The Best American Travel Writing 2012 (29 page)

Planning a walk along the border, you quickly encounter certain problems.

One problem is political. The only feasible way to walk the actual borderline is to follow the dirt roads used by the Border Patrol, but a lot of those roads appear only on proprietary maps that the Border Patrol refuses to give out to members of the public. You can turn to online satellite imagery, but these days even that can't keep pace with how quickly new border roads are being plowed.

Another problem is geographical. The borderlands, whatever route you sketch through them, are a rough mix of deserts and mountains.

Sometimes problems meld the geographic and the political, because sometimes politics dictate geography. Example: I'm in an area known as Smuggler's Gulch, just east of the Friendship Circle. My maps show a deep ravine, one that drug and human traffickers used for decades to ferry their goods across the border. But a few years ago the Department of Homeland Security, armed with congressional permission to waive a number of environmental laws and regulations, sent in earthmovers to decapitate some nearby hills, filled the ravine with the resulting 1.7 million cubic yards of dirt, then topped it with a Border Patrol road and floodlights. Smuggler's Gulch, an ancient wrinkle in the earth, has been Botoxed. My maps are wrong.

My plan is to stick to the border roads where practical, where they exist, where I can find them. But I won't be too scrupulous about hewing to the line. Where there isn't a border road, or where the route looks more interesting a little inland, I'll let myself drift north. My first chunk is the 350 miles that now stand between me and Ajo, Arizona, including the 120 miles of open desert that immediately precede Ajo, a stretch called El Camino del Diablo.

And that leads to the final problem: water. El Camino del Diablo, like a lot of places along the border, is dry. One hundred twenty miles' worth of water weighs a lot more than I can carry on my back. If this were a century and a half ago, if I were one of those obelisk-planting surveyors, I'd probably have opted to bring along a mule.

Instead I've got a baby stroller.

 

“You need help?”

Feet digging, ankles stretched, calves tight, knees bent, back straight, shoulders up, head down, arms out, palms open, leaning forward, into the handlebar. The handlebar doubles as a rack to hang things on and dangles my quick-draw necessities: a Garmin GPS, a 32-ounce Nalgene water bottle, a Spot emergency locator beacon, and a can of Counter Assault Bear Deterrent pepper spray.

I look up, but I don't stop leaning. The stroller, if you add its own weight to the weight of all the gear and food and water inside it, weighs more than 120 pounds. The incline here, near the top of Otay Mountain, a dozen miles east of the beach, is steep, at least 45 degrees. If I stop leaning, the stroller will roll backward, over me, on down the slope.

The agent is standing on the top of the rise, looking down. He's holding a pair of binoculars.

“I saw you coming from a ways away,” he says.

The border is approximately 1,900 miles long, and there are approximately 18,000 Border Patrol agents tasked with protecting it. That's nine agents per mile. Of course, these agents aren't posted at strict and regular intervals along the line. They move around, they cluster, and sometimes they pursue leads or man checkpoints up to a hundred miles from the frontier. But still. If you're walking the border, you're going to see a lot of Border Patrol.

I push the final few feet to the top of the rise and lock the stroller's wheels and stop to chat with the agent.

The eastern flank of Otay Mountain drops 2,000 feet into a deep valley that runs north to Highway 94 and south to Mexico. I can see the fence, about a mile away, and some cars passing by on the other side of it. That's where they cross, the agent tells me. It's best to spot them as soon as they hop the fence, when they're exposed, because once they enter the thick foliage of the valley, they become a lot harder to see.

I give him back his binoculars and keep walking. Otay Mountain is the highest peak for miles around, and this particular spot has a great view of the ocean. The chaparral that clots the slope—the redshanks, the monkey flower, the mission manzanita, the sugar bush—fuzzes into a blue-green pastel as the slope descends toward the Pacific, which coruscates mildly in the distance. Maybe it's just the pollution, the haze of the San Diego–Tijuana megalopolis, but everything has a soft focus up here.

