A sign outside of the Marina Inn in Imperial Beach proclaims it as the most southwesterly bar in the United States. It is no idle bit of public relations. From the inn’s parking lot you can look south three miles across a marsh to the coastal hills of Mexico. About 500 feet to the west is the Pacific Ocean. People in Imperial Beach are generally proud of this accident of geography and political boundary-drawing — both the city itself and its one newspaper, the Imperial Beach Star News, advertise themselves as the most southwesterly in the continental United States — but in reality, it is as much bane as it is boon. “You almost have to be coming to Imperial Beach on purpose to come here at all,” says Bill Russell, the owner of the Marina Inn. In other words, Imperial Beach isn’t on a path to anywhere. If it were a street, it would be a turnaround. For a businessman it’s bad news. “We’re kind of a small town next to a big city. We’re still not greatly populated, and that’s kind of nice.”

If this sounds a little unusual for coastal San Diego County – a strip better known for luxurious playgrounds like La Jolla, Del Mar, La Costa, and points north – it is. But unusual is a good word for Imperial Beach. It has some of the last vacant ocean-front lots in the county, and nobody will buy them. It’s a place with a reputation for lawlessness and drugs, a place with nearly two miles of ocean front and no way to launch boats into the ocean, a place where, just two years ago, the city council had to bail out the chamber of commerce with a loan. “When I go down there, I look around and think, ‘Am I still in Southern California?’” one woman from the East Coast told me recently.

With housing costs about $35,000 less, on the average, than the rest of the county, Imperial Beach has traditionally been a place where people who can’t afford to live near the beach live near the beach. But for years the city government has been trying to make Imperial Beach not only affordable but desirable. A number of schemes have been proposed to bring in more development and clean up the community’s image, and nearly all of them have included building a marina in the marsh next door.

The marsh is really the estuary of the Tia Juana River, which flows north from Mexico, passes into the U.S. a few hundred yards west of the border crossing at San Ysidro, and empties into the ocean just south of Imperial Beach. Sentiment to protect the marsh has been around for at least as long as plans to build a marina, and last month the possibility of a marina seemed to evaporate for good when the marsh was designated a national estuarine sanctuary, the tenth in the United States and only the second in California, to be preserved for research, education, and wildlife management.

The issue of marina-versus-marsh bitterly divided the residents of Imperial Beach, and its outcome has caused something of a community identity crisis. With a nature preserve instead of a marina complex with luxury condominiums, the citizens are wondering where their small coastal city can go from here. “I was very much in favor of a small marina or boat launch facility,” Bill Russell told me. “So were most of the people down here. It’s kind of dumb for me to have a place called the Marina Inn now, because it doesn’t look like there’s going to be any boat activity here at all.”

As he said this, Russell, a ruddy-faced former naval officer with a jovial manner, was sitting at a table at the Marina Inn. It was two in the afternoon, most of the inn’s lunchtime crowd had cleared out, and “On the Road Again,” was playing on the jukebox. Russell sipped a beer as he talked, pausing now and then to wave and say things like, “Harry, thanks for coming in,” when patrons moved toward the lone door to the outside world.

“The marina would’ve been the keystone to our economic development,” he continued. “I don’t want to sound too negative, but we haven’t really come up with any alternatives so far. We need more residents. Major commercial enterprises won’t come in until we have the people living here, and we need something to draw them in.”

Not everyone welcomes the prospect of more people and development in Imperial Beach, however. “People here are very unaware of what they have,” says Mike McCoy, a local veterinarian and one of the most outspoken proponents of the marshland sanctuary. “Imperial Beach is a nice little town to be in, but right now is a turning point. Developers could come in here and destroy this place.”

