1
"Sure," I told him.
As the Trooper came to frisk me--I was wearing a denim kilt with no underwear, my summer outfit--he asked me if I had anything in my pockets.
"Just these sunglasses." I pulled them out and held them up.
"Put them on the top of the car, and put your hands on the roof." He didn't growl, "Spread it," as they do on TV.
He fumbled discreetly over my kilt (if I had been of another persuasion, I might have been disappointed), my shirt, and then reported to the detective: "Nothing."
The detective looked at me. "Everything you tell us checks out," he had even called my wife's cell-phone and heard her message, "except this." He held up the baggie with the seeds.
I still had no idea where they came from, and told him so. Now, I think I know, but I really didn't have a clue at the time.
"You can't do better than that?"
I shook my head, and repeated the possibility that a friend might have put it there.
"Well," said the detective, gesturing towards the uniformed State Trooper: "it's up to him, whether he wants to cite you for it."
The Trooper tried with me again, but I really could come up with no other explanation, and they both could see my genuine perplexity at the baggie being there.
The Trooper shook his head. "For this measly amount, it wouldn't be worth it for me to cite you, and for you to have to come all the way down here. We don't do seeds, anyway."
I heaved a sigh of relief, but not visibly, and not until after they told me I could go, the guard, er, Correctional Officer, handed me my license and registration, and told me I had to continue around the rotary to the right. And not to come back. I didn't let out my breath until I drove completely out of the prison drive and was back on the main road.
Several lessons: don't invite a search of your car unless you know what's in it down to the smallest thing--thank god it was very small! And don't take pictures of a "Correctional Facility," because, believe it or not, the state thinks it is a terrorist target.
I was told the latter without irony. Our paranoia (America's), sees a huge prison as a terrorist target. Would terrorists blow up the walls to invite the inmates to join them, (a few might be tempted, if I remember their political alienation correctly)? Or would they attack it just to kill a lot of people the rest of the country wants to forget, anyway? I suppose, one well-placed bomb inside the walls (but not outside), could reap a gruesome harvest.
I doubt al Qa'ida would consider it, however. There are probably more African-American Muslims in that prison than in any comparable, random crowd anywhere in the USA. And anyway, the walls, built in 1939, thirty feet high, of solid concrete, probably at least ten feet thick at the base, would be blast-proof to any but a very large bomb. The only way to carry out a terrorist attack against such a target would be to recruit people "inside."
