Returning from overseas alone in the pre-social media era—before digital nomads and one-bag travel—anything could draw suspicion at Customs. A nervous twitch. An antsy scratch. Any waft of the foreign could trigger alarm bells. If your joke lands rougher than the flight turbulence, or your guffaw expands into a half-cough perceived as masking something. Customs is on your ass like grass stains on your new Sunday school slacks. After all, why would anyone leave the land of the free, the home of the brave, on their own—unless forced on some Griswold-esque family vacation? This seemed to be my Customs agent’s travel philosophy, anyhow. Based on the humorless gallows-brow and flatline facial expression she exhibited during our re-entry conversation.
Halfway through her questioning, I remembered the drug stash hidden in my bag.
“Where are you coming from sir?” she asked curtly, holding up my passport photo and comparing it to my sweaty mug.
“Europe,” I said cheefully.
This was my first time at an American border crossing that didn’t involve visiting my dad’s family in Canada.
She looked up from my picture. “WHERE in Europe?”
“Uhm, oh geez, where was I last?” I rubbed my chin while untangling the last 30 hours of transit in my brain. “Spain?”
She raised her eyebrows.
“That’s a big place too, isn’t it? Heh. No, okay, Barcelona. Been to so many airports they kind of all start to blend together.” My dad had made this all seem much easier when I was a kid.
I adjusted my backpack.
“Where else did you go?” She asked.
“In Spain or after?” She typed something into her computer instead of answering.
“Okay. After. Uhm, yeah, lets see. Well Berlin, then Garmisch Paster, Garmisch Paster newwww….. hah….I can never pronounce that place. It’s in Bavaria.” I put my hands on the counter in front of me, more to steady myself than anything, because this is when I remembered I had just transported drugs across 11 time zones and nearly as many borders. My unsteady movements caused the agent to look up from her keyboard. I pushed back from the counter and pressed my thumbs tightly underneath my shoulder straps to try and keep my hands from shaking. “So like, central Germany-area? If that rings a bell?” I added unhelpfully. I started looking at the ceiling to try and demonstrate ‘thought behavior’ and felt small beads of sweat forming on my forehead. “Okay so after Garmisch there was Florence, then Prague, then Krakow…… “ I trailed off and peeked towards the agent with the eye not facing the ceiling.
She didn’t seem to be liking my answers.
“How long were you there?” She said frowning, now flipping through my passport a second time. Stopping on each page to look at stamps.
“A little over two months.”
The incredulity wrinkles in her forehead flatlined. “Two months?! She spit the words out like cherry pits. “And this is ALL you have?” She nodded towards the backpack behind me.
“NOTHING checked?”
“Yep!” I replied brightly. Mustering the last shred of my confidence.
She closed my passport and slid it back to me. ”Join that line please.” She motioned to the left. Towards the Questionable Character Queue. A quick glance at the line revealed gentlemen in turbans and an over-tanned backpacker duo with matching dreadlocks, whose patchouli aroma had hit me like smelling salts each time we’d crossed paths in the turnstile cattle maze.
This is what can happen when you chase your Bliss. The European voyage I was concluding had been my first toe-dip into the international waters of global travel. I’d spent my previous post-college years ping-ponging between the American coasts, stitching a vast quilt across the Badlands and Redwoods, the Ozarks and panhandles—hitting 47 states over a five-year period in a restless pursuit of the New.
Though my family and friends couldn’t see it at the time, all the movement was intentional. My commitment to the road and relationships, my vocational schizophrenia – it was undertaken in an attempt to understand my origins. I knew I was headed overseas eventually, but living abroad would ring hollow if I didn’t first understand where I came from. How can I make fun of the red necks in Arkansas or the coastal elites in Nantucket if I hadn’t actually known any? While chasing Kerouac’s shadow across the country I was charting the course my future by the whispers of the past. And having now felt I’d sufficiently paid homage to my roots it was time to take the vagabonding global.
So I quit my good-paying job and left my well-functioning family for a one-way ticket to Spain. The trip had gone exceedingly well (check that, some hiccups occurred, see: Brutal Ends & Beautiful Beginnings: Up Late in Spanish Speakeasies – Uncharted Dives ) right up until this whole international drug-muling incident.
In my defense, her goddamned name was Bliss. I’d met Bliss and two of her teammates in Prague and, through a combination of luck and poor judgment, ended up traveling with them.
Most of the time, men cannot help but be men. And when the starting back line of the Pepperdine volleyball team asks you for a favor, the caveman brain takes over. You try to deliver. Bliss and her pals assigned tasks were generally harmless. Order their drinks at the bar, ask the creepy Balkans Beetlejuice desk clerk when breakfast started, toss a bag into the bus’s overhead compartment. Well. That never happened. They were taller and stronger than I was. The task causing the current consternation occurred three drinks in, when they requested I suss out the pot smell at a delightful waterfront bar in a quaint Czech Republic town called Cezky Krumlov.
