Big Time Truckin: True Trucking Stories
Dispatch 11: Border Wars

by Kirk Gonnsen

I just heard the news from another driver that one of our owner/operators was caught and busted by the FBI. Sources say that during an RCMP-initiated operation the driver was caught attempting to smuggle five East Indian men into the United States. His truck was impounded, the men are behind bars and their fate is now in the hands of American justice.

Drivers are smuggling things all the time. Usually it's just booze and cartons of cigarettes (It's illegal to have booze in a commercial vehicle in the US, plus there are restrictions on the quantity of booze and tobacco you can bring across the border). Sometimes drivers smuggle parts of their loads across the border, filing papers for the bulk of their cargo, but smuggling a 'machine' or something small and valuable that they can sell to a buyer in the States with an inflated profit due to the bypassing of duty and custom costs. Once that bridge has been crossed (both literally and ethically) the more desperate men begin to realize that the constant crossing back and forth between Canada and the US makes truckers good mules for drugs, criminals and 'terrorists.'

So why do they do it? Simply put, truckers are not getting paid enough and being overworked. This combination pushes their ethics to the point of risking their freedom and the freedom of their country for the sake of a few dollars more.

Several weeks after September 11th I was crossing from Sarnia to Port Huron, Michigan when I was taken out of my truck by a military guard. The custom agent had noticed that my US custom sticker was taped on, instead of stuck on my windshield. This minor infraction caused him to order me out of the cab, stand me in front of my truck with my feet apart, holding my left wrist with my right hand while a Reservist in full fatigue, and in my mind holding an AK-47, stood three feet in front of me. The agent searched my truck and sent me over to the side where I was finally released after I being order to remove the sticker from my windshield (even though it was registered to that truck and now I would have to pay $5 in cash to US customs every time I crossed the border.)

I have always felt some anxiety crossing the border. When I see that high sweeping bridge over the river; when I see those uniformed men and women who don't take any shit, who don't joke, whose jobs it is to catch terrorists. I'm the driver who feels guilty when he's smuggling a jar of Jif Extra Crunchy for a friend of his. But they don't sell Jif Extra Crunchy in Canada, and he really likes Jif Extra Crunchy, so... I have to bend the law that far. And if a friend of mine breaks the law, kills someone and needs to get to Mexico, will I bend the law further? Will I risk my neck, my freedom for his? Depends on whether or not I get my next raise.