McCoy thinks the city’s future lies in the long-term economic gains to be had from tourist dollars and increasing property values due to the sanctuary, but Imperial Beach Mayor Brian Bilbray disagrees. Insisting that preservation of the marsh is pointless if pollution from Tijuana’s sewage spills continue in the area, he claims, “The greatest deterrent to a high quality of life in Imperial Beach is not too much development but the lack of it.” These days, Bilbray is just about the only person in Imperial Beach who thinks the concept of a marina isn’t completely dead.

Imperial Beach has been looking to the Tia Juana River estuary for economic salvation ever since the city was incorporated in 1957. At that time, plans called for a concrete channel to carry the river directly from the border into the ocean. With the river contained within the channel and the surrounding valley safe from flooding, hundreds of acres of dried-up marsh could have eventually supported shopping malls and housing tracts.

But the channel was expensive – some $45 million worth – and it was opposed by a few local environmentalists. When new San Diego Mayor Pete Wilson withdrew his support for the channel in the early 1970s, the project stalled, and soon federal and state legislation was passed that virtually prohibited development of the type hoped for anyway. In the late 1960s and early 1970s the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act, the Rivers and Harbors Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and others all created a web of conditions and restrictions around developing river estuaries. By 1976 the channel concept had been abandoned in favor of a $12.4 million system of dikes and levees for dispersing flood waters, and hopes for developing the valley faded.

“They lost their chance back in the late 1960s,” says Mick McCoy of the effort to develop the valley. “Before all that legislation was passed, there was nothing stopping them; it would have been Mission Valley II out there.” McCoy is a tall, thin man with a bushy red beard. Along with his wife Pat he has been fighting to preserve the Tia Juana River estuary ever since moving to Imperial Beach in 1971. The McCoys are well known in this city of nearly 23,000, but while their outspoken views have earned them respect, they have also created animosity. Among the comments I heard about them recently in Imperial Beach:

“They have been called communists, which is the epithet they hang you with down here when they really want to make you sound despicable. That and homosexual.” “They’ve been in physical danger because of their attitude.” “They’re not hypocrites. They live their lives the way they believe.” “They are dedicated. They have a reverence for nature.” “Put them on donkeys and send them toward some windmills.”

The McCoys know their views are unpopular with a majority of the city’s residents. When they aren’t out working, attending hearings, or putting together leaflets, they sometimes laugh about it.

“A lot of people consider us crazed environmentalists, and I suppose we are,” Pat McCoy told me. “We’ve given them the sanctuary sort of like medicine, and they don’t like it.”

I met the McCoys one afternoon not long ago at their home on Citrus Avenue in Imperial Beach, about half a block from the ocean. They own a small, one-story house, and though the McCoys said they had moved in six months ago, the living room was nearly bare except for a few chairs, a desk, and a sofa. Papers and other items were heaped in cardboard boxes in the corners.

Mike McCoy explained that after the dike and levee system was completed in early 1979, the city’s main hope for development in the estuary became a marina. (In the mid-Sixties, Imperial Beach had sold 126 acres of city-owned marshland to the Helix Imperial Harbor Development Corporation for the construction of a marina.) The marina had several incarnations over the years, but the latest one called for dredging more than 400 acres in the northwestern corner of the estuary and replacing it with high-rise condominiums, private homes with boat slips in their back yards, and a commercial marina designed to accommodate several hundred boats.

The McCoys and a few others opposed the marina plan all the way. Where developers saw boats tied up, the McCoys saw nesting grounds for two endangered species of birds, the least tern and the light-footed clapper rail. When the developers talked economic gain for the city, the McCoys talked economic loss if the river’s flow of nutrients were cut off, ultimately affecting the productivity of the continental shelf and the commercial fishing industry. They pointed out that the marsh was the largest one left in the county and one of the few left at all, and they constantly harped on the fact that federal and state laws would almost certainly prohibit the marina from being built. “We felt like a chorus in a Greek play, singing out the laws, saying, ‘These are the reasons you can’t do it.’” Remembered Pat McCoy in her soft voice touched with an English accent. “The fact is, Imperial Beach was going after the impossible dream for a not very noble cause. Call it progress, call it what you want. I call it plain old greed. People will say we gave up the marina for a bunch of birds, but we were trying to protect the basic thing that keeps us alive.”

