Borderworld

Chris on the beach at Border Field State Park. Taken by the author.

The final stretch was sand, so we walked it. From the parking lot, we’d taken dirt trails to a paved, well-established road called Monument; that road had split apart and turned back to dirt, the dirt to gravel, and now, the gravel to sand. Less than thirty feet before we reached the end of our ride, Chris spun out, laughing. “Sand! God dammit!” We hopped off our bikes, grinned at each other, and carted them onto the beach. The wind buffeted our faces; the sun made us squint. We felt tiny and exhausted and happy.

“We’re here,” I said. “This is it. Holy shit, man.”

“Yeah,” Chris said. “Eighty-six miles. Can I tell you something?”

“Sure.”

“Ever since I got into long-distance biking, I’ve wanted to ride a hundred miles. It always felt like some intangible goal. But now that we’re here… and stopping right before it…”

“It doesn’t matter, though, right?” I said. The fence that separated Monument Road from the Tijuana River Preserve continued along the beach in both directions, and I leaned my bike against it. As I did so, I pulled off one of my clipless shoes for the first time in almost eleven hours. The sand was brownish, with an off-putting, moist layer of black sand just beneath it, but it felt impossibly soft.

“No, of course not. It’s not about the distance.” Chris propped his bike against mine and pulled out a bike lock. “I think riding from our houses to the border is a good enough story, even with someone picking us up at the end. But still…”

“There’s always riding circles in the parking lot.”

“There’s always that.”

Our bikes stowed against the fence, we finished taking off our shoes, stuck them in our packs, and started to walk. We spent most of it lapsed in silence. The closeness of our journey’s end was starting to set in: ahead of us, clouded by a faint haze, was the US-Mexican border wall. It cut sharply across the mud flats and bushy patches of the Preserve, hyper-secure dirt roads and a few milling Border Patrol vehicles on the US side, a seemingly ordinary suburban Mexico on the other. We didn’t mention it, but both of us felt the tension. This was not only the culmination of a full day on the saddle, ninety miles of mostly coastal riding between our houses in Laguna Niguel and here, but the metaphorical and literal center of four years of political rhetoric. I’d spent most of those years expressing outrage about this place, but now that it was right in front of me, I felt hopelessly disconnected from it. “The Wall” had become such an abstraction to me that, somehow, I’d forgotten that it’s just a wall. The rhetoric tends to recede when you realize its subject doesn’t really even separate two places — it more just divides one big place.

The closer we got, the higher the tension rose. We could see a Border Patrol vehicle on a hill overlooking the beach — a few people milled right on the other side, seemingly without issue. Less than sixty feet from it, the people dispersed, the Border Patrol vehicle pulled away, and Chris spotted a dog running around on the US side. It appeared to be examining something. We came to a halt and watched. The dog scampered around a bit, shooting a few cautious glances our way, before squirming under a tiny, invisible gap in the wall and disappearing into Mexico.

“Huh,” I said. Chris and I looked at each other and laughed. The last line of defense had fallen. Finally, we could approach the border wall.

The first thing I noticed was the color. The US side, of course, was a normal rusty brown, unrepentantly bleak and foreboding (the ringed barbed wire coating the bottom and top areas didn’t help matters), but it was obvious that the Mexican side had been painted. The angled sides of the beams had been splashed with bright colors; I can’t be sure of it, looking back, but at the time, I thought I saw dolphins, aqua blue and cheerful, frolicking in pink, purple, and yellow water. The stretch of sand right in front of the wall was strewn with sea-borne debris: lots of seaweed, a few pieces of driftwood, and…

“Oh, whoa,” I said.

“Holy shit,” Chris muttered.

Laying on its side, close to where the sand turned to dirt, was a dead dolphin. Its dorsal side, with a short, sharp fin in the center, faced us; the one visible pectoral fin dangled uselessly in the air like some sharp foreign tool implanted on the rubbery, scarred mass of the dolphin’s body. As we stepped towards it, I felt like I was entering a church. Every movement was being watched and judged, and I wanted to come across as respectful as possible.

The author at the border wall. Taken by Chris.

Respectful or not, though, I had to get a good look at the thing. “Man, look at those teeth,” Chris called over to me, and, as I got closer, I could tell why he’d pointed them out: they were perfectly-spaced and an unstained, flawless shade of white, by far the body part least affected by its owner’s demise. The rest of the dolphin’s body, however, was less than immaculate. Its vacant eye socket dripped with coagulated blood; its underside was mottled and pink, whether due to normal ageing or decomposition, I couldn’t tell; its skin was dry, too dry, and looked fake. Heck, the whole thing looked fake, like a model you’d find at an aquarium: passable, sure, and a reasonable metric for the dolphins you’d see in the wild, but nobody could ever mistake it for a real one. Not in a million years. It didn’t even smell.

