Free The Coyote's Bicycle by Kimball Taylor Page A

immigrating to North America to work in mines and build railroads. They brought opium poppies and introduced the plant to the Sierra Madre. As California’s gold rush and railroad building came to an end, US legislators shut the door on Chinese immigrants. By then trade routes from the Sierra Madre through Ensenada and Tijuana to the opium dens of Los Angeles and San Francisco were already well greased. The narcotics passed through Smuggler’s Gulch with the goats and cows. During Prohibition, smugglers traced the same routes with beer, whiskey, and tequila.
    Nearby is Russian Hill. It is true that eighteenth-century Russian trappers made it down this far about the time they’d colonized parts of Northern California (San Francisco’s Russian Hill is named after a cemetery established by early traders). But this hill earned its handle through a type of labyrinthine mythology peculiar to border towns. The highland belonged to a ranch owned by a Señor Soler. At one point Soler was a regional player in the Mexican Communist Party. The ideology was popular with Mexican thinkers and artists, and arguably, didn’t carry the same stigma that communism did in the US. Soler was ambitious in his ideals. At one point he built abullring and a theater on his hill in order to attract people to a neighborhood he intended to base on socialist principles. Much later, at some point in the 1980s, a blocky, multistory building was erected on the edge of Soler’s growing barrio. Residents set up so many large antennas and satellite dishes on the roof that its position lording over the American valley became noticed. Over time, Tijuanenses associated Señor Soler with communism, communists with Cold War Russia, and the USSR with spies. Clearly, the building topped with CB antennas and satellite dishes at the precipice of the United States just had to be teeming with communist spies, and thus its name: Russian Hill.
    The naming of Bunker Hill actually was a consequence of geopolitics. Cement bunkers, something like the string of batteries along the coast of France, were dug into the mesa during World War II. They’re still there. Somewhere offshore rests a sunken submarine. Residents like to think it’s a Japanese sub wounded by the guns of Bunker Hill. There’s a kind of dark glee in the idea that the enemy had been so close. But more likely, the sub is an obsolete American vessel junked and sunk by our own navy out of boring expediency.
    The submarine is invisible, but scars of war preparation lie all over the dirt. The desert has reclaimed an important landing strip, evidenced only by a stretch of relatively level ground. Historian Charles W. Hughes wrote that early unmanned aircraft, or “drones,” were tested in the valley and used this strip. In fact, during World War I, a boy stepped out of his ranch door on the way to milk his heifers just as an out-of-control drone dropped from the sky and decimated the barn.
    There’s a small basin clogged with bamboo thickets that is popular with illegal crossers. It was named after Tijuana’s first health food restaurant, Yogurt Canyon. The namesake eatery is still open just on the Mexican side, where the canyon is called Sauces , or Willows. A small, flat-topped mesa next to it is striated in a white residue. Thethick layer of chalk looks like a stark geologic phenomenon, but it was actually created from nine thousand years of the Kumeyaay people’s clam harvests. They scooped and ate the clam meat, and dropped the shells at their feet. Imagine eating the same thing in the same place for nine thousand years. I imagined consuming nine thousand years’ worth of hot dogs—the mound of wrappers rising underfoot year after year, into a mountain. I could look down and see my great-great-great grandfather’s wrappers. I could see that he preferred ketchup and pickle relish. There’s a story in the waste. But this mound of our