“I’m sorry, Marcel,” came the shaky voice over my phone’s speaker, trembling like a ghostly echo from another world. “It seems that Sylvia, the coworker responsible for your work visa process, was suddenly transferred to another department in Oregon... yesterday. Unfortunately, none of the applications or documents she was supposed to file for your visa were ever submitted. Not only have all the deadlines passed, but—” here came the dagger twist, “—your tourist visa extension has also expired. You’re now, technically, illegally in the United States. So... sorry.”
The words hung in the air like the gloomy toll of a funeral bell, each one slicing through my brain with the precision of a paper shredder that had no mercy for human error—or, apparently, Sylvia. I stood frozen, clutching the phone as if it were the only thing tethering me to reality. My face turned the colour of old dishwater as I locked eyes with my wife, her expression a perfect mirror of my own horror.
It felt like standing in the middle of the road, paralysed, as a car hurtles toward you at full speed in reverse. Fight, flight, or freeze? Freeze. Definitely freeze. My world didn’t just crumble—it imploded. The rug had been yanked so violently from under me, I wasn’t even sure I’d hit the floor. I was suspended midair in an emotional whirlwind, a human piñata being battered by the blunt objects of disbelief, betrayal, and sheer, unrelenting dread.
Before my mind’s eye, scenes of enraged TSA dweebs flashed—armed with high-voltage tasers, machine guns, and enough heavy-duty zip ties to start an Amazon packing facility. They’d be relentlessly chasing me, bringing me down, throwing a black hood over my head, and tranquillising me. I’d wake up in some CIA black site in Serbia, tortured for information I didn’t have, then buried alive to rot with my secrets.
This wasn’t one of life’s plot twists. This was a plot demolition. My personal American dream wasn’t just crushed—it was ground into smouldering rubble, a heap of bureaucratic failure ignited by a Molotov cocktail of incompetence and indifference.
All was lost…
But, let’s rewind the story to a time when my world still smelled like roses—well, apart from the faint whiff of aviation fuel and the mind-numbing tedium of grinding through instrument rating training. It was the day I left the Cody flight school test facility, feeling like a genius who had just cracked the cosmic enigma of whether intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe—because, as I was about to painfully discover, it sure as hell doesn’t seem to be anywhere near Utah, least of all in Salt Lake City.
It was the 6th of December 2022, and it was also the day Tom from Cedar City Predator Control Headquarters called with the kind of news that makes you want to kiss a New York subway handrail during flu season—just to celebrate. From now on, he said, the Utah General Attorney’s Office would handle my work permit. Nothing could possibly go wrong anymore.
I mean, this was Salt Lake City—home to sharp-suited professionals who handled red tape the way a housewife juggles plastic containers at a Tupperware party: with speed, precision, and maybe just a little too much enthusiasm. There wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of a screw-up now. No disasters, no catastrophes, no…
But of course, mayhem was exactly what was about to happen.
“What do you mean you passed the test with a score of 97%?” Nate stared at me, his brow furrowed as if he were studying an exotic specimen from outer space. “I didn’t even know that was possible.”
“Well,” I replied, attempting a casual tone, “technically, the scale goes all the way up to 100%, so 97 isn’t exactly out of the realm of possibility. That said, it’s going to cause me additional problems. The examiner for my practice test is now going to assume I’m a genuine smart-ass and turn my oral exam into a public execution. "Given my unparalleled ability to misunderstand anything verbally explained to me—especially in a language I barely have a handle on—this can only spiral into disaster.”
But that wasn’t the worst of it.
“You see,” I continued, “my long-term memory, thanks to this whole live in the moment philosophy I’ve embraced, operates on the same cognitive plane as a kitchen funnel. I can hold a certain amount of wisdom for a fleeting moment before it all just, well... pours straight through. In a few days, I’ll be lucky if I can remember how to get to this airport, your name, or—God help me—even what IFR stands for.”
Nate didn’t look convinced. He kept eyeing me suspiciously, like I was trying to sell him beachfront property in Wyoming. But we had more pressing matters to deal with than trivial tests. Outside, a raging winters blizzard was piling up the snow faster than the national debt—or a chubby kid’s plate at an all-you-can-eat chocolate buffet.
Much to Nate’s disgust—he took any weather phenomenon as a personal insult, whether it was winter’s cold or summer’s heat—and much to my utter delight, a day of relentless snow plowing was on the agenda. I loved the serenity of sitting high in the plow truck, admiring the beauty of softly falling snowflakes… even if they were coming at me sideways at 30 knots, like nature’s way of keeping me humble.
