Trip to Montreal, Part 1
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I really haven’t written very much about the adventure I had getting Sam into the US for Christmas.
Dad and I left for Montreal around 6:30 PM on December 23rd, and got on the road about a half hour later due to a stop for gas and a visit to my brother’s place to drop off my keys so my family could come by early and start work on the cooking that I was supposed to be doing.
The drive wasn’t that bad, just really really long. I’d been fighting a low-level virus: no coughing or sneezing, just deep aches and pains in my muscles that cause extreme fatigue, forcing me to eat Advil with breakfast and again at lunch to get through the day. I tossed back two or three of the little orange pills before we hit the road. But I was running on pure adrenalin: I had barely slept at all Sunday night because of the flu, and managed about 5 hours on Monday night.
Thanks to years of touring and regional travel, I’ve learned which fast food restaurants are places you’d actually want to eat at, and which are selling food poisoning on a bun. McDonalds is typically bland, but at least you won’t spend the next week shitting your pants every time you pass gas. Wendy’s makes a decent, if dry, burger. Roy Rogers is vile except for the fries. And Burger King… well, the less said about them the better: the food looks really good, but will leave you with such a bad case of the Hershey Squirts, you’ll feel like a milkshake machine. Unfortunately, that’s all there was on the Garden State Parkway at 7:30 PM, and we weren’t due to stop driving until about 1:00 AM. The ensuing farts were ghastly: they all smelled of the fake grill flavor Burger King injects into its food, and as they beefed out my ass, they were as warm as the burgers had been going down. So hey, fuck you, King.
I’d also like to add a word about my dad. A lot of you have read about our infamous arguments that go on and on for years (literally) without resolution, but that’s only one side of the guy. My dad volunteered to accompany me on a very difficult and long emergency excursion, and took over some of the driving as well. He’s a good navigator, and a great shotgun partner who can talk at length and with authority on just about any topic. Anyone who’s ever had to do an all-night drive knows how useful it is to have someone in the passenger seat keeping your mind awake with conversation.
As for our fights, we talked about that as well over the course of the trip. “I don’t think Christina or your mom understand,” dad said. “The refusal to give up isn’t about pride or stubbornness. I can’t speak for you, but I have to guess you feel the way I do: that with enough thought and debate, you actually CAN arrive at the truth, or at least something LIKE the truth.”
“Oh yeah, totally,” I agreed.
“For me,” Dad continued, “the best part of an argument isn’t winning, it’s being proved wrong. Because when you’ve been proved wrong, you’ve learned something you didn’t know before. You’ve been enlightened. It’s the best thing one person can do for another.” Hard to argue with that…
We arrived in Plattsburgh around 1:30 AM. Even though I was exhausted, I did most of the driving on the trip up. My dad’s 66 years old and was already stressing his body by jumping in a car for what would be nearly 17 hours of driving, and stuffing his system with fast food, hardly the diet for a man chomping low-cholesterol meds. By this time the snow was pouring down heavily. Plattsburgh’s at the tippy-top of the Adirondack Northway, which winds through the mountains and along the Schroon River. Because it’s a protected area, the state tries to prevent light pollution by cutting way back on the streetlamps along the highway: when the snow is falling that fast, conditions get dangerous quickly. You have to use your low-beams, because the high beams pick up every single flake, making it impossible to see the road.
Somewhere along the highway, my dad came up with a good idea: instead of both of us rising before daybreak, making for two dangerously tired drivers, I should wake up first and get Sam on my own. That would allow my dad to sleep in, so he could be better prepared to drive a few miles while I recuperated with a nap in the passenger seat. Because of their work schedules, the only way we could arrange an early pickup that was even remotely close to the US border was to schedule it for 7:00 AM. So it was that 4 hours later, I pulled my carcass from my sleeping bag (I always sleep on the floor in hotels), stumbled into my clothes and out the Super 8 Motel door into a raging blizzard.
The hotel lot was covered with snow. The road to the hotel was covered with snow. The on-ramp to the highway was coated with 2 inches or more of snow, and the highway itself was a blanket of the white stuff. Napierville, a small town in Quebec, is only a half hour away from Plattsburgh. Of course, that’s based on normal weather conditions that permit you to drive 65 mph: in the snow and darkness I was reduced to about 45-50 mph.
