Illegal Border Donking

Hello Manifestites! What can I say, 2009 has been a pretty crappy year. My last post was in January, almost a year ago. I had a few things lined up for blog posts and then weird things started happening. I quit poker again for about the 15th time. Our wonderful economy took an ugly turn and the company that hired me on in December did mass layoffs and one day in February I was brought into a room with 60 others and told I no longer had a job. I was out of work for 3 months with the very real possibility of having to play poker for a living, and it disgusted me. Of all the possible professions that I’m qualified for (or not, depends on which side of the joke I’m on), poker is about the last on my list for things I’d like to do. The thought of spending day in and day out grinding against a bunch of retards that are only playing poker because they can’t function in society enough to leave their parents’ basements just makes me ill. Thankfully the poker gods were kind to me and did not let me pursue my lifelong nightmare of having to push buttons on a computer for a living. Instead, I work in IT. Err, wait a minute…

I took a job in May that required over 100 miles of driving each day and although I had a lot of time on the road, I honestly did not run into a single episode of Donkeys on Wheels, despite the long drive and somewhat crazy construction along the way. It’s almost like the collective idiot is working together to make the world a better place. Or something. Fortunately for me things look to be turning around, new job coming up next month much closer to home, poker is somewhat enjoyable lately, and the holidays are coming up.

Anyway, enough about me. A friend of mine had what can only be described as an incredible experience (and unfortunately for him, almost none of it good) earlier this year, and he shared the story with some friends. I read it and immediately thought of you, my faithful readers, who have been checking this site day in and day out just waiting for that next blog entry. I got his permission to edit the story to take out names and specific places, and I have it here for you in all its glory.

As a precursor to this, I’ll say that my friend, who we’ll call, umm, Mr. Q, has had some interesting experiences in his life of less than 30 years. Several years ago he got into a situation where he met a girl here in the US (he lives in Europe somewhere), moved here and married her thinking he could become a legal citizen that way. Well, things don’t work that way for non-Mexicans, so once the US Govt. got a hold of him they deported him and banned him from entry to the US for several years. A while after that he met another girl from the US and one can only surmise that at some point about oh, 9 months or so prior to his story begins, she visited him and a partaking of the secret love dance of the Dawnkeigh took place.

While I did edit the story to take out names and places, I left in the typing/grammar as is. Mr. Q’s native language is not English, so it would have been nice of me to help him out, but I’m not that helpful really, and I think the way its written actually helps portray the story from his point of view. That said, here it is, in all its glory. Enjoy!



“My fiancée is expecting my child very soon, and because of some medical problems and the already very tiring task of taking care of her first child (not mine) she told me that she would like having me around to help. So because of the custody agreement not allowing her to leave the state she was pretty much stuck in her state, I would have to come to her. Her situation would have allowed her to be able to support me financially if there was no other way, and the whole online poker thing means i wouldn't really need a work permit. So that leads to a plan of me just walking across the border from canada,
because frankly there is no secure border there.

The story begins in the end of may, when i cash out some money to pay for a ticket to canada. The flight was in early june, buying the ticket was easy. From there the plan was that my fiancée would come to the airport, grab my luggage, give me a compass and a flashlight, drive to the border with me, spend the night in a motel, and pick me up on the american side to drive to her place. That much for the Theory of it, in practice it all happened slightly different. It started one day before i left home with me sending her some more money for gas and stuff and for having a couple hundred lying around that i didn't want to carry with me. So then we have failure number 1, moneygram failed to do the only thing they do, when she tried to pick up the money she was told it wasn't there. That issue luckily was fixed with just about one hour of talking to some chick at the moneygram place who could not be bothered to even check the receipts they obviously keep before the hour long talk. As soon as she actually did check them the whole issue was fixed within 5 minutes....so there goes a total of about 5 hours for fixing that issue.... didn't need sleep anyway. now it's 10pm on the night before the flight, and i barely have enough time to disassemble my computer to take it with me, make some food, and finish packing before i need to get to the airport. 2 stop flight to my destination was really not bad at all. except for having a 7 hour flight after no sleep for 30 hours and the guy next to you can just not sit still for two minutes. Oh well who needs sleep anyway.

1st airport in canada
After getting off the plane, there obviously was the passport check, then going through immigration. no problems so far for some reason....but wait, then they want to check my luggage. so because of some strange items in my luggage they don't really believe my story, which was just a short vacation in canada.... strange items in my luggage ingclude the computer and some poker books. They send me back to immigration for a more in depth discussion with them. No matter, the connecting flight doesn't leave for 3 hours so why would i mind sitting down and having a long talk with someone. Eventually i changed my story somewhat, telling her that i was going to meet my fiancée who was going to have my child soon.... she still looked very sceptical, told me that she probably shouldn't let me go, but would anyway. Then she said that i would be banned from canada if i didn't manage to leave the country by the date of my return flight, and that there would be a warrent for my arrest. Neato off to airport 2.

