The Crossing : Whether Delineated by the Great Wall, the Blue Danube or a Chain-Link Fence, Borders Are What You Make of Them

I roll out of my sleeping bag to watch the sun come up over the Otay Mountains and illuminate the beach at the California-Mexico border. I wait.

And watch.

And wait some more.

The sun does not rise, at least not where I can see it, and shines only enough to chase away some gloom. A quarter mile, maybe half a mile west of my camp is the beginning of the California Coastal Trail. It’s my job, on behalf of the California Coastal Trails Foundation, to pioneer a new trail connecting the state’s remaining wild lands to each other and to those hikers willing to make an effort to visit them. But this morning, the trail is lost in the mist.

In dawn’s gray light, the marsh birds raise a racket. A white-tailed kite circles over the nearby Tijuana Estuary. Gulls scavenge the tide’s debris. As I walk oceanward, I dip into a ravine and soon lose sight of the horizon.

A woman’s shout comes out of the mist.

In the bottom of the ravine I stumble upon a Mexican family--mother, father and little girl--ready to take flight. They appear frozen, like jack rabbits caught in headlights. When I walk closer they determine, after a hurried, whispered conference, that my green button-down shirt is not the uniform of a border patrolman. Panic gives way to uneasy smiles.

“ Que pasa? “

My question is answered with more uneasy smiles. Obviously it’s not going very well or they wouldn’t be stuck out here in this no-man’s- land, half a mile from the border.

I try English. “Where are you going?”

“Chula Vista,” the man answers.

The little girl tugs at my shirt. “ Agua? “

“ Si .” I find my canteen, hand it to her. She gulps furiously, water trickling over her chin.

“Maria!” her mother scolds.

“It’s all right,” I soothe.

Maria hands the canteen to her mother. The woman hesitates, caught between pride and thirst.

“It’s all right,” I repeat.

She drinks, hands the canteen to her husband. When he tilts his head back I see 30 hard years etched in his face, 50 in his hands.

The canteen makes another round and is returned to me.

An uncomfortable silence settles over the dunes. This gringo can do nothing more for them. After exchanges of adios, I leave them to their fate--a successful dash under the cover of darkness to Chula Vista or discovery by Audubon bird watchers or arrest by the Border Patrol. “ Dios consiente, mas no siempre, “ the Spanish say. God provides, but not always.

As I walk toward the Pacific, the sun sneaks up behind me, enlarging from a tiny spotlight to a great floodlight. I emerge atop the coastal terrace overlooking Border Field Beach as the foggy curtain parts and a white light pours down on the borderland. I look to the limits of the clouds: Point Loma, Silver Strand, Tijuana River flood plain, the Coronado Islands.

A few million years ago the ocean inundated this land, wearing the peaks beneath into a nearly flat platform. This platform was later lifted out of the water by forces within the earth to form a coastal terrace. The remains of this terrace, battered by the ocean on the west and the Tijuana River on the east, resembles an immense, flattop aircraft carrier listing to starboard.

An empty parking lot sprawls across the stern end of the bluff top, ending at the chain-link fence separating Mexico and California. The flimsy fence surprises most Americans. Before visiting Border Field State Park they imagine a more militaristic border--a Berlin Wall topped with barbed wire, guarded with machine-gun nests. (“They gotta lotta damn nerve callin’ this a border, Martha. This fence wouldn’t hold chickens in a coop.”) The wire fence extends only a little past the low-tide line, and northbound migrants could easily wade around it. Yet few cross here. The term wetback, as applied to Mexican migrants, originated in Texas, where they must cross the Rio Grande to enter America. Here in southernmost California, undocumented aliens prefer chancing the unfenced desert border farther east.

Next to the fence is the graffiti-splashed border marker; from a distance it resembles a 1/25th-scale model of the Washington Monument. When California became a territory at the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848, an international border became a necessity. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo dictated the location of the boundary, and survey parties from both countries were appointed to determine and mark the line. The federal government, anxious to secure its new border, quickly dispatched an American survey team from Washington.

