glasseye
03-31-2012, 05:01 PM
http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2627/3893010709_cc269a3ab8_z.jpg
The Race to the Border
A NAFTA T1N Saves the Day and quite a few dollars.
In a gas station in Havre, Montana I sat in the cab and plotted my route home. I'd spent the last 48 hours running first north then west from Sioux Falls and I was bound for home in southeastern British Columbia. I had decided to cross back into Canada on either one of two tiny back roads that entered Canada near the Cypress Hills on the Alberta/Saskatchewan border.
My map showed that the route divided about five miles north of Havre. One road led to Alberta, the other to Saskatchewan. Each road was a tiny red line, with no towns or interruptions along the way and each route appeared to be about the same distance to the border. “I’ll decide which route to take when I get to the intersection”, I said to myself and I went inside to pay and pee.
Inside, I noticed by the cashier’s clock that the time zone had changed, so I reset my watch from 5:15 to 4:15, an hour back from Central Time to Mountain Time. It was a gratifying event, one that signaled my progress westward across the continent. Little did I know that as I adjusted my watch I was really setting a ticking time bomb.
Outside again, I leisurely cleaned my windshield and side windows, a not inconsiderable feat given Frito’s vast expanse of inaccessible glass. Two days of high speed running across the Great Plains had coated the windows with an incredible array of dead insects. The view from Frito’s front seat is truly fine, so it’s important to make the glass perfectly clear, the more to enjoy the afternoon light. I took my time and did an excellent job. With squeegee and paper towels, I puttered away at the windows, unaware, unconcerned.
The time bomb continued ticking.
I rolled out of Havre and started up the road to Canada at a sedate pace. I’d found that the faster I drove, the more bugs I acquired and I was in no hurry to get to the border or to sully my sparkling clean windshield. With Ry Cooder playing and not another vehicle in sight, I rolled northward at a gentlemanly 55.
ROAR! A big red pickup blazed past me and disappeared towards the horizon like I was standing still. “Alberta plates”, I said to myself. Albertans always seem to be in a hurry.
I still had no idea.
Traveling westbound for the entire day, I’d fought a vicious crosswind. Fields of reeds were blown nearly flat by the roadside sloughs. On-coming semis assailed us with a WHUMPH as their bow shock crashed against Frito’s tall expanse of metal. The passenger side A-pillar roared continually in protest at the downwind turbulence. My fuel economy dropped by nearly ten percent. From my motorcycle days, I hate wind in any form, but I especially hate crosswinds and Frito couldn’t agree more.
Tailwinds, however, are a different story. When I turned right at Havre to head north, the crosswind suddenly became a tailwind and my worst enemy became my best pal. The noise level dropped, my throttle opening lessened and Frito became a different vehicle. Ahhhh. Sweet tailwind. I sat back, turned up Ry Cooder and marveled at the clear autumn light and the straight, empty road ahead. Nothing but clear sailing from here to the border.
And the time bomb kept ticking, ticking.
Ahead lay the intersection, the point of division between the route for one border post in Southwest Saskatchewan, or the other in Southeast Alberta. The green signs offering the choice appeared.
Tick, tick, tick, CLICK. The time bomb timed out.
According to the signs, the distance to each border station was the same: 41 miles. The choice was a toss up. Alberta? Or Saskatchewan? What caused the time bomb to detonate was the second line of the sign: the information that indicated the closing time for the border post.
Now, the border closest to my home, one I cross frequently, closes at 11 PM. It's never a problem. I can cross easily, leisurely. The problem, and the source of the time bomb, was the closing time indicated on the signs for both borders. It said “Border Closed at 5PM”.
“Five?”, I said out loud. “FIVE O' ****ING CLOCK? HOLY ****!”
I looked at my watch. It showed 4:29. I had half an hour and one minute to travel more than forty miles. I had to average 80 mph for the next forty miles if I was to make the border before it closed for the night. Otherwise, I’d have to either return to Havre, or camp overnight at the lonely, empty border crossing. Neither was an attractive proposition.
