That Time We Almost Got Detained at the Canadian Border, Episode 2
The Family Vacation
Early on in our marriage my spouse and I got the cockamamie idea that going on a vacation with his parents and his sister and her family would be a great[1] time. It went so well that the day I leapt into a patch of nettles by the roadside in order to photograph a train was one of the high points, but we soldiered on nonetheless. One of the side junkets we had planned was a trip to see the border but not actually cross it, because neither his father nor my kids had passports and they were required by that time — still weird for a New England kid for whom Canada was the place up the road where you sometimes got quarters you couldn’t use, and not like a whole other country or something.
There was a lovely little dirt road that ran right alongside it so you could marvel at the fact that something as legally significant as an international border pretty much looked like a cornfield [2] with a fence in front of it. The kids were expressing regret that they could not actually go into another country, and we had not yet told them that technically, they did, because the staffed border crossing that we didn’t cross was actually about a mile into Quebec. Both of them lean towards the literal and anxious, and I didn’t want to spend the next several hours reassuring them that they would not be arrested, something that would be ironically amusing in short order.
A brief aside, to explain the difference in our personalities: despite the fact that I routinely organize and pal around with anarchists, climate activists and antifascists who find themselves on the wrong side of legal authority with some regularity, it is my spouse who has never met a rule that he wouldn’t break if he figured he could get away with it — the shame of secretly being a social justice paladin disguised as a rogue, versus growing up middle class, white [3] and male and thus relatively assured of an utter lack of consequences, I guess.
He leapt out of the car to grab a souvenir in the form of a decorative ear of corn for them, to make up for the lack of passports, and drove away thinking nothing else of it. We were a good 5 miles away from the border and back on a main road when he first saw the lights in the mirror. We were already more than passingly familiar with the outline of a white Border Patrol SUV and had a strong suspicion that his little hop had not gone unnoticed. Indeed, when we were pulled over a few minutes later their primary concern was whether some stranger had leapt into our vehicle out of the cornfield.
Strange, sure- but unfortunately we all had to admit that we knew him and he stuck to the story that he had exited the vehicle to take a picture, gesturing to the Giant Honking SLR on the dash which did truthfully have several high-quality photos of a barbed wire fence in a cornfield. In the trailing car, my brother in law was not having such good luck reassuring them, and they were held by the roadside for a bit longer while we drove off, ear of decorative corn safely stashed under the driver’s seat. [Author’s note: it was finally thrown out last year, for mildew on the husk, after being proudly dragged from home to home for over a decade. Probably one of the longest-lasting souvenirs, given that we mostly bought tshirts for rapidly growing kids at that time.] Brother in law was Not Amused that we had inadvertently brought Homeland Insecurity down on their heads and sulked for the rest of the day.
I, on the other hand, was extremely amused that, in the name of being stern with us, the agent basically detailed the type and location of every sensor in the field, something that even to my innocent self seemed like not the sort of thing one boasts of to a suspected criminal. That we have mostly encountered the border as being upheld by benign incompetence is of course largely a function of being visibly Middle Class [4] White People, and the degree of bravado and aggression is exactly reminiscent of that one hall monitor that everyone knows is a bully as soon as teacher’s back is turned, only this time instead of being a socially awkward weird nerd with a target on my back they seem to believe I’m one of them — it still baffles me on an emotional level.
[1] Horrible.
[2] Derby Line, VT, remains my favorite instance of a border, where it is literally a painted stripe across the middle of a neighborhood, leading us to ponder whether a neighborly lawnmower misalignment would create an international incident. I was the one who nearly got arrested there, not my spouse, for a change.
[3] Spouse is at least 1/4 eastern European Jewish by genetics, but not culturally, so I’m leaving him out of their conditional whiteness. Pork-free golobki and impermeable 3C hair aside, he’s a blue eyed kid from south Jersey.
[4] Barely clinging to the raggedy bottom edge of, for most of my life (thanks Reagan!) but overeducated and fluent in the class markers thereof. The acquaintances who have been subjected to the merest brushes of my political leanings tend to assume that we are white collar Lincoln Republicans. Foolish mortals.
