Remote Access

Tony Colleraine, a 60-year-old retired plasma physicist from La Jolla, shuffled past the wild dogs on the street and turned into a squat, bunker-like building marked with the sign: “The Net: Travel the Globe.”

The concrete shack used to be a low-rent tourist bar known as the Deadly Viper. Now, it is the high-tech center for San Felipe--a dusty Baja town of 20,000 Mexicans, a few hundred American retirees and one Internet connection.

During the last four years, Colleraine and a small band of American retirees have stockpiled a collection of castoff computers by scavenging, begging and--when the situation called for it--using their RVs to slip past border guards and import laws.

“We take whatever we can get our hands on, even if it doesn’t work or we don’t know what it is,” Colleraine said. “We are the very bottom of the computer world’s pecking order.”

In the furthest backwaters of the technological revolution, hundreds of miles away from the nearest computer store, a scavenger culture is being spawned out of the inescapable modern demand for instant community and connection.

The machines inside the Net are generations old: Stone Age in the computer world. Some have been cast off twice, once by Corporate America and a second time by schools in the United States to which they were donated.

Yet here in San Felipe, and in other remote places in the United States and abroad, there is an audience hungry to scoop up the road kill from the ever-changing electronic boom.

“We came here to get away from everything that modern life in the U.S. stands for,” said Colleraine, his sun-faded brown eyes squinting in the cold glare of a Baja sunrise. “What we didn’t realize is how much we still need it.”

This morning, local kids join the dozens of expatriates who stroll into town and hang outside the Net. The crowd patiently waits in line for one of the eight working machines, casually sipping coffee and soda.

They are here all day, chatting and schmoozing in English and Spanish. They yak over their cell phones and take classes on building Web sites and using Excel to map ways to stretch their Social Security-backed budgets. They type e-mail messages by the score, chicken-pecking at the worn keyboards for $8 an hour.

That’s a lot for the Net’s 400 members, most of whom are American and Canadian retirees who moved to Mexico to stretch their fixed incomes a bit further. Members pay $30 a year to join the nonprofit center and fork over $4 for 30 minutes of time online.

The Net is barely breaking even, Colleraine said, because bandwidth costs eat up most of the center’s income from membership dues and hourly rates.

Telnor, the Mexican phone company that serves northern Baja California, charges the Net nearly $1,300 a month for a 64-kilobit-per-second connection--25 times costlier and 25 times slower than what most people pay for a high-speed connection in the United States.

With several computers hooked to this data pipe, doing the most basic Web searching is painfully slow. It takes minutes to pull up the Yahoo front page, just so the retirees and locals can begin their online adventures.

There’s not much of a tech scene here, a fishing village that did not have electricity until 1964. It is a town where a lulling pace of life has drawn thousands to its miles-long stretches of empty beach and emerald-green bays.

Fishing is the lifeblood of San Felipe. Generations of fishermen have spent their years slowly puttering large skiffs into the Gulf of California before dawn and spreading their nets along the cooling sand at dusk.

Sport fishermen--bargain-hunting anglers from up north looking to snare a cochito, or perhaps a few white sea bass--trickle through town, but it is a tiny number compared with the tourist crowds that head to Tijuana and Cabo San Lucas. Only the adventurous trundle down the bumpy road to finally reach this tiny slice of sand.

Despite its remoteness, San Felipe is tantalizingly close to storming into the digital revolution. Underneath the dunes a few miles outside of town lies a fiber-optic link to Mexicali that was buried in the sand several winters ago. It offers enough bandwidth to feed all the data needs of a small county.

But so far, no one has bothered to connect it to San Felipe.

Most of the residents of San Felipe don’t know and don’t care much about the gigabits of information that could one day flow through the fiber line. Fewer than 500 homes in this village of 20,000 have residential phone lines that actually work, locals said. Families are far more likely to have a television and a satellite dish than a rotary phone.

When people want to talk to one another, they use walkie-talkies and marine radios--or they simply walk outside.

But for the American expatriates in town, the lack of an easy and fast way to contact the States sharpens the sense of loneliness and disconnection from the hyper-speed world they left.

“It’s so isolated out here, especially once you get outside of town,” said Alan Hiatt, 75, a former structural analysis engineer who worked at IBM. “We used to only be able to talk to family back in California by fax. But that got pretty frustrating, particularly when there was an emergency and you wouldn’t find out about it for days.”

