The most heartbreaking sign in California can be found at Doghouse Junction, near the summit of fire-scarred Otay Mountain. It is a simple, chilling image of a family desperately fleeing flames. Anyone encountering the sign will instantly understand its meaning: people burn here.

Otay Mountain and its border-straddling sister, Tecate Peak, offer refuge to legally protected trees, birds and butterflies, but the militarization of the border and the recent wildfires have so defaced the landscape that it is difficult to recognize the underlying natural beauty. The views of San Diego-Tijuana and their entangled destinies remain superb, but otherwise Doghouse Junction looks like a NATO firebase in the Pamirs: a helicopter landing pad, occasional National Guard Humvees and ever-lurking migra SUVs.

The Otay-Tecate wilderness is Tijuana's backdoor to San Diego, now that the front door at San Ysidro has been bolted shut by Bill Clinton's Operation Gatekeeper and the Bush Administration's re-erection of the Berlin wall. From the perspective of immigrants, these mountains may seem an obvious alternative to the deserts of Imperial County or Arizona. The promised land of construction jobs and sweatshops is enticingly close at hand, and a greenhorn would easily underestimate the terrain.

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