“Are you both American citizens?”
It seemed like a simple question. I didn’t think there was any way to get it wrong. But I did.
Some people told me afterwards I was just being honest, the way my Irish Catholic parents had taught me to be. Other people, like me, thought I was just plain stupid. I’ll let you be the judge.
Yolande and I were sitting in my car, parked approximately 500 feet in front of the entrance to White Sands National Monument. We had left our motel room in Las Cruces a couple of hours earlier and drove roughly 55 miles through the New Mexican Desert on Route 70 to see the part of New Mexico that the tourist brochure described as “one of the world's great natural wonders - the glistening white sands of New Mexico. Here, great wave-like dunes of gypsum sand have engulfed 275 square miles of Desert and have created the world's largest gypsum dune field", it read. We had one day left on our “honeymoon”, (although we preferred to think of it as a mini-vacation) before we had to head back to Long Beach, and we thought ‘What the heck?” How often do you get a chance to see 275 square miles of Desert engulfed by dunes of gypsum sand?
About 100 yards before the brown sign with white letters that read “WHITE SANDS NATIONAL MONUMENT” with an arrow pointing toward the upper right hand corner, a curving row of orange traffic cones channeled the vehicles traveling this lonely stretch of highway down to one lane. I instinctively reached for my wallet to pay whatever fee the National Park Service deemed equitable to allow visitors to view "one of the world’s great natural wonders". We came to a stop behind 4 or 5 other cars, obviously waiting for whoever was at the front of the line to pay their fee and pass through.
As we pulled up to the front of the line I noticed something a little strange. There didn’t seem to be a booth for the gate keeper to sit in, take in money, and pass out parking permits and brochures. There was just a man in uniform standing on the left hand side of the lane which passed by what looked like a wooden toll booth or guard shack on the right. What was even stranger was the fact that he wasn’t wearing the standard U.S. Park Service uniform of a tan shirt, brown pants and brown ranger’s hat. Instead, he seemed to be wearing a dark green, almost black shirt and pants and a dark green baseball style hat. As I pulled to a stop and rolled down my window I finally got a good look at him, and I could read the letters printed on his ball cap: “U.S. Border Patrol”.
He leaned down to see how many of us were in the car. That’s when he asked the question. “Are you both American citizens?”
For a split second I mentally debated on whether or not to just say yes. He had obviously just asked the same questions of all the cars in front of us and each one of them had passed through after stopping for just a few seconds. If I answered yes I was sure he would simply wave me through to take in the wonders of the white gypsum sands about 500 yards away. All I had to do was say yes and we’d be on our way.
I opened my mouth and to my own astonishment I said, “I am, but she isn’t.”
He looked at me for a second, and then he looked over at Yolande and said, “Do you have a passport or visa?” She looked back at him, smiled and shook her head. I then started to realize what I had just done.
“We’re married”, I told him. “We’re just here on a little mini-vacation."
“You have a marriage license or a marriage certificate?”
I looked over at Yo. She smiled back and we both shook our heads. Who the hell would think that we’d need a copy of our marriage certificate? We’d just gotten married 8 days earlier in a civil ceremony at the LAX courthouse and we had traveled through 12 states on a car trip across the U.S. a year and a half earlier without any problem, even before we were married. Why would we think we would need a passport, visa or marriage certificate to visit a place just two states away?
“We just got married last week”, I told him, like that was going to make any difference. He just kept staring at us through his Border Patrol sunglasses. “Well, I need to see some sort of document that shows that you’re married. Do you have any letters or credit card statements? Any bills that have both your names on em?” Nope, we said we didn’t have anything like that. He stood there for about 5 seconds and finally said, “Okay, then, pull over here on the side for a couple of minutes. I’ll be right back”.
For a minute or so, I wondered what the odds were of flooring the gas pedal and speeding off across the Desert to out run the Border Patrol cops. Somehow, I didn’t think the odds would be very good. Since we were smack dab in one of the most god forsaken parts of the world that you could only get to by one Desert highway, excluding horses or helicopters, and that highway didn’t have an exit in either direction for about 20 miles, other than the entrance to White Sands, I didn’t think we had a very good chance of running. At the same time, I knew that if he walked into that guard shack or into the trailer which I now noticed was parked alongside the road about 100 feet behind us, and entered Yolande’s name into the computer, it was pretty much over. I rolled the options around in my head as I pulled over and stopped on the side of the road.
The bottom line was there were no options. We were screwed.
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