“Right now the landfills charge twenty-seven cents to dump a tire, because they're bulky, they don’t decompose, and they keep coming back to life — they keep floating up to the surface. So tires are a big pain."

I was intrigued by one woman who kept saying to her fussy two-year-old child, “If you don’t shut up, I’m gonna bust you one, little girl.” She said it with as much affection as anger.

I made my bed in the lee of a stout little juniper, but Schad, fond of wind and rain and discomfort,made his on the crest. Then we huddled together to cook noodles and tuna, with a Kahlúa chaser.

"When I was a kid growing up here, during the war years, Eden Gardens was little more than a place to contain Mexican farm workers,” Frank Renteria said, folding his hands on his desk and …

Anyone not familiar with the curious habits of Louis Ortiz might mistake this rasty-looking character rooting through the fire pit at Moonlight State Beach for just another beach wino out on his dawn patrol, rummaging …

Apparently the horse thieves drive as far as they can down the rough dirt roads south of Anza, then ride into Coyote Creek on horseback. “They go in and rope the young foals.”

I was sitting in the captain’s chair of a big thirty-four-foot Executive, surrounded by all the plush comfort's due a man of significant corporate weight: rich burgundy carpets, vinyl-walnut cabinets, and dramatic scarlet curtains. In …

Until January of 1984, Kathleen O'Brien had been thinking she had a very good chance of making the U.S. Olympic cycling team. Though she had only been a competitive cyclist for a couple of years, …

It’s amazing how quickly new-age fads come and go. The fire-walking rage burned itself out in less than a year. Flotation tanks, those sensory-deprivation aids to meditation, can be found lying belly up at garage …

“When I first came to Encinitas, in 1975, every street in Encinitas had its own greenhouse. And every greenhouse had a family with its own story — the Andersons, the Weidners, the Eckes. And every greenhouse had its own clientele."

“What I don't understand is how people can be so cruel to each other.” this big, kind, brokenhearted cowboy was saying. Just two days ago, he had walked into a restaurant in Phoenix and ordered …

According to the department of fish and game, the catch of one-and-one-half fish per angler hour in the Salton Sea was much higher than any other non-stocked fishery in the state, marine or freshwater.

“If we had this Poway team back in Iowa,” Branstetter lamented, “the local paper would be covering our matches move by move. Here in San Diego, hardly anybody notices.”

From the outside, the Kiva house looks like a magazine portrait of the tidy, all-American dream home. It sits on a two-acre lot on the outskirts of Lakeside and has a broad view of the …

Not long ago the state of California failed to take advantage of an opportunity it may not have again until after the next ice age: the chance to reintroduce grizzly bears to this overcivilized and …

The legs may be long gone, but at 67, the tennis trickster can still outhustle the best of 'em.

The modern-day El Camino Real picks up about a half-mile to the west, climbs the bluff, and continues across Encinitas Boulevard to La Costa. But a more obvious route lay directly ahead, along Rancho Santa Fe Road.

A kid on a skateboard weaves his way down the asphalt trail, swinging the cast on his forearm in front of him like a club, twisting and contorting his body in pursuit of some mystical kinesthetic release.

Over the years he had acquired a lawyer's knowledge of Indian law. At his home he kept a copy of the Santa Ysabel patent, written in long-hand and signed by Benjamin Harrison in 1893.

Since 1977 ten police officers have been shot and killed here — three in the last year. A cop in San Diego is ten times more likely to be killed than a cop in Chicago.

"There’s a whole den of lions down on Prisoner Ridge [west of Lake Henshaw] somewhere,” he says. “It’s so brushy you won’t see ’em every day, but they’re there. I seen tracks, lotsa tracks!"

"We thought it was the bingo parlors out on the Indian reservations cutting into our business. For a while they were getting 1500 people a night out there. Now I’ve heard their business is way ofF.”

Shortly after dawn on a chilly desert morning, Bill Engler, 44-old fish farmer-entrepreneur, and Victor Wade, his 45-year-old French-Canadian partner, are standing in their pole-barn fish hatchery trying to figure out how to measure a …

The girls know the drug dealers are usually free spenders because their money is illegal — it’s easier to spend it than it is to launder it, and besides, there’s more where that came from.