“You wanna get a picture?” Chris said. The thought released me from my stupor. I nodded, stood a few feet away, and stared forlornly into the camera as Chris took the shot.

As soon as I was sure he’d gotten it, I turned around to face the ocean. Then something odd happened.

A loud, piercing sound echoed over my shoulder. I remember it as “KIKIKIKIKIKIKAKAKAKA,” heavily distorted and low-pitch — not unlike, I thought, if the clicky, anguished wail of a dolphin had been filtered through a short-wave radio. As my brain processed that analogy, a moment existed, lasting just the few milliseconds after that sound played, where I was convinced that it had been made by the dolphin. I could see in my mind’s eye the way the half-open mouth would twitch and the skin around the belly would tremble; I could see the bloody eye rotating in its socket, alive again and desperate to escape its current circumstances. Afterwards, I would say that, for that span of time, I lived in a world where dead dolphins came back to life, where a beached corpse could spend a few minutes gathering its strength before howling its displeasure to the world, and where the US-Mexican border wall created a miniature universe that didn’t abide by the same rules as the world outside it. I would say it to elicit laughs, of course, but the shock of the moment was as real as the sand beneath my feet. It knocked me sideways, left me sputtering, and as soon as I turned around, it was over.

The Border Patrol vehicle had returned. As I stared at it, stupefied, it emitted another unintelligible stream of loudspeaker gibberish: “KIKIKIKIKAKAKAKAGHSH,” this one with a distinct “PLEASE” on the end. My heart pounding, I glanced at the dolphin. Motionless. Of course.

“We’d better vamoose,” Chris said.

Our last photo of the border wall, moments after being told to leave. Taken by the author.

“Yeah, for sure,” I answered, trying to regain mental control of the situation. I waved to the Border Patrol guy, patted my heart to simulate the surprise he’d given me (which immediately made me feel a little silly), and joined Chris as he speed-walked to safety. A soon as he was sure that we were leaving, the Border Patrol officer pulled away, and I felt calm enough to snap one last photo of Chris, grinning like a goon, with the water-wreathed end of the border wall next to his head. Our experience with “The Wall” was over.

On the way back, I relayed my experience to Chris, who found it as funny as I’d expected him to. “Man, you know,” he said, “I didn’t have the same dream-state-thing you did, but I picked up on that vibe. Everything about it was surreal. It felt like we entered a world and we’re just now leaving it. Or maybe we haven’t even left it yet.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Like, we stumbled into something too massive for our brains to comprehend. I mean, a partition between two countries? That’s some world history shit. That’s, like, wars, and leaders, and trade, and Global Developments. And then with the dolphin, and the fact that we’re just two ordinary kids…”

“Two kids who rode to the border.”

“Right. When I couple all that with the day of riding, and think of us going home, returning to normal life…”

“It probably won’t feel real,” Chris said, smiling.

“It probably won’t. And that’s a weird thought to have when you’re still living through something.”

“Yeah,” Chris said. He took a moment to kick the sand around with his bare feet. “Borderworld.”

“Yeah, man, Borderworld.”

We talked the whole way back to our bikes, sat in the sand, and talked some more. Our conversation meandered from the islands that loomed on the horizon, neither of which we’d known about or researched beforehand, to the bright, intangible Future, the adventures yet to be had, the hiking and climbing and biking and sailing and exploring yet to be done. We talked about good trips and bad trips, the balance of unpredictability with “putting your ducks in a line.” Finally, as the sun sank deeper into the horizon, washing the waves with light and wreathing us in a soft, slow darkness, we talked about not wanting to leave, about being desperate to hold on to moments like these, trap the entirety of that life-giving day in amber to look at for the rest of time. But our ride was here and we were getting cold. Slowly, we put on our packs, got on our bikes, and rode away.

Borderworld didn’t follow us home. Borderworld stayed right where it was, as surreal and impenetrable as we’d left it, just as quick to wash away every hint of our presence as we were to scurry back to our showers and warm beds. Maybe, someday, we’ll make the journey back to the border wall, and it’ll feel entirely different: sunnier, more grounded, and with fewer talking dolphin corpses. But Borderworld is intact in our heads. We trapped its seclusion, its austere and aloof nature, in amber and locked it away. And maybe, someday, we’ll feel it again, and if we do, I hope we’d be older and wiser. I hope we’d sit on that same beach staring out at those same islands, have the same talking dolphin scare, revel in the same feeling of grand, historical powerlessness. Maybe that’s what we found. Maybe that’s Borderworld.