In April of 1980 the city sponsored an advisory proposition that called for the marina to be built. Backed by Mayor Brian Bilbray, the measure won overwhelming support of the majority of Imperial Beach residents. But it was a moot point; by Christmas of that year the Helix Corporation had given up and sold its 505 acres of marsh, including the property it had purchased from Imperial Beach. To the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The service began to talk about the possibility of a permanent sanctuary. At the time, Bilbray said he was surprised by Helix’s move, but the McCoys scoffed at this. “We tried to tell him it would happen,” Pat McCoy told a reporter from the San Diego Union. “But he totally ignored us.”

Brian Bilbray was born and raised in Imperial Beach, the city in which he is now the mayor. He was elected to the city council at the age of 25 and became mayor at 28. Today, at thirty years of age, he is undoubtedly the most influential person in the city, and at least as controversial as the McCoys. Almost everyone in Imperial Beach has an opinion:

“He’s outspoken, and that’s just what this city needs.” “The guy has guts.” “He’s impatient and abrasive with those who don’t support his viewpoint.” “The reasons I despise him is he doesn’t think things through. He seems to jump without thinking of all the consequences, the costs.” “We need the flamboyance of Brian. He is totally devoted to this city.” “He’s brought us publicity, but what about the quality of the publicity?”

“The first time I met him,” remembers Bill Russell, “there were a bunch of people in my bar who were going to tear it up. And they basically left because of the force of his personality. He was not on the city council at that time, although he might have had political aspirations. But I recognize a natural leader when I see one.”

Bilbray remembers the incident a little differently. “I was eating dinner and I was halfway through my meal when these two guys started fighting,” he told me when I asked him about it. “They were on the floor, so I grabbed them by the heels and dragged them outside and shut the door behind. I couldn’t see a couple of bums tearing up a poor guy’s business.”

One evening a few weeks ago, Bilbray agreed to drive me around Imperial Beach, to show me his town. He is a man of medium height with short blond hair and a narrow, recessed chin – a fighter’s chin. When he greeted me in his office at city hall, he was wearing a short-sleeve knit shirt open at the collar, blue jeans, and jogging shoes. He has broad shoulders and an athlete’s body, and seemingly every movement he makes is rapid, as if it is designed for maximum efficiency. He talks rapidly too, and gives the impression of being short-tempered, an impression which, according to a number of accounts is not entirely inaccurate.

Bilbray owns an old blue Triumph, but to drive around the city we took a city-owned car. It was five o’ clock and the streets were uncrowded; in Imperial Beach, rush-hour traffic is almost unheard of. “I went to high school right there – Mar Vista High School,” he said as we headed down Imperial Beach Boulevard toward the beach. “I went to elementary school right behind it, at Imperial Beach Elementary, and also at Westview Elementary. I spent almost all my time at the beach. I did a lot of surfing. My parents were always afraid I would drown. In fact, one of the reasons they built a swimming pool in our back yard was to try to keep me off the beach. It didn’t work.”

I asked Bilbray if we could drive by the house where he used to live, and he smiled. “It’s not a situation of where I used to live there; I live there today,” he replied. “I took over the family house and live in the same place now that I did when my mother brought me home from the hospital. That’s it right there.” We had turned onto Second Street near the beach, and Bilbray stopped in front of a small, one-story white stucco house with a low brick wall around it. He glanced at the house briefly and then back at me. We drove on.

As a teenager Bilbray drove across the country and back on a motorcycle he had purchased from his brother. When he returned to Imperial Beach, he worked as a lifeguard for six years, from 1970 to 1976, and it was during this period he began to get interested in politics. “I saw a hell of a lot of things going on at the beach, from lifeguarding, mostly, but also at night from riding around on my motorcycle. And things were just totally out of hand – the lawlessness, the rioting. It was really a bad situation.”