2nd airport in canada
Getting out of the plane i obviously looked for my fiancée, didn't see her. turned on my cell phone, called her and heard it ring one time before the battery went dead. No problem, i can just go somewhere, sit down and wait. Eventually i got paged and was told that she would be about 2 hours late. Still not a problem. About 5 hours after my flight landed i was slightly worried.... so I spend a fortune on a coin phone calling her. She had to tell me that the canadian immigration wouldn't let her into the country. Great, stuck in the airport with not enough money to get a motel room and not enough money to get to the border.
I decided to get a cab into town with the little money i did have and got majorly ripped off. I went to subway for some food and ended up paying way too much for the worst sub i've ever eaten. So far canada is going great....

Eventually subway closes and i decide to have a seat in the parking lot behind it to try and think of what to do. Interestingly enough there was a bar right next door which seemed to be the only thing still open at the time. A couple of guys around my age were playing football in the parking lot and kinda stumbled over me, made me come in. We had quite a long conversation about where i've come from, why, what happened, etc. Eventually they decide to look up phone numbers/locations for homeless shelters and the like and bus companies that i might be able to call in the morning for a reasonably cheap ride somewhere near the border. I end up making the reasonably retarded decision to just go hitchhike to the border right then. One of the guys gives me C$40 that i tried but failed to refuse. I get them to call a cab for me and i tell him to take me as far south on the high way as i have money for (saving the $40, though). So then i'm standing somewhere on the highway at 2am with 80 pounds of luggage.

I decide to get rid of some of the stuff that i won't need anymore, stuff that can just be bought again if needed, like the poker books I had bought with fpps from stars. heavy stuff, big stuff.... and i feel bad for leaving it at the side of the road, but i didn't feel like i had too much of a choice. I certainly couldn't walk with that much luggage, and getting someone to stop, pick me up, and get that much luggage in the car would probably be difficult as well. So the suitcase is now somewhere at the side of the highway, it has an address tag on it in case you find it and want to send it back ;) . I only have to wait about 3 hours before i get picked up for probably not more than 10 miles. Not 5 minutes go by after getting dropped off before the Canadian police pulls over to ask me what i'm doing and where i'm going.

Here we have the difference between canadian and police in my country. The officer who talked to me told me that he had a call out, but if i don't get a ride before he comes by again he will give me a ride to the nearest town himself. In my country the officer would tell you to get off the damn highway because it's not a damn sidewalk.

I actually manage to get a ride from there within 10 minutes, taking me to the same town that the cop would have taken me. He dropped me off at a 7Eleven. I got myself a dr pepper and went on. Unfortunately i had to wait about 2 hours before someone picked me up again. Very nice guy he was, though, he gave me something to drink, some chips, some mini donuts.... he didn't take me all that far unfortunately, probably around 10 miles. From this point on I'm on the road that leads directly to the little border town that i want to go to. Unfortunately there isn't much trafic besides heavy trucks that have the order not to pick up anyone. I end up walking farther than the next guy takes me, and from there i walk another hour or so before the last guy picks me up and drives me for 80 miles or so.

Small Border Town
I don't actually see any houses except for a gas station/motel/restaurant that's on the road to the border crossing. A very nice girl, looking a bit younger than me, is working behind the counter. I ask her how much i would have to pay for a room and she says $39. Clearly i hit the jackpot considering i have $40 in my pocket....unfortunately you silly Canadians and Americans just can't be bothered to include taxes in your prices.... very annoying. After we cleared that up, she tells me that there's a motel in another town that has rooms for $25. She even asks someone if they could give me a ride over there, it just would be a while. A few minutes later she offers to buy me dinner. I would like to say i tried to refuse.... but i was so hungry.... she was serious too, and the food was quite good. Very small restaurant but they made a pretty good burger that i ordered (along with fries) because it was pretty much the cheapest thing on the menu. About an hour after that she asks me if i would rather stay there or go to the other town. I tell her that i would rather stay there and she ends up covering the difference between the 40 bucks i had and the 43.25 or so the room would have been out of her tip jar, then she ends up giving me a $5 phone card on top of all that. I'm enourmously grateful, but she never even gave me her name....Amazing how nice those canadians are.... i would definitely go back any time. Sure beats the hell out of my country. I have to wait about half an hour while they get the room ready for me, and from there i just end up going inside, getting in bed and falling asleep almost immediately for about 12 hours.