Now I understood why the Alberta-plated pickup had passed me at such a high rate of knots. He knew. I didn’t.
I matted it.
Frito, bless his little turbo heart, responded to the cool, moist air of the autumn evening with delight. He quickly ramped up to 80 and then some, stabilizing at an 85 mph indicated. NAFTA Sprinters are governed by the engine management computer to 83 mph. As the song says: “My foot was glued like lead to the floor. That’s all there is. There ain’t no more.”
We roared along, me blessing the tailwind, Frito happy to be off-leash for once. I watched the mile markers count down, anxiously comparing their passing to my watch.
“I’m never gonna make it”, I concluded. “It’s hopeless”. But I didn’t lift. My right foot was welded to the floorboards.
Frito hummed along. “Whatever”, he said.
One by one, the mile markers ticked by. My watched ticked relentlessly. At each marker my brain calculated over and over the story they told. It was going to be very, very close.
Now, there is another component to this story - a financial one. And it added considerable stress to my date with destiny at the Canada Customs and Border Agency. In Sioux Falls, I’d picked up from a weaver, a loom. An eight-shaft jack loom, to be specific. A large, heavy wooden contraption that took up most of Frito’s cargo space. New, they cost several thousand dollars. This one, very slightly used, I’d bought for five hundred. My wife had negotiated this deal with one of her textile artist friends while at an artist’s workshop nearby. This valuable tool would extend her weaving capabilities ten-fold. The catch was, the cost of shipping such a device would exceed its purchase price, but with Frito on the case, the deal made sense. The loom was tied down inside, bound for a new home in Canada.
The trouble is, Canada imposes some pretty onerous taxes on things imported from the USA and as the miles and minutes flashed by, I came to a realization. If I made the border before closing, there was a good chance I’d avoid these taxes all together. At the very end of a long shift at a lonely border post, the customs official would most likely be more interested in getting home and opening a beer than in filling out paperwork admitting a weaving loom to Canada. Add to that the $200 or so miscellaneous purchases I’d made in addition to the loom, and the cost savings would easily exceed three figures.
Relentlessly, the pressure was building. My watch and the mileposts continued their lockstep march to the inevitable conclusion somewhere down the road.
“It’s getting better”, I said to myself, as I compared the two indicators of our progress. My chances of making the border before closing had edged upward from “impossible” to “unlikely”.
In my favour was the highway. It was smooth, wide and absolutely empty. I saw but a half dozen vehicles on my mad dash for the border, all of them going the other way, one of them a cop who motioned in his windshield to slow down. I did, until I was satisfied that he hadn’t turned around to follow me. He was probably going off-shift, too. The odds were shifting ever so slightly in my favour.
“You can’t outrun a Motorola”, I thought to myself, as I imagined the cop calling his border pals to arrest me if I arrived too soon. It’d be tough to argue that I hadn’t been speeding.
What the hell.
Pedal back to the floorboards. Speedo locked at 85. Taking corners using the entire roadway. Apexing each one with Precision German Steering.
I could actually feel the engine responding to the computer’s metering out less fuel as the speed approached the government-mandated maximum. ****ing governments. In the rest of the world, Sprinters are unregulated and can approach 100 mph. Oh, if only…
Suddenly, a ray of hope appeared in my mind. “Wait a minute”, I thought. “I set my watch using the clock in the gas station. What if that’s not the real time? What if…”
I pulled out cell phone and read the exact, real, GPS time. “YES!”, I exclaimed out loud. I’d just gained two minutes. I was still ten minutes out from the border but, for the first time, it looked like I had a chance.
With the mile markers ticking past, my watch keeping pace and the border moving ever closer on my laptop screen, I allowed a glimmer of hope to invade my thoughts. I might just make it! My pulse rate began to rise. The lure of the cost savings was just too good to be true, cheap bastard that I am.
"Whatever", said Frito again. Despite continuous flat-out running for nearly half an hour, his coolant temperature hadn't budged. Together, we blasted through the Montana evening, prisoners of the simple arithmetic of time, speed and distance.
