Walking Alone through Friendship Park
IMPERIAL BEACH, CALIFORNIA
I CHECKED INTO THE SAND CASTLE INN IN SAN DIEGO COUNTY. It was the cheapest place I could find, and I liked the name. The owners were a family of immigrants from Thailand who made me feel as if I were a visitor in their home. Their motel was spotless and I could see the Pacific from my door! And I had gotten there by three—perfect.
I unloaded my bag, rested a few minutes, and then returned to the office to ask about Border Field State Park. I had a map that could get me close and I could see it on Google Maps, but I had seen no road signs that mentioned it. I needed some local knowledge. Luckily the owners did know something about the park once called “Friendship” and said I would need to get on the interstate to find it. The son drew a map for me showing me roughly where I had to turn, and I set out for the border again, driving south this time along the strand in the mild California afternoon sun. I wished for a convertible and a good stereo pumping music as I drove through the Imperial Beach strip, but the Chevy sedan and its radio had to suffice. The station I played as I cruised with my windows rolled down was ranchero.
After receiving a warning on their radios, Border Patrol officers prepare to race away on their ATVs near the border wall’s end in Friendship Park, California.
There were no exits off the interstate for the park, and no signs indicated its whereabouts. It was now obvious that few people go there, and it seemed that the government wanted those who don’t know about it to pass by without noticing. But I had to find it—it was the final destination of my quest. After several wrong turns and doubling back, I finally drove through a small ranch into what seemed a dead end and arrived at an abandoned entrance. I parked my car where a chain stretched across the road prohibiting anyone from driving farther. Luckily there were no “do not enter” signs, so I started out on the long sandy road heading toward the beach. Halfway there, as I walked by deserted overgrown fields and mudflats, a Border Patrol truck zoomed up to me and the officer asked me what I was up to. I replied that I was just walking and wanted to see the beach. I didn’t go into the full explanation. I braced for a reprimand or worse, thinking maybe the place was off limits after all, but he zoomed away just as fast as he had arrived.
I walked a mile farther, reached the beach, and put my hand into the chilly Pacific. Throughout my walk there had been Navy helicopters flying test runs, their blades whopping as they took off and landed at the naval air station or outlying field just north of the border. There are tens of thousands of test flights from the base every month. Even at the water, they continued to be louder than the ocean waves. I can’t say they seemed out of place as I neared the wall, as militarized as it was.
I walked southward on the sand, where I started seeing innumerable tracks of what had to be Border Patrol ATVs. They had covered every inch of the beach. Strangely the park signs still said it served as a bird sanctuary, even in the midst of all that driving and helicoptering. But somehow a few birds still remained. Some gulls and a flock of pelicans flew by, though not one beachcomber or bird-watcher was there to witness. Not one wader or swimmer was anywhere near either.
It was strange to be alone on a beach on a sunny afternoon just south of where millions of people live. It didn’t seem natural for the place to be so desolate, particularly because I could see people on the Mexico side having fun. As I walked I realized my whole trip had been a journey into solitude and many of the places I’d gone had seemed strangely lonely and sad, not at all what Mexico seemed to be experiencing at the moment.
I had seen the fence from a distance as I walked toward it, and all of it had seemed foreboding. Yet as I got closer, the chinks in the border armor became more obvious. The metal wall, with its numbered military surplus sections, had looked impenetrable, but up close the posts driven into sand on the beach and into the surf had begun to deteriorate, with some leaning and literally dissolving into the Pacific. The rusted and broken posts looked more like pilings from an old pier that had been taken out by a storm. Swimmers of moderate ability could easily make it around them, particularly at low tide. Close to the wall there was a lighthouse on the Mexican side not very different from the lighthouse at Boca Chica, though this one was maybe a little better kept. Both white towers had been built as markers of safe harbor, signals of hope for those lost at sea. But a lighthouse next to a border wall was at best a mixed message.
