The Coyote's Bicycle

by Kimball Taylor

  There was another high point nearby that I’d long admired for its vantage. Peregrin and I could see its pinnacle from Spooner’s Mesa. Even before I glimpsed the coyote bikes, I’d pedal or hike up to certain lookouts on Point Loma—the swayback peninsula that rises to 422 feet to face the broad Pacific—always on the first evening of a Santa Ana wind. These breezes that start off cool in the box canyons of Utah cross the desert and bloom into hot, offshore gusts that completely transform the face of the south coast. Tan, chalky cliffs, slate-blue ocean, and dusty green hillocks warm into the true colors following a morning rain—but with something else, an atmospheric patina reminiscent of an old photo. That past-meets-present clarity is what takes me up to the lookout. Because on the horizon at sundown, San Clemente Island looms out of the west nearly fifty miles away. Normally the island is completely invisible to the naked eye, but at times like this, landscape detail emerges from a great distance.

  I often thought about the last bikes trapped out there on a craggy, mysterious island that appeared only during rare atmospheric conditions. Part of the appeal had to do with the restricted access, as civilians weren’t allowed near it. After the swing gang mentioned that, given the speed with which bikes disappeared from military bases, San Clemente Island was probably the only location where the swamp bikes could be said with certainty to exist, I had the occasion to interview a lobster fisherman who happened to work the backside of the island every fall. As he regaled me with the terrifying details of a boat sinking he’d survived out there, I found a question rising to my lips. I was about to ask the man for a ride on his new boat, out to the island, where I imagined myself scaling its desert cliffs and scouring the topside for junk bikes probably rusting away in the dirt somewhere. That’s when I stopped. I finally realized how far I’d overshot my mark. Bicycle brakes never really were that good.

  Months later, Watman sent word that El Negro wanted to see me. And I took this as an opportunity to make amends. En route, I tried to script an explanation for my doubts. I didn’t want to lie, yet I couldn’t frame up an honest answer without poking at the old wound. But when I found Negro socializing near the bathrooms below the lighthouse in Playas, no trace of a grudge could be detected.

  He said, “Did Daniel tell you?”

  “Tell me what?” I asked.

  “I found him.”

  “Who?”

  “El Indio,” he said. “Come on, there is a message for you.”

  We hurried along the promenade, past the coconut seller, bars, and taco stands where freelancing mariachis idled, thumbing the strings of their guitars.

  “What does he look like?” I asked.

  “A young guy. Regular, not real good-looking.”

  “You mean he’s indigenous, and you’re not going to tell me anything more.”

  “Sí,” he said.

  Negro opened the black doors of the ship, and I could see that it was not rotting but was finally taking shape as the themed restaurant it was always meant to be. We took up chairs on the plank flooring. I admired a fake new chandelier made of rebar. Negro fetched his notebook. He sat and explained how he continued to visit the home of Roberto and his family until Negro’s presence had passed annoyance and merged with the everyday, like an ugly sofa. And then, one day, Indio was there. The bicycle coyote was not thrilled to be confronted, but he wasn’t combative with his pursuer either. El Negro showed Indio his interviews, and they discussed the characters who filled them. Indio didn’t think it was a very good story at first. But the investigator and his subject met like this several times, until, finally, El Indio was persuaded there might be something to his adventures after all. On that occasion, they sat at Roberto’s small kitchen table and, because they’d become friendly, they drank Tecates together. The men looked over El Negro’s notes again, and afterward, Indio dictated this letter:

  First, I’d like to say thank you, because I never thought that an American would have focused on me, or something as insignificant as crossing our people to the other side. In that respect, I hadn’t given the experience a lot of thought, much less to honor it by writing it down. But now I can see that, yes, it is a good story. Believe me, I would have really liked to put down the real names of the people important to this story. Because each of them deserves the mention. As I’m sure you can understand, the possibility remains that we could all end up in prison in one country or the other.

  El Negro and I have had disagreements. He is a very insistent person. I sense the majority of the time he comes out with what he’s looking for. And I think this is an exception, a unique time, you could say, because he is impossible. He’s always gotten some kind of response. He has insisted that I do an interview with you, and I’ve turned him down and I’ll continue to turn him down because, well, some things hurt me too much to talk about. As I imagine you already know, Marta was the grand love of my life. A great collaborator, one of whose many gifts was this business that prospered beyond our dreams. Take care of those close to you, there is nothing more fragile than a family.

