For 700 Miles, Hiker Kept the Mexican Border in View, and on His Mind Joshua Stewart - San Diego Union-Tribune
go to original July 10, 2017

Mark Hainds put the toes of his hiking boots into the Pacific Ocean last week with the U.S.-Mexico border just off to his left — where it has been during his entire 700-mile journey.

“I dunno,” Hainds said, his clothes covered in dust and his face well-tanned and garnished with a scruffy beard. “It’s a weird thing. I should be feeling celebratory, but I haven’t figured it out.”

Since December, Hainds has hiked in two-week clips from El Paso, Texas, to Friendship Park at the southwestern edge of San Diego County. It was the culmination of a trip he started three years ago, also from El Paso, but headed east, along the Rio Grande to Brownsville, Texas, where the river flows into the Gulf of Mexico. He finished the first leg on Dec. 21, 2014, and started the second jaunt exactly two years later.

He’s one of the few people to hike the United States’ border with Mexico, and between the two legs of his trip, the views of that geopolitical boundary have shifted dramatically and promise to change the relationship between the two countries. On the campaign trail and now as president, Donald Trump pledged to build a wall along the border to prevent unauthorized immigration, hire 5,000 border patrol officers, and cancel or dramatically change the North American Free Trade Agreement, a deal that made it easier for cross-border business.

Hainds, who is 48 and from Alabama, said the change in politics was apparent when he talked to people along the way, many of them strangers who gave him food, took him in and gave him a place to rest for the night and tend to his feet.

“I guess the big thing was that nobody was talking too much about Trump, and nobody was talking about a wall in 2014,” he said. “And now, I think people have cordoned off more into camps. And still, the majority of people I meet are still against the wall, and further militarization of the border.”

Read the rest at San Diego Union-Tribune

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