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WELCOME TO SAN DIEGO
JORDAN KISNER
San Diego is famously mild, sunny, seasonless-and quietly extreme. A surf haven by reputation, it is also the largest and most important military outpost in the West, a leading national center of biotech research and development, and an exceptionally high-traffic site of smuggling contraband across the border, mainly weapons, human slaves, and stupendous amounts of meth. It is on the edge in the most basic geographic sense, all jammed up against the border and the ocean; the end of America or, depending on which way you're driving, the beginning. San Diego is as far as you can go. It's not just a military town; it's the most military. Its meth problem isn't just bad; it's the worst. The wealthy there aren't simply wealthy; they're Mitt Romney with his $12 million house expansion and his "car elevator." The wretched, farther south, are so unwanted and voiceless they functionally, civically, do not exist. The weather is perfect until the city burns.
You can see this, if you know what you're looking for, from the roads.
* * *
The most important roads in the county are its north-south arteries-the I-5 and the 805-and it's no accident that they extend between the county's two largest military bases: Pendleton in the north and Coronado down by the border. San Diego's self-styling as a "military town" began around the turn of the twentieth century, when politicians began vying for marine and naval contracts, hoping to use the money to expand the city. The existing army artillery base at Fort Rosecrans was joined quickly by the navy and the air force, and by World War II, San Diego was the country's biggest military town west of the Mississippi. The region swarmed with people and industry, and the city grew to accommodate them. Today, San Diego is still funded by the military and surrounded by the military: at its southernmost point lies Coronado Naval Base, the West Coast's primary center for warfare and Special Forces training. The naval base, which remains the largest single employer in the county, has fifty-seven thousand acres spread from Coronado Island back to the La Posta Mountain Warfare Training Facility fifty miles east into the desert. On the northern edge, forty minutes up the 5, there's Camp Pendleton, the largest West Coast expeditionary training facility for the Marine Corps. In between is Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, former home of Topgun. Many neighborhoods were once barracks. Fully a quarter of county residents work for the military and defense industries.
These last facts might be surprising to the average San Diego civilian. There are aircraft carriers in the bay and the occasional air show at Miramar, but otherwise the military's presence is inconspicuous. Most personnel live on or near the bases; you almost never see anyone walking around the suburbs in a uniform. Everyone knows there's a naval base on Coronado-it takes up more than half of the island-but you don't see it. Instead, you see the Victorian spires of Hotel Del, where Marilyn Monroe shot Some Like It Hot, and giant sand dunes and plazas made from terra-cotta tile. There are snipers being trained a mile or two away, but even if you drive to the base entrance, it doesn't look like much, and without clearance you can't drive any farther.
Total reliance on an industry that takes pains to remain out of sight can give a city a tensile sensitivity to what should be seen and unseen. North Torrey Pines Road is another hub of the San Diego economy but one that's deliberately visible, lined with the grand institutions and titans of local industry that the city is proud to exhibit. It begins at the UC San Diego campus in front of the La Jolla Playhouse, which sends a Tony winner from its gleaming, state-of-the-art theater complex to Broadway nearly every year. The La Jolla Playhouse's biggest patrons are its neighbors, the scientific research and biotechnology institutions that constitute the city's second most important industry and dominate the mesa that North Torrey Pines Road bisects. Many of them sit on land formerly owned by the city government, which donated large tracts to research institutions and defense contractors in the 1950s in another ploy to attract industry to the region. The grandest of them, only a few minutes from the La Jolla Playhouse, is the Salk Institute, the city's monument to the sciences, founded in 1960 as a collaborative environment for scientists to consider, rather loftily, the "wider implications of their discoveries for the future of humanity." Louis Kahn designed the complex, a dramatic modernist construction with a wide center pavilion and buildings set at rakish angles to maximize the cliff-top ocean view. It is so stunning that people come from all over the world to tour the grounds. Inside, Nobel laureates lead teams tasked with curing cancer, ending world hunger, and stopping global warming, and they're making progress.