  I hope you don’t get offended by what I’ve said. I would have liked very much to have met up with you some time. I only know you by the picture. El Negro gave me a book of yours that you had given to him. He gave it to me as proof. I feel that I know you now, by the company you keep, and by the photo. It is not easy for me to trust a citizen of the country into which I passed so many of us illegally. Pardon my sincerity. Really, you don’t need me at all. What you needed, you already have.

  When you’re finished reading this, please drink a chelita [cold one] to my health. And I will do the same and toast your work.

  Gracias amigo,

  El Indio

  I continue to visit El Negro aboard his ship. The themed restaurant opened for one week and closed. For El Negro’s sake, I hope it’s for good. We talk about tunnels and submarines and other mysterious things. We talk about writing and the machinery of stories. He tells me that El Indio did something no millionaire American would do—he took up a career in manual labor. Indio bought a truck, a lawn mower, some rakes, shovels, and Weedwackers—and he started a landscaping business. He goes to work every day. Negro says El Indio is softening to the idea of the three of us getting together, drinking some cold ones, and talking about bikes. At these times, I wonder if El Negro himself composed that letter from El Indio. If he did, it wasn’t his best work, really. So I continue to believe that it came from the bicycle coyote’s lips, and I believe all of the other bits El Negro tells me, even about ghosts who sometimes sit down to drink with you and tell you what they’ve been up to en el otro lado.

  I continue to pedal the Free Spirit around the neighborhood and the city. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t spot a landscaping truck, its bench seat burdened with workers. I always look—especially when I’m on the saddle of the Free Spirit. I look through the windshields and into the cabs of those trucks for a worker with an eye for a bike; the narrowed gaze of appraisal, the glint of familiarity. I’m sure I’ve made a number of landscapers pretty uncomfortable. The moment will pass. I’ll ride on—and then I’ll imagine all of the swamp bikes still out there, ferrying new people to new places, their spokes a blur spinning out new stories into the world, the details of which I’ll just never know.

  A Note on Sources and Acknowledgments

  While researching the development of the bicycle, my reading stumbled upon historical accounts that, for me, have become like favored items I keep in a kind of mental Wunderkammer—a cabinet of curiosities. Often, in the process of writing this book, I’d return to these images, dust them off and spin them around. One is set at the Paris Exposition Universelle in the summer of 1867. Inside beautiful fair buildings, artists, explorers, and scientists had assembled a collection meant to represent the forefront of human knowledge. So much effort had gone into selecting these astonishing displays that, it seems, the entire endeavor overshot a development that had occurred practically in the shadows of its scaffolding: the h
umble bicycle.

  French inventors had just recently given the bicycle pedals, an event that held implications for all forward movement. Yet the bicycle was not admitted among the achievements of the exposition. The slight did not matter: regular Parisians rode their new bikes to the fairgrounds anyway, and, at the exposition steps in the Champ de Mars, they pedaled their wheels in lazy, entertaining, joyous circles.

  Twenty-six years later, the main attraction at Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition was none other than George Ferris’ monstrous wheel, a contraption that looped thirty-six passenger cars 264 feet into the sky. It was an iconic engineering achievement intended to rival the Eiffel Tower, as well as, essentially, just a giant bicycle wheel: axel, spokes, rims and all.

  Another scene I return to occurred indoors on wooden, elliptical rinks. As the bicycle craze of the late 1800s hit America, manufactures realized that a major impediment to sales was the fact that potential customers didn’t know how to ride. The go-around was to establish cycling schools. When I discovered, through El Negro’s interviews, that the bicycle coyote organized such lessons for migrants who had not yet learned to balance on two wheels, the distance between the very first beginners and those on the border with El Indio’s gang collapsed for me—I saw only gyrations through time.

