Me and ICE (Part I)

This story is only political if you want it to be.

I’ve crossed the US-Canada and US-Mexico border, by motorcycle and car dozens of times. I’ve done one old-fart boat cruise with my wife, leaving from Miami to the Caribbean once. Most of the time, coming and going in and out of the US has been almost a non-issue. But not always. On average, the Canadian border officers are, as you’d expect, polite and efficient and, occasionally, humorous. The Mexican officers are sullen, over-armed, and officious. The old joke about US Border Control officers is that “they are the guys who flunked the postal exam.” And that has been my typical experience at any of the dozen places I’ve crossed the US border, on my way back home. Depending on whether I’m behind bars, or not, after I publish this story, I might tell a few more of my border-crossing stories after this one.

In 2008, I took a motorcycle trip from Minnesota to New York’s Thousand Islands to Quebec to Nova Scotia and back home, with a pause in Nova Scotia to enjoy some resort time with Ms. Day. Altogether, it was 28 days away from home with most of the nights spent in a tent in campgrounds and spots off of the road where I found campsites private and isolated enough to put up a tent and park the bike. At, roughly, the mid-point in my trip, I blasted more than 1,000 miles from Quebec to Nova Scotia to drop off my gear at a resort I’d booked for the two of us and back to Halifax to the airport to pick up Ms. Day and the wardrobe she’d brought for her 5 days in Canada.

After one of the most harrowing rain storm rides ever, from the Halifax Airport to our Port Dufferin “resort,” Ms. Day and I relaxed, canoeing the bay, taking short sightseeing trips within 100 miles of our incredibly comfortable room, ending with a leisurely ride back to Halifax where we stumbled into the weekend of the annual Halifax Busker Festival and stayed in a nice hotel close to the airport to make Ms. Day’s getaway as painless as possible.

After dropping Ms. Day off, I took a relaxed loop around Cape Breton before I returned to the good ole’ USA. I was a long way from burned out, since I’d taken about 3 days to make the loop from Halifax around Cape Breton Island and back to catch the ferry in Yarmouth. That was some of the nicest camping and sightseeing I’d done in my 50-some years on a motorcycle. I still often go to sleep to the surf recordings I made at the campsites along the north shore of Cape Breton Island. If I’d have been hard at pounding the miles, it should have taken me about 20 hours for that loop (approximately 1,600 km). Because I love ferry rides, I took the ferry from Yarmouth, Nova Scotia to Bar Harbor, Maine.

At that point in the trip, I’d been on the road for fifteen days, counting the five days relaxing at Dufferin Bay and Halifax, and almost 10,000 miles. I always packed light for motorcycle trips, usually stowing a half-dozen t-shirts, pairs of socks, and riding shorts, one pair of swimming shorts, and no more than one half-decent-looking pair of pants and a shirt. When Ms. Day was loading up her gear for the return flight to Minnesota, she swapped a couple of my t-shirts for clean(er) shirts that she’d packed. Three days later, and I’m down to one clean shirt when I boarded the ferry. I was wearing this one (see above). It’s a piece of Ms. Day’s original artwork. Go ahead and ask, “Do you know how to dress yourself?” The answer is, “maybe?” I have a simple routine for the clothes I wear almost every day: I wear whatever is on top of the drawer. Sometimes that can be embarrassing, but usually I’m oblivious to embarrassment, too.

So, I’m in a long line of vehicles, mostly poorly tuned pickups spewing unburned fuel, and it’s a hot August day. I’d been wearing an Aerostich Darien suit, but I’d turned off the bike and stripped down to my riding shorts and tee-shirt and riding boots. The rest of my gear was insecurely slung across my bike’s seat and tank. I turned the engine off early in the cue and I was pushing the bike toward the check point when one of the Border goobers spotted me and routed me out of the line to an inspection area. I think it was the shirt that pissed him off. He even patted me down, as if I could hide something in skin-tight Aerostich Lycra riding shorts and my wife’s tee-shirt. I think he might have been making a pass at me. He and one other ICE goober marched me into the office and sat me down where everyone passing through the area could get a look at the terrorist in tight pants. And a gang of ICE prepared to “inspect” my motorcycle.

My 2004 Suzuki DL650 V-Strom was pretty well setup for touring in less-than-ideal locations. I had stuff hidden all over the motorcycle and multiple storage locations. My custom Sargent seat had a tube strapped under the seat where I kept my passport, $500 in emergency cash, Traveler’s checks, a couple of credit cards, and copies of my driver’s license and other identification. I had two large GIVI side cases and one large tail case, two home-made tool tubes under the side case frames, and a tank bag with stuff in all of them. I explained which key went to the seat release and which side case contained the keys for the rest of the storage cases. I explained how to unscrew the covers of the tool tubes. For my effort, I got snarled at and told to “sit down and shut up.”

For a guy who made a significant bit of income as a writer, mostly for magazines, I was not much of a photographer until I bought my first decent smart phone a few years ago. The digital camera I’d brought on the trip was locked in the tail case and I didn’t think to ask if I could retrieve it before being sequestered in the office. However, an AI art program did a pretty serviceable job of re-creating the scene on the inspection slab and this AI-generated picture is how I have described the Border Control “inspection” for the past almost-20-years. Five uniformed “officers” wandered around the bike for a LONG TIME without managing to open any of the storage, other than the zippered tank bag. Being the macho boys they were/are, none of them thought to ask me to show them how to get any of my luggage open. They just wandered aimlessly around the bike, just like this picture, until they gave up and handed me my keys and told me “get outta here.”

I had plans to jet out of Maine to New York to see my mother’s younger sister in her care facility, but that was a ten-hour ride and I didn’t get out of Bar Harbor until late afternoon. So, I headed for a campground in New Hampshire and spent the night there. I suppose I should have slept soundly, knowing that the country was well-protected from terrorist motorcyclists wearing marijuana artwork tee-shirts. In fact, I was pretty convinced that it is incredibly easy to bring contraband into the country, just “hide it” in a plastic case with a cheap key lock.