longtime residents, truck farmers and small-time ranchers in clapboard shacks and travel trailers set to blocks, who needed to be displaced before it could happen. In San Diego, the city fathers had requested federal funds to study the problem. They brought in the Army Corps of Engineers to recommend the channelization of the Tijuana River. Claiming an increase in land value, the city began to raise taxes on valley farmers, forcing many to sell. They sold to speculators banking on development. They sold to men like Lucian Fahey.
As in Mexico, this development did not go unopposed. Unlike their Mexican counterparts, however, the U.S. protesters eventually succeeded in demonstrating that the Tijuana Flood Control Project was in essence a thirty-million-dollar public subsidy for landspeculators who stood to earn over one hundred million in profit. It was also deemed to be an ecological disaster, the valley being home to dozens of migratory birds and the last great saltwater estuary on the California coast. In the end, the project was stopped in its tracks. The large-scale color relief maps faded with time. Architectural drawings of marinas and hotels and oceanfront condos cracked and yellowed, turned nicotine-stained edges in drawers and dusty bins while the valley itself, empty now of its old inhabitants, their trailers gone, their shacks dozed or abandoned, went to mud and marsh and sandbar willow, tamarisk and wild radishes and marsh grass, sage, poppies, and yellow sumac. In summer it blistered, bone dry beneath the Mexican mesas. In winter the same mesas, home now to Mexico’s burgeoning maquiladora industry, flowed with rain and toxic waste. These in turn mingled with the sewage and mud running down from the canyons, from the countless clapboard colonias erected overnight to house the peasants streaming north to work in the factories. It came by the ton, swamping the old Mexican treatment facility, joining itself to the Río de Tijuana, on its way to the sea, on the American side of the fence, so that after a few good rains the valley filled with mud and waste and was, for at least a portion of every year, an ecological disaster, though not of the type imagined by the people who had once battled the developers on its behalf.
The border patrol asked for high-risk pay. The Navy SEALs out of Coronado forsook the mud and empty beaches in favor of new training grounds, having lost too many of their number to a variety of exotic, flesh-eating bacteria. The migratory birds on the other hand seemed not to mind and the polluted ocean teemed with life. And of course there were still the immigrants who would stop at nothing, and the drug runners and bandidos, the handful of small-time farmers still clinging to their land, the cowboys, and assorted derelicts . . . And finally, there was Lucian Fahey, right down thereamong them, one of the people, having leveraged himself silly to all but steal the land from beneath some aging worm farmer, and just in time to see the whole scheme go belly up and who in the aftermath of this calamity was left with nothing to show for himself but more bad debt, an absentee wife, and a scrawny, towheaded kid he would just as soon have fed to the fishes, or the worms, or the beaner wetbacks and burro eaters. In short, he never took it well. Unlike that old miner in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, when the gold dust blew to the four winds, Lucian Fahey wasn’t laughing. He was deep in Chapter 11, sitting on a worthless worm farm in the goddamn toilet of the Western world.
His back to the wall, Lucian Fahey elected to work the land. He read a mail-order pamphlet on vermiculture as the road to riches then spent what little money he had left trying to rebuild his stolen worm farm. As was usual for the old man and as would prove true for his only son as well, his timing was impeccable, if, that is, one took into account its appeal to the grotesque. Those were especially hard years for would-be worm
As in Mexico, this development did not go unopposed. Unlike their Mexican counterparts, however, the U.S. protesters eventually succeeded in demonstrating that the Tijuana Flood Control Project was in essence a thirty-million-dollar public subsidy for landspeculators who stood to earn over one hundred million in profit. It was also deemed to be an ecological disaster, the valley being home to dozens of migratory birds and the last great saltwater estuary on the California coast. In the end, the project was stopped in its tracks. The large-scale color relief maps faded with time. Architectural drawings of marinas and hotels and oceanfront condos cracked and yellowed, turned nicotine-stained edges in drawers and dusty bins while the valley itself, empty now of its old inhabitants, their trailers gone, their shacks dozed or abandoned, went to mud and marsh and sandbar willow, tamarisk and wild radishes and marsh grass, sage, poppies, and yellow sumac. In summer it blistered, bone dry beneath the Mexican mesas. In winter the same mesas, home now to Mexico’s burgeoning maquiladora industry, flowed with rain and toxic waste. These in turn mingled with the sewage and mud running down from the canyons, from the countless clapboard colonias erected overnight to house the peasants streaming north to work in the factories. It came by the ton, swamping the old Mexican treatment facility, joining itself to the Río de Tijuana, on its way to the sea, on the American side of the fence, so that after a few good rains the valley filled with mud and waste and was, for at least a portion of every year, an ecological disaster, though not of the type imagined by the people who had once battled the developers on its behalf.
The border patrol asked for high-risk pay. The Navy SEALs out of Coronado forsook the mud and empty beaches in favor of new training grounds, having lost too many of their number to a variety of exotic, flesh-eating bacteria. The migratory birds on the other hand seemed not to mind and the polluted ocean teemed with life. And of course there were still the immigrants who would stop at nothing, and the drug runners and bandidos, the handful of small-time farmers still clinging to their land, the cowboys, and assorted derelicts . . . And finally, there was Lucian Fahey, right down thereamong them, one of the people, having leveraged himself silly to all but steal the land from beneath some aging worm farmer, and just in time to see the whole scheme go belly up and who in the aftermath of this calamity was left with nothing to show for himself but more bad debt, an absentee wife, and a scrawny, towheaded kid he would just as soon have fed to the fishes, or the worms, or the beaner wetbacks and burro eaters. In short, he never took it well. Unlike that old miner in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, when the gold dust blew to the four winds, Lucian Fahey wasn’t laughing. He was deep in Chapter 11, sitting on a worthless worm farm in the goddamn toilet of the Western world.
His back to the wall, Lucian Fahey elected to work the land. He read a mail-order pamphlet on vermiculture as the road to riches then spent what little money he had left trying to rebuild his stolen worm farm. As was usual for the old man and as would prove true for his only son as well, his timing was impeccable, if, that is, one took into account its appeal to the grotesque. Those were especially hard years for would-be worm
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