Český Krumlov looked like a fairy tale somebody had forgotten to dismantle. The Vltava River curled almost completely around the old town, enclosing a maze of medieval streets beneath a 13th-century castle that still kept actual bears in its moat. It was the kind of place so absurdly picturesque you half expected a princess to lean out a tower window and ask where you’d parked your horse. By evening we’d settled into a bar along the river beneath the castle, when the girls caught the unmistakable smell of pot drifting through the night air and decided I was the man for the job.
As I followed the pot smell like Toucan Sam around the bar I was reminded of the downside of solo travel. Nobody’s got your back. When you take a leak at the airport, there’s no one to watch your bags. If your phone dies on the jungle trek, there’s nobody with a half-charge to get you home. And when you’re wandering around a 2 am Czech bar surrounded by a cast of characters straight from Chalmun’s Spaceport Cantina on Tatooine, Obi-Wan isn’t back there to saber your way to safety. You have to coax your brain back from the breaches of drunkenness into straight faced sobriety all on your lonesome. In the current circumstances, not only did I have to feign operational clarity, but I also had to convince strangers to part with their precious cargo so a table of babes can imbibe. Oh, and there’s a catch, the gals didn’t want the suppliers invited back to the party. Common courtesy in the corners I was familiar.
California girls, man.
The Questionable-Character Queue at customs was staffed by heavily velcro’d dudes who appeared over-armed for the task at hand. They looked better equipped to fast rope out of a Black Hawk on the Bin Laden raid than confiscate CBD spray and hemp oil. One of them motioned me forward, slung his Uzi behind his back, and in a single swift movement slapped my 30-pound pack onto a large silver table like it was a ribeye. He started unzipping the bag, staring eight-gauge holes into the back of my skull in the process.
Prior to the Cesky Krumlov detour I first encountered Bliss and the gang at a hostel in Prague. I had heard what sounded like American english down the hall and decided to use it as an excuse to escape the flirtation from a squat Ausie gal who was serially philandering her way through the males in my dorm room each night. Their door was open and I entered to find them unpacking and joking around boisterously. Had I looked more closely I likely would have never had the courage to approach. All three were strikingly attractive blondes with builds befitting elite college athletes. The one I later hit it off with introduced herself by the name of Bliss.
Do I hear some english in here? I blurted out stupidly, upon entering. For some reason, they laughed, and the next few minutes of my charm offensive worked just well enough to get invited to their evening bar hopping plans. Over the course of the night, I demonstrated myself sufficiently harmless to be invited on the next leg of their journey, to a place called Cesky Krumlov, which I must admit, sounded positively fabulous. Poland could wait.
The officer pulled out each piece of my clothing, pushed it flat against the table, and then pressed on every inch to ensure nothing was hidden or sewn into a secret compartment. The sweat was now pooling on my forehead. I started debating whether it drew more attention to wipe it away or let the sweat drip down the bridge of my nose onto the table.
He continued with my toiletry bag. Opening each item and inspecting it.
There was a movement behind him. Something emerged from one of those windowless rooms people enter to get their lives destroyed when caught in limbo at an airport. A drug sniffing dog.
“Don’t do that.”
I snapped back to Judge Dredd.
After cavity searching my deodorant, he was now holding up one of my pill bottles.
“What’s in here?” He shook the bottle.
“Oh, just advil, pepto and a few tylenol I think.”
“Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Don’t mix pills”.
“Oh, okay.”
“Everything should have a prescription or be in its original packaging. Or, better yet, check it.”
He threw my bottle in the trash. I watched with my eyes, not moving my head, sensing my life would soon be following it.
The dog started heading in my direction. Man’s best friend had just become my mortal enemy.
This wasn’t the first drug dog I’d seen on the journey. There had been another one snooping around while I boarded in Barcelona. I spotted him while standing by a large sign that had an image of a gun, a knife, a firecracker, and a lighter. All of which were brightly crossed out in red like the ghostbuster’s logo. Oh shit! I remembered at the time, I’ve still got my lighter! Being the responsible travel-guy that I am, I left my place in line, and not wanting to look conspicuous rummaging around, quickly tossed the whole pack in the trash.
Along with the lighter, carefully folded into the bottom of the cigarette pack, was the leftover drug stash.
The special forces wannabe zipped up my lopsided bag and handed it back with a sheepish grin at the hacksaw job he’d done on my carefully curated packing cubes.
“No bother, chap,” I thought, walking blissfully towards the exit and my next leg in life. “I’m in a forgiving mood.”
I had no job, no plans, and no money, but I can’t recall a time in life I was ever more grateful.
Uncharted Dives 