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Tuesday, July 11, 2006

A taste for the brothers who can’t be here with us today

This morning as I sat conspicuously long-haired and bearded in the Wellton Border Patrol office lobby waiting for my appointment to begin, the agents brought in one of two big trucks they’d intercepted out in the desert. The drivers had run off, consigning their cargo — about a ton and a half of fine Mexican sinsemilla — to the tender mercies of federal law enforcement.

I went out with the gang to look at the first truck they brought in, still loaded with bud. One after another, about half the agents took me aside to joke meaningfully about their college days. Wanna know what three quarters of a ton of pot looks like? It looks like a bunch of plastic-wrapped bales of something tied with packing tape. The second truck was mired and it would apparently take them a while to tow it out of the desert, whereupon the local representatives of the Drug Enforcement Agency would haul all the pot away for burning, and not in that nice way the agents recollected from their undergraduate days.

I went off to watch a couple Power Point presentations before my trip to the field, then Agent Mike Crelia, my tour guide for the day, gassed up a Border Patrol truck for us. We hopped in and headed west on Interstate 8 over the Gila Mountains to look at a few popular border crossing spots.

At the base of the freeway grade on the Gilas’ east side we passed an Arizona DOT “Adopt-A-Highway” sign: “In Memory of Jerry Garcia, 1942-1995.”

Atop the pass a mile or so onward, two large shiny pickup trucks with familiar-looking bales in their beds were pulled over on each shoulder of Interstate 8. The DEA guys had failed to secure their loads. One of the bales had tumbled out into traffic, rolled to the left shoulder and burst. Mike Crelia said “this isn’t good,” pulled us over onto the shoulder, put on his flashing lights. We stood and watched, chuckling, as the discomfited DEA agents picked through the weeds and gravel and broken glass at roadside putting several hundred spilled buds into plastic evidence bags— enough to supply a good-sized dormitory for a month.

Rest in peace, Jerry.

(Cross-posted at Creek Running North)

Posted by Chris Clarke on 07/11 at 01:40 AM
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