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is a region prone not only to drought but to real deluge as well—unexpected walls of water that come quick and serious. The winter flood that caught my attention brought several forty-foot Dumpsters’ worth of used tires floatingwith it. The receding waters of the Tijuana River left tires hanging from branches like kids’ tree swings. American-made rubber clogged drainage ditches, got stuck under bridges. Black, steel-belted donuts were strewn throughout a half-dozen American horse ranches. But the odd thing about this situation was: it wasn’t all that unusual.
    Some estimate the flood cycle at seventeen years. But heavy rains do sometimes fall in consecutive years, even in a string of them. Clogged culverts, riffraff stuck under bridges, sluices and ditches that go unmaintained—all have allowed relatively minor rains to turn into disasters. In worst-case scenarios, reservoirs and dams fail. It doesn’t always happen in the same manner or at the same portion of the waterway or, for that matter, in the same country. It always makes for a surreal scene. In 1895, the cast-iron obelisk called Monument 255, a pillar commissioned by Congress to mark the international boundary at San Ysidro, was caught by currents, washed away, and buried. In 1916 and 1927, storm water caused the often dry Tijuana River to swell to a mile wide, the Far West’s replica of the Mississippi. The Mexican customs house was destroyed twice. The region’s first church was pushed off its foundation. The bridge to San Diego collapsed three times. Tijuana’s original horse track, and its famous multistory mountain of manure, were simply washed away—the manure hillock receding whole like an island in the rear view of an ocean liner. In a Mexican neighborhood butted against the boundary, a flash flood caused a landslide that carried several houses down with it. One of them was full of paper money. Neighbors jumped into the brown river to rescue the notes. In the United States, a commune of farmers called the Little Landers was completely wiped out. One hundred families were left homeless in a matter of hours. There were bloating dead horses and cows and snakes. A dairyman complained of having to milk his surviving cows under water. A raft of wooden casks filled with Mexican wine once washed clear into the San Diego Bay. Local boat crews were seen fishingthem out of the brackish water. An observer noted, “The casks were well made, so I bet there was plenty of good wine left inside.”
    In 2008, an assignment to cover yet another incident involving flood and debris brought me to the Tijuana River Valley and the borderline. I was asked to document the recurring nuisance of these mysterious car tires and how it was that they so consistently ended up in the Pacific Ocean. At the heart of the reporting was the fact that, even though the tires came floating into the United States from Mexico, they weren’t Mexican tires at all. California’s drivers had paid good money to have their used tires properly disposed of—recycled even. These tires had gone through the legal channels. But there they were, scads of animated and willful Dunlops with the directional sense of snow geese.
    As the Tijuana River enters the United States from Mexico, its northwesterly run elbows straight west toward the ocean. The valley that holds the river then spreads out like a fan. Saltwater marsh rolls away from the channel flat and green. Recessed in the tidal lands, snaking waterways meander through oxbows and torpid shallows up to the banks of a small town called Imperial Beach. A few farms and ranches occupy the southern shore of the riverbank. Then, across Monument Road, tan, chalky palisades surge three hundred feet from the valley floor and stagger parallel to the river and wetlands. From the ranches below, this escarpment looks like a fortification of sorts—not all, but most of the high ground was ceded to Mexico in