“OK, whats your story folks?”

That’s actually the first thing the young US Customs Officer asked my husband and I one evening we were crossing the border into the US from Canada. We had been returning from visiting my mother one evening in the nearby town of Osoyoos, B.C. for a few hours on one of our twice yearly trips up from California. This was about a year ago now but the incident came back to me this morning, in the wee hours as I first awoke. Perhaps reading the recent news articles regarding the “militarization” of local police forces had something to do with this being in my stream of consciousness, as things heat up in the small town of Ferguson, Missouri, following the shooting and killing of an unarmed young black man by a police officer. But, to return to MY ‘story’, this one particular evening of which I write, Rod and I had been up from California for a week, to relax at our cabin and visit old friends in our local community of Oroville, just miles from the US/Canada border, where our cabin sits on a nearby fishing lake. It has been our retreat for the past 13 years or so, we kept the property after selling our Oroville home and relocating in Taft, California after Corey was sentenced and designated to Taft C.I. to serve his decade long sentence for selling marijuana. Every year while living in Cali we’d make two trips up, spring and fall, to check on our property, make any needed repairs, do some maintenance, and go up to visit my folks, both now elderly. My father has since passed away, from a stroke, just 3 years after we moved to California in fact, so we’d make a point to go see mom, have a good catch up, these few opportunities we had. My folks resided (and I was raised in) the small town of Osoyoos, just four miles from the US Border, and Oroville, where I had lived for a good 34 yrs with my husband and family prior to Coreys arrest, was only four miles south of the border.

This particular evening as we were clearing US Customs, as we returned from just such a catch up visit with my mother, having handed over our I.D.’s, and answered the standard questions from the Officer, he told us to pull our vehicle over and go inside. This wasn’t the first time this had happened, but it had been a while since the last time, a few years perhaps. We did as instructed and went inside the large, multimillion dollar complex (completed about 12 or 13 years ago to replace the two small stations, US and Canadian, that had existed up till then). We sat and watched several officers busy at their desks, some chatting with other officers, and after about twenty minutes one gets up from his desk (one who had been chatting and laughing with another officer after taking a phone call, perhaps from the outside Officer in the booth, in regards to his sending us inside?) slowly swaggered up to the counter, looks at us, smirks and says “ok, whats your story folks?” Whats our STORY??? Are you kidding me? We gave our names, where we were from, where we had just come from and why. He then asked a few other questions including did we have more than $1000 on us to which we said no (even though it is legal for us to carry just under $10 THOUSAND dollars with us across the border without reporting it). He then said to sit back down and wait as our vehicle was thoroughly searched and proceeded to call up two Officers to do the deed. At this point I was surprised he wasn’t having us both strip searched! We were clearly ‘under suspicion’ and being treated like we were hiding something.

It turned out this particular evening one of the other Officers in attendance, and who had come up to the far end of the counter, was someone we knew from Oroville. We had known her many years, and she had been a US Customs officer at this port for many years. After the Officers left to search our vehicle and we’d sat back down she came out from behind the counter to say hello and gave us both big hugs in greeting, asking us how we were, that it had been a while since we’d last seen each other. The other Officer who had so roguishly questioned us, who seemed bent on making the lives of two senior citizens a misery for the time he had them in his ‘control’ watched on, seemingly in surprise. We chatted with our friend for about twenty minutes, until the men searching our vehicle returned with a clean bill of health. It was only then the Officer ‘in charge’ smiled and said something to the tune of “OK folks, thank you very much, you can go now, have a nice evening”. His manner seemed apologetic almost, and I have to wonder what conversation took place, if any, between he and our friend after we had been ‘let go’. And I am certain, had she NOT been in attendance that evening, he would never have changed his gestapo behavior to that of the friendly, respectful, public servant that he was!

It was after Coreys marijuana arrest that Rod and I began to be routinely pulled aside and searched whenever we crossed the border from Canada, almost every single time we returned from visiting my parents in Osoyoos (we were never searched on the Canadian side upon entering). Mind you it wasn’t that often we were able to get up there to visit, our lives were crazy busy and stressful at that time, maybe just two or three times during that first year of Coreys prosecution. Thereafter, twice a year, spring and fall, for the next ten years we were living in California and returning to our cabin to make sure all was secure there. Those earlier years we’d be up most times the Officers we’d get at the checkpoints were members of the Oroville community, someone we’d know, be acquainted with, and they’d be apologetic in asking us to pull over into the bay for a vehicle search. In recent years there seem few ‘locals’ that work this huge new Port of Entry, I’m sure,‘by design’.

Anyways, clearly our I.D.’s and licence plates were flagged in their computer data base. It was annoying but not unexpected. Though we always wondered how stupid they must think we must be, that we would even consider ‘smuggling’ anything (!!!) across the border with our sons recent arrest and prosecution for selling marijuana! Not that we’d ever smuggle anything regardless of the current situation. We’ve crossed that border thousands of times and never broken any laws.

I speak of these events now because as I awoke this morning it was with thoughts in my head of how simple and uncomplicated life was not so many years ago, and how it has changed in such a small amount of time. Whistleblower Edward Snowdens revelations of the NSA’s mass surveillance of our citizenry, data bases collecting and storing every little bit of information possible about all of us, to be used against us how and when? The ‘militarization’ of even small and local police forces, armed to the teeth and using force as their first answer to community conflict. I can still remember riding my bicycle across this same US/Canada border crossing as a 14 or 15 year old, often with another young friend, off on a days adventure, biking to the small town of Oroville, ‘just across the border’ (never even really thinking about it being in another country!) to buy some small item or just have a “cherry coke” made up at one of their local drugstore counters (something OUR drugstores didn’t have and that we thought were pretty cool)…no proof of I.D. was even required of us to enter the US, or to return to our home turf of Canada. I know!! That is Unimaginable today, a mere 50 years later. Most all the Customs Officers back then, at each small border station, were long time members of their communities, known and respected, and treated incoming visitors to their country in kind. There were of course requests to ‘please open your trunk’ for random inspections, and I’m sure on more than one occasion someone had merely “forgotten” to declare a few items that would have put them over their dollar import ‘limit’, and who then had to just go inside to pay the ‘duty fees’ before being allowed to proceed home. Today such a person would no doubt be arrested and prosecuted, maybe even do jail time, for ‘lying’ to a US Govt Official!!

I have to worry about the world my children, and my grandchildren, are now living in, and how my grandchildren, and their children, will never know any different. How they will never know real privacy, or the security and freedoms that were guaranteed by our Constitution, our civil rights stated within crumbling faster than we can recall what they even were. It truly IS a Brave New World. It is the ‘brave’ I wonder about, and how and why it will be necessary to be so.

“America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.” ~Abraham Lincoln