What I truly cherish about Wyoming is its simplicity—there are only two real seasons: winter and not winter. And then there are the extremes. The winter of 2022 was the coldest I’d ever endured, with temperatures regularly plummeting below -30 degrees. It was so arctic that my clattering Range Rover had to run all day just to avoid becoming a permanent ice sculpture—an automotive popsicle destined to thaw out sometime around July.
Then there’s summer, which begins the moment the last snowbank surrenders, instantly transforming the airport tarmac into a purgatory of blistering heat. Not even the devil himself would dare set foot in Wyoming during the summer months—he’d probably burst into flames and end up with a sunburn that would make a lobster look pale. I had to park my wheezing Rover on a patch of dirt just to stop the tires from melting into a slow, sticky river of molasses.
Anyway, to spare myself from Nate’s relentless bickering, I immediately switched off the radio and opted for the classic defence of feigned incompetence.
“Damn, Nate,” I said, squinting at the handheld like it was an alien artefact. “I really wish I could figure out how this bloody thing works! For the love of God, how many channels does this over-engineered contraption have?”
Nate shot me a look—somewhere between pity and disbelief, like I’d just confused a funeral for a county fair. “Actually, Marcel,” he said dryly, “it has one channel. Default. Always.”
The promised phone call—or rather, the grand annunciation of one—from the holy grail of work permit offices arrived a few days later, courtesy of someone who was either an intern, a sub-co-worker, or possibly just the janitor’s assistant. Sylvia, the self-proclaimed Oracle of Immigration, apparently found the task of dialling a phone beneath her station. Instead, she delegated the “undignified” chore of collecting my personal details to someone else—no doubt to reinforce the aura of her own self-importance.
The kid on the line had the eager-to-please tone of an elementary school student trying to impress their teacher, which only made the absurdity of the situation even more grating.
Admittedly, I’m a complete dunce when it comes to recognising intricate mind games or sniffing out hidden agendas—probably because I’m far too simple-minded. Disguising my true intentions or engaging in tactical psychological warfare are concepts as foreign to me as a retirement plan is to a suicide bomber. It wasn’t until I told Nate—who responded with nothing more than an exaggerated eye roll—that I even began to grasp the absurdity of the whole affair. But, as always, trivialities like these slip past my attention as effortlessly as a fully armed terrorist sporting an "I Hate America" bandana strolls undetected past a TSA employee busy confiscating shampoo bottles.
Life at the airport carried on as usual until—rue the day—Sylvia called, interrupting a maintenance run on Scott’s Super Cub. Scott, btw, the USDA’s only reliable voice, was as knowledgeable as he was silent, as tight-lipped as an Egyptian pharaoh’s tomb. When he spoke, it was only to offer expert advice, never a word more. I should’ve paid more attention to those rare words of wisdom.
Sylvia, meanwhile, opened the conversation with a curt reminder that she was extremely busy and had very little time to talk but wanted to inform me, nevertheless, that after I had wiped out what felt like an entire rainforest worth of immigration paperwork, all was now under control.
“Worry not,” Sylvia chirped with the confidence of someone who’d just Googled her way through a legal manual. “I’m an immigration lawyer and specialist. I know exactly what I’m doing. This isn’t my first rodeo, and I’ll have you working in no time! Goodbye now—gotta run!”
It wasn’t until later that I discovered her expertise in immigration affairs was, in fact, nonexistent. She wasn’t a lawyer or an attorney but some kind of glorified legal intern—or maybe just someone who wandered too close to the Attorney General’s Office and got swept up in the hiring quota. It would become painfully clear that Sylvia’s career was powered by a bizarre cycle of incompetence: she would wreak havoc, sow unparalleled disaster, and then be transferred to another department to start the chaos anew, like a bureaucratic tornado on an endless loop.
I could tell Nate was slightly miffed when, barely a second after hanging up on Sylvia, my phone started ringing off the hook again. Suddenly, I felt like the overworked complaints hotline operator for an IKEA outlet—endlessly picking up and slamming down the receiver until shoulder and wrist tendinitis became my lifelong, uninvited roommates.
This time, though, it was the director of the Utah branch of the esteemed USDA. Today, for the sake of variety, let’s call him “Dick,” for Richard, of course. Apparently, Dick had a bit more time to spare—roughly 30 seconds before resuming his noble quest of scraping deer carcasses off the freeway. Just enough, it seemed, to rattle off a canned spiel about the job, how he’d “heard all about me,” my “extensive experience,” and how he was absolutely thrilled to meet me. Yakkity-yak.