In the meantime, gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill, and every Yanqui in Southern California headed north. The Gold Rush slowed the American surveyors, first delaying them in the crush of ‘49ers funneling across Panama, then luring some of the party to the gold fields. The more sober civil servants, preferring government sinecure over speculation in precious metals, finished surveying the border line. The spot where the monument now stands was used as the initial survey site. Chiseled out of Italian marble, the monument traveled by ship from New York and with great ceremony was carried here by Army escort.

My trail begins at this monument, at the very southwest corner of America, on the border between the United States and Estados Unidos Mexicanos. Truly, there are more-inspiring trail heads. On the other side of the fence is the gaudy, pink Tijuana bullring, surrounded by cantinas . A tired Chevrolet Impala, its muffler dragging, trumpets an exhausted reveille.

One shouldn’t judge a book by its cover--nor, I suppose, a trail by its trail head. In contrast to its departure point, the trail north looks promising. Long, wide Border Field Beach is bisected by the Tijuana River, which flows parallel to shore for a mile or so, then makes an abrupt dogleg turn into the surf. Beyond the river is another beach, the Silver Strand, where a trillion seashell fragments glint in the sun.

Motoring down the beach is a border patrolman astride a three-wheeled motorcycle, a machine nearly as cacophonous as the unmuffled Tijuana taxis. The balloon tires squirm through the sand, leaving clouds of granules in the cycle’s wake. Law enforcement does not assume a low profile in these parts. Like the outnumbered frontier cavalry troopers who rode their horses in circles to stir up dust and fool the Indians into overestimating their strength, the Border Patrol hopes that a show of force will slow the onslaught.

The force this morning is one frozen patrolman, who zooms up an asphalt ramp to the top of the bluffs. He stops 10 feet from me, cuts his engine and dismounts. He swings his arms, stamps his boots and arches his back, hoping his impromptu aerobic exercises will transfer some thermal energy to the extremities. Then he removes his crash helmet, revealing the visage of an aging surfer: thinning blond hair, deep sun-squint crinkles around the eyes, a forever-red nose. “Morning,” he greets. “Where you headed?”

“El Norte. Like everyone else.”

He laughs. “Yeah, like everyone else. Actually, we had a slow night last night. You’d think more of ‘em would go for it on a foggy night with no moon. But it doesn’t seem to work that way. Slow morning, too. Nobody out but me and the bird watchers.”

“Bird watchers?” I envision 20 pairs of binoculars trained on the dunes where three frightened would-be migrants await nightfall and a second chance.

“More than a hundred kinds of birds hang out in the estuary,” he says, sounding more like a tour guide than a patrolman. “They migrate here from all over the world.”

His mention of the estuary prompts me to think of the Tijuana River, which spills out of the lagoon and arcs to the sea. My auto club map paints the river as a wide, blue swath, and I worry about a difficult crossing. “How’s the river crossing?”

“Radical. Probably comes up to the middle of your chest--or higher. And you’d better watch out for the current at the river mouth--it’s really tricky. Know about the current?”

I shake my head.

“The current along most of the coast runs north to south, but the way Point Loma sticks out, it reverses things and sets up eddies. The eddies built up Silver Strand beach up north and made things super-gnarly down here, especially at the mouth of the river. Sometimes illegals try to cross the river. Sometimes they don’t make it.”

With a wave and a last look north, I tramp down the asphalt path to the beach.

“I’d detour back to the highway if I was you,” the patrolman calls out.

I hike ocean-side over the firmly packed sand at the high-tide line. The sun pokes above the low sand dunes and chases the last of the shadows from the beach. Anchoring the dunes are clumps of salt grass, verbena and pickle weed. California poppies and sea dahlias splash orange and yellow across the sand. Back of the dunes is the estuary, one of the last in Southern California, full of native and migratory waterfowl--and bird watchers. Through a gap in the dunes, I spot a party of birders, their bright-orange parkas as obvious as signal flares. Fortunately for the family in the dunes, the orange-breasted Auduboners have their sights set on a blue heron.

A hundred years ago, a city was planned for the beach on America’s southwest border. The railroad reached San Diego in 1885 and precipitated a land boom. Developers lured prospective buyers from colder climates by selling the weather, “sure to cure rheumatic proclivities, catarrhal trouble, lesions of the lungs” and various other ailments. Settlers poured in, land companies sprang up, property values rose. The rich got richer and the poor got lots on the installment plan ($25 down, $25 monthly), and soon new cities surrounded San Diego Bay. The town of International City was planned for the area just north of the border. But the boom went bust, interest in settlements south of San Diego waned and International City never came to be.