I hope to average 20 miles a day, but the mountain is steep and the cart is heavy and I only make it 10 today before the sun drops away completely. I stop and make camp on a clearing beside the trail. I'm tired, and fall right asleep, then spend the rest of the night waking every couple of hours to the rumble and glare of patrols passing my tent.

At dawn I get up, get ready, and start again.

 

Coming down off the mountain is a lot easier than climbing up it, and I can relax a bit and let the rhythm of the walk begin to establish itself.

Every few miles I'll run into an agent, who'll ask what I'm doing out here. Sometimes he'll ask to see the soles of my shoes. Agents spend most of their time cutting sign, which is to say, they patrol dirt roads near the border, looking for fresh footprints or other sign of aliens. When they come across people who are not aliens, they often ask to see the soles of their shoes. That way they won't later confuse native sign for alien sign.

Sometimes I'll see agents even when they're not really there. I'll spot their bright white-and-green vehicles parked on almost every significant overlook, but it's not till I'm right up on them, peering through the tinted windows, that I can tell whether they're occupied or just expensive scarecrows. About a third are empty.

The trail from Otay Mountain feeds into State Route 94, and I follow the highway east for about 10 miles, then cut south toward the border again.

I spot a truck, and this one has an agent inside. I tap on the window and he rolls it down and gives me a nod. People call this town Tecatito on account of how it sits right across the border from the much bigger town of Tecate, Mexico. The agent's got the nose of his truck pointed straight south, where every so often someone walks out of the customs building and into America. A poster pasted to a wall in his line of sight features head shots of ten Hispanic men, along with details of the crimes they're wanted for, mostly smuggling, some kidnapping, some murders. I tell him I'm going across, that my hotel's a couple of miles away, that I'll have to walk through most of Tecate to get there. Does he think I'll have any problems, safetywise? Tecate's not too bad these days, he says. From what he hears, anyway. He's never crossed himself.

The passport-control booth is empty. Nobody's there to look at my ID or ask to see what's inside the stroller, so I just walk across the line.

Let me make my prejudices clear: I love Mexico. I lived in this country for a couple of years when I was a kid, and I used to go back all the time. I love the language, the food, the pace, the people, the temperature.

Let me make something else clear: Mexico scares me.

The last time I visited, I was driving around a small city with an off-duty police detective, and the car we were in was his own, and he wasn't wearing a uniform, and he was just cruising at first, relaxed, a big tough guy spinning stories about some of the scrapes he'd been in, but I'll always remember the jolt that went through his body when at a stoplight he suddenly realized he'd left his wallet with the badge in it lying open on the dash, and how fast he scrambled to snatch it and hide it away, and the look on his face as he shot glances at the other vehicles stopped at the light to see if anybody had noticed.

That kind of fear is contagious.

And I hate it, how this fear works its way into my experience, how it becomes as tangible a part of the background texture of Tecate as the uncatalyzed exhaust or the swollen-titted dogs or the snakeskin boots or the sweet little old lady who gives me directions to my hotel and then says,
“Dios te bendiga”
as I'm walking away.

Because if you scrape away the fear, if you dig through it, or just look past it, all the best parts of Mexico are still here.

Tonight I eat at a restaurant near my hotel and they bring me flank steak and grilled nopale cactus and homemade corn tortillas and flan and a couple bottles of the local brew and a shot of Tres Generaciones and it is, without a doubt, the best meal I've had in months.

 

“You weren't wearing those earlier.”

He's got his flashlight aimed at my feet, at my three-dollar flip-flops. I tell him they're my camp shoes.

Agent Muñoz shines the light through a scrim of trees, toward the tent.

“Anyone else back there?”

No.

We're a few hundred feet north of the border, on a low rise beside a dry creek bed, 18 miles east of Tecate. It was a long walk today, pegged to the fence, lots of hills. The coastal flora had faded and hints of the high desert—tumbleweeds, the occasional cactus—had begun to show.

I'd already made camp and was just finishing my dinner when Agent Muñoz rolled up. He's edgy, keeps his gun holster, with its HK P2000 double-action pistol, angled away from me.