To cut it short, he needed a postal address to send over the work contract and—after some prodding on my part—spared the absolute minimum amount of time to inform me where I’d be stationed: Fillmore, Utah. A one-horse town and the undisputed epicentre of sheep farming, where the nightlife rivals the wild excitement of a nude beach party at the Arctic Circle.
The moment Scott, the oracle of all things unspoken, walked into the workshop, I couldn’t help but ask him about Dick—specifically, his opinion on the man. Surely, with all Scott’s knowledge and wisdom, he could spare me a little advice, especially considering my naïve, blissfully ignorant approach to this whole endeavour was bound to land me in deep, unforeseen trouble.
Scott stared at me, his face a masterclass in internal conflict, torn between the moral dilemma of crushing my childish little dreams and the far more pressing task of warning me about the catastrophic danger lurking ahead. In true Scott fashion, he opted for the safest route—he said nothing.
And that, my friend, should’ve been my cue to run for the hills, toothbrush in hand, and start a promising career in the far less hazardous art of scrubbing motel room toilets in bomb-riddled Bosnia. In hindsight, I wish I had.
But, of course, I hadn’t.
Still, amidst the never-ending excitement of our Sisyphean efforts to clear the runway for planes that would never arrive—possibly because visibility was so low I needed a torch, a life vest, and a signal revolver just to cross the apron to the workshop—life had even more thrills in store for me.
No sooner had the burden of my looming written test lifted from my shoulders than it was replaced by the soul-crushing prospect of a six-hour instrument flight in that airborne harbinger of misery, the PA28, which we had somehow deemed suitable for my training.
To make matters worse, I was about to be crammed into this flying third-world bucket, packed so tightly that being buried alive would’ve felt like a honeymoon suite by comparison. My companion for this airborne purgatory? A meticulous instructor who treated strict adherence to aviator standards and radio procedures as humanity’s magnum opus—a sentiment he tirelessly hammered home. Not that it mattered much, since my mounting terror at our ever-increasing altitude rendered any chance of coherent radio communication laughable. I had my hands full deciphering the cryptic riddle of holding patterns while valiantly staving off a full-blown panic attack.
While I’ve mercifully forgotten most of that eternal airborne travel holocaust, one brief episode stands out—a moment where I seized control, left Art, my instructor, utterly speechless, and gave him a firsthand lesson in what real seat-of-the-pants flying was all about.
We had just broken through the imaginary low clouds at 300 feet, the runway level with us off to the left, when I wrestled the controls from my stunned instructor and told him to sit tight and observe. He protested, insisting we make a nice, smooth extension for a proper final approach. Instead, I yanked the controls hard to the left, nosedived 180 degrees toward the threshold, and flawlessly planted the plane on the runway like I’d been born to do it. Art was left staring at me, his jaw somewhere around his knees.
“Art,” I said, unbuckling my harness, “you might be the reigning champion of IFR procedures and fancy radio calls, but nobody—and I mean nobody—beats me at bush flying. I could land this flying dumpster on a spot so tight even a cockroach would think twice.”
With that, I taxied to the fuel station, parked the plane, climbed out, and walked off to the coffee shop, leaving Art to piece together his shattered confidence.
It became glaringly obvious to both Art and me that our partnership had run its course. The reasons were numerous, and for almost all of them, I was squarely to blame. From the start of our training, I had warned Art that I wasn’t just a difficult student—I was downright stubborn. I had made it abundantly clear that I regarded the entire endeavour as a colossal waste of time and money, only tolerable because I had capped my patience (and wallet) at two months and $10,000.
“If we’re not done by the end of December,” I had told him flatly, “then there’s no point in starting at all.”
Art, with the confidence of a man who had clearly never met me, assured me it could be done. But even he seemed taken aback by my blatant disregard for IFR flying and my unshakable disdain for the intricacies of a system he held so dear.
To be clear, none of this is meant to diminish Art’s abilities. He’s a fine man and a superb instructor. The problem lay not with him but with the sheer incompatibility of his typical students and me. Before meeting me, Art was used to guiding aspiring private pilots who viewed their instructors as sages, even gods. Naturally, I was none of that. My flying résumé was so radically different from theirs that any attempt to fit me into the standard mould was doomed from the start.