There are old photographs of the fence that once stood at this place back when it had been called “Friendship Park.” First Lady Pat Nixon had gone there in 1971 to dedicate the 370-acre park made from land taken from the naval base. At that time there was only a five-strand barbed wire fence between the two countries, basically a livestock fence that people could crawl through if they wanted. The United States had constructed a park for visitors there, complete with an attractive entrance, picnic tables, and, most importantly, an area where families divided by immigration policy could visit with one another and even embrace across the low fence.
The Los Angeles Times reported then that during Pat Nixon’s visit to the park, a member of her Secret Service detail cut the topmost strand of barbed wire as the First Lady prepared to walk up to it. Though we know now that her husband’s policies were at the forefront of some of the United States’ first efforts to further strengthen the border fence, at least at that moment in August, she approached the fence with one strand intentionally removed and said, “I hate to see a fence anywhere.”
Then she shook hands with a father holding a child on the Mexican side. She hugged the little boy wearing shorts and tennis shoes. “I hope there won’t be a fence here too long,” she said, looking at the child. I have no idea who the child might have been, but he would be near fifty years old by now, if he’s alive.
In 1994, two decades after her visit, the border fence began going up there first, and the other major urban border cities were not far behind. Fifteen years later, in 2009, with three parallel walls now complete, people couldn’t touch through the fence at all and the park was all but abandoned. The picnic tables left on site looked unkempt and sad.
I walked in the ATV tracks toward the wall and came upon four Border Patrol agents sitting on their ATVs up on a sand dune overlooking the wall’s western end. I decided to approach them first before walking closer to the fence, partly as a precaution and partly just to have some human contact. I clambered slowly up the dune to greet them. They weren’t exactly welcoming, but they weren’t unfriendly either. After they sized me up, I thought it okay to approach.
I began to sense as soon as I walked up that they were worried about what appeared to be unrest on the Mexico side. Some of the people in Mexico had started shouting. One of the officers muttered, “They’re always cussing at us.” Was I going to be in the middle of something? I sure as hell didn’t want to be around if a rock came our way.
Then I realized that there was a big party going on in Tijuana that had nothing to do with the officers at all. I told them I thought it was a celebration, but they wouldn’t hear it. They were convinced it was sinister and about them. I started to hear faint blasts played on a tuba and then wafts of other instruments. I could see people playing in a park nearby. Some seemed to be dancing. Groups of young men played soccer down on the beach. People began chanting and singing. One of the officers said, “They’re always trying to provoke us.” They all looked askance at the dancing crowd.
Then it hit me that the crowd had gathered to celebrate Mexico’s victory over France in the World Cup—the underdog really had won after all, for the first time against a major European foe. “That’s a soccer party,” I said, but they weren’t listening. They were at the moment preoccupied with some message being sent through their helmet radios. They began to fidget. Suddenly the head officer signaled to the others. They cranked and revved their engines, jumped into place on their seats, and whizzed off the dune and down the beach at full speed. They seemed to forget I had been standing there; all I could do was step back to make sure they didn’t run over my feet.
Then the dunes were empty and I was the only human being on the American side of Friendship Park. I walked toward the wall and touched it. All of the panels were numbered in paint, having been brought there from the Gulf War salvage yard and assembled in order. I took photographs through the wall, and I listened. At one point I even tried to shout over the music, “Viva Mexico!” to show my support for their team. No one heard me, and I felt shut out. My side was lonely. Mexico was where the party was, and I was locked out.
I headed down to the beach and tried to get a picture of the deteriorating end of the wall up close. As I stood focusing and framing, a soccer ball inadvertently came over the wall toward me. I thought, “Great, now I have a chance to throw a ball back to the players and maybe get a chance to interact.” But before I could get to the ball, a guy about eighteen years old sidled up to the fence, glanced up to where the guards had been, then slipped between the posts and entered the United States in front of me. I couldn’t believe he fit through, but it was obvious he had done it before. He hardly slowed down. In U.S. territory, he grabbed the ball and kicked it to his friends on the other side, and then slipped back into Mexico as quickly as he had come. At precisely the moment he was slipping through, he looked back toward me and I snapped his picture, my last photograph of the trip.