“Can’t Pass the Postal Exam”

In 2018 I found myself spending a lot of time in the Rochester Mayo Clinic’s Neurology Department. Eventually, I was diagnosed with myasthenia gravis, but back then I was still in the early stages of discovering what was causing my face “to melt” (as Ms. Day described my most visible symptom), in the meantime I was often entertained by conversations in the waiting area. People with neurological disorders seem to be a specially wide spectrum of personalities.

The day I am writing about a pair of Trumpers (old white men) were going on about “all of Trump’s accomplishments” at the borders. A friend of theirs was a Border Patrol agent somewhere at the Canadian border and, supposedly, he had stories of those “terrible people” trying to cross into the US from Canada. While these two nitwits reveled in their friend’s supposed “adventures,” loudly and arrogantly, I remembered a comment someone had made at a campground in Maine when I was coming back from a 2008 motorcycle trip to Nova Scotia, “The Border Patrol cops are just people who failed the Postal Exam.”

I’ve written quite a bit about that long ride on my Geezer blog, but this episode stuck so firmly in my mind that I have sometimes wondered if it were real. At about the 5,000 mile point in this long ride I decided to be lazy and take the CAT High-Speed Car Ferry from Nova Scotia to Maine. The upside to the ferry was that I’d get a 5 hour rest stop instead of a seven hour, 450 miles ride from Nova Scotia to the Maine US border. The downside was that that I’d be going almost straight from the ferry to a US border crossing in Bar Harbor, Maine.

It was a hot August day when Ii arrived in Maine at the hottest time of the day. I was solidly geared up in my ‘Stich Darien suit, road boots, and the usual helmet-gloves-etc setup I always wear on a bike trip. By then, I’d been on the road, “wearing what I’d brung” in my saddlebags, for about two weeks. Some of my clothing was pretty . . . raw, after shower-laundry and multiple reuses. The weather had turned out to be quite a bit warmer than I’d anticipated, too, and I hadn’t brought many lightweight bits of clothing. As she was packing up for her flight back home from Nova Scotia to Minnesota, Ms. Day loaned me one of her clean teeshirts and I was wearing it as I crossed into good ‘ole USA.  If you know me, you’ll likely know that I don’t pay much attention to what I’m wearing. And this is where you might decided that my “situational awareness” needs some work. The shirt was a silkscreen of Ms. Day’s take on a fairly famous pagan character called “The Green Man.” I was pushing my bike along the slow moving trail from the ferry to the US Customs office, since it was hot and we were moving at about 0.1mph, I’d tossed my jacket on to the bike along with my helmet, gloves, and anything I could dump to stay cool.The guy at the border gate took one look at me and sent me into the “security office” to be thoroughly “examined” for contraband because I was so clearly a clear-and-present-hazard to the security of the United States. Remember, this is the stock market, real estate crashing United States of George Bush II’s whackjob 2008. (Almost as bad as the idiocy we have been experiencing since 2017.)

Once inside the security office, which isn’t much more than an overpriced trailer with extra windows, I had to strip down to my teeshirt, Aerostich riding shorts, and socks while the border cops meandered about doing their low-tech job of determining what kind of contraband I was bringing into the country. I must have been quite a sight to the people who came into the office for other business.

To try and expedite the inspection, I offered to help the officers go through my bike storage, but they insisted that i keep my 60-year-old, undressed, dangerous self where they could see me. They didn’t even trust me to open the cases, pop the seat, or even point out where my storage was. I am not, as I have said before, a camera guy and this was one of many times that I wish that wasn’t true. For almost an hour, three to five of the Customs Department’s “finest” wandered around my motorcycle, fumbling with the keys to the cases, and looking like a troupe of monkeys trying to figure out a typewriter and with exactly as much hope of ever writing “Macbeth” on the damn thing. They, finally, managed to get the two large GIVI side-cases open and spread my clothing all over the parking space in the process. The top case totally foiled them as did the tube tool box under the left side-case and the under-seat storage wasn’t even a consideration. One of the Customs goobers managed to unlock the tank and get a good sniff of Canada’s 90 octane mid-grade gas.

After an hour of entertainment, they gave up and booted me out of the containment area. By then, it was late enough that I started looking for a campsite for the evening. Just out of Lubec, Maine I found a terrific privately-owned campground where I rented a super-cool cabin for less money than I’d been spending for a tent-site at most of the campgrounds on the trip. About an hour after I’d unpacked, the young woman who’d checked me into the campground brought a big tray of fried goodies that hadn’t been sold that evening and that solved me dinner problem. While I ate, we talked about where I’d been, what I’d seen, and I mentioned my Border Patrol episode of the day. And that is where I heard, “They’re just a bunch of losers who couldn’t pass the postal exam” explanation for the fools who freaked out by my wife’s artwork.