Bilbray doesn’t like to describe what he saw going on in great detail, but other residents of Imperial Beach recall gangs of unruly youths threatening and shouting obscenities at passers-by, drugs being sold on the beach, people urinating off the city pier. “The place had an image problem when I took over here six years ago,” Bill Russell told me one afternoon in the Marina Inn. He lowered his voice conspiratorially. “This bar was a biker hangout. Hard drugs and stolen merchandise were being sold across the bar. Open defiance of the police was the norm; carrying concealed weapons was standard. The bikers and fringe element were pretty much in control of the city.”

Through the efforts of the police and small, beach-front businessmen like himself, Russell claimed, the area near the pier has been cleaned up considerably. “What did I do? Number one, I fired all of the employees, very quickly. I changed the music in the juke box from acid rock to middle-of-the-road. I don’t have anything against rock music, but I’m just telling it the way it is. So I did that, and I bought new furniture, put tablecloths on the tables, and basically operated scared for quite a while.

“We’re getting more and more families coming down here now, and not many knifings and shootings,” Russell continued, reaching out and rapping his knuckles on a nearby wooden chair in the time-honored way to avoid having to eat your words. “And our mayor has helped a lot in this regard. Because he is young, and used to ride a chopper, he could rap with a lot of these people and get through to them. He has been effective in changing the image of Imperial Beach.”

Bilbray had turned onto Seacoast Drive (until recently known as First Street), and as we passed by the lifeguard station at the foot of the city pier a few of the lifeguards waved at him. Bilbray waved back. “We’ve kept our identity, we’ve never lost that small-town atmosphere.” He said when I asked him to describe Imperial Beach. “We’re surrounded on three sides by water (San Diego Bay to the north, Tia Juana River to the south, and the ocean to the west), so our influence by anyone comes from the direction of the freeway. Community-wise, we go all the way to the freeway, but there’s a strip of land out near the freeway that was annexed by San Diego before Imperial Beach was incorporated. We call it the occupied west bank of the freeway.”

Driving up Palm Avenue toward Interstate 5, Bilbray slowed the car as we passed Fifteenth Street, the boundary between the cities of San Diego and Imperial Beach, and pointed out to me the contrast in appearance. On San Diego’s side of Fifteenth, storefronts and billboards were strung out for half a mile or so to the freeway, but Imperial Beach’s side consisted mostly of small homes and apartments without a billboard in sight. (The city has an ordinance prohibiting billboards). “That’s one of the reasons we resent San Diego’s influence here,” Bilbray remarked. “We’ve tried to get them to clean up their side, but they just drag their feet. San Diego treats Imperial Beach – and the whole South Bay area, really – like a colony. And it is a colony. We have no political clout and very few economic ventures. Basically, all the empire of San Diego wants to do is control the border crossing and the economic benefits they can get from that.”

We made our way over to Imperial Beach Boulevard (a street that, where it crosses into San Diego, becomes known as Coronado Avenue. Bilbray noted with a tight smile), and headed down toward the beach again. Imperial Beach has a small navy commissary and more than its share of bars, fast-food stops, and auto parts stores, but noticeably few motels, grocery stores, and real estate offices. (“If you wanted to buy sandals, Imperial Beach would sell you combat boots,” Mike McCoy once told me.) It has a lot of apartment buildings too – 64.2 percent of the city’s housing units are rentals, a rate that is among the highest in the county – many of them occupied by unmarried enlisted Navy men. Bilbray told me that these young enlisted men were a relatively new phenomenon in Imperial Beach, during his childhood, what Navy personnel there were here consisted mostly of families. “The enlisted bachelor, I think he creates more problems than he solves. Like anyone else that age, the enlisted man is spending more money in the bar than in the grocery store.

