Woke up this morning with enough wind that I thought maybe, just maybe there’d be some junky but surfable waves at Fort Ebey. With this wishful thinking,a surf check is born. Things needed for a proper morning surf check include:

•Coffee (The lady at Miriam’s in Coupeville starts making my Americano when I walk in the door.)
•Your surfboard in case it looks like Waikiki.
•A plan for what to do when it looks like Lake Erie.

Flat. Flatter than Lake Erie. My backup plan is set into motion: Drive to Cananda. Multiple motives exist for this trip:

•The other day, while assessing a patient’s mental status, I asked, among other things, for the name of the President. He said, “well, I am from Canada, so that’s not a fair question.” Granted, this man didn’t know his own address or what month it was so I could’ve stopped right there. But because the request of naming government leaders was already out there, I only thought it fair to reword with a more Canadian friendly question. Who’s the Prime Minister of Canada, then? As soon as I asked it, I realized I didn’t know the answer to my own question. How alert and oriented does that make me? He said something like Stephen Harper, and to me that sounded more like a basketball player, so I considered him delusional and had him admitted. I decided then and there that I needed to go North for a visit.

•I am a _____ and driving somewhere just to drive there, never sounds like a bad idea. My surname actually translates to Of the Rose, which is a nod to the compass rose that has been utilized throughout my bloodline.

•In a future rotation I will be within driving distance of Old Mexico, and the more International I can make these rotations seem, the better it will look on my résumé.

•I hadn’t been treated like a terrorist in a while, so I was due for good border crossing.

A piece of advice for anybody going to the big C, eh? N, eh? D, eh? is to actually look at a map and at least pick out one town to tell the bulletproof vest wearing Canadian Border Cop that that is where you are going. All I really had was “I am here to visit.” He needed specifics and I just froze. It doesn’t help that a surfboard bag and a body bag are very similar in appearance, especially when being brought across international boundaries by an unshaven, unshowered man on Wednesday morning. They took my driver’s license, my passport, my cell phone and my car keys and told me to wait inside. I felt like a vulnerable ER patient, forced to wear nothing but a cheap open-backed gown, and told to sit in a small room and wait to be told your fate.

After a short-lived visit with our northern neighbors, I found out that the US Border Patrol also frowned on me “just taking a quick trip” to Canada. I even rehearsed my statement while in line. But once the questioning began of why exactly I came up here, by myself, on a Wednesday, in a van, for a few short hours….I just couldn’t convince them of my aforementioned motives. Oh, and apparently a surfboard bag looks just as much like a body bag in the southbound lanes as it did to the Canucks guarding the northbound route. Once again, keys, passport, wait inside with the other miscreants. Why are my palms sweating trying to innocently make passage to my own motherland?

Maybe both the Canadian and US Border Patrols have successfully convinced me that, yes that was a stupid thing to do on a Wednesday morning. It’s like they had seen my To Do List…Let’s see, laundry, phone calls, pay that bill, read up on Huntington’s Disease…..look at all this stuff you should be doing, Mr. DuRoss, you don’t deserve to make some willy nilly flight of fancy to another country, with all these other things going on….

I spent more time in Customs than I did in Canada. I didn’t even learn anything about the leader of the Canadian Government. But, I made it back to Whidbey Island without any latex gloves being broken out, so I consider that a small victory. Next time, I’m leaving the body bag at home. Actually, the next time will likely be a Mexican border crossing, so the surfboard will be coming along. I guess next time I just need a better story to go along with it.