Since Austin, I have suspected that this road trip may be too long. Granted, it’s basically the length I always expected it to be—I’m surprised that I’m exactly on schedule so far—but I didn’t anticipate the effects that it’s had on me: the exhaustion, the aching right leg, the mental meandering. This whole time, I’ve been searching for some objective way to qualify whether or not this journey has reached an excessive length, and today, I have an answer. Today, I am driving through Canada.
Today, I am taking a shortcut through another country.
This road trip has officially gotten out of hand.
At the last town in America, I fill my car up with gas and dig my passport out of my messenger bag before making my final approach to the Canadian border. It’s Easter today, and traffic is light—I spend maybe two minutes waiting in line before pulling up to the border guard station, where I hand the guard my passport. Since the passport was issued to me in the lead-up to the Magical European Murder Trial Tour, I’ve aged nine years and gained probably 30 pounds, and in the photograph, I’m wearing a dark blue fleece pullover jacket that I last saw shortly after the picture was taken. One day, I took it to the laundry room for my mom to wash, and it promptly disappeared. I assume that it became King of the Stray Socks.
The border guard neither knows nor cares about that. He gives my passport only the briefest of glances before asking my purpose for traveling to Canada and whether I’m bringing in any firearms, drugs, or other things that may be frowned upon by our neighbors to the north. I assure him that I am not, and he allows me to continue on my way, the whole process having taken no time at all.
Just like that, I am now driving kilometers instead of miles.
“Wait!” Karen O, lead singer of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and the last great rock star, pleads from all ten of my car’s speakers as I cross the Blue Water Bridge. “They don’t love you like I love you.” The goddess has become a siren, trying to halt my progress, but I continue on anyway. She has been singing this song to me for years, and I’m still not sick of it, though I frequently wonder why it’s only the women I’ve never met who profess their love for me.
The answer, it seems, is to run. To speed, to gun my car up to 1001, and enjoy the guilt-free nature of this country’s roads. As “Maps” gives way to “Y Control,” as Karen O switches from pleading to mourning, bemoaning the sorry state of her love, I do just that.
Far sooner than I expected, signs on the side of the road inform me that I have arrived at the crossroads which I mentally debated for the duration of today’s drive. From here, I can return to America via two cities: Buffalo and Niagara Falls. While I intend to spend the night in the former, I’ve never seen the latter. With more than 5,000 miles on the odometer this trip, I’ve yet to stop to see any sights. Therefore, the Falls qualify a road trip moral imperative.
After driving around the Canadian side of the Falls for a brief while looking for free parking, I concede to spending $15 for a space in the parking lot of a Travelodge, and then kick myself for paying such an absurd price to watch water move. During the three-minute walk down to the scenic viewpoints, I pass signs for a Ruby Tuesday’s, Hard Rock Cafe, Rainforest Cafe, Madame Tussaud’s, Guinness Book of World Records Museum, and at least as many tourist traps whose names are less well-known.
Niagara Falls may as well be a wetter version of Times Square.
As disappointing as the touristy nature of the place may be, the view once I’m within sight of the Falls underwhelms more. I wander a half-mile or so of the sidewalk, taking in the angles and the sounds and the moisture, but it somehow doesn’t live up to my nonexistent expectations—the Falls look like a moving postcard, sound like the roar of I-5 when I walk downtown from my home, and from this distance, feel like a typical Seattle rain. I could have virtually this same experience a half-mile from my home by holding my iPhone at an appropriate distance from my eyes.
I’m supposed to be impressed. I realize and acknowledge that the disappointment I’m staring at is considered one of the great natural wonders of the world, but to me, from this distance, it seems like little more than the physical manifestation of gravity. Nowhere in the world does more water fall per minute, but if it weren’t happening here, somewhere else would inherit that record.
To be fair, while the Falls have not stopped running, everything else has due to Easter. No boats will take me to the base of the Falls, where I might be wowed, and the “Journey Behind the Falls” attraction—one of the few things here that actually interests me, for which I’ve been following signs—appears shut down for the day as well. Of course, the adjacent gift shop where I can buy quick-drying underwear is open.
All of the gift shops are.
Wandering away from the water and back towards my car, I’m more fascinated by the other tourists than the traps set for them. Niagara Falls is a veritable melting pot—despite so many attractions being shut down and today being one of the most important days of the Christian calendar, people are out in full force. As I weave my way through the crowd, I notice people of virtually every ethnicity I can imagine—on the (alleged) anniversary of the day Jesus (allegedly) rose from the dead, hundreds, if not thousands of people have come here to watch water fall from a cliff.
They may continue to gawk, but after less than an hour, I am done here. For now, it’s onwards to Buffalo, where I intend to enjoy some wings and perhaps lose a Super Bowl or three.
Whereas crossing the border into Canada took all of four minutes and as many questions, returning to the U.S. of A. takes slightly longer. A two-lane bridge across the border between nations feeds into nearly a dozen lanes of entry points, but only half of these are open, and that’s a relative term, as the lanes move slower than the glaciers that carved this area. Everyone is apparently a suspect.
Today is the first time I’ve left the United States since 9/11. My last trip outside of our borders was to Vancouver in August of 2001, where we departed for a week-long Alaskan cruise two weeks before I started college. The only time I came close to leaving was when a cousin’s step-son was going to have his bar mitzvah in Israel, but that trip got scrapped when war broke out with Lebanon two weeks before our visit.
Unlike many people my age, seeing the world doesn’t interest me. I’d love to do a handful of things outside our borders—one of these years, I’ll finally going skiing in New Zealand in August—but I lack the sense of wanderlust that infects so many twenty-somethings. Actually, I hate the process of traveling2—packing, dealing with security lines, getting stuffed into an airplane for hours upon end—almost as much as I hate being the stereotypical American, wandering around foreign countries not speaking the native language and hoping they speak mine.
