on tide and season, the river mouth will push or pull a tremendous volume of water while appearing placid. “They looked fine at first,” Abbott said, “but just as soon as I turned my head, all five were in trouble.” He bolted down the dunes and into the swirling water. He gathered the group of fully clothed men and women, most still clutching their few possessions. And then he began to swim them to the farther, northern side of the river—a distant crescent of dry sand. This valley comes with a separate set of rules. Abbott knew that if he did the much easier thing and pulled the “illegals” back to the southern shore where they’d entered, the group would only attempt to cross again. “You don’t want to have to save them twice,” he said.
In 1998, a North Pacific storm brought the kind of surf the Strand sees maybe once a decade. Some waves approached two stories high. Thirty-knot winds out of the southwest carried rainsqualls, drenching the coast and whipping the waves into a fury. The ocean temperature plunged. In all this heaving gray tone of texture and energy, Abbott spotted a panga fishing boat foundering off Coronado Beach. Coming over in pangas, open wood boats propelled by outboard engines, had become a popular yet reckless immigration technique. The problem was that pangas, while great fishing boats, were poorly designed for long-distance travel. Few migrants swam well enough to justify the risks. Abbott observed a huddle of bodies in the front of this one. His fear was that the person in charge would force the passengers overboard in an attempt to lighten the load. The panga pilot approached the surf line but fled out to sea when waves rose up. Then Abbott, as he feared, saw people slipping over the rails. The boat turned and headed back south. Those men weren’t going to make it, Abbott knew.
“I called in backup from everybody in the world before I jumped in there,” he said. He’d ordered a Jet Ski. He looked at his watch. Slim chance the ski would arrive in time. So he grabbed his gear and started swimming out toward a raft of men drifting into the surf’s impact zone.
Drowning victims don’t often cry for help. That action requires energy and breath, two resources victims conserve in order to survive. Once out there, Abbott met seven Mexican men in their twenties, all clinging to a couple of life vests and a surfboard. Their expressions were those of men at a wake. Abbott understood the challenge was to get the living out of the surf zone as a group. But he couldn’t touch any of them. He knew that one or more, in silent panic, would attempt to claw themselves on top of their savior, simply to fill the lungs one more time. So Abbott tossed a lifeguard strap, tethering himself to about a thousand pounds of drowning people. In Spanish, he warned them to keep their distance. If Abbott led the party straight toward the shore, he was certain to lose a few in the pounding waves. It was procedure to swim them farther out to sea. But as he did this, a rare set of extremely large waves jacked up in front of the group. The timing couldn’t have been worse. The first wave landed squarely on top of the men. Abbott felt and heard bone grind
ing in his neck. He struggled to hold the line. His body was tossed and rolled. The cold felt like a tight belt constricting his chest; the vastness of the sea drained energy and body heat. As he attempted to breathe, his lungs made short, violent convulsions. Nearing the point of blackout, Abbott finally felt a cold wind shear on his face. He’d surfaced. And as the waves passed, men popped back up. All of them. Abbott looked for the beach. But a rescue vehicle wasn’t coming, and he knew it.
So the old lifeguard made one stroke and followed it with the next. Steadfast ocean sense helped him negotiate lulls in the swell, locate the currents and rips, and coach the men shoreward. By the time they landed—faces blue and lips purple—the entire parking lot at Coronado’s public beach was a theater of flashing lights and bleating sirens. Some of the victims stumbled and fell, a symptom of hypothermia. A migrant wearing a soaked dress shirt threw up blood. All were rushed to the hospital.
The single-handed rescue of seven men in dangerous conditions garnered newsprint and an award. But Abbott thought, “Maybe being a fifty-five-year-old seasonal isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.” Not long after, the ecologist post opened up at Border Field State Park. The beat was the same, but this time the job entailed saving small life. “Yep,” he said, “I went from being a respected hero to a bird guard.”
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