I guess you could take everything above as the prologue, now it gets interesting. i get up around 3am, use the phone card to call my fiancée to let her know i'll be starting to walk now, put the phone card back into the room, so that maybe someone else will profit from the genorosity of that girl without her having to pay for another phone card. And off i go to the forest, or what i thought was forest anyway. I walk along the road to the west about 2 miles before going south towards the USA. So far so good, sunrise should be reasonably soon after i cross the border (the border town is about 4 miles from the US border), shouldn't be a problem to just walk south for a while, right ?

Eventually, after my very limited sense for what time it is it should have been akound 7am (i didn't have a watch since my cellphone always took that job) i decide i should be heading southeastish so i don't miss the meeting point. But it's not much of a problem if i don't actually get to the meeting point, it is under 20 miles from the border, so I could just get there, get to some gas station and ask if i can make a phone call.... shouldn't be a problem at all. Most of the walk i didn't really think that i was deviating from the straight line that i was trying to walk. However, it was a pretty cloudy day and in the woods i couldn't see the sun for most of the day. Sometime in the afternoon i was suspecting that i hadn't been going south for a while. At this point i really only wanted to get out of the woods tho, since i had my doubts of getting out of there alive. I still had my bag with another 40 pounds of mostly clothes with me, which caused me to take very frequent breaks after never walking very far. So unfortunately the bag had to stay while i tried to get out of the damn woods. Another thing that made my life very difficult at this point was that the so called woods were mostly swamp. A few times during the journey i felt like i was surrounded by very deep water on all 4 sides and for long hours the path i chose to walk consisted of roots of the trees that i had to step on to stay dry. Dry is said too much, my pants and shoes were soaked pretty much from the very start. The journey through the woods was very interesting, i saw a buck, way too close for my taste, a bear, also way too close for my taste, but they both seemed to be afraid of me. To make the long story short(er), ever since the afternoon i just tried to get out of the woods, maybe somewhere that would tell me where the hell i was. I was certain i was on US side and i thought i was reasonably close to roseau. Eventually i heard big trucks in the distance and decided to just follow the sounds to the road. It took a long time to find said road, it was well after dark when i got there. I decided to follow the road to what i thought was south.

Now here comes the zinger of the whole story. After walking on that road for about 20 minutes i came back to the exact spot i started at. Neato. Now unfortunately i didn't have money, i didn't have that damn phone card, i hadn't had anything to eat or drink in about 35 hours and it was getting very cold. The gas station was open all night, but no one was attending it. Still there was a truck pulling in and i actually begged the driver for some food or drink, but he said he had nothing. I decided that i couldn't just sleep in near freezing temperatures and so i just started walking to the south again. This time, though, i was smarter, or bolder, at first anyway. I walked on the road until i got pretty close to the border crossing, that was closed at night. Only stepped back into the swamp/forest about half a mile away. Obviously i ended up getting lost again..... genius i am. So now i know that my sense of direction in the swamp is totally nonexistant, there's no sun, no moon, no idea where i'm going. I end up trying to sleep some, in wet clothes, near freezing temperatures, but from all the walking and dehydration i felt pretty hot. Still i ended up waking up shaking all over, freezing horribly. No way to get back to sleep. So i end up just standing there waiting for sunrise. Eventually i see the tips of the trees having some sunlight on them and i think i know where i need to go. I get back near the road, and keep walking in the forest about 150 yards from the road, almost never taking my eyes off of it. At some point in the morning i ended up walking about 100 yards before taking a break, more often than not a short nap, because i was too exhausted and hungry to keep going. I had told my fiancée on the phone that if i wasn't there by the previous night i would very likely not make it. Now I'm assuming that i need to get to the meeting point very quickly so i could maybe call her before she's back home 700 miles away, plus at this point i'm so hungry that i don't think i could go much longer. New plan, just walk on the damn road. That actually worked pretty good. I was able to go about 10 times the distance before needing a break. So there i am sleeping on the shoulder of the road when the border patrol pulls up.....I tell him that i'm a US Citizen of course, unfortunately i left my ID at home.... but somehow he doesn't believe me. He puts handcuffs on me, and searches my backpack, so then he finds my passport.

The border patrol apparently has a very lengthy booking process, or they don't do it very often.... took them about 5 hours to finish the whole paperwork. They tell me that they will be searching my hard drives and my cell phone (i still have neither of em back). They tell me that I can request to see an immigration judge that may let me stay in the country, so i could see my daughter be born. (unfortunately i found out when i saw the judge that there was 0 chance of that happening). They tell me that if i request to see the judge it would be about 7 days that i would have to spend in jail.