Of course, many people here use cellular phones. But financial constraints limit how long many people can chat. “I can’t afford $1 a minute, which is what most people around here pay,” Hiatt said.

The Internet, and e-mail in particular, seemed to be a perfect solution except for a small problem--no one in town at the time had a computer or an Internet connection.

Colleraine came up with a solution in 1997, largely out of boredom. He arrived in Baja in 1995, after retiring as an engineer at General Atomics in San Diego. He had built himself a three-story adobe perched a single step away from the sand, with inlaid stone floors and a 180-degree view of the ocean.

But after a few years, he grew tired of this beautifully monotonous life. In a burst of enlightenment, Colleraine recruited several neighbors and hashed out a plan to create the Net.

With the assistance of several university professors and local engineers, Colleraine organized an informal public meeting in April 1996. When 3,000 people showed up, Telnor decided it was worth installing a microwave link between San Felipe and Mexicali. That link, in turn, would enable the retirees to create a steady--though painfully slow--connection. A local hotelier offered to donate the empty bar.

All they needed to do was come up with a few computers and enough money to pay Telnor for the link.

Computer retailers are plentiful in Mexicali, which is only a couple of hours north. But what would they do with a high-end Dell, or a tricked-out Gateway?

“We wouldn’t know what to do with a Pentium 4, to be honest,” Colleraine said. “It’s a Cadillac, when our Internet connection is made for a jalopy.”

Volunteers at the Net recruited local Americans to help forage equipment. One by one, the retirees began writing letters to friends and former co-workers back in the States, pleading for digital donations. Leads cropped up slowly: a PC here, a hard drive there, a slew of old monitors that a school administrator in San Jose was dying to dump.

“If you happen to be one of these regulars, please drop us a line and let us know when you’ll be coming down,” the center volunteers plead on their site. “Perhaps there is someone in your neck of the woods who has a CPU or monitor to donate but no way to get it to us.”

Kay Gabbard said she was delighted when a friend at St. Robert’s School in Sacramento offered to give the Net a few of the school’s old PCs. Some of them worked. Others didn’t.

The trick was getting them across the border with the minimum of hassle.

Grabbing the family RV, she and her husband, Bill, 67, left their home in San Felipe and headed north to collect the dusty boxes. The couple said they arranged all the permits needed to bring the machines back to San Felipe, but were stopped--and ultimately turned away--at the border in Calexico because they were still missing some permits.

“We left and came back a couple days later,” Kay said. This time, the computers stayed in the back.

Her tale of impromptu smuggling is a common theme among the Net’s fans, much to the chagrin of Mexico’s burgeoning computer industry, which abhors the idea of the country becoming a dumping ground for old computer equipment.

Import laws in Mexico allow an exemption for personal use of a new computer and do not charge people any taxes or duties if they want to bring in a single machine to use at home, according to the Ministry of Commerce.

But used equipment requires a permit issued by the ministry, as well as a fee to cover a sliding-scale tax and duty charges.

Such policies are designed to protect local business, “which doesn’t want its sales to be cannibalized,” said Bruce Berton, an international business consultant with Stonefield Josephson Inc. “They don’t want their own landfills piled high with America’s high-tech castoffs.”

At the Net, random, mismatched chips and electronic cards--with no identifying paperwork--show up in plastic grocery bags. Old printers, lacking the cables to make them work, arrive in stained fruit crates. Off in the back are stacks of PCs that came loaded with flawed software, and no manuals or tutorials explaining how to fix them.

“We can’t identify half of the stuff we get,” Colleraine said. “I’m happy when we push the button and the machines turn on.”

But even for the machines that do turn on the first time, there eventually comes a day when they no longer work as well. After being cycled through corporations, homes, schools and finally San Felipe, there is only one journey left for them.

Ancient Apple SE machines sit stacked along the floor, a line of beige boxes with barely enough memory to turn them into digital clocks. A smattering of PCs sit side by side with well-worn Macintoshes. The most powerful box of the bunch has a Pentium processor, giving the machine just enough juice to run Windows 95.

When the machines break down, the boxes are transformed into furniture, often becoming a sturdy footstool for folks to rest their feet while they surf the Web.

One old 386 machine, sitting on the bare concrete floor, acts as a doorstop for the center’s front entrance. A cool gulf breeze flutters in, bringing relief from the heat and a light kiss of sand. The grains creep across the ground and into the open slots of the broken-down PC, slowly burying its silicon remains in sand.

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Times staff writer P.J. Huffstutter covers technology.