Salk is the shining example: idealistic, innovative, rigorously productive, and-not for nothing-nice to look at. But there are also the labs at UCSD, where scientists are curing phantom-limb syndrome and mapping the way human memory functions, and the Scripps Research Institute next door, which is developing cures for deafness, obesity, Huntington's disease, and addiction-including a vaccine for heroin. Scattered between the biotech companies and the research institutions are the defense contractors: L-3, which does surveillance and recon for Homeland Security, and General Atomics, the region's largest and oldest defense contractor. General Atomics, which, like Salk, occupies land donated from the city, is responsible for everything from supplying nuclear research reactors to government agencies to developing the drones used by the military in Afghanistan. Right now it's also designing a series of theoretical nuclear reactors, as well as systems for hazardous material destruction, magnetic levitation systems, uranium processing, and "advanced laser technologies."
And it's attractive. The air smells of the eucalyptus trees that shade the sidewalks, which are clean, white, and trimmed with politely shaped hedges. The grass is very green, which means the grass is very expensive, maintained in defiance of the desert climate and water shortages. All the shiny buildings have cliff-top views of the ocean or of the thirty-six-hole golf course where pre-scandal Tiger Woods, looking handsome and correct in a bright red polo, won the U.S. Open in 2008 to the applause of day-drunk, suntanned men wearing Oakleys and carrying AmEx cards. Socialites swathed in Lululemon yoga pants, diamonds, and the same shade of blond flit in and out of the luxury resort spa at the Lodge at Torrey Pines. The most stunning views are privately owned, but the second best is publicly accessible from the dusty cliffs by the Gliderport, hidden on an unpaved road just behind the Salk Institute. Acres of undeveloped mesas and canyons roll back from the coast-dotted with multimillion-dollar homes-and there's so much ocean between the beach and the horizon that on a clear day Mexico emerges faintly in the distance. At the Gliderport, people strap themselves into paragliders and leap off the mesa into blue air, because the curvature of the coast is such that hanging above North Torrey Pines Road, you can see the whole county, from Pendleton straight to Coronado.
Some of that undeveloped land belongs to the Salk Institute, but most of it is the state reserve for which North Torrey Pines is named, dense with chaparral and pine trees and spiky plants that look like aliens made them. Just past the golf course, you can hike from the cliffs all the way down to the beach. There you will find old surfers and kid surfers and babies and runners and ladies in big hats and teenage couples and really every kind of person out for a walk on the beach. These beaches are not like the beaches of Cape Cod or Mykonos or Normandy. They are dramatic and wild looking and a little dangerous. The cliffs are sheer and unstable, hundreds of feet tall and given to crumbling and dropping lethal amounts of clod and rocks onto the sand below without warning. But it's hard to stay away from the cliffs; the beach narrows so precipitously in places that when the tide rises, the surf erases it entirely.
Once I was down on the beach in the haze. The sun became material, and there was so much of it: hundreds of feet of light swirling above the surf. The cliffs stretched higher. Everything grew huge. On the ground, the babies and the surfers, everyone, seemed wrapped in a heady gladness, reverent.
You can drive all this in five minutes, from the La Jolla Playhouse past Salk and the Gliderport and the Lodge and General Atomics through the reserve. There's a bend as the road dips down steeply toward the ocean, and the trees and sandy cliff faces lining the road fall away so that you're making a gentle left turn into panorama. This stretch of road is like a gift. No traffic, and the water glitters hard, and the car flies down the hill without any help from the gas pedal, and then you are blessed in a way only San Diego can bless you.
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There's a phenomenon known to residents of San Diego, and Southern California generally, called the Santa Ana winds, which visit sporadically and reverse things. Normally, the wind blows through the county from west to east, carrying cool air from over the ocean out toward the desert, which accounts for both the breezy temperateness that draws tourists to its beaches and the way the mercury climbs by the mile the farther away from the shore you drive. But when the Santa Ana winds come, the whole thing turns around, blows east to west so the desert air sweeps back toward the coast, flooding the shoreline with air so dry and abrasive it feels as if it could light matches. You wake up in the morning, and the world feels thirsty and vaguely murderous. Your skin knows in a way your brain doesn't that something isn't right.
