It's easier to leave than to get back home

May 29, 2008

Dear Julie,

Getting into Canada was much easier than getting back into the U.S. The Canadian customs officer in British Columbia only looked at my passport and asked about my profession before waving me and my car into the country. Seven days later, American customs officers at the North Dakota border had many questions about my vacation and searched my car while I cooled it in a waiting room with mirrored windows. I must have fit one of their smuggler profiles.

After all, my passport showed I'd recently been to India, and when asked I told the officers I'd been in Northern California before crossing the border into Canada near Vancouver. Everybody knows about Northern California's biggest cash crop. They wanted to know who I'd visited there, so I gave them your name. Just so you know in case the DEA shows up at the door.

They also wanted to know where I'd stayed in Canada and how I'd paid for the trip. Yes, I resigned from my job two months ago. No, I don't start my new job until August.

I'm unemployed. Gulp.

They wanted to know if I was carrying any weapons. Just a Swiss Army knife, I said.

They weren't unfriendly, but it was the third-degree without the lamp that's supposed to make you sweat. They tried to put me on the defensive to see if my story had any holes.

What's in the bubble wrap? one asked. It was the big piece of fused glass art I got for DC while visiting you. The piece she wasn't sure she would like. I wondered if the customs agents would settle the question by dismantling the work of art.

The drive east across Canada had been thrilling in some places and Kansan in its sameness in others. In beautiful Banff, when people talk about mountain people they're not referring to Jeremiah Johnsons. Mountain people in Banff rock-climb and snowboard. Lots of healthy looking young adults with foreign accents were in Banff. Some were cleaning the rooms at my hotel in the morning so they could get back on the mountain in the afternoon.

Wind whipped hard across the prairie in Saskatchewan, creating towering spirals of vapor over a lake still chunky with ice near the tiny village of Morse. It was magical, like phantasms rising from the water.

At Winnipeg I turned south and began thinking of home. Scanning the radio I happened on a Rush Limbaugh broadcast. It was nice to hear a voice that used to be from home. I hadn't listened to one of his shows for many years and was dismayed to hear him make points by insulting the intelligence of anyone who thinks otherwise. I used to have a friend who did that, who said anyone who thought some way or other had crap for brains. End of discussion. How do we talk about the issues of life in America when insults replace insights? In my experience, people who insult others' intelligence are insecure about their own. Maybe he's just trying to be entertaining.

I arrived in Iowa shortly after the EF-5 tornado did. Now I'm home. DC revarnished the floors while I was away, so things were topsy-turvy here, too. Furniture filled the dining room, so to get from the kitchen to the living room we had to walk up the back stairs and down the front ones. Sort of like being mountain people.

In the end, the customs officers confiscated only my apples and only because I'd taken off the stickers identifying the country of origin. As one of them handed me my passport and said I could return to America, I smiled. The other agent then smiled for the first time.

"You know Rush Limbaugh?" he asked.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a former reporter for the Southeast Missourian.