The Police Flashers Came On!
Sunday evening, after almost a full month of driving through Canada, we finally arrived at the Canada-U.S. border in Warroad, Minnesota. It was an hour before sunset, and I (Marc) thought we would find a good camping spot near the border crossing. We were right on the east side of the Lost River State Forest, which we had heard was a great birding spot in Northern Minnesota and even had the possibility of dispersed camping. Alas, my research was a bit flawed — the access to the forest was actually on the west side of the park, 45 minutes away. The extra bit of driving would land us there just before dark. And we don’t like to drive in the dark. We trekked out to the west side of the forest, then north up Route 310, to within half a mile of another U.S.-Canada border crossing in Roseau. We looked for any sign of a park road or camping pull-out, but still could not find a single spot to camp for the night. &$%#! By now it was dark and we were both getting cranky. Disappointed and frustrated, we drove back into the town of Roseau to the “City Campground”, which we expected would be a slab of concrete with a bunch of noisy RV’s. Actually, the park wasn’t half bad — it was green with lots of trees, quiet with only one other camper in the whole place, and even had a bathroom with a shower. Not bad!
It wasn’t even 2 minutes after we parked in campsite #3 that a black truck pulled up behind us. I thought to myself, oh this must be the campground host here to collect our money. The truck stopped there for a moment and hesitated. I rolled down my driver’s side window and waited for someone to come out, and then... the police flashers came on! “Oh Crap!”, we thought to ourselves. It was an undercover officer. A border patrol agent in full uniform and weapons stepped out of his mysterious unmarked vehicle. He was secretly following us around town ever since we did a U-turn in the Lost River State Forest, half a mile from the Canadian border. It must have looked suspicious that we drove towards the border and turned around. He thought we were doing a drug run! We explained we had just pulled up in the city park to camp for the night and that we had been searching unsuccessfully to find a place to spend the night. He proceeded to grill us on where we had been, what we were doing for over an hour in the area if we had just crossed the border at 8:01 pm, where we were from, and many other questions. Then, he brought out “Ulix” from his truck — the on-duty drug-sniffing Belgian Malinois K-9 unit! Eliana whipped out our road atlas to show him where we had been, who we were, and we scrambled to clear up the confusion. There was a mistake in the border patrol computer that showed we had originally crossed over in Roseau when actually we entered the U.S. in Warroad. We weren’t actually doing a drug run or running an illegal immigration operation across the border, really! As we explained a little more about our drive, our cross-country birding trip, and the evening’s fruitless campsite search, he seemed to finally come around and believe us. So much so, that we actually struck up a friendly conversation and chatted like new friends for the next half hour and petted and gave some love to the fearless Ulix. We heard about his experiences as a border patrol agent in Texas and Minnesota and finally snapped a photo with the agent and his K-9 inside Valentina! He put our license plate on the “safe list” since we’ll be back birding in the state forest in the morning. After we said goodbye to Agent Whitney and got the VW prepped for the night, within 5 minutes we had a new “Like” on our Facebook page — our border patrol agent is now our Facebook fan!
Dream. Discover. Bird on!
-Marc & Eliana