I have my Passport I Swear

I did not have high expectations for Mexico. I assumed that we would get to the border, show our passports and drive into the abyss. Right on the other side of the border crossing we would witness our first gunfight. Visions of a pitched battle between drug runners besieging the bridge crossing, striving to get their product to the border, and the military defending it like the minutemen at Bunker Hill danced through my head. I would break out my heroic driving moves, and tires screeching twist our trusty SUV (so trusty that it was on its second engine of the road trip, but that’s another story entirely) through the hail of bullets and navigate safely through the battle, only to make the fatal mistake of stopping at a red light (ever the law abiding citizen even in my nightmares/fantasies whatever you want to call this I still stop at red lights).

My rookie mistake would cost us and a handful of masked gunmen would jump out of nowhere, hijack our car and steal all of our earthly possessions leaving us stranded and alone on the side of the road roughly thirteen seconds after leaving the safety of my home nation. It seemed reasonable at the time; given that before I got here all I knew about the border was that lots of people get killed, all the time. It was even a little bit optimistic, I mean, I didn’t imagine us being killed only threatened and robbed.

Well, fourteen day veteran of the Mexican border that I am, I can laugh at how foolish my original assumptions were. Not so much about the gunplay and the hijacking, since that still seems pretty reasonable (one of the Leggy Redhead’s coworkers suggested avoiding driving in the middle lane of three lane roads because the side lanes offer better escape routes, just in case) but about the having to show our passports. Not once has anybody at the Mexican border crossing asked us to show our passports

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Unlike how I envisioned it in my head, crossing from one country to another is fairly simple. Where we are, the US and Mexico are separated by a river with very little water. It’s more like a muddy basin. That riverish thing is spanned by bridges with U.S. border guards on one side and Mexican ones on the other. You deal with the Mexican border patrol on the Mexican side of the bridge only when you are travelling from the US to Mexico, and you deal with the U.S. guys on the opposite side of the bridge when you are going the other way.

The U.S. side is how you would expect the border to be. They are very very serious people. They give off the impression that if you blink too many times they will give you a colonoscopy. There are sunglasses, drug dogs, gates, barriers and barbed wire fences. It’s a pretty intimidating place. Now, the Mexican side is intimidating too…mostly because there are lots of army guys standing around on trucks with great big giant machine guns. The sight of them makes me very much want not to be a bad guy. On the other hand it’s hard for me to imagine how they figure out who to shoot, since nobody at the border seems to be assigned to look for documents of any sort. You drive up, if you get unlucky they give a cursory inspection of your car, but for the most part you talk to nobody, show nothing to anybody, wait about fifteen seconds at what looks like a tollbooth, then the gate goes up and you go on through.

I guess they figure nobody would be dumb enough to come here if they absolutely didn’t have to. And then there’s me.

This blog has been drug gang related violence free for 14 days
Body Count: 0