With just 50 hours on my license, I’d been thrown into the chaotic abyss of African bush flying—a trial by fire where the only rule was survival. Adversaries would sabotage your tanks with sugar to unceremoniously eliminate you, poachers would shoot at you mid-flight, and “maintenance” was little more than a cruel joke, turning perfectly good machines into airborne disasters waiting to happen. Radios, if used at all, were for vague landing announcements or the occasional taxi order.
A crucible like that produces a very particular kind of aviator. Unfortunately, in my case, it also cemented a deep-seated mistrust of rules, regulations, and anything resembling authority. I was, in essence, the anti-student—an extreme product of necessity and chaos.
I suspect Art, in search of solace, began spending more time than originally planned with his more docile students. To his credit, he tried to guide me toward a different approach, suggesting I log simulator hours at a flight school in Cody. On paper, it was an excellent plan. In reality, of course, it wasn’t.
The first hurdle in this debacle was, unsurprisingly, the TSA—an agency whose sole purpose, it seems, is to drive flight students to the brink of madness. For reasons entirely opaque to me, the simple act of spending a few hours at a different flight school necessitated enduring yet another arduous and costly clearance process. The entire ordeal was so laughably ridiculous and utterly fruitless—designed, no doubt, by sadists—that I promptly decided to ignore their intrusive demands altogether. I’ll spare you further details to avoid wasting both our time.
Now, onto the simulator—a brief, twistedly entertaining endeavour.
Arriving at Cody’s flight school with the optimistic plan of logging two hours in the morning and two in the afternoon, I was greeted by my instructor: a young, highly motivated Amish girl fresh out of recruitment. She led me to what could only be described as a dressing room from Macy’s, complete with curtains.
With an enthusiastic but misplaced sense of authority, she explained the day’s agenda. I was to perform several procedures—holding patterns, ILS landings, and other soul-sappingly dull tasks—using a setup consisting of three TV screens and controls that resembled a child’s gaming console.
Sitting before this contraption, I felt as though I had been transported back to the Stone Age and handed a Rubik’s Cube. The connection between what my eyes saw on the screen and what my brain translated into action was nonexistent.
We never even left the virtual ground. Instead, my panicked flailing on the controls resulted in a cinematic disaster: the imaginary plane plunged into an imaginary forest, sparking an imaginary catastrophe of global proportions. The imaginary airport was ablaze, and I imagine imaginary first responders were shaking their heads in despair.
My Amish instructor was left speechless, her face a mix of bewilderment and something I could only assume was profound existential questioning. As for me, I was left wondering whether the TSA might have actually been the lesser of two evils after all. With that, I grabbed my meagre belongings, vacated the building in complete silence, and left behind a disheartened young instructor, who—after witnessing my catastrophic flight simulation—was probably now reconsidering her life choices. I wouldn't have been surprised if, by the end of the day, she'd been in touch with a needlepoint club, contemplating a more peaceful, less soul-crushing career.
Similarly disheartened was Art, but that was of little consequence because December was swiftly drawing to a close, and so was my interminable IFR training. By then, I had come to a conclusion: if the USDA truly wanted my services, they could foot the bill for the remaining 5 hours of training and the check ride. Simple as that.
But, as is the way with most things in my life, the flight training situation resolved itself in the most unpredictable and inconvenient of manners.
It had been three weeks since my last conversation with the high priestess of immigration, the infallible Sylvia. Since then, Salt Lake City had been eerily silent, save for the occasional chirp from Dick, the USDA director. I found this rather odd, but I convinced myself that Sylvia's supposed brilliance and connections must have made further follow-ups unnecessary. The year ended, a new one began, and on January 4th, I finally decided to call her office. There were two very pressing matters at hand: first, my extended tourist visa was about to expire on the 21st, which I found mildly alarming, and second, my first day of work was scheduled for February 1st. I figured it was time to start planning my move to Fillmore, Sheep County—perhaps I should start hunting for a place to stay, or at the very least, a decent tent.
The immigration office kindly informed me of my impending doom with a letter announcing the imminent termination of my tourist visa. Sylvia, ever the beacon of reassurance, dismissed my concerns with a casual wave, like a teacher telling a panicked first grader not to stress about a math test. “Not to worry, Marcel,” she chirped. “I’ll handle that. Odd they haven’t heard about your work visa application, but, hey, immigration is even more useless than the DMV.”