At the moment, I have a very different gripe.
Few things offend me more than excessive security performed in the name of anti-terrorism. Right now, as I sit in No Man’s Land, stuck in traffic between two countries and wanting no more than to get to Buffalo, to a hotel and food, I know one thing.
The terrorists have won.
People throw that phrase around a lot these days, mostly in facetious fashion, and I’m as guilty of it as anyone. I have almost certainly uttered the sentence, “If you don’t come out drinking with us Saturday night, then the terrorists win,” at some point, because I am not a serious person. Right now, I am completely serious.
While I wait to get back into my own damn country, Osama bin Laden is laughing somewhere on the Afghanistan/Pakistan border.
He dreamed of this.
Many people3 lead the public to believe that the extremists whom we label terrorists want nothing more than to kill every American, but this is not true. It’s a convenient soundbite, the kind of line that leads to unjustified invasions of countries that say mean things about our own4. In reality, terrorists know that they can never hope to kill every American. As such, they aim for a simpler achievement: To disrupt our lives so greatly that we accede to their demands.
In terms of disruption, at least, they’re winning.
How much time have we as a society wasted at airport checkpoints since 9/11? How many pairs of shoes have we removed, x-rayed, and retied since Richard Reid attempted to blow up that plane? More than six years have passed, and we’ve yet to hear about a single other attempted shoe-bomber, but still, every single American air traveller must remove his Nikes if he wants to get to his sister’s wedding in Des Moines.
I’m not saying terrorism isn’t a real thing, obviously. Some people out there very much wish to kill us, but, realistically, we can’t stop them all. Even if we destroy their networks, there’s little to stop a guy from renting a truck, filling it with fertilizer, and driving it up to a federal building in Oklahoma City5. In fact, as the security lines grow longer, they become a more appealing target—I’m amazed that nobody has attempted to suicide bomb a winding airport security line, because if they pull that off, what’s next? A security line for the security line?
Knowing that we cannot stop everybody, our government’s goal should not be to reduce the risk to zero, it should be to reduce the risk to the lowest level that does not disrupt our day-to-day lives. Benjamin Franklin famously6 wrote, “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
I guess I’m getting what we deserve right now.
After moving forward at about a car’s length per song for the first half of Death Cab For Cutie’s Narrow Stairs, followed by the majority of Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief7, I finally reach the booth that serves as the last barrier between myself and my country. I pull ahead, roll down the window, and hand my passport to the border guard.
“Citizenship?” he asks.
“American,” I reply.
“Place of residence?”
“Seattle, Washington.”
“Whose car is this?”
“It’s mine.”
At this point, the border agent apparently grows suspicious. His voice sounds a little more stern, his gaze looks a little more wary.
“Where did you say you lived again? Washington, D.C. or Washington state?”
“Washington state. Seattle.”
“Where did you visit in Canada?”
“I was just passing through. I stopped for food in London, and I stopped here at the Falls. I’m on a big road trip.”
“What’s the purpose of this road trip?”
“I’m trying to write a book.”
“What’s your job?”
“I’m trying to write a book.”
“For who?”
“Myself.”
“Who’s your publisher?”
“I don’t have one. I’m funding it on my own with money from when my dad was killed.”
The millisecond the last two words leave my mouth, a feeling of imminent doom settles upon me. I said my dad “was killed,” not that he “died” or whatever passive form would have lessened further queries, and this skeptical agent has already proven quite keen on follow-up questions.
I am trying to cross the American border in a car with license plates from more than 2,000 miles away, carrying a passport with a photo so old that I bear little resemblance to the boy pictured in it. I have stated that I am not working, and writing a book for nobody in particular. Worst of all, I just answered a question in a way that presents an obvious follow-up question, the honest response to which will include some variation of the word “terrorism,” almost certainly the word one least wants to use while attempting to cross the border into America.
I can hear the latex gloves snapping already.
The man takes another look at his computer, glances down at my passport, and then looks up at me while holding out his arm to return the passport.
“I’m sorry to hear about your dad,” he tells me.
I do not believe him, but I don’t suppose it matters. He believes me, and I’m back in America.
Land of the free, home of the TSA.
By the time I find a hotel in Buffalo that doesn’t look like a place with a 100% murder rate, night has fallen. While I check in, I ask the woman at the front desk if there are any good wings restaurants nearby. She pulls menus from beneath the counter, but all of the places are at least five miles away, and after spending more than an hour trapped at the border, the last thing I want to do is sit in my car anymore. Instead, I walk to the Applebee’s across the street and grab a seat at the bar. While I catch up on the day’s news on my iPhone, the bartender complains to one of his customers about the Sabres.
“It’s bad enough that they’re killing their own fan base,” he remarks. “But all these early playoff exits are killing my business, too. This place is packed when they’re doing well.”
“They need to fire their coach,” the customer replies. “It’s like the Yankees with Joe Torre. At some point, he just wasn’t motivating the players. He wasn’t getting it done.”
I want to point out how Joe Girardi fared no better last year, how an early playoff exit is better than not even making it that far, but I silently eat my dinner instead. I am not happy to be in Yankee country, but it’s better than being trapped on a bridge, in no country at all.
- Which, of course, is only 62.
- Says the guy on a road trip so long he’s taking a shortcut through another country.
- Read: Politicians.
- Quite a few of which are accurate.
- A heinous act which, somehow, led to Libya paying $2.7 billion in reparations to families including my own.
- Or perhaps apocryphally
- It seemed inappropriate to not listen to it, given my present circumstances.