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One of the things I find attractive about living on Otay Mesa is its flat, open spaces – and you can still find a few out here, with a view of wide-open sky and mountain, you can still find a few open spots in spite of all the millennial development and construction – yes, a spot or two from which you can watch the broad expanse of the heavens above the stretch of earth with mountain in the nearby distance.

The view of heaven – from a wide, open space – can make for a scene particularly dramatic when the sky is peopled with clouds and sunbeams and shades of gray and yellow and white and blue or even crimson and orange.

At sunset especially I enjoy walking near the border vendors' parking lot by the pedestrian access to the international gate, close by the California mini-mall (with its SOKO coffee house mmmm fresh daily newspapers every day), along the sidewalks by this street or the next, looking west through chain link fences and scant trees, over bushes.

Or going out on the big bordergate boulevard itself to gaze west across the crowded lines of cars (or occasionally empty lanes of dark asphalt), then beyond the low walls and metal rooves of the Mexican big-wheeler customs sheds, into the west toward the rosy-painted salmon & gray cloud banks trimmed in yellow-orange, or the fat crimson orb sinking low in clear skies, the occidental sunset away, away, toward the unseen, but still nearby (ten miles) ocean sea.

Sometimes I go even further, slip through the crowded lanes and climp up on the mounds of dirt dumped over there (across the boulevard from Plaza California) in an undeveloped waste piece of land. There, raised up on a low mound, my view becomes truly 360' – You can see the lumpy double peak of Cerro Colorado, signature hill of the city, in the southeast, the flat, definite line of Table Mountain in the south toward Rosarito, and of course, the looming bulk of Otay Mountain.