Her confidence didn’t quite rub off on me, but I dutifully promised to call Dick to sort out housing in Fillmore. Maybe I’d even check out my future plane while I was at it. And, who knows? I might even sign a contract if the stars aligned.
Two days later, a follow-up letter from immigration landed in my mailbox. My work permit application, they informed me, was inconclusive. Translation: the application was blank. Completely. Apart from my name and the USDA address, every field was untouched. Naturally, I rolled up my sleeves, filled out the paperwork myself, and sent it back, plastered with so many Post-it notes it resembled a kindergarten art project.
The following day, my contract finally arrived, signed by Dick himself. A tiny flicker of comfort. He assured me he’d be in touch about housing and handed over a contact to arrange a meeting about the plane.
If not for the arrival of the signed contract, I’d have ended this dreadful circus right then and there, packed my bags, and headed for a sunny beach instead. Wyoming’s temperatures were plummeting to a bone-shattering -38 degrees—so cold even a penguin would’ve thrown on a parka.
In the bureaucratic Bermuda Triangle of Salt Lake's Attorney General, Dick’s USDA office in Utah, and Homeland Immigration, Cedar City’s Tom was the lone glimmer of sanity. Occasionally, he’d check in, asking how things were progressing and assuring me that everything would work out in the end. Sadly, inter-agency cooperation was nonexistent on the best of days; on the worst, it was a competition to see who could throw the first monkey wrench. Honestly, declaring a sword wielding bedouin the king of Norway would’ve been a smoother process.
Still, if I could claw my way into the hallowed system with a proper work permit, I’d have my pick of jobs at Wyoming’s predator control outfit. Small dreams in a land of endless red tape.
When my papers were returned for the second time by immigration—this time because the haplessly inept Sylvia had forgotten to include the required payment—I felt as though I’d been flung headfirst into a festering pit of bureaucratic despair. My extended tourist visa had officially expired—an unprecedented failure in over 30 years of frequent visits to the USA. Suddenly, every trip to the mailbox or grocery store felt like a high-stakes game of hide-and-seek with a trigger-happy TSA rookie lurking in the shadows, itching to slap on cuffs and deport me to some phantom location that even Google Maps hasn’t dared to acknowledge.
As before, I called Sylvia, who seemed so bizarrely detached from the entire fiasco that calling her indifferent would’ve been a glowing compliment to the concept of apathy. Still, she somehow managed to pin the blame on some inexperienced co-worker, though I struggled to picture who that might have been. By this point, even Beavis and Butthead, staring blankly into the middle distance, radiated more competence in immigration matters than the glorified human Post-it note ever managed.
It was time to take action and grab the bull—or cow in this case—by the horns. I called every possible contact I could conjure up: Dick, Tom, the Utah Attorney General, the President of the United States, and even, for a fleeting moment, considered the Pope.
Dick, predictably, was MIA as usual, likely buried in a meeting, knee-deep in sheep droppings, or scraping mangled deer carcasses off the highway. Tom, reliable as ever, would eventually return my calls, though his enthusiasm for this circus was visibly cracking under the strain. The Attorney General? Never called back. Instead, I got shuffled off to two dweebs from his legal department who might as well have been interns for all the help they provided.
As for the President, his number proved surprisingly elusive, and the thought of involving the Pope—given my less-than-cordial relationship with religious zealotry—was promptly discarded. Some strings, it seemed, were simply not worth pulling.
My ever-patient and trusty wife—always the one with the sane ideas—suggested we hop into our clattering Rover and drive straight to Salt Lake City to sort things out. Failing that, we could always track down Sylvia and either toss her under a moving dumpster truck or discreetly add her to Dick’s rolling carcass lorry. I agreed with her plan, minus the part involving our decrepit Rover. One good jolt, I argued, and the rolling rubbish repository would scatter itself across the highway like a scrapyard confetti cannon.
After clawing our way through Wyoming’s frozen, desolate passes—buffeted by blizzards and cursed with a heater that stubbornly refused to do the one thing it was designed for—we finally limped into Salt Lake City. The temperature outside hovered at a cheerful -38 degrees, and inside the car? Not much better. It was less a journey and more a masochistic trek through hell’s frozen suburb, miraculously landing us on schedule—though at this point, that felt more like the universe mocking us than anything resembling success.
My grand plan had been simple: meet Dick for the first time, endure the clammy awkwardness of shaking his lukewarm, sweaty hand, collect my contract along with the holy grail of paperwork (my work permit), and continue our jolly odyssey down to grotty Fillmore to move into our new "home."