On these days, the weather report warns of brush fires, which overtake the county once every few years and incinerate houses and land and people until the wind changes again. In 2007, the fires flew from East County all the way to the coast. I was gone by then, but my parents still live near the beach, and over the course of two days the fire moved toward their house, uncontrolled, until it was less than half a mile away when the Santa Ana stopped, the wind reversed course, and everything blew back out to the desert. This is how Santa Ana comes and goes, like wrath.
* * *
The 805 crosses the 905 in Otay Mesa, a town featured prominently in the traffic reports because it's a major border checkpoint and there are always delays. Continue on the 805 for two miles past the 905, and you're at the end of California, Tijuana rising before you on a hill, the windows of its tightly packed box houses reflecting the vision of Otay Mesa back across the fence. When there's no traffic, the signs change quickly. IT IS ILLEGAL TO TAKE FIREARMS OR WEAPONS ACROSS THE BORDER, reads one. Another reminds drivers not to try to cross into Mexico with weed in the car.
The 905 runs parallel to the border, peeling like tape through land that was flat and arid to start but was bulldozed and stripped anyway, just in case. It's the east-west highways that move you from the tidy rows of palm trees and bright storefronts into a landscape that desaturates by the mile. Head east and everything gets browner and drier with every passing exit. Most of the east-west freeways are lined with tract home developments with inaccurate names like Sun Valley or strip malls full of Toys "R" Us stores and Paneras, but the 905 as it passes through Otay Mesa is all warehouses, scattered like overturned building blocks. Some are commercial-Performance Plastics, Martinez & Sons Produce-but most are unmarked storage or lie empty. SPACE AVAILABLE signs flap against corrugated metal or are driven on stakes into the dirt. There are no stores of any kind except for a few bodegas, a taco stand with a faded banner, and a gigantic Goodwill. To the right is the famous fence, miles of "climb-proof" chain link rising fifteen feet into the air and looped with barbed wire at the top just in case. Ahead-black hills.
The 905 is where San Diego's secret economies reside, only fifteen minutes from SeaWorld. The Sinaloa cartel took control of the smuggling corridor in 2006, and since then trafficking of both drugs and people has been on the rise. Over 70 percent of the methamphetamines trafficked into the United States pass through San Diego: between 2008 and 2013, three times more meth was seized at the Tijuana border than all other U.S.-Mexico border crossings combined. It comes in through cars, hidden in gas tanks or seat lining. There are also tunnels: in October 2013, Homeland Security found a smuggling tunnel more than six hundred yards long connecting a warehouse in Tijuana to one of the many unmarked warehouses in Otay Mesa. The tunnel was equipped with lighting, ventilation, and an electric rail system, and inside the authorities found 8.5 tons of marijuana and 327 pounds of cocaine. It was the eighth tunnel like this discovered since 2006. According to the special agent in charge of Homeland Security investigations in San Diego, Otay Mesa's claylike soil makes it "popular."
The weapons go in the other direction: the government did a study in 2012 which found that nearly three-quarters of the firearms recovered in Mexico over five years were traceable back to the United States. American gun suppliers make approximately $127 million a year on the guns smuggled across the border, and a lot of it comes through Otay Mesa. Then there are the people. Human trafficking is on the rise, and in 2012 the FBI declared San Diego a "high intensity child prostitution area." A few times a year the news reports surface: teenage sex slaves discovered, gang members arrested in "massive" trafficking conspiracies. The number of cases prosecuted tripled between 2009 and 2013. In October 2013, authorities found nineteen persons being smuggled through the Otay Mesa checkpoint inside air conditioners. It is also widely speculated that sexual assault of migrant women by Border Patrol is rampant, but those cases aren't prosecuted.