“Strange place to camp,” he says.

I tell him I chose it for the location, because it's not right next to the fence, and because the trees are thick enough that I can't even see the fence, which means that nobody at the fence can see me. I tell him I chose it because that's one thing everyone told me was very important: to avoid camping right next to the fence, or even in places where I could be seen from the fence. Because I'm most vulnerable at night. Because bandits on the other side could spot me, scramble over, take whatever they wanted, then scramble back, untouchable.

Agent Muñoz listens, nods.

“You've never been here before?”

No, I haven't.

He shifts his hips, relaxes a bit.

“I wouldn't camp here,” he says. “I don't even like to be here.”

Everything I thought made this a good place, he explains, is exactly what makes it a bad place. This deep creek bed, shielded by its canopy of trees, is like Smuggler's Gulch before Smuggler's Gulch became Smuggler's Flat. The cartels love it, and drug mules come through all the time.

“We've got some pressure sensors buried farther up the creek,” he says. “We send out a team anytime they get a hit. But that takes a while.”

Should I pack up my tent? Would I be safer somewhere else?

He shakes his head.

“Nowhere's safe around here.”

Before he gets back into his truck and drives away, he gives me the direct line to the nearest Border Patrol station, says I should call immediately if I see anyone.

“Tell them you're in the bottom of La Gloria. Everyone knows where that is.”

The trees shimmer and wobble in the red glow of his receding taillights, and then it's dark again and I go and gather up everything I think I might be able to use as a weapon, including the pepper spray, a knife, and some hiking poles. I bring it all inside the tent, crawl into my bag, zip up, and lie there, waiting. Every so often I hear something moving outside, crunching seedpods or snapping twigs, and I turn on my headlamp and scoot up and try to look out through the tent's wall of mosquito netting, but the netting catches the light, and all I see is the wall itself. Then I turn off the light until I hear something else. Lying there in the dark, watching vague shadows on the polyester, it feels like a world of unknowns is outside pressing in.

 

Another gust lifts the dirt and sand off the road and spits it in my face, and I've had enough, so I take a break and lean sideways against the fence, my back to the wind. It's been blowing all day, fierce. The fence here, a few miles past La Gloria, is crude but strong, made from corrugated sheets of brown and yellow steel. The National Guard was deployed to build this stretch back in 2006, and every couple of miles a different engineering battalion marked the section it was responsible for by carving a piece of metal in the shape of its home state and welding it in place. The fence builders came from Hawaii, Wisconsin, South Carolina, and when they got here, they worked till they were done, even through the holidays, I'm guessing, judging by the spray-painted Christmas tree I'm leaning next to.

The fence is tall, 12 feet or so. It would be tough to climb over. And the steel of the fence would be almost impossible to tear through. But dirt is dirt, and from where I'm standing, I can see a spot where the dirt next to the fence has been dug up and there's a little hole underneath it, and I bet I could get down and crawl right through.

There's a sign on the other side of the road. It's bright yellow and busy with pictographs: a sun, some mountains, a rattlesnake, a cactus, and a little drowning man, one arm raised, sinking into a pool of water.
CUIDADO!
the sign reads.
NO VALE LA PENA!

It's not worth the trouble!

But of course it is.

The returns are as stark and clear as those pictures on the sign. By the simple act of carrying his own body across the line, a man immediately boosts his earning potential sixfold. And if he chooses to carry something else along with his body, well, a pound of cocaine costs twice as much in Tecatito as it does in Tecate.

It's worth the trouble, and so every year roughly 2.5 million people in Mexico make the simple and consummately rational decision to make unauthorized entry into the United States of America.

It's worth the trouble, and so the fence, like the Border Patrol, has more than doubled in the last decade. But the incursions haven't stopped. Instead they've shifted. Back near San Diego, where the fence is particularly brawny and the density of the Border Patrol is particularly high, traffic has slowed. Here, where the fence is easier to conquer and patrols are less frequent, traffic has increased. The pressure on the other side remains the same, and as long as there is any gap, any weakness, it will push and probe until it finds a way.