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My first memory of Imperial Beach is of bodysurfing small, low tide waves at the south end of First Street (now Seacoast Drive). After I emerged from the water, my younger brother Nicky and I wandered over to the sand dunes that lined the beach south of the Boca Rio apartments. As we ran over the dunes, the sight of the winding channels and mudflats of the Tijuana Estuary stunned us. Whooping with delight we jumped into the inviting waters of the Sloughs.
by Serge Dedina
02/06/2006:// Most of our trips to the beach after that windless summer afternoon in August 1971 were spent with my parents and friends from my east IB neighborhood around Hemlock Avenue and 14th Street playing in the cool waters and sand embankments of the Tijuana River mouth. My mom packed sack lunches and lead us merrily on our bicycles through the trails that wound through the Sloughs from the northwest corner of Ream Field.
On Sunday afternoons we clammed with the families that walked up the beach from Playas de Tijuana. Clam cocktails never tasted so good. Later my best friend Mike McClure and I placed our lunch and towels in plastic bags and swim across the river mouth to its southern shore where we built a driftwood fort and roasted hot dogs and marshmallows. Sixth grade heaven. Later when I learned to surf, my grommet friends and I surfed the Boca Rio at the south end of Seacoast before classes commenced at Mar Vista Junior High.
After a decade studying and working in Wisconsin, Texas, Arizona, and Mexico, it was a dream come true to return to Imperial Beach six years ago to raise my family. Today, my childhood playground is still my favorite destination in Imperial Beach. When my two sons, Israel and Daniel were toddlers, my wife Emily and I walked down to the river mouth with them, collecting driftwood to make surfside teepees.
Now, early winter mornings are what draw me back to the Sloughs. While standing on the dunes that begin where Seacoast Drive ends, with the red ball of the emerging sun lighting up the sky and the feathering crests of Pacific waves that seem to break forever, it is hard to imagine that behind me lies Tijuana, one of Mexico’s largest cities. During a clean northwest swell, before winter rains have hit, it is almost inconceivable that the mouth of the Tijuana River, my favorite surf break, is one of the most polluted waves in the United States.
On most of my first forays to surf the Sloughs, a mythical wave that can break up to a mile outside the Tijuana River entrance, a pod of bottlenose dolphins emerges from the Pacific to greet the local crew of surfers scanning the horizon for the next clean up set. Tijuana’s wastewater just doesn’t fit into this ocean wilderness.
The drama of ongoing beach closures in Imperial Beach for many in San Diego is a old news. For those of us who live, work and play in Imperial Beach, the hundreds of millions of gallons of sewage that flow out of the gullies and canyons of Tijuana and into the Tijuana River every time it rains, it is one of our biggest headaches. Sadly, the people of Imperial Beach have been completely ignored in the policy debates on how to clean up our beaches. These debates are not open to the public at all. They occur in the backrooms of Washington D.C. where deals have been made to completely cut Imperial Beach out of the picture. We are worse than irrelevant. We have been wiped off the map.
This has happened because one company, Bajagua, owned by Tijuana developer Enrique Landa and his North Couny partner, Jim Simmons, has provided more than $650,000 in lobbying fees and campaign contributions and spent more than 20 million dollars to receive a sole-source no-bid contract with the International Boundary and Water Commission to build a $600 million dollar sewage treatment plan in eastern Tijuana. Unfortunately the plant won’t treat any of the sewage that flows into our beaches and fouls our waters. But in today’s political climate, money talks. The Washington D.C. lobbyist culture has finally hit home. In a big way. And we are the losers.
Is there a solution to this mess? Of course there is. If astronauts can land on the moon, we can easily reduce beach closures in our little corner of the world. It is going to take those of us who are most affected by this problem to make our voices heard. We have to make sure when it comes to cleaning up our beaches, that it is the residents of Imperial Beach, and not the campaign donors of elected officials, who determine how we will clean up our beaches. Our children cannot wait any longer. And I need to know that I can continue to look forward to surfing the emerald waves of the Sloughs that call me home.
Serge Dedina is the Executive Director of WiLDCOAST.
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