Campo/Mexico border (mile 0) to Hauser Creek (mile 15)
We wake early in the dark, movement all around as sleepy anxious hikers mill about. Drinking coffee. Laughing briskly. Sunscreen on. Bags on the porch. Then everybody is out of the house, the cars are loaded and we’re speeding east towards the lightening sky in a beige minivan with bottomed out suspension.
32 degrees today, there is frost on the corrugated rusted metal that makes up the border wall which runs to the horizon both east and west. Everybody climbs out of the cars and I wonder if everybody else worries if their bags are too big, if they have packed too much food or too little water. But what is there to be done? Nothing. So I sling my bag on my back and walk the small hill to the start of the trail. The monument at the southern terminus is a collection of concrete pillars and though it signifies so much it is barely memorable in appearance. After dozens of sets of pictures that we both are and are not in another car load of hikers arrives and we begin to shuffle on our way.
As I hike into the sunrise again and again I think we’re here, we’re doing it, is this it? is this real? how did we manage any of this? It must be, but my god, how incredible.
Our day is filled with the desert scrub land that is so ubiquitous in these areas, giant piles of boulders strewn in haphazard formations dot the hills, shot through with the faded green chaparral, yucca, and at lower elevations oak, all folded upon each other, layer by layer like so many rumpled blankets.
As we hike I think of our fellow hikers. Who are these other people out here on this strange vacation with us? Are these people I’ll call my friends later, and who of them do I like, and can I even tell? I wonder who will be the first person to drop out. I imagine everybody who sets out from the southern terminus believes that they’ll finish. But this idea clashes with the idea that less than half do. I guess we’ll see.