I got into Canada without a hitch, explaining the situation to a cute and bemused looking young blonde Canadian border guard with schoolmarm glasses. “I’ll be back in a half-hour or so,” I said, as I waved goodbye and continued up the highway, which was now Canada’s Autoroute 15.
The pickup went off well. Sam hopped in the car, we said our goodbyes, and went our separate ways. As I headed toward the border, I nearly skidded off the highway when someone slammed on their brakes in front of me, but all told the return trip through Quebec was not entirely terrifying.
Until we hit customs.
I’d like to refer to something I wrote back in December:
Passport laws for children are confusing and contradictory. Generally speaking, a minor child accompanied by a passport-holding adult does not need a passport to cross the US/Canada border. However, this is at the discretion of customs, which essentially means “he doesn’t need a passport unless Joe Customs says he does.” Also, and most importantly, this rule does not apply to entering the United States via airplane: to enter the US by air, you need a passport.
When we arrived at the border at about 8:00 AM(?), the guard took one look at me, with big bags under my eyes, disheveled hair, stubble, a little boy in the back seat with no mommy in sight, in a blizzard, and his antenna perked up. As I told my bizarre story, involving a child out-of-wedlock born to a Canadian and a Philadelphian, trips that usually involve Syracuse and Interstate 81, and a missed flight for Christmas, he was clearly getting more and more suspicious by the minute. The guard held up Sam’s battered birth certificate. “Awfully torn up, wouldn’t you say?” he asked me.
“Well yeah,” I answered. “I always take it with me when I go to pick him up, and this has been going on for nearly 5 years.”
“How often do you come to Canada?” he asked.
“As little as possible,” I responded. “Like I said, we usually meet up in Syracuse–”
“Why?”
“Because that’s the midway point between Montreal and Quebec, and there aren’t as many tolls as there are on the Thruway.”
“So why are you here now?”
“Because, like I said, his mom didn’t realize he needed a passport to enter the US by plane, and if we were going to have him for Christmas I’d have to to drive up to get him, which is what I did. I’ve been driving since last night.”
“How long did it take you to get here?”
“Six hours or so to Plattsburgh, we left around 6:30 or so yesterday.”
“Uh huh.” He paused, skeptical. “Roll down your back window please.” I rolled it down.
“Little boy? What’s your name?” the guard asked.
“Sam,” piped Sam from the back.
“And who’s this driving?”
“Daddy,” he replied helpfully.
“And where’s your Mommy?”
“She had to go to work, so we came extra-early!” Sam said. This was all very exciting for him, and terrifying for me. Visions of being dragged away and thrown into a cell while Sam was remanded to a foster home were flashing through my mind.
“Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to turn off the engine and put on your hazard lights,” said the guard. I sighed and did as I was told. It was hard to be angry with the guy: he was obviously trying to do the right thing, and who can blame him? If I had been sitting in that little booth I would have been suspicious too. I took out my cell phone to call Sam’s mom and let her know what was going on, but another guard made a cutting motion across his throat with one hand, while pointing at the “no cell phone use” sign with the other. After a few minutes, we were directed to an area where I parked my car and handed over my keys and identifying documents to another border guard.
We were herded into a windowless building lined with stainless steel seats. The room was filled with Chinese people who had been removed from a bus on suspicion of something or another. There were a few Francophones waiting for service as well. A guard about my age began asking me the same questions the guy in the booth asked me. Then he asked the same questions again, but in different order, adding new topics like “Is that your car? How long have you owned it? Where do you work? Where did you work before that? What do you do? How long were you with his mom?” Then he asked the same questions again, and had me empty my pockets and turn them out. Then he asked me the same questions again. Sam was sitting nervously in one of the stainless steel seats, fidgeting.
