Come With Me, Sir

For God's sake, please don't cut the blue wire!

I don't pretend to understand the system used by TSA and various border patrol officers for investigating suspicious characters as they cross international boundaries, but up until a month ago I at least put up with its decisions. Well, in so far as it never stopped me from moving about the world unfettered and un-patted-down. It was a nice existence wherein I had the audacious self-entitlement to brag about my mobility to those less fortunate. My friends in the foreign service who always get stopped received comments like, "weird, I always go right through even though I've been all over the place!" My road-weary brothers who constantly find delay got flippantly delivered sucks to be you's, and pretty much everyone else was told, "hey, it's just a random thing man, whatevs."

Whatevs, my left butt cheek! In the past month I've been stopped on three separate occasions, and I do believe that my dumb luck has done run out.

When leaving St. Thomas a few weeks back, I got pulled aside by TSA for a thorough pat down and pants inspection that was really more of an annoyance than an invasion. I was traveling light, so the security folks got to see a shabbily dressed single man traveling alone from the tropics to New York City carrying only a notebook, a wallet, and a packet of sugar-free gum. If that doesn't scream "red flag" than I don't know what does, but the freedom to not carry on a carry-on is a luxury I'm not about to trade for the world. The only other time I was stopped in the past, the TSA lady had a bad reaction to the cat hair on my bag, acquired from a recent visit to my parent's house, and my impromptu bag inspection became a move along sir. No harm, no foul. The St. Thomas folks were a bit more intense, and dare I say competent, in their screening, but they were both wicked friendly to the point that I wanted to fill out a positive comment card afterwards and tell their supervisors they had actually brightened my day.

I got a granola bar instead.

But I tell you what, a week or so ago on my trip to Montreal, the Canadian border patrol really knocked me down from "optimistic patriot" to "skeptical dissenter." Driving up with famous rock star and friend of the blog Shwa "I Just Want To Cuddle" Losben, we two fairly clean cut and upstanding young gentleman were grilled at the border both entering and leaving the frozen north! Already a bit behind schedule, we itched to get into Montreal and get our party on. Sailing through the first border check point, the car was filled with innocently dropped wow that was easy's and a series of unfortunately timed comments about our national security being in jeopardy if this was how they were going to handle things. Boy oh boy was that misguided.

Not two minutes later, we approached the second border checkpoint, and following a quick grilling by the border guard we found ourselves detained at the checkpoint security station. Quietly we sat, awaiting whatever random fate was to befall us, me having a serious need to hit the bathroom and Shwa a serious need to find out why the hell we had been stopped. By the end of this interaction, neither need would be met.

In the drab, portable office-in-a-trailer sat two seemingly bitter border guards, each grilling a separate Canadian couple about their various and sundry US purchases and subsequent failure to declare said purchases. One particularly ill-spirited border guard had apparently seized one woman's engagement ring, purchased in the US over a year earlier but never declared upon entry, and released it back to the unhappy couple only after they begrudgingly relinquished a 10% of fair market value tithe-qua-penalty. Shwa and I were now certain that they were going to nail us on some kind of ridiculous excise tax despite the fact that our carriage lacked any sort of marketable goods. Then came our turn, and the questions were shot rapid fire in our general direction, ultimately uncovering only that we were in fact completely legitimate travelers with valid passports and absolutely zero inclination to do anything but spend American dollars in their stupid country.

During this inquisition, a litany of aggressive WTFs came to mind, including:
- Excuse me, do you think we can get some answers here?
- You know, out bilateral investment treaties pay your salary
- Are you a Pisces? I bet you are, cause all the Pisces I know are fucking assholes

Thanks to an impressive display of self-control and general fear that we'd actually be locked up for even looking at them cross-eyed, I kept my tongue holstered and my potty dance to a minimum. I didn't dare spend any more time in that woebegone shed of misery...best just to get out of there and defile a Tim Horton's up the road.

Amazingly, we got stopped again on our way back through the border to the US! Convinced that I had been flagged because of my recent travels around the world, I asked the border folks what the hell was their problem (in a nice way of course), and unlike their north-bound counterparts they politely took a minute to treat me like a human. "I guess it's just bad luck, these are really random. You guys didn't do anything wrong, and I really do hope that this doesn't dissuade you from coming back up to visit Canada in the future." Once again, I felt like filling out a positive comment card and letting his supervisor know that their border guards were putting smiles right back onto all the faces they had moments earlier ripped them off of. I suppose two out of three positive experiences with border patrol wasn't that bad, and they deserved some kind of recognition for their good work.

I got another granola bar instead.