It was eight o'clock in the morning and I was standing in a cheap apartment in Leucadia, staring at a wall decorated with the faces of dead Mormon prophets. It had been years since I …

Orville Cummings, owner of the 9000-acre San Felipe Ranch at the bottom of the Banner Grade east of Julian: “The backpackers would camp right at the windmill and keep the cattle away from the water.”

There was a certain kind of woman who found him irresistible: the very fat ones. They seemed to want to wrap their fleshy arms around his neck and smother him in their bosoms.

On September 6 an arsonist created an East County inferno. Fighting that blaze was as risky and complicated as wartime combat. This is how it was done.

At four o'clock on a Saturday morning about the only people you will find awake in San Diego County are short-order cooks, cops, insomniacs, truck drivers, and bass fishermen. Of them all, the bass fishermen …

I was standing on the highest point in Baja — the highest point for hundreds of miles in every direction. To the west I could see the Pacific Ocean. To the east I could see the Gulf of California.

Every athlete who has reached that point in his life when he is almost ready to admit he is over the hill has those moments of regret. Usually they come on a Sunday afternoon while …

Once a week Cathy Elkin has the unlikely task of educating 500 new sailors about the dangers of their first liberty. The Navy calls it “Liberty Lecture,” and Elkin, who is director of public affairs …

The kids, annoyed by the tone of Herbert's demand, refused. They exchanged threats, and when one of the kids raised his gun to protect himself. Herbert shot him in the eye and killed him.

In the spring of 1960, a tall skinny kid with sun-bleached hair, a nose his body hadn't yet grown into, and a tan that could only have come from Hawaii, parked his ’47 woody (nicknamed …

After a while two sisters from Valley Center sat down on either side of me and introduced themselves as Blondie and Shorty. “We’re not really regulars,” they said. “We haven’t been here since Wednesday.”

The older skaters who survived the last era have left their marks on the sport, and if they sometimes seem angry and bitter, it is really just their way of warning the younger skaters.

Art Flores, the joker who used to brag that he'd never kept a job in his twenty years, is down on his knees in a muddy hole at Cardiff State Beach with an ax in …

Coyote was lying in bed watching the moon come up over the freeway, wondering what he would have for dinner. For the past few weeks he’d been living in a canyon overlooking the San Elijo …

He had refrigeration trucks made up to look like camper vans to transport the illegal shorts, and he made arrangements for airplanes to land at San Clemente Island to pick up the shorts and fly them to Las Vegas.

I wondered if the professor was just a good storyteller. Deborah Szekely: “The spirit of what he says is true, but in that book many of the people’s names aren’t even correct.”

At some time, very late at night, somebody plays an old tape of Jim Morrison and the Doors. They turn it up so loud that it drowns everything else out.

Across the Sea, in the area called North Shore, the flooding problem isn’t so bad, since they 're a little higher. Nor is the wind quite as unrelenting. The realtors of North Shore call Salton City a “blow-sand area.”

I finally fall asleep in the early hours and awaken about seven a.m. feeling surprisingly fresh. I had a dream that I went around the next bend and found myself in downtown San Diego.

Just across the Colorado River from Blythe, less than a mile into Arizona, there’s a big corrugated tin shed at the end of a dusty gravel road. It looks like some kind of deserted warehouse, …

At the moment, Green Sticker Money is being used by the state parks to purchase 14,000 acres near Ocotillo Wells in an area that has already been heavily, although illegally, used by ORV users for years.

Then, on top of Jacumba Peak, I rediscovered a time-worn gesture directed from one human being to all his fellows: There on a rock, painted in red, courtesy of the class of ‘79, was the ubiquitous finger.

Steve Mathias decorates his house with surfboards the way you or I might decorate our houses with furniture, paintings, or plants. They line his driveway, border his shrubs, greet you at the front door. Rotting …

There's a classic confrontation in Oceanside these days that should be interesting to watch in the months to come. It involves the city council, Camp Pendleton, the Western Surfing Association, the Army Corps of Engineers, …

He got on the phone and started calling his neighbors to see if someone could take him to the doctor, but nobody was home. He didn’t want to drive himself in that condition.

All right skeptics, here’s an exercise in faith... Try to imagine an old stone Gothic house some-where along the German-Austrian border. In this house live 12 wealthy and mysterious brothers, seven of whom hold down …