Finally, I breasted a low hill and sighted the border crossing a mile or so ahead. My watch showed 5PM, but I still had the two spare minutes of cell phone time in hand. If Canada Customs kept accurate time, things were looking good.
Then the red signs began to appear along the roadside.
“Speed Zone Ahead”
“Construction”
“Fines Double”
Dozens of vehicles lined the roadside, fluorescent green jackets everywhere. Dust. Construction materials. America was building a new border crossing, a huge, two story fortress in the middle of nowhere that dwarfed the tiny white hut that housed Canada Customs nearby.
Ignoring all the signs, I slowed to barely legal speed and, trailing dust and debris, crossed the border, coasted through the still-open gate, parked outside the door and shut off the engine.
The silence was amazing. I was shaking with tension.
A few moments later, a border guard appeared and walked purposely to the back of Frito where he swung the gate closed behind us.
“Passport”, he said as he appeared at my window.
I gave it to him.
“Time in the US?”, he said, brandishing his clipboard.
“One week”
He made a notation.
“Total value of goods you’re bringing into Canada?”
“About seven fifty”
“Nature of the goods?”
“One second hand hobby loom worth $500 and miscellaneous articles totalling about $150.”
More clipboard notations.
“Any alcohol?”
“About one inch of gin in a bottle, about two inches of red wine in a box and a half a six pack of Samuel Adams.”
“Any weapons?”
“No weapons.”
“No hand guns, rifles, bows, knives?”
“No weapons of any kind”
“Any tobacco?”
“No tobacco”
“Any drugs?”
“No drugs”
“Any currencies or monetary instruments in excess of $10,000?
“None of those.”
He paused for probably thirty seconds, writing carefully on his clipboard.
He gestured to the now-closed gate behind me.
Cuttin’ ‘er pretty close, ay?”, he said, a tiny smirk breaking his professional demeanour.
I agreed with him, rolling my eyes.
“Have a nice day, he said, “and drive carefully.”
So I did. All the way home.
The Race to the Border
A NAFTA T1N Saves the Day and quite a few dollars.
In a gas station in Havre, Montana I sat in the cab and plotted my route home. I'd spent the last 48 hours running first north then west from Sioux Falls and I was bound for home in southeastern British Columbia. I had decided to cross back into Canada on either one of two tiny back roads that entered Canada near the Cypress Hills on the Alberta/Saskatchewan border.
My map showed that the route divided about five miles north of Havre. One road led to Alberta, the other to Saskatchewan. Each road was a tiny red line, with no towns or interruptions along the way and each route appeared to be about the same distance to the border. “I’ll decide which route to take when I get to the intersection”, I said to myself and I went inside to pay and pee.
Inside, I noticed by the cashier’s clock that the time zone had changed, so I reset my watch from 5:15 to 4:15, an hour back from Central Time to Mountain Time. It was a gratifying event, one that signaled my progress westward across the continent. Little did I know that as I adjusted my watch I was really setting a ticking time bomb.
Outside again, I leisurely cleaned my windshield and side windows, a not inconsiderable feat given Frito’s vast expanse of inaccessible glass. Two days of high speed running across the Great Plains had coated the windows with an incredible array of dead insects. The view from Frito’s front seat is truly fine, so it’s important to make the glass perfectly clear, the more to enjoy the afternoon light. I took my time and did an excellent job. With squeegee and paper towels, I puttered away at the windows, unaware, unconcerned.
The time bomb continued ticking.
I rolled out of Havre and started up the road to Canada at a sedate pace. I’d found that the faster I drove, the more bugs I acquired and I was in no hurry to get to the border or to sully my sparkling clean windshield. With Ry Cooder playing and not another vehicle in sight, I rolled northward at a gentlemanly 55.
ROAR! A big red pickup blazed past me and disappeared towards the horizon like I was standing still. “Alberta plates”, I said to myself. Albertans always seem to be in a hurry.
I still had no idea.
