Contraband

I heard a story the other day that I thought was pretty funny--though probably not for the people who lived it. Nevertheless, I am prepared to laugh at their expense. This concerns a group of guys who do an annual fishing trip to Canada--rent a cabin, stay a few days, drink a lot of beer and commune with nature. At the border crossing, they were asked if they had any produce. Well, knowing full well there would be no problem (and probably to divert attention from the amount of alcohol they were bringing along) they declared the potatoes destined for the steak dinner on the first night at the cabin.

Oops.

The potatoes were enough of a red flag that the Canadians ran checks on all of them for prior vegetable smuggling convictions. It turned out they were first-timers with the vegetables, but one of the guys had a prior DUI--an automatic felony in Canada. And this from a country that shares a border with Wisconsin--they must be more foreign then they seem. Anyway, they would not admit the poor sap into the country and in a three musketeers gesture, his companions refused to proceed without him.

So they turned back, only to find that their nongrata status in Canada had all the alarms ringing on the US side of the border. In short, the US border patrol couldn't say exactly why, but they really didn't want them back. Not if Canada didn't want them. Caught in no-man's land with a sniper pacing the roof between the two borders, they spent an additional few miserable hours trying to smuggle their potatoes back into the land of their births.

And as I listened to this story, I couldn't help thinking about how times have changed. I remembered the time we crossed from Canada into the US with a car full of chaotic and muddy camping gear and the guy asked us if we had any guns. We invited him to check for himself, and though he didn't laugh as much as we thought he might, he didn't arrest us either.

And the sniffer dog who went into high alert over my carry-on bag which contained a large sheep's cheese from Italy--well I lied to the dog as well as his handler and they looked at me and my two young nervous cheese-smuggling children and let us all walk.

Would that happen now? I am not so sure. A kilo of declared Italian dried herbs (and yes, a kilo of dried herbs does connote a certain something, as well as being a really impressive amount of herbage) did walk through Chicago customs a few years ago, but the reindeer jerky from Norway did not. Apparently there is a ruminant virus in Scandinavia and we don't want to catch it. No, we would rather hold the fort at chronic wasting disease, a prion disorder that I prefer to call mad deer disease. I explained that I had no intention of eating the reindeer jerky or feeding it to other deer, but only wanted it to stuff the Christmas stockings of my (adult) children and claim it came from Rudolph. Maybe I got what I deserved...or maybe the customs guy thought that was an excellent idea and confiscated my jerky to distribute himself.

Either way, the fun is certainly going out of crossing international borders with food, one of my favorite souvenirs. And don't even think of taking anything with dirt on it into New Zealand. Kiwis may seem very happy-go-lucky, but those customs people can be quite severe. Trust me, I know.

I think it is only a matter of time before we are dumping not only our shoes, but all of clothes, into those little gray bins. Then naked through the showers before seeing the sidewalks of any other country. Mark my words.