  I suppose what my visual curios have in common is a type of circular synchronicity, pictures and stories that always come back around to their beginnings. Outwardly, the developments of the US–Mexico border and the bicycle don’t have much in common. But they do share this circular nature, this piquant for irony. Some of the stories that occurred on the border were just too thick with it to include. For example, a common legend has it that construction on the earliest government fence was contracted out to American ranchers. Upon completion, the very next act of those locals was to cut holes in the fence to give themselves access to Tijuana’s delights. Or, in more recent times, the government contracted with a firm to extend a physical boundary into San Diego’s interior. This fence company was later charged with having used illegal labor in the building of the fortification designed to keep such labor out.

  The search for El Indio took on a similar character, always cycling back to the few bits we could be certain about, variously plying the story with deeper mysteries. For El Negro, the characters involved in the bicycle operation appeared and disappeared again, as is the nature in a city where modern communication can be an expensive luxury. The odd numbered chapters that explore the rise of El Indio are very much the result of having learned the coyote’s story over time, from the memories of disparate individuals. El Negro conducted dozens of interviews with the gang, beat cops, and other officials, often returning for critical details. Illustrations of the same events, depending on the teller, differed in shape and scope. El Negro and I probed the veracity of these tales by visiting the scenes of the events—Panteón Jardín, where Marta is buried, or El Gato Bronco, or Los Laureles. Separately, I traveled to Oaxaca, Mexico, to small villages like the one where El Indio was born, to learn something not only of the place, but of the era in which Pablito and Solo resided there.

  To understand the experience of migration I spoke to people who lived in the Tijuana River, deportees I met in Playas, people who had returned from the US to Oaxaca, people who had once crossed illegally but had obtained citizenship, and also to Dreamers, the children of crossers. The federal case against the brothers Raul and Fidel Villareal, the Border Patrol agents who were convicted of crossing migrants in Border Patrol vehicles, was especially enlightening. Enforcement agents I’d met, speaking on condition of anonymity, were extremely generous with their time and experiences. Victor Clark Alfaro, a human rights activist and lecturer at San Diego State University, invites human smugglers and street prostitutes to his office in Tijuana, where the subjects explain their work for his SDSU students via a video feed. I was able to attend one of these events at his office, and found Clark’s use of primary sources in this field unparalleled. What I learned in person was aided by the books and articles of Peter Andreas, Lawrence A. Herzog, and Joseph Nevins.

  So many people contributed to The Coyote’s Bicycle in small ways, I could never thank them all. Early readers Chris Patterson, Brian Taylor, Cameron Taylor, Angie Fitzpatrick-Taylor, Zach Plopper, and Tim Barger helped to foster the work along. Grant Ellis labored over rugged terrain to capture the cover image. Shawn Bathe acted as both my Baja co-pilot and artistic collaborator. Almost all of the principals and interview subjects in this story were unstinting with their information. I’d like to thank: Dick Tynan, Terry Tynan, Carol Kimzey, Sharon Kimzey-Moore, Jesse Gomez, David Gomez, Greg Abbott, Chris Peregrin, Mike McCoy, Serge Dedina, Oscar Romo, Janine Zúñiga, Eric Kiser, Kim Zirpolo, Tarek Albaba, Johnny Hoffman, Brian Anderson, Ron Nua, Eric Amavisca, Aaron Garrison, Maria Teresa Fernandez, Ana Teresa Fernandez, Eric Blehm, William Finnegan, J. Jesus Cueva Pelayo, Vianett Medina, Amy Isackson, Gabe Duran, Steve Hawk, Ian Taylor, Ken Gomez and the volunteers of Bikes del Pueblo, the Binational Conference on Border Issues, Squaw Valley Community of Writers, Tony Perez, Nanci McCloskey, and the staff of Tin House Books.

  And in hopes that what El Negro promised his sources—“No one will know who it is except the one who knows his own life”—is indeed the case, I’d like to thank El Indio, Solo, Roberto, et al.

  Notes and Sources

  Page numbers listed correspond to the print edition of this book. You can use your device's search function to locate particular terms in the text. Please bookmark your page before following links.