Traveling westbound for the entire day, I’d fought a vicious crosswind. Fields of reeds were blown nearly flat by the roadside sloughs. On-coming semis assailed us with a WHUMPH as their bow shock crashed against Frito’s tall expanse of metal. The passenger side A-pillar roared continually in protest at the downwind turbulence. My fuel economy dropped by nearly ten percent. From my motorcycle days, I hate wind in any form, but I especially hate crosswinds and Frito couldn’t agree more.
Tailwinds, however, are a different story. When I turned right at Havre to head north, the crosswind suddenly became a tailwind and my worst enemy became my best pal. The noise level dropped, my throttle opening lessened and Frito became a different vehicle. Ahhhh. Sweet tailwind. I sat back, turned up Ry Cooder and marveled at the clear autumn light and the straight, empty road ahead. Nothing but clear sailing from here to the border.
And the time bomb kept ticking, ticking.
Ahead lay the intersection, the point of division between the route for one border post in Southwest Saskatchewan, or the other in Southeast Alberta. The green signs offering the choice appeared.
Tick, tick, tick, CLICK. The time bomb timed out.
According to the signs, the distance to each border station was the same: 41 miles. The choice was a toss up. Alberta? Or Saskatchewan? What caused the time bomb to detonate was the second line of the sign: the information that indicated the closing time for the border post.
Now, the border closest to my home, one I cross frequently, closes at 11 PM. It's never a problem. I can cross easily, leisurely. The problem, and the source of the time bomb, was the closing time indicated on the signs for both borders. It said “Border Closed at 5PM”.
“Five?”, I said out loud. “FIVE O' ****ING CLOCK? HOLY ****!”
I looked at my watch. It showed 4:29. I had half an hour and one minute to travel more than forty miles. I had to average 80 mph for the next forty miles if I was to make the border before it closed for the night. Otherwise, I’d have to either return to Havre, or camp overnight at the lonely, empty border crossing. Neither was an attractive proposition.
Now I understood why the Alberta-plated pickup had passed me at such a high rate of knots. He knew. I didn’t.
I matted it.
Frito, bless his little turbo heart, responded to the cool, moist air of the autumn evening with delight. He quickly ramped up to 80 and then some, stabilizing at an 85 mph indicated. NAFTA Sprinters are governed by the engine management computer to 83 mph. As the song says: “My foot was glued like lead to the floor. That’s all there is. There ain’t no more.”
We roared along, me blessing the tailwind, Frito happy to be off-leash for once. I watched the mile markers count down, anxiously comparing their passing to my watch.
“I’m never gonna make it”, I concluded. “It’s hopeless”. But I didn’t lift. My right foot was welded to the floorboards.
Frito hummed along. “Whatever”, he said.
One by one, the mile markers ticked by. My watched ticked relentlessly. At each marker my brain calculated over and over the story they told. It was going to be very, very close.
Now, there is another component to this story - a financial one. And it added considerable stress to my date with destiny at the Canada Customs and Border Agency. In Sioux Falls, I’d picked up from a weaver, a loom. An eight-shaft jack loom, to be specific. A large, heavy wooden contraption that took up most of Frito’s cargo space. New, they cost several thousand dollars. This one, very slightly used, I’d bought for five hundred. My wife had negotiated this deal with one of her textile artist friends while at an artist’s workshop nearby. This valuable tool would extend her weaving capabilities ten-fold. The catch was, the cost of shipping such a device would exceed its purchase price, but with Frito on the case, the deal made sense. The loom was tied down inside, bound for a new home in Canada.
The trouble is, Canada imposes some pretty onerous taxes on things imported from the USA and as the miles and minutes flashed by, I came to a realization. If I made the border before closing, there was a good chance I’d avoid these taxes all together. At the very end of a long shift at a lonely border post, the customs official would most likely be more interested in getting home and opening a beer than in filling out paperwork admitting a weaving loom to Canada. Add to that the $200 or so miscellaneous purchases I’d made in addition to the loom, and the cost savings would easily exceed three figures.
