Then he told me why they considered taking pictures such a serious matter. This was a major "facility" and there were a lot of men inside, as well as all the correctional officers (one doesn't call them guards in the prison biz); it could be a terrorist target. He said this with total conviction.
When I think of this, it sounds ludicrous, but he was serious. Then he asked: "Are you a terrorist?" He was grinning as if it was a joke, but he meant it. Then he asked, could he be sure there was no terrorist paraphernalia in the car? When I assured him, he asked, "Will you let me search it?"
There was nothing in that car--I thought--that was at all suspicious. "Sure. Go ahead." I opened the trunk. It was empty. The detective rummaged through the shopping bags (cloth) and sweater on the back seat, the cast-aside shirt on the front seat. The detective checked the pockets in the sweater. Nothing.
He then went through the glove compartment. Suddenly he held up a small, resealable plastic bag. "What's this?"
Maybe, what saved me was that I was genuinely surprised. The bag had about ten marijuana seeds in the bottom, and as the State Trooper remarked disdainfully, "some residue." Really, at that moment, I didn't know where it had come from. I had only gotten the car in December. It had been years since I'd tried (unsuccessfully) to seed marijuana along people's forest margins, the only reason I might have had for carrying some in my car..
He asked me if they were mine. Truthfully, several friends had offered me seeds, so I said: "A friend of mine must have put it in there!" I was genuinely bewildered.
"No friend of mine would do that," remarked the Trooper.
Well, it turns out that the police--and the "correctional officers"--were much more concerned with discovering whether or not I was a terrorist. The detective asked, politely, if I would submit to a search of my person.
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