Finally, someone came along and handed me a declaration sheet: it seems my story checked out and after the 45 minute ordeal, we were allowed to continue on our way. But one thing was clear: we had to get a passport for Sam, or this was going to happen again and again, and eventually there might be real trouble. So as soon as Christmas was over, we began working out how to get Sam’s citizenship. This was harder than you might expect, As I wrote in January:
[D]ual citizenship for a child born out of wedlock is very difficult. In fact, it is a royal clusterfuck of epic proportions.
This is because the US embassy A) doesn’t publish guidelines for children born out of wedlock in a foreign country because B) the rules keep changing, and C) in order to call the US embassy in Montreal, I have to pay $1.59 (Canadian) per minute. At the very least, that’s a $15.90 call, and given that the conversation with my senator took 20 minutes it’ll probably cost a lot more than that. Oh, and when I call the main number, they tell me they no longer take telephone inquiries. Awesome.
As that next-to-the-last sentence suggests, I just got off the phone with someone from my senator’s constituent services office dealing with immigration issues. He told me he can’t tell me what the rules are even though he knows what they are because they are constantly changing. The whole situation, in his words, is “ridiculous”. “If I was to tell you what the rules currently are, it would be a disservice to you because they won’t stay that way for long,” he said. “And US rules and regulations regarding out-of-wedlock children born abroad are one of the single largest sources of litigation for us. It’s a total mess.”
What was clear was that this was going to be a large effort involving not only phone calls from me, but from Sam’s mom as well, and almost certainly a trip to Montreal, which we began planning immediately. Sam’s mom handled the calls to the consulate, since it was a free call from her side of the border. She got as much information as possible, but there was the sticking point of how to legitimate him. From what Senator Casey’s office had told me, legitimation varied broadly from country to country, and in Canada, from province to province. Sam’s mom had as much luck as me in determining what that was, but since we had to show up in person, we saved our questions for the consulate. Meanwhile, she got all his passport stuff in order, so i could just sign off and send the application in when we arrived.
Since we were making such a big trip, we also decided to schedule visits with his school. Due to some miscommunication and a tight schedule, I had missed the school’s open house, but after a bunch of phone calls to administrators and with Sam’s mom, we decided on one we both felt comfortable with. It was easy to make an appointment to visit.
Finally, to get to the point of this post, Christina and I left on Saturday February 14 for Montreal, arriving around 7:00 PM at the Midtown Holiday Inn. Besides Valentine’s Day, it was President’s Day weekend, which meant that our obligations at the consulate had to wait until Tuesday morning. that left the weekend free to explore and hang out with Sam, and Monday to take care of his Canadian passport.
A day or so before we left, Christina found an article in the New York Times about Sucrerie de la Montagne, a traditional maple sugar shack. Everything the article said was true, and then some.
There are hundreds of cabanes à sucre in Quebec. Usually, a visit is just a day trip, but I was planning to spend the night, and Sucrerie de la Montagne is one of the few that offers accommodations. The rate for my two-story maisonette included dinner — a feast of traditional Québécois food served at rough-hewn tables in a cavernous hall while a fiddle-driven rigodon band played bouncy folkloric music. Because the real reason why you go to a cabane à sucre is to eat and dance.
We picked up Sam from the YMCA, where he takes his swimming lessons (he’s getting prepped up for summer), and drove about a half hour west of the city. Montreal is a lot like Philadelphia, including the shitty highways. And like pennsylvania, the area surrounding montreal gets really rural, really quickly. In no time at all we were listening to classic American country music on the radio (!) and driving down winding roads past farms. The weather was hovering around 4 degrees Celsius: I’m too lazy to convert to Fahrenheit, so let’s just agree that it was cold as a well-digger’s ass.
In the car
The parking lot, if you could call it that, at the Sucrerie was covered with a thick sheet of ice. The air was fairly still, but very chilly. Sam’s nose and cheeks were red. So were Christina’s.
The path to the sucrerie itself was long and covered with snow and ice, but that’s not a problem: an enormous red sleigh, complete with runners, driven by a burly French Quebecois wearing a fur hat (whose name i forget), and hauled by Clydesdales.