“But now we’re going through the next metamorphosis, and that is, now the professional people are coming in.” Bilbray turned south when we reached Seacoast Drive again and drove past a row of luxury apartments and condominiums that faces the ocean. “Some of these go for $250,000. $300,000 easy,” he said. “With this kind of development we’re getting lawyers and doctors. We’re getting more of the professional types that the city has been lacking for so many years. And that’s why the marina was so important. It would have brought in at least 11,000 people – high income, professional people. There would have been sales tax and property tax to go along with that. And it would have put us in a strategic location, and that’s the big key. We would have been between the population of Southern California and the best fishing grounds in the area, the Coronado Islands.”

We come to a stop at the end of Seacoast, which dead ends a half mile or so south of Imperial Beach Boulevard. To our right was the ocean and in front of us lay the broad, flat expanse of the Tia Juana River estuary, unbroken except for a few low hills. “That’s our infamous Tia Juana slough,” Bilbray said, gesturing toward the marsh. He shook his head. “The concept that this is a pristine estuarine environment with badgers and everything else is humorous, if not downright disturbing. The critical element there is not the land use but the water quality. The fastest growing city on the West Coast, Tijuana, is going right up on the other side. It’s going to be bigger than Los Angeles in five or ten years, and they’ve got no sewage treatment. But nobody’s talking about that problem; everyone’s ignoring it.”

Well, not quite everyone. When a broken sewer pipe in Tijuana sent raw sewage flooding across the border last year, Bilbray tried to call attention to the problem. When there was no action, he and a few members of the Imperial Beach city council decided to take matters into their own hands.

The year 1980 was not a good one for Imperial Beach. In early February, heavy rains and high tides flooded the city’s streets, washing away huge chunks of asphalt and knocking down fences. Battered by storm waves, the end of the city pier began to crack. Two weeks later a portion of it finally fell into the sea. Currents swung this piece around and carried it back through the pier’s main stem, smashing the connection to the mainland. Damage was estimated at one million dollars.

The same storms that did in the pier also washed out sewer lines in San Diego and Tijuana. One persistent break in Tijuana, submerged under flood waters, fouled the Tia Juana River estuary and caused Imperial Beach’s shoreline to be quarantined. The break was first discovered April 1, and when it still hadn’t been fixed by mid-June, people in Imperial Beach were getting restless. “Everyone kept telling us, ‘Just wait, just wait, just wait,’” said Bilbray. “It was an international issue, but Washington has traditionally been very apprehensive about saying anything here because of oil politics. We felt we were being sold out.”

Bilbray’s assessment sounds plausible, but ignores the fact that San Diego was also plagued by breaks in city sewer lines well into the summer of 1980. Nevertheless, Imperial Beach felt the time had come to act. One June 18 Bilbray and three members of the Imperial Beach city council practiced driving tractors and other heavy equipment, and announced that the next morning they were going to build a dam across the mouth of the Tia Juana River. Bilbray explained to the local media that the dam would act as a “filtration system” and would prevent the sewage in the estuary from reaching the city’s beaches. “I’ve had people tell me it won’t work,” he told the San Diego Union. “But even if it breaks down in two weeks, that’s just that much less time we have to put up with raw sewage.” (The Imperial Beach city attorney had already advised the council that the dam would be flagrantly illegal, but they chose to ignore him. ‘Talking to the city council is like talking to a bunch of grapes’” the city attorney said later.)

The dam construction, dubbed “Operation Beaver” got started at six o’ clock the following morning. Wearing hard hats, Bilbray and his cohorts rumbled down the beach in their city-owned heavy equipment. They had already built a makeshift earthen dam across the river mouth when the growing crowd of onlookers, residents, reporters and environmentalists was joined by a patrol inspector from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

By this time, according to several accounts, things were getting out of hand. Supporters of Operation Beaver were trading taunts with opponents. A group of people had tried to pull Bilbray from the cab of his skiploader and failed. Bilbray shouting, “You like water so much?” – had scooped up a load of sewage laden water and tried to dump it on the protesters. Soon the fish and wildlife inspector, citing laws protecting endangered species, threatened to arrest the dam’s “engineers,” Bilbray took him on a tour of the beach to show him dead seals and other animals, which the mayor claimed had died because of sewage pollution, and Operation Beaver began winding down.

