As an instinctual reaction they kept looking straight ahead until they realized how non-threatening the question was, “Las 9”
“Gracias!” I said as a robotic reacion as the words 'Las 9...', passed my brain like a cloud while the two men passed by through the cross walk in front of me. The light turned green and the grip on my right hand twisted up, 'las 9, las 9...' I repeated as the cloud the words were trapped in started disipating into a thin fog as my scooter accelerated through streets of downtown Tijuana already starting to fill with people, with long pants, long sleeve shirts, and smiles emerging walking most with coffee in hand through the light fog, "oh! las 9, I'm totally gonna make it by 9:30a to the bicycle locker Rendevue spot just across the border to ride through the Tijuana estuary to the Bi-national garden with my friend Alex."
I sat on my little 50cc border mobile 3 cars from the front of the line at the border crossing after zooming through downtown, up the open lane and in between the cars with poor souls who had been sitting there for hours. Made eye contact with one of them near the front and he gave me the normal non-resentful, "no it's cool" nod that motorcycles get as an unspoken pass. As I waited, a Customs and Border Patrol agent was led by a drug dog jerking her this way and that as its snout launched from bumper to bumper while another female agent followed behind them. My mind drifted with the hmm of the hundreds of idling engines, 'How do they know when the dog finds something? if anyone has anything, they must be shitting their pants right now, how humiliating it would be if you got caught and everybody was looking at you. The beautiful long haired german shepherd suddenly pulled the agent over to my giant red duffle bag lying on the floor of my scooter. He dug his snout into my bag for a longer time then he spent on the bumpers and kept going back in for more, “look mommy I think I found it”, he said through his smile every time he looked back at the Agent staring intently at the bag. She turned toward the other agent and blushed a little and then to me, “You smoke weed?”
“No, never put weed in that bag.” I said, just a hair nervous.
They had me open up all the different compartments on my scooter including the gas tank lid and the 2 agents and the German Shepard checked everything out.
At this point, the cars ahead had passed through and I started wondering if the guy who gave me permission was rethinking the whole motorcycle exception pass. “Should we pull over to the side?”, I offered to the agents.
“No, you're going up here” she motioned to the booth that vehicles normally go to for their first inspection crossing, “to get sent to secondary inspection.” The blue uniforms now matching the sky triggered an annoyance that instantly focused my thoughts uniterrupted by even the slightes morning fog, 'why am I going there if it's already been decided I'm going to secondary?'
They walked up to the booth and gave the agent my ID wrapped in the orange slip as I walked the scooter up behind them up to the stout male agent, “You got to inspect me as well...?”, I asked watching the other dog-agents walking ahead already and hoping to skip at least one step knowing that secondary was going to make me late.
“Yeah,” he said in an 'of course what are you stupid?' tone, “Where's your passport?”
“I lost it. It's still valid, though.”
“If you lost it, it's not valid.”
Oh man, an asshole, I thought and knowing some just decide that's the best way to do their job and I shouldn't take it personally, but still getting a little upset.
“Actually, it is still valid. I never reported it lost.”
“Bad idea. It's not lost, then.”
“Well, I can't find it, so it's lost.” Now on the brink of arguing.
“Where are you going?”
I stopped myself from arguing, “I'm going to a couple places. I'm the coordinator for the bi-national garden...”
“I asked, where are you going?”
“Well, I was getting to that, but you cut me off.”
“Just a simple question.”
“Well, it's part of the story. I'm going to the Beyer Trolley station first.”
“I don't want a story, I just want to know where you're going.”
“Ok.” I said holding back the deep seeded resentment.
Once in secondary, the ladies told another Agent about my case, “Oh something interesting!”, he said raising his eyebrows with his hands in his pockets. I was thinking, 'I think you're going to be disappointed.'. But didn't say anything.
After they did a thorough search of everything in my pockets, my bags, and my scooter and shuffled me around to a couple different agents to do paperwork and scribbled on my orange note, they stuck it to my headlight and showed me the way out.
