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This usually means tires are slipped into Mexico through the noncommercial lanes on flatbeds or in vans and personal trucks. Another eighty thousand tires cross the border attached to vehicles destined for the scrap heap. To add to the mess, tires hauled from Oregon, Nevada, and Arizona that are never unloaded in California never get counted. All of these tires don’t carry the drivers of Baja as far as they might, either. Owing to the quality of the roads, tires have to be replaced frequently. The state of Baja has no real way to deal with what are now “waste tires.” The stacks that appear in open lots and along waterways like the Tijuana River are called “legacy piles.” These often catch on fire and emit acrid black smoke for weeks; water collects in their wells andmosquitoes take up residence. Tires don’t like to be buried in the dump, either. Because they don’t biochemically degrade, tires almost magically shimmy up as layers of landfill settle around them over time. When it rains, those waste tires float, most often downstream.
    â€œThat $2.50 I paid to have my used tires disposed of only covered the gas money to get them to Mexico,” McCue said, “but the Tijuana River will bring them back for free. And that $1.75 environmental fee, it was added to a fund that grows by about $40 million a year with nowhere to go.”
    â€œThis valley is forgotten,” hollered Dick Tynan. He’d stepped down from his tractor. The machine coughed one last belch of smoke, sputtered, and died, but Tynan was still yelling above its roar. “We’ve picked up five hundred tires already. Some spots are this deep in it,” he said, pointing to his waist.
    From Monument Road, McCue had turned onto a dirt lane and into the Kimzey Ranch, a historic parcel at the foot of Smuggler’s Gulch. Adjacent to the hundred-year-old ranch house was a barn with its doors thrown open. This is where we found Dick and his son Terry. As Dick parked the tractor, Terry migrated over from some outbuildings. Together, they looked like facsimiles of the same man at different ages—white T-shirts and blue jeans, ample bellies, slack shoulders, breast pockets taut with packages of Marlboro Lights. Their postures gave the impression that they’d been molded from river clay. Both had burned necks and stubble on their faces; Dick’s was white and Terry’s salt-and-pepper. Dick wore his hair loose—a white Beatles cut from that period just before the band turned hippie. The bangs framed piercing blue eyes. Terry’s were shaded by a stained baseball cap that read INTIMIDATOR . But the nose was the same straight short nose as his father’s. They withdrew their Marlboro Lights and tapped the filters on the packages with what looked like a practiced synchronization.
    Nearby stood a forty-foot Dumpster that was slowly being filled. McCue pointed out that this was just one of the ranches in the river’s path. Once the tires crossed back into the United States, they were immediately designated as toxic waste. Instead of costing $2.50 each to dispose of, the price was now estimated at twenty dollars. This was why Dick and Terry were out collecting the flood tires themselves.
    Dick Tynan had married into one of the few remaining horse ranches in the valley. The Kimzey place got its start raising thoroughbreds for the action at Tijuana’s Agua Caliente track. This was not a lonely business in the early part of the twentieth century. Until Santa Anita opened near Los Angeles in 1935, the Agua Caliente Handicap had been the premier event in North America. Gambling was the big draw. Even in the trough of the Great Depression first place garnered a purse of $23,000 or, adjusted for inflation, nearly $400,000 today. Dozens of stables and breeding operations occupied the American side. Famous actors and horses passed through on their way to Tijuana’s casino and race track. Movie star