Bilbray said he would be happy if the dam lasted two weeks. It turned out to be an optimistic guess; a high tide washed away all traces of the earthen dam within two days. “Operation Beaver was a product of the community, not city hall,” Bilbray told me when we were back in his office. “When you’re as small as Imperial Beach is, you can’t force the federal government or the state government to do anything. All you can do is what a little guy would do – embarrass the big bully and try to make it obvious how bad things really are.” Still, the accomplishments of the incident were dubious at best. The broken Tijuana sewage pipe couldn’t be fixed underwater, and it was repaired as soon as the water receded. Sewage spills in Mexico still occasionally pollute the estuary.

Currently Tijuana is building a sewage treatment plant near Rosarito Beach, about ten miles below the border. Even when the plant is completed, however, it will simply channel Tijuana’s sewage into the ocean, where currents often carry it northward onto the shores of Imperial Beach. The plant is expected to reach capacity within five or ten years anyway, so it is no more than a short term solution at best. The International Boundary and Water Commission, a joint agency of the United States and Mexico, has been studying the problem for years, and is still studying it. So far the agency has offered no solutions, although there has been talk of an international sewage treatment plant on the U.S. side of the border.

“Can we persuade Mexico to stop the pollution problem?” Bilbray asked me rhetorically. “Look, they could care less about the Environmental Protection Agency. And to think they’re going to have their sewage under control in five or ten years is a very interesting though, especially when you’ve got a country that is striving to feed its masses and build an economy. Even our country would have trouble, with our resources, coping with the problem…”

Bilbray takes the view that pollution from sewage will doom the estuary and its new sanctuary sooner or later, paving the way for a marina to be built at last. But as the McCoys have pointed out, a marina does nothing to solve the water quality problem. “I doubt if any boat owners would enjoy going out on a pier while raw sewage was collecting on the pilings underneath,” Mike McCoy says drily. “The water quality is a critical issue, but it’s an international issue. Imperial Beach can’t solve it. The border area has to be managed as a region rather than two separate countries, as far as sewage and water quality are concerned,” McCoy and others see hope for a solution in the management structure of the new sanctuary, which will include a water quality committee composed of representatives from the governments of both the United States and Mexico. But Bilbray is probably right when he foresees a sluggishness to act on the part of the Mexicans, and it could be a long time before sewage stops flowing across the border.

One afternoon a few weeks ago I took a walk with Mike McCoy in the new Tijuana River Estuarine Sanctuary. We entered from Fifth Street in Imperial Beach, where large single-family homes crowd right up to the edge of the marsh. Passing a green border patrol van parked at the end of the street – McCoy said hi to the officer inside who nodded back – we made our way southward along a path just outside the fence around Ream Field, a Navy helicopter training field. A cool breeze was blowing, and the Coronado Islands rose ghostlike out of a fog bank a few miles offshore.

We passed two middle-aged women out for a walk, and then McCoy led the way to the top of a nearby bluff. A pied-billed grebe bobbed and dove in a pond below us, and McCoy pointed out a tall patch of reeds near the pond that indicated a freshwater marsh within the larger saltwater one. Mexican workers attempting to enter the U.S. illegally frequently use such places to hide when they first cross the border, he said, leaving trash and “all the pants and underwear you could ever want.” We could see a few items of clothing from the bluff, and here and there lay piles of flood-deposited wood and plastic, too. But overall the marsh seemed strikingly pretty and serene, and even some formerly pro-marina residents have said they are surprised how quickly the marsh is recovering from the sewage spills and floods of recent years,