Eventually they take me to the local county jail and tell me that I would be moved in a couple of days, most likely monday. I ended up getting moved to a larger city jail in another state on tuesday. where i was told it would be a couple of days before i see the judge. It was a pretty nice jail. We only got locked down between 10pm and 6am, there was a day room that 8 cells were attached to. We spent most of the time in said day room. They had a nice poker game going, no blinds, ante 1, going to 2 soon as someone got knocked out, then 3, etc. buyin 1 rahmen noodle. over the whole time i was there i stayed pretty much even. after 7 days i got moved again (4 days after they told me i would have seen the judge), now to another county jail. There i was told that i would be seeing the judge after 10 days. I kinda didn't believe those guys since i figured that it had already been too long so it should be a day or 2 at most.... wrong again. 2 weeks after i got moved to that county jail they took me to the court. immigration court is arguably the worst thing you can go to. There were 15 locals that day. we all got put into one cell. A short time later there were transports from 3 other jails all throwing people into that one cell. One toilet, no privacy, and you get to stay there from about 8am until about 5pm.

Alright, finally seeing the judge, they told me there just is no way I would get to see my fiancée unless i got someone to pay the bond (initially set at $15,000). So at the hearing i asked the judge to reduce the bond, and he set it at $7,500. Unfortunately still way more than me or my fiancée would be able to come up with. So at this point i knew i wouldn't see her and i wouldn't get to see my daughter being born. And i knew that i had just wasted 24 days trying to see the judge when I coulda just told the border patrol that they should just deport me. Now, court was at the end of june, I was told that deportation to my country was pretty quick, i would leave within 2 weeks, probably sooner. The rest of the time in jail i was always thinking i would get deported tomorrow.... disappointed day after day. Finally 4 days later they got me out of bed at 5am, telling me that i'd get deported (they don't tell you until that morning....). unfortunately they took me to immigration court and from there i was taken to yet another county jail. I definitely could have done without that experience..... after 2 months in jail i was strip searched the first time. The food was the worst I have ever eaten and after getting moved to a different cell after dinner i was in a cell that was so cold that i couldn't sleep at all. No matter, Immigration was actually honest and i got woken up for breakfast at 4:25am where i was told that i'd be getting deported after breakfast.

I was given back my clothes (still smelling like the thing from the swamp) and after getting dressed (and letting me sit there for over an hour) they took me back to immigration court where i was given my backpack and everything else that the border patrol took from me, except for my cell phone and hard drives. Then they took me to the airport (state in the midwest US) and 2 people escorted me, handcuffed (glad they took the shackles off my feet at the court), to the gate. They actually took off the handcuffs then. They were nice people. From there i was escorted to an airport in the southwest of the US where we had nice mexican food for lunch at the airport, 4 hour overlay. Had some decent conversations, those people get around a lot, have a lot of stories to tell. Until bording started for the flight to my country they had me under the impression that they would be coming along, but they just got me on the plane and watched so i didn't get back off. Delta airlines unfortunately had very shitty service on that flight and computer problems with the entertainment system (redhat, was rebooting over and over, showing all the normal boot up messages of a linux system). They actually fixed that about 2 hours into the flight.

Back home
Back in my home country there actually were 2 cops waiting for me when i got off the plane. They checked the paperwork, checked if there were any crimes on my record and all kinds of stuff. Eventually they let me go. Now I'm in my country but 400 miles from home, no money in my pocket.... The police suggested that i go visit the church services inside the airport who may be able to help me. They let me call my brother, who amazingly enough was at home, and even more amazingly was able to get me a train ticket home. He picked me up at the train station, drove me to the house where I thought i lived, and started a long conversation. He said that my family didn't actually want me to ever get inside that house again.

Now that very last paragraph requires about this much text again to explain. The short version being that they made some very unreasonable requests about me doing maintanence on this property (owned by my family), which was one of the reasons i had for leaving.... and i didn't tell my family that i was planning to leave.... they weren't happy. The situation is not resolved but right now i have a place to stay.”


So there it is. Completely true, verified, etc. Poker books still unclaimed as far as we know, so if you happen to be walking along the highway next to a swamp, keep a lookout for a suitcase full of books.

A few of you have asked what the future was for the Manifesto. I’m unsure myself. I have been gathering stuff up, and I spent some time organizing The List into a spreadsheet where I can sort/filter out based on subject, which potentially makes writing up blog entries easier. I also have been saving up some rather amusing table chat. I’d say right now I have enough material for 4 more entries which should cover me through 2010 or so. Ok just kidding, I’m hoping to have installment #2 of The List within the next month. Until then, enjoy!

Yours Donkily,
Morphy