There are two exits when you don't get sent to secondary, one of which I can't take on a scooter cause it forceably connects onto the freeway and this is the only one available coming out of secondary. As I passed a CHP car parked under a bridge, my thoughts of hoping it was a scrare crow type plant mixed with trying to drive safe on the freeway at 40 mph up to the first exit and thoughts about wether I could sue CBP for wasting my time and how stupid it was for them to stop me because I might have had marijuana. So what if I did? Is that worth all those tax dollars for you guys to find out that I'm bringing marijuana to San Diego? Like it's some type of dangerous substance that hundreds in the city aren't enjoying right now on a Saturday morning.' By the time I got to my bike locker, I had gotten over it or at least able to put the resentment aside rationalizing to myself that I could sue them later.
I pulled out my tablet to see that it was 9:45a. Not bad, I think all that ridiculousness probably added 20–25 min. I didn't see Alex and wondered if he had come and left or if he never made it. After locking up the scooter to the fence, breaking out the bicicleta and stuffing my big suspicious duffle bag into the locker, I rode around the parking lot thinking he might be sittng in his car somewhere. No such luck.
Well, I should be able to make the 6 mile ride out to the garden by 10:30a as I had promised on Facebook, in case there was anyone wanting to check out the Bi-national Friendship Garden of Native Plants during the restricted hours that Border Patrol allows people to come to the primary border wall inside Friendship Park.
Once on the windy road with hills, farms, and native brush climbing up the cliffs, I started to forget I was only a couple miles from a freeway and thant only a quarter mile on either side of me were two conjoined metropolis.
I passed by a white pick up truck backed into a clearing at the end of a trail next to the road. It looked like a govern't vehicle but didn't have government plates and had a green cap with a patriotic symbol of Calfornia and an American flag on the dashboard.
“Vigilante minutman type?”, was the first thought that came to mind. I stopped to take a picture. After, my thoughts changed to it was probably just some patriotic dude going for a hike.
Even though I was running late and I had rode by a lot of tourists that were potentially interested in seeing the garden, I decided to go to the shed and get everything set up in the garden first before I started promoting. On the brink of dropping something or falling, I carried two big hoses and a bag of trowels, gloves, and such along with my backpack up the steep hill while walking my bicyle to the spigot to drop off the hoses. Then walked around the 17 ft high tubes that made up the secondary barrier with the bags and left the bike at the entrance to the Friendship Park area inside the enforcement zone. “Good morning Agent Stricklin.”
He nodded and continued chatting with a group of tourists. I got out to the garden about a hundred feet away where I dropped off the bags, weeded the hose through the secondary wall out to the biggest of the the three garden circles with the first barrier marking the border of San Diego/Tijuana running through the middle of them. As I came back out and rounded the entrance door again to go back to the spigot, I noticed a couple gentlemen with brown sun-worked faces kind of looking at me while talking in Spanish to each other. “Buenos días” I said. “¿Ya conocen el jardín binacional?”
“No. ¿Qué es?”. They were very interested in the whole deal mainly since they saw me round the corner and go out to an area where the agent had been telling people they weren't allowed to go. “Ese sí tiene palancas \[that guys got some leverage/inside influence\]”, they said they were saying to each other when they saw me. I explained how anyone can go over there, you just have to ask the Agent cause he won't bring it up and that I come every Sat to give people tours and the Agent will let me take up to 5 at a time over to the garden. They asked about the rules for ID and I explained that they normally don't check for ID inside the Friendship/Enforcement area but can where we are now and all around the state park area. I've seen and heard of instances when they do. I told them I was headed back to connect the hose, but would be glad to give them a tour of the garden.
“When? How do we go about signing up for that?“
“We can go right now. We just have to check in with Agent Stricklin and he'll let us over.”
They were full of questions about how I got access over there and I explained the history of the garden how there used to be access to the public in general after we planted it in 2007 when the park was wide open and there was no secondary wall. Once the wall came in, in 2009 access was completely prohibited but little by little with a great deal of insistence a coaltion of orgnaizations called the Friends of Friendship Park, Border Patrol now allows this limited access.