Bitterness over the loss of the marina seems to be fading in Imperial Beach, and many residents are now concentrating on other ways of sprucing up the city’s image. “If we’re going to have a sanctuary in the city limits, I’d like to have the best one in the whole world,” says Pat Emond, an assistant to Bilbray. “We’ve got to get as much good from it as we can.” Emond is one of the founding members of the Imperial Beach Whale and Sunset Watchers Society, a civic-minded group that raises and donates about $5000 a year to the city for beautification projects. Similar groups have existed in other cities for decades, but in Imperial Beach the society is a novelty. It has planted trees and bought signs for city hall, and this year the group will buy the materials and donate the labor to re-paint part of the city’s pier, which was finally repaired last month.

Meanwhile, Bilbray and the city council are nearly ready to invite development of hotel/motel complex on one of the few city-owned parcels left in Imperial Beach, an ocean-front lot currently used as a parking lot. There has also been talk of a breakwater to protect the worsening problem of erosion of the city’s beach. The breakwater would enclose the beach behind a wall of riprap and cement built by the army corps of engineers, but privately, some citizens express doubts over the experimental nature of the project and wonder if it isn’t just a foot in the door for an ocean front marina.

Bilbray also talks about building “high quality” residential development to attract more resident professionals. “The ocean is where our future lies,” he says. “Nobody can take that from us. Imperial Beach is like a teen-age girl who hasn’t learned to put her makeup on, or doesn’t own the jewelry or the expensive dresses yet. But it’s all there, and with a little time and a little money to get the nice things she should have, she’s going to be one hell of a creature.”

Not everyone is convinced they want to meet Bilbray’s “creature,” however. When the mayor starts talking about things like knocking down single-family homes to build luxury condominiums, the McCoys, among others, start getting upset. “This idea that we should clean up the town by replacing the people who live here with a layer of professionals is a constant battle,” Mike McCoy told me as we stood on the bluff overlooking the marsh. “People who have lived here for years might lose their homes. What we really need to do is lower the high rental population here – get rid of all these absentee landlords. A more stable community will have more pride, and it will support a commercial center. That’s where we should concentrate our efforts. As you provide services through small businesses, they’ll begin to support one another. I realize we can’t do this overnight. But it’s what I do. As a veterinarian, I’m a small businessman here, and I provide a service.”

McCoy said he is concerned Imperial Beach will lose its small-town character if it becomes a bedroom community for professionals who work in cities to the east and north. He thinks the future lies in the estuary instead. Property values will rise as the sanctuary is cleaned up and maintained, he pointed out, and construction of a visitors’ center, which could be built in Imperial Beach if state funds to match a recent $500,000 grant come through, could draw in tourists.

“It’s great for the doctor to think that, but I’m not optimistic about it at all,” Bilbray responds. “I’d like to see the center built where we can get some economic benefit from it, but I think it’s going to be very minute. The McCoys want everything to stay as it is. But it’s just a matter of time before the investors and the money and the amenities they bring with them finally ends up in Imperial Beach. It’s unavoidable, and I don’t think it should be avoided.”

The afternoon sun was beginning to wane as McCoy and I left the bluff and walked down toward the main channel of the Tia Juana River. It took only a few minutes to get there. Herons and egrets were feeding in the shallows upstream, and a group of Western gulls sat on a sandbar in midriver. McCoy pointed west around a sweeping bend in the channel, to where the river had cut a path through the beach to the sea. “That’s where the Tia Juana River empties into the ocean,” he said. You can see where the two currents come together.” We watched for a moment as waves pushed up partly by the outgoing river current came crashing down a few yards from shore. But the oncoming tide was more powerful than the feeble flow of the river, and even after the waves had broken, they swept up the river in small, choppy swells, forcing it back. All across the river mouth the water was roiling and turbid, and above it terns hovered, diving for fish.