The Navy gave Border Field its name. During World War II it used the area as an aircraft landing field. Pilots received gunnery training, learning to hit steam-driven targets that raced over the beach on rails called rabbit tracks. The Navy resisted multifarious real estate schemers, who planned to build an International City of condominiums, and turned over the air field to the state park system in the early 1970s.

Whether delineated by the Great Wall, the blue Danube or a chain-link fence, borders are what you make of them. They become what you say they are if others are willing to accept your declarations. Three miles out to sea is the established demarcation line for America. The 1932 best-seller “Boundaries, Areas, Geographic Centers and Altitudes of the United States, Geological Survey Bulletin 817” states in a sudden blush of surmise: “When the three-mile limit was adopted, it was thought that this was the extreme range of cannon that could be used for coastal defenses . . .” Considering the kinds of “cannon” available to today’s armed forces, the three-mile rule, at least as a defensive measure, becomes a quaint leftover from yesteryear.

A less precise line is the border between land and sea. With every wave the boundaries change; the sands move in and out with the seasons, so that in summer people walk the beach with their feet higher than their heads would have been a few months earlier. The dividing line between land and sea, then, is not really a line at all but a dominion in its own right. Partaking in some measure of both earth and water, it belongs entirely to neither.

The border between natural and built environments is another that intrigues me. “With regard to Nature, I live a sort of border life,” wrote Henry David Thoreau, a man caught between the wilderness of Walden Pond and the society of Concord. “I live a sort of border life on the confines of a world into which I make occasional and transient forays only.”

Human destiny is transience, Thoreau thought. We are travelers on a ceaseless journey from the known to the unknown. Encouraged by Thoreau, I shall, for the day at least, wander the borderlands. With trail mix and traveler’s checks, pen and pack, I will live a border life, a life of quiet confrontation.

My first confrontation is not quiet. Brown with silt, the Tijuana River rushes out of its placid estuary with what appears to be unseemly haste. I have crossed rougher, far more dramatic rivers than the Tijuana, but those crossings were made through wilderness waters. Never have I crossed a river so near civilization. Have migrants found a watery grave here, or was the border patrolman attempting to scare me? The offshore current is reversed, so that at least I won’t be carried off to Mexico. Instead, my bloated, barnacle-covered body will wash up on a populated stretch of sand to the north--Mission Beach or Pacific Beach or the dining terrace of the Hotel del Coronado.

The river looks worse, not better, when I reach its southern bank. At the mouth of the Tijuana, freshwater and salt collide in a roiling caldron of kelp and froth. I can’t see the bottom beneath the whirlpooling green, blue and brown waters. The river spreads itself wide and, one hopes, shallow, forking into three tributaries that spill across Border Field Beach and into the surf.

I have two options: a short but no doubt deep crossing upriver, or a dash across the shallows between the incoming sea and the outgoing river. The first appeals to my common sense, the second to my spirit of adventure. Either option means getting wet. Very wet. I remove boots and pants and regard the river. If I can time my sprint just right, the waves won’t crash over me . . . .

Off and running. Cold water and soft sand shorten my stride. I’m running hard, getting nowhere. I’m through the first fork of the river and splashing through the second when a good-size comber strikes me waist high. I crab sideways 10 feet or so, trying to keep my balance. Moments behind the first wave, a second advances. I wriggle out of my backpack and hold it above my head. A wall of water strikes me shoulder high. My feet slip out from under me. Swallowing water, I struggle to keep the pack above the surge. As the wave recedes, I sprint again, splashing through the last branch of the river mouth. Kelp wraps around my legs, like the tentacles of a sea monster, pulling me down to Davey Jones’ Locker. Another wave, a huge one, rolls toward me. Up the river bank I scrabble, trailing 10 feet of seaweed. I reach safety just as the mammoth wave crashes ashore with enough force to reroute the river to Arizona.

I stand spitting, sputtering. Saltwater fills my every pore. I feel not so much delivered as baptized.

I disentangle myself from the kelp. Ahead lies the Silver Strand, sparkling with seashells and promise.