San Diego summer is all about the beach. East of the beach does not exist. And if you live anywhere east of the sand you should scoot down to the coast and play in the ocean (because as you know it is hot and getting hotter which means that as Rob Davis made clear in a recent voiceofsandiego.org story, we won’t have much water left to drink in San Diego).
And if you can’t be at the beach and are stuck in an office park somewhere around the hell that is the I-15 you should listen to the summer beach music selected by my hipster brother Nick who is at Rhapsody and has the coolest music blog around.
If you find yourself approaching the azure waters of La Jolla but are terrified of entering the ocean due to the warning by Scott Peters that gangs of rampaging white sharks will devour anyone swimming in Versace bunhuggers, you should just plop yourself down in the sand or on the sidewalk (where if you are near Children’s Pool rampaging SDPD officers and San Diego Lifeguards will start screaming at you) and read Kem Nunn’sbrilliant Tijuana Straits.
Because after you read Nunn’s epic novel about surfing, polluted water and Imperial Beach, then you will know what it is like to spend the summer in my hometown where the water has been polluted and the beach closed since Sunday. That is because lots of developers in the western part of Tijuana south of Playas de Tijuana love to dump sewage right on the beach
And also because sewage flows out of about just every manhole cover and gully and gulch in the Tijuana River Valley watershed on both sides of the border.
And after reading Nunn and visualizing the stinky waters of IB (you know the place that Congressman Brian Bilbray used to be from until he said he was from La Costa) you will also be prepared to watch David Milch’s new HBO TV series, John from Cincinnati, that is set in and will be filmed in Imperial Beach starting in August. It will be “Deadwood” meets “Dogtown” meets Tijuana Straits.
La Jolla gets the sharks. But dude, IB gets Hollywood. Just another summer in San Diego.
Serge Dedina, guest blogger for Thursday and Friday, is the executive director of Wildcoast and lives in Imperial Beach. He can be reached at sdedina@wildcoast.net.
– SERGE DEDINA