That Time We Almost Got Detained at the Canadian Border, Episode 1
The Honeymoon
The week that Nice Boy and I moved in together, we spent a few days stuffing an oversized couch through the door to our new flat and combining our separate collections of Stuff to form a semi-unified household before taking off for our first weeklong road trip.
There had been some back and forth- do we go south or north? West was intriguing but anything interesting enough to serve as a goalpost was at the edge of our time and money. East was a little damp for a road trip. Potential loops were drawn up, one going down the coast to Georgia and back up alongside the Appalachian Trail (or maybe down the mountains and up the coast, we never settled that) and the other going up the coast of Maine to Bar Harbor and beyond. His parents had gone to Hopewell Rocks when he was just out of high school, and he couldn’t get time off from his crappy retail job to go with them. I grew up spending a few weeks every summer in southern Maine with my grandparents and cousins but had never been north of Castine, where I once spent a week on a goat farm as part of a marching band exchange trip. Plus, we were starting from Vermont- so Maine it was.
We had sold his zippy coupe for a battle-ready tank of an Audi wagon, whose utility as a camping pod had been tested in New Hampshire and whose off-road chops had also been tested extensively in the mud of a New England spring along the Green River. She was packed to the hilt with food, clothing, and gear as we planned to camp our way across the Atlantic provinces.
Amusingly enough, it was Bucksport (right next door to Castine) where we stopped the first night. I had faint memories of my chorus teacher hiding on the floor of the bus when we crossed a bridge nearby, and we arrived at that same channel just before 11PM after securing a cheap motel for the first night. The bridge had been replaced by a newer style and was illuminated by floodlights. We pulled into the scenic turnoff to take a photo, looked away for a second to get the camera set, and turned back to find… nothing.
One minute you’re taking a dramatic photograph of a bridge at night, the next you’re trying to take a picture of a bridge, at night. The lights must have been programmed to shut off at 11 sharp- but that was unnerving, having it disappear on us like that.
The cheap motel was adequate for the price, and we slept semi-decently then set off the next morning with the goal of reaching Hopewell Rocks sometime before dark. Once it was visible, the bridge was in fact quite scenic. Bar Harbor did its “oh hey look, I am a picturesque coastal New England Village not at all beset by tourist traps!” thing, and then we kept going north to the point where you could actually see the vegetation and the angle of daylight start to change. It was mid-afternoon when we got to the border in Calais, and we were both already exhausted and a little punchy from the heat.
We go through the standard questions. I was nervous, since I was still traveling with just a birth certificate and driver’s license- the last year this was possible- because my passport wouldn’t arrive until August, but that was fine. Then they ask where we’re from. Quite truthfully, the Nice Boy answers “Massachusetts, Connecticut and Vermont.” [Me, him, and us as of 2 days ago. It made sense, honest.]
Pause.
The border guard looks into the car, confused. “There’s only two of you?”
Then, because he is possessed by some unknown force, Nice Boy turns towards the back of the car and says “Huh.” I do not even have time to facepalm before we are asked to step out of the vehicle.
I have to hand it to Canada- we were escorted to a nicely air conditioned office and offered lemonade while they strip searched poor Mockingbird, taking all our gear out of the back, peering in the spare tire well, the side access panels, and so on. Even nicer, they put everything back as if it was never touched. They even re-rolled the sleeping bags. I can’t get anyone else in the house to do that, they’re all convinced that it requires some kind of sorcery, and yet here they were, perfect little spirals of flannel and put back right where they’d come from. An hour later, we were on our way again, with a story that will never get old.
