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Spot: Imperial Beach, CA [im·pe·ri·al]
32°34'46.07"N 117° 8'0.91"W
Made famous, or maybe infamous, by Kem Nunn’s book Tijuana Straits, and the summer 2007 HBO series John From Cincinnati, Imperial Beach is a border town, and border towns are always a little different.
According to the John From Cincinnati wiki: “Known as a biker town for its rough atmosphere and seedy beachfront area throughout the 70s, Imperial Beach has undergone a significant makeover in the last ten years.”
In his interview with Kem Nunn called Slouching Towards Tijuana, Enrique Gili described IB as a no-man’s land “tinged with desperation and madness.” All the characters in John From Cincinnati were on the edge – of sanity, civility, sobriety, mortality – and so IB was the perfect place for them as it’s a city on the edge of California and Mexico.
Not that there’s anything all that wrong with that. Imperial Beach is kind of an outpost, down there on its own, caught between the United States Navy at Coronado and… Mexico.
Imperial Beach used to be closer to the trashed, run down Tijuana than to squeaky clean Coronado, but these days even the oddest stretch of California coastline is worth its weight and gold, so IB has been spruced up and yuppified and is a nice place to visit.
The Good
Remote and removed and on its own, so a good place to find uncrowded surf. Beautiful on a nice day and a clear day, when the sun is out and the winds are offshore and the sky is blue, it’s an odd, beautiful place.
The Bad
The Tijuana River runs through Mexico for 115 miles and then sneaks across the border for the last 5 miles and empties into the ocean south of Imperial Beach. That last five miles is mostly wetlands, which is supposed to be nature’s Britta water filter, but not even five miles of wetland can undo the damage that Tijuana does to the river that bears its name – and its filth.
The Tijuana River is one of the most polluted rivers in California, the United States and the world with as much as 300 million gallons of sewage polluted water flowing out to sea when the rain is falling.
It is odd that a river in a state with environmental controls like California, in a country with environmental controls like the United States, could be that stinky, but it’s really bad. And while the current generally flows north to south, when the wind is blowing from the south, it blows that effluent up to Imperial Beach and beyond.
In 1996 the south end of Imperial Beach – where the best surf breaks - was closed 199 out of 365 days, because of pollution
The Strange
The Tijuana Sloughs might be the only still-existing California surf spot that was more popular in the 1930s and 1940s than it is now. There are other spots, like Killer Dana in Dana Point and Flood Control in Long Beach, that were popular surf spots from that era that have been engineered out of existence. But in the mid-20th Century Dempsey Holder was a local San Diego legend who surfed out there with with Miki Dora, Pat Curren, Peter Cole, the Hoffman brothers, Don Oakey, Lorrin Harrison, Buzzy Trent and Bob Simmons. Tijuana Sloughs were one of the proving grounds for the North Shore back in the 40s and 50, when the waters were mostly untainted by a Tijuana that had a population of 22,000 in 1940 and 65,000 in 1950.
This is a beach town with a uniquely weird vibe, as it’s the last outpost of civility before the throbbing waste bin of Latin America.
Here is how it was all described in the original script for John From Cincinnati, and the rewrite:
The original:
EXT. TIJUANA RIVER VALLEY - FIRST LIGHT
Raw land, five miles deep and two wide, holding within its dark recesses the
last reaches of the Tijuana River, ending in beaches vacant as the moon and
these known as the Tijuana Sloughs --
High ground lies to the south -- mesas cut by THE FENCE, and beyond these
the hills of Mexico --
North, the land is flatter. The grasses of a broad estuary give way to the
nearly featureless waste of IMPERIAL BEACH -- the last beach town in
California. The one no one wants. From the windows of its cheap tract
homes the great disc of the Tijuana bullring can be seen emerging from the
polluted coastal air like the mother ship of some alien race come to survey
its holdings --
And here's the opening scene of the JFC pilot re-shoot:
EXT. THE U.S. / MEXICAN BORDER - DAY
The lights of Tijuana flicker to the south -- its sprawling factory district, its high-rises and American-style shopping centers, the homes of its businessmen and drug lords reaching toward the coast. North are the
lights of Imperial Beach, the last coastal town in California, the one no
one wants. Between these encampments, in the shadow of the great steel
fence that divides them, lies a ragged expanse of raw land, five miles long
and two wide. It is the Tijuana River Valley, haunt of migrants, smugglers,
and others Without The Law. The Valley¹s last reaches end in beaches vacant as the moon.
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