Agapo and Luis took me up on doing the 15 min tour and were very interested in coming back some day to help. They were landscapers in Escondido and had some useful tips about how to recognize plague on the leaves of plants and what to do about it.
We were hanging out and my friend Carlos Foo Kong, a biologist and director of the butterfly sanctuary in Tijuana showed up on the Mexican side. While we were all chatting and getting to know each other through the fence and talking about plants, Agent striklins familiar booming “Mr Watman!” from a 100 yds away interrupted. Everyone was silent, even Carlos safely on the other side of the fence.
“O no, parece que me está regañando.... o tal vez solamente me quiere decir algo. Ahorita vengo..”.
Even though that yell often means I've broken another Border Patrol rule without knowing, this time it was simply to let me know that there was someone interested in seeing the garden.
Jessica was a young lady from New York doing her thesis on poetry at the border and was thoroughly enthrawled with the garden. She ended up helping out with watering and taking pictures and video, and wrote some beautiful messages on the rocks in our “wish garden.”
I asked Agent Stricklin, if Jessica could stay longer than he normally allows for tours as an impromptu volunteer in the garden.
“That's fine as long she doesn't reach through the fence, I have no problem with that.”
“You can stay longer” I told her as I walked back up to the garden.
At one point, I was watering a plant through the fence. “Can I do that?” Jessica asked.
“Sure. Just let me do this one, and you can do the next.”. I felt a little like I should've just handed her the hose and let her finish that one and not sure why I said that.
“MA'AM!!” in the same authoritative voice as the “MR. WATMAN!” yell I'd heard earlier and so many times since Agent Stricklin was hired for this new Frienship Circle PR/vigilence post created by Border Patrol a couple years ago.
'Uh, oh.' I thought. 'Jessica's in trouble.'
I kept watering while they were chatting a hundred yards away at his white SUV window.
I waited until they were done and went and chatted with her, “I stuck my fingers through and he asked me why I did that after he had already told me that I wasn't allowed to pass my hand through.”
I felt bad and tried to convince Stricklin a little to let her back in but she was restricted to the Monument area only, 50 yds away from the garden.
It started raining a little and everybody left so I figured Agent Stricklin wouldn't be too busy and decided to chat with him a bit. We were both kind of laughing how just a small amount of rain turned everybody away. We were both pretty relaxed and being open about things and it felt appropriate to merge into the conversation a beef I had with his report from last year to his higher ups about my acitivity in the garden and Friendship Park.
“My report this year won't reflect what last year's did.”
I went on to tell him, that I had honestly tried my best to work with him and BP's rules in general and the report stated that I was trying on purpose to break rules which in turn caused everyone at the meeting with the higher up officers to come down on me.
“Well, from an enforcement point of view, if something is repeated, it's considered purposeful.” He said, not argumentative at all just kind of letting me know tone of voice keeping up with our very friendly conversation. Aferwards, I realized he contradicted himself when telling me he was ok with letting more than normal 5 people at a time over to the garden if there's a group that has 6 or 7. I remembered him turning down a sixth member of a cyclist group that wanted to see the garden a few weeks ago which split up a husband and wife so the spouse didn't go in either and only 4 could go over. I realized this riding my bicycle out of the estuary and it really bugged me because he seemed so sincere in wanting to work with me in general as much as possible within the rules. It really seemed like we had built a trust in the conversation and now I was starting to wonder how sincere it was or if it just kind of depended on what type of mood he was in. While going through all this in my head, a border patrol jeep drove past and stopped in front of me with the his lights going.
“Where did you come from?”
“Friendship Park.”, thinking if this guy gives me a hard time, I'm not going to be able to contain myself from giving him a hard time back. I think the days vigilance had accumulated.
“Where are you going?”
Before I could answer another Agent drove up behind us, “No, he's not the one I thought.”
“You're free to go sir.”
