The Best American Travel Writing 2012

by Jason Wilson

  The man glided to the foot of my middle sister’s bed. Now that he was closer, I tried to sniff for curry or hair oil. But there was only the smell of the room—coir matting and furniture polish. And outside the crickets were singing as if everything were normal. The window was wide open as usual, never mind that we were on the ground floor, because however much they threw the phrase around, my parents were far more concerned about fresh air than they were about the Knife at the Throat. At home, the French doors onto the verandas were fastened back day and night, upstairs and downstairs, the windows too. But when I worried about this, they just pointed out that the only invaders we’d ever had were monkeys, which would reach into the kitchen to snatch something from the table and then gibber up with it into the mango tree, the dogs in pursuit.

  It was the dogs, really, that were meant to protect us. As long as they lay around our feet, cocking an ear for someone to chase—anyone, in fact, who didn’t belong in the house—we were supposed to feel safe. Just let the garden boy emerge from the servants’ quarters and they’d be after him in a pack, barking, snarling, snapping. The same held for Pillay, and for delivery boys, and for the Zulus pouring down the hill on a Sunday afternoon.

  And yet what good were they now, here in a hotel in the mountains, with a man staring down at my middle sister? They were hundreds of miles away, at the kennels. And anyway, how many dogs would it take when all the servants rose up at once with their knives and sticks? Even Superman, our houseboy, had managed to slice Simba’s ear with the stick he carried to protect himself walking between the kitchen and the garage, or back to his room in the servants’ quarters. And when an enemy put a curse on him one day and he came to say he was leaving and wanted his wages, it was almost as if the dogs themselves were cursed too, because they just stood back and watched as he walked to the gate, carrying his cardboard suitcase.

  The man turned toward my corner. And just as I was thinking that whatever he was I would leap up before he could get to me and scream at the top of my lungs—just then, he turned and walked over to the window. I pushed myself up a bit to see, and yes, there he was, climbing out, first one leg and then the other, and he was still wearing his hat.

  As soon as he was gone, I jumped out of bed and burst through the door leading into my parents’ room. But they were too fast asleep to take me seriously. Eventually, though, my mother did climb out of her bed and lead me back to my own, agreeing, for once, to close the window. And then, the next morning, as soon as I heard the early-morning tea trolley rattling down the passage, I was back at their bedside.

  Something about my insistence must have caught their attention at last, because when he’d finished his tea, my father put on his dressing gown and slippers and came through to our room to question my sisters. They scoffed, of course—they’d seen nothing, heard nothing. But then, opening the window to let in some fresh air, he noticed some soil on the windowsill. And when he leaned out, there, in the flowerbed below, were four large footprints—two on their way in and two on their way out.

  No one ever found out who or what the man was, and no one but me believed he could have had anything to do with the Knife at the Throat. And so on we went, doors and windows open, dogs in place, until the real terror began—coming not at all as we’d expected, but haphazardly, here or there, day or night, with guns as well as knives, because by then guns were almost as plentiful and cheap as hamburgers, and the dogs themselves were the first to be shot—until then we carried on with the paradise of our lives: luxurious but not rich, safe and yet threatened, carefree if one did not think too carefully about the future.

  LUKE DITTRICH

  Walking the Border

  FROM Esquire

  THE FENCE STARTS about 80 feet out into the Pacific. It’s made of metal pylons and looks like a procession of old telephone poles, each jutting about 20 feet above the waves. The pylons are spaced tightly together, and there’s a sign warning of additional barriers below the waterline. Once the fence hits dry land, it marches east across the beach, and then, on a little hill that begins where the beach ends, it changes. It becomes, in fact, two fences, a double barrier. Compared with the single-ply barrier on the beach and in the water, these two fences—sturdy square beams supporting tight rows of whitewashed steel spindles—look much more modern and formidable, like prison fences. One of the two fences picks up right where the beach fence leaves off and continues east along the actual borderline, while the other follows a parallel line a few dozen feet to the north of it.

  The buffer zone between the two fences is reserved exclusively for the use of the U.S. Border Patrol, with one exception: at the top of the hill, there is a little door in the northern fence, and a sign informs that twice a week, Saturdays and Sundays from 10 A.M. until 2 P.M., U.S. citizens are allowed to enter. Then, if there happen to be Mexicans on the other side of the second, southern fence, the Americans are allowed to look at them and talk with them, though reaching through the fence or attempting “physical contact with individuals in Mexico” is prohibited. A portion of the American side of the visiting area has been paved with cement, in the shape of a semicircle, and there is an identical semicircle on the Mexican side of the fence.

  The official name of this place is the “Friendship Circle.”

  A big marble obelisk stands in the center of the circle. There is a break in the southern fence to accommodate the obelisk, and some additional fencing around the break to keep anyone from trying to squeeze through.

  In 1851 some men from something called the International Boundary Commission placed the obelisk here. Back then, the Mexican-American War had just ended, and Mexico had agreed to surrender more than half its territory to the United States, including the places now called California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. The job of the International Boundary Commission was to come up with a map of the revised frontier between the two countries. They started here, on this beachfront hill, and installed the obelisk as their first survey marker.

  Then they walked east, into the borderlands.

  A geographer described accounts of the International Boundary Commission’s expedition as the “stuff that dime novels are made of,” complete with “deaths from starvation and yellow fever, struggles for survival in the desert, and the constant threat of violent attacks by Indians and filibusters.”

  Back then, of course, those surveyors had no choice when it came to transportation: in order to see the border, they had to travel either by foot or by horse.

  Today there are lots of alternatives. You could fly from San Diego to the Gulf of Mexico in a few hours, or could drive the distance in a few days.

  But there’s still something to be said, when you want to really understand something, for slowing way down.

  So this morning I’m taking my cue from the men who planted this obelisk.

  I start on the beach.

  I walk east.

  The border’s simple.

  It heads due east from the beach straight across California until it hits the Colorado River, at which point it backtracks a bit, squiggling southwest along the river’s edge before firming up again and slicing across the bottom of Arizona in two long straight lines. Shortly after reaching New Mexico, it suddenly jogs north for a few dozen miles, but then quickly resumes its straight, eastward course all the way to Texas, where it merges with the Rio Grande and rides out the final stretch to the Gulf.

  The border’s complicated.

  From a distance it looks like an impossible tangle of Minutemen and La Migra, drugs and money, fence builders and fence hoppers. It’s tempting to look away. But we shouldn’t. The border is the place where we end and they begin, which makes it the definition of a defining place.

  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 Bord
er 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.