Read Online The Coyote's Bicycle by Kimball Taylor - Free Book Online

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, beingwatched. 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 manybelieved 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