  CHAPTER 2

  page 17: most crossed international border zone . . . “Number of Border Crossings Stabilizes,” Sandra Dibble, San Diego Union-Tribune, July 11, 2010

  page 17: brought several forty-foot Dumpsters’ . . . Interviews with Dick Tynan, Greg Abbott, and Chris Peregrin

  page 18: the flood cycle at seventeen years . . . “Historias de las Inundaciones in Tijuana,” El Mexicano, January 23, 2011

  page 18: was caught by currents . . . Ibid.

  page 18: The bridge to San Diego collapsed three times . . . Ibid.

  page 18: Tijuana’s original horse track . . . Tijuana: Identitades y Nostalgias, Francisco Manuel Acuña Borbolla, 2002; Seabiscuit: An American Legend, Laura Hillenbrand, 2001

  page 18: a flash flood caused a landslide . . . “Historias de las Inundaciones in Tijuana,” El Mexicano, January 23, 2011

  page 18: a commune of farmers . . . “The Little Landers Colony of San Ysidro,” The Journal of San Diego History, Winter 1975

  page 18: A dairyman . . . San Diego Union-Tribune, February 2, 1993

  page 18: A raft of wooden . . . Imperial Star News, March 2, 1980

  page 20: “When I bought” . . . Interview with Ben McCue

  page 21: There was actually a guru . . . “The Flow of Used and Waste Tires in the California-Mexico Border Region,” 2009, Institute for Regional Studies of the Californias, San Diego State University

  page 22: “This valley is forgotten” . . . Interview with Dick Tynan and Terry Tynan

  page 23: Until Santa Anita opened . . . Seabiscuit: An American Legend, Laura Hillenbrand, 2001

  page 23: Movie star cowboy Roy Rogers . . . “Roy Rogers’ Horse Trigger (1932?-1965): A Biography,” RoyRogersWorld.com; Interview with Dick Tynan

  page 23: Actor Jay Silverheels, who played Tonto . . . San Ysidro and the Tijuana River Valley, Barbara Zaragoza, 2014

  page 23: automobile magnate Charles S. Howard . . . “Charles S. Howard, Owner Of Seabiscuit, Noor Dies,” San Diego Union, June 7, 1950; “Howard Ranch,” San Diego Union, January 1, 1969

  page 27: Horses had even drowned . . . “Horse Owners Surprised by Flood Waters,” San Diego Union-Tribune, December 18, 2008

  page 27: not one little piece . . . In June of 2013, a fire that began on the All Bikes lot quickly grew into a blaze that consumed an estimated nine thousand bikes and motorcycles.

  CHAPTER 4

  page 39: women
of the 1890s . . . Bicycle: The History, David V. Herlihy, 2004

  page 40: the most militarized portion . . . “Background to the Office of the Inspector General Investigation,” Office of the Inspector General, U.S, Justice Department, 1998

  page 41: had sold for decades . . . Sears contracted with numerous manufactures to produce a range of styles under the Free Spirit brand. Some were made in the US by Huffy and Murray, but many more were made overseas, in Europe and Asia. I gleaned this information from knowledgeable enthusiasts on several cycling forums including BikeForums and oldroads.com. Under the tag, alanbikehouston, one Free Spirit buff had this to say on BikeForums, “During the 1960’s and 1970’s, probably half the bikes in any given small town in America were labeled ‘Free Spirit.’ Most were sturdy bikes for their specific price range. An oddity of ‘Free Spirit’ bikes in the 1968 to 1980 period was that Sears would buy bikes of similar appearance from suppliers in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, and Japan. So, although the bikes looked like the same model, they might use different size rims and tires.”

  page 42: It was set at yellow . . . Chronology of Changes to Homeland Security Advisory System, http://www.dhs.gov/homeland-security-advisory-system.

  The color-coded advisory system lasted for nine years, ending in 2011. According to the DHS, it was going to be a “comprehensive and effective communications structure.” CNN commentator Bruce Schneirer wrote, “It was introduced after 9/11, and was supposed to tell you how likely a terrorist attack might be. Except that it never did.”

  page 42: The ranks of the border patrol agents . . . “Border Patrol has lots of agents . . . in wrong places,” Associated Press, June 29, 2014

  page 42: least open or transparent . . . “Reporting Around DHS Opacity,” On the Media, October 25, 2013; “Shedding Light on DHS,” On the Media, February 28, 2014

  page 42: In his 2009 memoir . . . The Test of Our Times: America Under Siege . . . and How We Can Be Safe Again, Tom Ridge, Larry Bloom, 2009; “Ridge Says He Was Pressured to Raise Terror Alert,” Associated Press, August 20, 2009