The word "pharmaceuticals" carries a different meaning in such a place, as does the word "innovation." The fact that both words are just as relevant in Otay Mesa as they are in Torrey Pines provides subtle justification for the dominance of the military and defense industries in the city, which are paid by government agencies in exchange for help regulating the border. But even their presence seems altered and cloaked this far east and south. You can drive within a quarter mile of the headquarters of San Diego Border Patrol and never know it is there. Blackwater is in Otay Mesa, the private military security company notorious for, among other things, illegal arms trading, killing sprees of unarmed civilians in the Iraq war, and creating a private special ops team of former CIA officers. But you'd never find it as such: its name has been changed twice-from Blackwater to Xe and then to Academi in 2011-and it doesn't advertise itself. The building, a giant cube with mirrored, opaque windows, lies several turns off the freeway among flattened fields, on the corner of Siempre Viva Road and a cul-de-sac to nowhere. It is, eerily, surrounded by roads to nowhere, neatly paved advances into the seven hundred yards of fields that lie between Siempre Viva and the border, tracing paths to corporate lots that were never developed. In the warehouse, Academi training sessions are in process, but outside it is silent. Like everywhere else in Otay Mesa, plenty is happening, but there's nothing to see. Scrubby trees poke up from the dirt in neat rows every thirty feet, shading empty sidewalks where no one walks.
The last time I was in San Diego, I drove to Otay Mesa and spent a morning cruising the dead ends. My brother, Griffin, rode with me and served as a kind of terse spirit guide, doling out dispassionate observations ("Well, the drag racers are using it," he said of Siempre Viva Road, noting the skid marks) and practical advice ("Get the fuck off your cell phone, you're going to get arrested"). When we agreed that we'd seen what there was to see ("Not very much"), we drove west on the 905, away from the mountains and back toward the 805 cross. A few minutes passed in silence, and then he spoke again: "Prisoners."
I jumped, scanning the cars in front of us. There it was: a white unmarked van that looked pretty much like any other white van except for a small floodlight attached to the back, angled to shine down on whoever might be stepping in or out. Through the tinted back windows, I could see that the inside of the van had been converted into a cage, like the ones used to transport animals back and forth from the pound, but the silhouettes inside were human profiles, sitting in two rows facing each other.
"ICE," Griff ventured. "Immigration. Some guys got picked up in the desert trying to cross the border." He was probably right. People come every day, alone and in groups. They scale the fence or attempt to walk across in the most remote, dangerous parts of the desert or just make a break for it and sprint up the freeway at the checkpoint, fleeing north and west. In November 2013, a crowd of a hundred stormed the border, hurling rocks and bottles at the agents.
At the border, the signage changes again when you head north on the 805. No more finger wagging about weapons or half-lit fluorescent advertisements for bail bonds. Instead, a warning to watch for something darting across the five-lane freeway. You see signs like these in other states, but the figures outlined in black are deer or moose or falling rocks. In this sign, it's a family-a mother, a father, and a little girl-running as if chased. The little girl has pigtails. Then, fifteen car lengths later, a larger and more colorful sign reads, in large, loopy letters, WELCOME TO CALIFORNIA.
Selection and introduction copyright © 2015 by n+1 Foundation
Map copyright © 2015 by Jeffrey L. Ward
"Welcome to San Diego" copyright © 2015 by Jordan Kisner
"Los Angeles Plays Itself" copyright © 2015 by Dayna Tortorici
"The Office and the City" copyright © 2015 by Nikil Saval
"My Las Vegas" copyright © 2015 by Katy Lederer
"Phoenix Rising" copyright © 2015 by Emily Gogolak
"Upstream in Williston" copyright © 2015 by Nicky Tiso
"Lessons of the Arkansas" copyright © 2015 by Ben Merriman
"Dallas and the Park Cities" copyright © 2015 by Annie Julia Wyman
"Saving Detroit" copyright © 2015 by Simone Landon
"The Cleveland Model" copyright © 2015 by Gar Alperovitz and n+1 Foundation
"Late Show Philadelphia, 1999" copyright © 2015 by Chanelle Benz
"The Highway and the City" copyright © 2015 by Dan Albert
"Lehigh Acres, Designated Place" copyright © 2015 by Spencer Fleury
"Disappearing in Duluth" copyright © 2015 by Shawn Wen
"Boston Buys Resistance" copyright © 2015 by Steve Meacham and n+1 Foundation
