Please step out of the car, ma’am
I lied to a border guard recently for no good reason other than I didn’t want to have to try to explain why I’d driven to Seattle and then turned around and driven back to Vancouver. (”Well, I was supposed to be meeting friends - no, I don’t know where exactly - exit 68, I think, in a Denny’s or Shari’s or some ghetto place like that - no I don’t know where they are currently - they live in Vancouver but they’re from the states - they sent me an email and I didn’t see it before I left so when I finally called I found out they had a personal emergency …” Yadda yadda yadda.)
I knew the border guards would be suspicious that I’d only been across the border for 2.5 hours, but I figured that that true story sounded so flaky that I’d get called in *for sure*. So instead I lied and told the border guard that my Mom had called and that there was a family emergency so I had to turn around and come back to Canada.
In case I needed confirmation that I’m a bad liar, now I know for sure. I guess my bad lying skills (coupled with the multitude of junk in my car, especially the three black opaque garbage bags full of mildewed books that I’ve been carting around for months) made the border guard suspicious, but she merely smiled at me (for future reference, that’s where you should start to worry), handed me a non-descript form and told me to park and go into the office and sign a customs declaration.
So I parked, and went in, and stood in the lineup, and somebody took my form and my ID and the smiled at me, asked me to have a seat, and realizing there were no seats available brought a chair out for me from the back. That’s when I realized I was in trouble.
Eventually a guy came out and asked for my car keys. “Hello, how are you today? Do you mind if I take a look in your car?” As I pulled my keys out of my pocket he said “You seem nervous - why are you nervous? Is everything okay?” By then, of course, I *was* nervous, so I said (probably really unconvincingly): “I’m worried about my Dad. That’s why I’m going back to Canada.” And then, of course, he asked what was wrong with my Dad and I had to make up a story, which made me more nervous, which was all totally stupid because of course I had nothing illegal or even vaguely interesting in the car. (While in America, I’d bought a frappucino. But I’d also consumed it in America. Could that be illegal?)
(Which reminds me of a story I read once about a guy that kept crossing the border in a van with special concealed panels in the sides and the floor, and every time the border guards searched his van and found nothing until they eventually realized that he wasn’t smuggling drugs or weapons or liquor, he was smuggling *vans*.)
While he went out and searched my car, I sat in the steno chair in the middle of the crowded customs centre (which is about as conspicuous as wearing a dunce-cap) and worried about what I was going to do when they called my parents and asked how my Dad was feeling. I had already made up a story about how they were probably at the hospital and that usually my Mom doesn’t carry her cell (which is true, but - who knows - today might be the exception - and besides, at some point she’d get the message, and while better than explaining to a border guard, it still wouldn’t be a comfortable scene) but then they were going to ask *which* hospital and I was seeing the remainder of the afternoon unfold in a back room featuring black rubber gloves. (I wonder if they’re really black? Hopefully I’ll never know.)
Which was *all so stupid*. But then the guy came back and gave me my keys and told me to have a nice day and said he hoped things went okay for my dad. And maybe I’m a better liar than I thought because he only opened two of the black bags - thankfully, the ones containing the books instead of the one containing the sealed petrie dishes of virulent genetically-enhanced rhino virus that I picked up from my Uztakistani contacts in Snohomish County.