This picture is from original article and does not do justice to the sheer size of the driver, who flirted with Christina the entire time. He was like a bear with a French accent
Photo: Yannick Grandmont for The New York Times
After loading up the sleigh with visitors, the driver took of a a quick trot across the ice, deliberately skidding in a gigantic circle that left everyone laughing and dizzy. The tour of the syrup production facility was fun for grown-ups, but perhaps a little much for Sam, whose boredom seemed to be intimately related to the subzero temperature. That all changed when we went into the dining hall. Within a few minutes, we were eating a delicious and hearty bean soup, dipping bocce-ball sized loaves of bread into the broth. After the soup was gone, the main course appeared: bowls of meatballs in gravy, ham, thick slabs of bacon, meat pie, more bread, sausages, preserved onions, beets, and cornichon pickles. I couldn’t even begin to clean my plate.
Not angry, just stuffed to the gills
Even better, an old timey duo was on stage playing traditional Quebecois fiddle tunes. Old timey is old timey wherever you go, and pretty soon the whole room was clapping and stomping, including Sam who loves that stuff.
After a few songs, the band pulled out a bagful of musical spoons and invited the audience to come up and participate. Sam and I headed to the front.
Kids today: when i learned to play the spoons, it was the old-fashioned way, with two soup spoons balanced on my fingers. These wooden things took a lot of the skill out of it, but if it makes a kid happy, so what. Here’s Sam, figuring out how to work them, with a little help from me.
I love his expression in this shot, you can see he’s really banging away.
Around about that time, we learned that Sam could dance. I’m not talking about jumping up and down and waving his hands around: I mean “getting down like a young Michael Jackson. Sam insists he got these moves from a video game. Wherever he learned it, he’s got rhythm and moves. I wish I’d had the sense to have taken a video, because these photos simply don’t do any justice to my boogie down kid. I want to send him a copy of Breakin’ and see if he can learn how to do headspins, backspins, and all that other stuff I never bothered with because I was too busy skateboarding and slamming.
The end of this post is probably going to a be a bit anticlimatic, since this is about where the photos end. That’s because the visit was short, the details about the consulate and his passport are mundane at best, and the remainder of the shots aren’t so great. The trip was 100% successful in that I accomplished everything i set out to do. Sam’s application for a Canadian passport was submitted, and the document should arrive within two weeks. In terms of the consulate, we received all the information we needed, and (thank heaven) a DNA test is NOT required. Sometime in the next two months, I travel back to Montreal where, armed with proof of my identity and citizenship, as well as documentation proving I have been in the US for five years since i was aged 14 and two years before Sam’s birth, and a check for $65.00, I’ll sign an affidavit agreeing to support him until the age of 18, and ba-da-bing! Sam can claim his rightful American citizenship, opening twice as many doors to opportunity than most people. Lucky kid.
In addition, I was able to visit his school, which was great: the library was especially impressive, and the computer lab looked very new. I also learned exactly how French immersion will play out: he’ll learn in English on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and in French on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. I’m thinking of dropping by my library to pick up some “teach-yourself-French” dvds, to see if i can refresh my memory enough to have conversations with Sam. His soon-to-be step-dad and I also both speak spanish, so Sam may well end up trilingual. That’s going to open a few more doors too. Lucky kid, part deux (or dos, as the case may be).
More to come…
February 19th, 2009 at 12:50 pm
I have to say, in the last picture Sam really looks like your brother Ray. Did you get a chance to check out any nightlife or rock music?
February 19th, 2009 at 1:31 pm
[...] Lil Miss Morgan Dork wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptWithin a few minutes, we were eating a delicious and hearty bean soup, dipping bocce-ball sized loaves of bread into the broth. After the soup was gone, the main course appeared: bowls of meatballs in gravy, ham, … [...]
February 19th, 2009 at 2:19 pm
B–Awesome pictures and it looks like an awesome time. I am feeling happy for you.
Billy D.
February 19th, 2009 at 3:54 pm
Caillou!
February 19th, 2009 at 6:06 pm
He’s so cute!
March 23rd, 2009 at 6:43 pm
[...] my mom gave me $125 toward this case for Christmas, thanks to the Sam citizenship clusterfuck, I had to spend that money on a hotel room in Montreal where we sort…. My bass remains unprotected from the elements, when it could be ferried around in an Upton Deluxe [...]