Relentlessly, the pressure was building. My watch and the mileposts continued their lockstep march to the inevitable conclusion somewhere down the road.
“It’s getting better”, I said to myself, as I compared the two indicators of our progress. My chances of making the border before closing had edged upward from “impossible” to “unlikely”.
In my favour was the highway. It was smooth, wide and absolutely empty. I saw but a half dozen vehicles on my mad dash for the border, all of them going the other way, one of them a cop who motioned in his windshield to slow down. I did, until I was satisfied that he hadn’t turned around to follow me. He was probably going off-shift, too. The odds were shifting ever so slightly in my favour.
“You can’t outrun a Motorola”, I thought to myself, as I imagined the cop calling his border pals to arrest me if I arrived too soon. It’d be tough to argue that I hadn’t been speeding.
What the hell.
Pedal back to the floorboards. Speedo locked at 85. Taking corners using the entire roadway. Apexing each one with Precision German Steering.
I could actually feel the engine responding to the computer’s metering out less fuel as the speed approached the government-mandated maximum. ****ing governments. In the rest of the world, Sprinters are unregulated and can approach 100 mph. Oh, if only…
Suddenly, a ray of hope appeared in my mind. “Wait a minute”, I thought. “I set my watch using the clock in the gas station. What if that’s not the real time? What if…”
I pulled out cell phone and read the exact, real, GPS time. “YES!”, I exclaimed out loud. I’d just gained two minutes. I was still ten minutes out from the border but, for the first time, it looked like I had a chance.
With the mile markers ticking past, my watch keeping pace and the border moving ever closer on my laptop screen, I allowed a glimmer of hope to invade my thoughts. I might just make it! My pulse rate began to rise. The lure of the cost savings was just too good to be true, cheap bastard that I am.
"Whatever", said Frito again. Despite continuous flat-out running for nearly half an hour, his coolant temperature hadn't budged. Together, we blasted through the Montana evening, prisoners of the simple arithmetic of time, speed and distance.
Finally, I breasted a low hill and sighted the border crossing a mile or so ahead. My watch showed 5PM, but I still had the two spare minutes of cell phone time in hand. If Canada Customs kept accurate time, things were looking good.
Then the red signs began to appear along the roadside.
“Speed Zone Ahead”
“Construction”
“Fines Double”
Dozens of vehicles lined the roadside, fluorescent green jackets everywhere. Dust. Construction materials. America was building a new border crossing, a huge, two story fortress in the middle of nowhere that dwarfed the tiny white hut that housed Canada Customs nearby.
Ignoring all the signs, I slowed to barely legal speed and, trailing dust and debris, crossed the border, coasted through the still-open gate, parked outside the door and shut off the engine.
The silence was amazing. I was shaking with tension.
A few moments later, a border guard appeared and walked purposely to the back of Frito where he swung the gate closed behind us.
“Passport”, he said as he appeared at my window.
I gave it to him.
“Time in the US?”, he said, brandishing his clipboard.
“One week”
He made a notation.
“Total value of goods you’re bringing into Canada?”
“About seven fifty”
“Nature of the goods?”
“One second hand hobby loom worth $500 and miscellaneous articles totalling about $150.”
More clipboard notations.
“Any alcohol?”
“About one inch of gin in a bottle, about two inches of red wine in a box and a half a six pack of Samuel Adams.”
“Any weapons?”
“No weapons.”
“No hand guns, rifles, bows, knives?”
“No weapons of any kind”
“Any tobacco?”
“No tobacco”
“Any drugs?”
“No drugs”
“Any currencies or monetary instruments in excess of $10,000?
“None of those.”
He paused for probably thirty seconds, writing carefully on his clipboard.
He gestured to the now-closed gate behind me.
Cuttin’ ‘er pretty close, ay?”, he said, a tiny smirk breaking his professional demeanour.
I agreed with him, rolling my eyes.
“Have a nice day, he said, “and drive carefully.”
So I did. All the way home.