The Coyote's Bicycle Read Online Free PDF Page B

1848.
    It was hard to believe, driving along Monument Road, that one of Mexico’s fastest-growing cities simmered just on the other side of this rise. The country beyond the windshield looked every bit of rural California: towering green juniper served as windbreaks along property lines, sycamores shaded ranch houses. Beefy trucks towed horse trailers. It was so American there was no need for the frequent flags.
    I rode shotgun in environmentalist Ben McCue’s SUV . The thirty-year-old looked just about what the last name would suggest: curly blond hair, a sprinkle of freckles, a lean Irishman. McCue liked to be awed by natural or extra-normal events; he liked to be bowled over by volume and numbers and synchronicity. For the oddities produced by this strange valley, his temperament was a perfect fit. Luckily for my story, he also knew a lot about wayward car tires.
    â€œWhen I bought my last set of new tires,” he said as we eased through a curve in the tree-shaded road, “I paid an environmental fee of $1.75 for each one. By state law, that buck seventy-five is supposed to follow that specific tire through its life span and aid in its eventual recycling or disposal. But I also paid the shop a ‘disposal fee’ of $2.50 for each of the used tires I left with them. I could have taken the worn tires home with me and skipped the shop’s disposal fee, but they would have just taken up space and I would have had to throw them out anyhow. I could have driven on that set a few more miles, but for safety, I let them go. There are over thirty million registered motorcycles, cars, and trucks on California’s roads, nearly a vehicle for every person in the state. But neither the state nor the shops have the capacity to recycle or dispose of all of those tires.”
    â€œSo where do they go?” I asked.
    â€œYou’ll see,” he said with smirk. “A lot of them go to Mexico.”
    McCue and I had met in Spain years before. He was studying at a north coast university. I was covering the European leg of a professional surfing tour for American sports magazines. The pay was so low that I traveled in a class with students, backpackers, and bearded men who slept in parking lots. McCue’s roommate, Zach Plopper, happened to be a professional surfer from California, and on account of that connection the three of us formed a rollicking fan club of Spanish food, wine, and waves. We surfed windblown beaches on the North Atlantic. We each carried an empty wine bottle to be refilled by local vintners. I drove a hot-wired silver Peugeot with noregistration or known owner. It had just been handed down surfer to surfer, year after year. On departure, I left the Peugeot with an Aussie surfer in France. Instead of keys, I handed over the screwdriver that opened the door. Following that season, McCue and I lost touch. I learned that he’d found work as an environmentalist on the boundary about the time I received a series of magazine assignments concerning pollution and development issues in Mexico. McCue’s was an easy call to make.
    â€œWhat usually happens is that the tires I paid a disposal fee to get rid of are sold to a tire-hauling middleman who takes them across the border. The tires I left with the dealer weren’t bad, they just wouldn’t have been safe for much longer. But that gap, between safe and impossible, is what Baja California drives on. The middlemen sell their load to tire shops called llanteras . Most likely, my tires were put on a car owned by a regular Mexican driver for a fraction of the cost of a new set.”
    There was actually a guru of this used tire business. According to a 2009 study led by Paul Ganster, director of the Institute for Regional Studies of the Californias at San Diego State University, the state of Baja California accepts about 750,000 used tires as legal imports per year, but a significant volume is also imported “informally.”