Naturally, none of that was destined to happen. Instead, we were thrown headlong into the crescendo of the most absurd, infuriating, and outright revolting bureaucratic farce I had ever witnessed. When we reached USDA headquarters, the ship had been well and truly abandoned. The only survivor? Dick, who—given his size—had likely gotten wedged in the emergency exit during his attempt to flee.
While Tom, the military man, was all trim efficiency and radiated competence, Dick was his perfect antithesis. He looked like someone who belonged behind the counter at McDonald’s, flipping burgers with greasy precision. The closest he’d ever come to physical exercise might’ve been watching a late-night infomercial for vibrating massage belts between reruns of his favourite soap operas. Though amiable, Dick was a certified slob. If he ever went camping, the bears would hide their food.
Predictably, after we awkwardly squeezed into his conference room—his chair protesting under the weight of his grotesque bulk, squeaking as if it might just collapse into the floor under the pressure—the conversation achieved precisely nothing. It was the same tired parade of excuses, each one more absurd than the last, as Dick threw everyone and everything under the proverbial bus: "I don’t know what happened. The office is to blame. I never followed up on the visa process..." (Bravo, Dick! Truly, you’re a master of accountability).
In an utterly futile attempt to project some semblance of authority, he dialled up the General's office, demanding to speak to Sylvia, who, as it turned out, had been transferred to some mythical location that doesn’t exist on this planet or functions as the final resting place for discarded DMV and TSA employees alike. What used to be Sylvia's working cubicle until a few days ago was now an apocalyptic dust bowl—forms, applications, and correspondence strewn around like an abandoned battlefield, and likely, a desk piled high with half-digested fast food wrappers, the likes of which the world hadn't seen since the notorious Messy Mike fled to Nebraska.
Why anyone had ever trusted Sylvia with the task of handling my visa—and reducing what was once called my life to a smouldering pile of rubble—was a mystery even Sherlock Holmes couldn’t solve. She was a walking disaster in human form. Having been yanked from some other department a year earlier—presumably to a round of applause as she set that place on fire too—her qualifications were... let's just say questionable. The only real credential she seemed to have was her friendship with the deputy director of some USDA offshoot. To quote a former colleague: "Sylvia was okay, I guess, but frankly, she couldn’t tell the difference between an Arab and an armchair, which is why we relegated her to minor tasks that wouldn’t let her cause too much destruction here."
Like, say, handling my visa—because clearly, entrusting her with something as trivial as my entire future was a masterclass in bureaucratic genius and razor-sharp diligence.
"Let me get this straight, Dick," I said, my voice dripping with restrained fury. "I’m now trapped in some catastrophic vortex where I don’t have the job you promised, nor the work visa I trusted you to handle. Which means I’m here illegally, unable to finish the IFR rating I’ve sunk eight grand into—a certification now about as useful to me as a coat hanger in a coffin. Oh, and let’s not forget: I’m homeless too. Does that about sum up the unmitigated disaster you’ve orchestrated, or am I missing some punchline here?"
"Eh, yes, I believe that about sums it up," Dick stammered, his face the perfect blend of guilt and indifference. "I’m sorry, but we did start looking for another pilot in case your visa doesn’t come through. Unfortunately we haven’t found anyone yet…”
Ah, yes, nothing says we’ve got your back like scouting your replacement before the body’s even been identified. A true testament to loyalty—assuming loyalty was a word you’d use to describe a parasite abandoning its host.
We left Dick in his conference room, wedged into his gaming chair like a beached basilosaurus, and headed out. I needed air and, more importantly, a sane voice or even the faintest glimmer of advice. So, naturally, I called Tom down in Cedar City. After all, we had happily planned for me to swing by in a few days to pick up my USDA gear—a flashy flight suit, a prized gun, and a Star Wars Stormtrooper-style aviation helmet. Then I’d launch into flight training to learn how the USDA handled low-level flying, compared to my own method, which relied entirely on gut feeling and pure recklessness.
To my surprise, Tom had no advice beyond promising to reach out to a friend in Washington. I could only hope this "friend" had a direct line to the Director of Homeland Security because, in my current situation, the odds of being shot on sight by a trigger-happy border patrol agent were far too high for comfort.
From that day forward, crickets became my only companions. No word from Dick—no grand surprise there. Utter silence, to my dismay, from Tom as well—a man whose integrity I had clearly overestimated, his loyalty extending no further than his own precarious position. Even Nate, who knew full well my first job was supposed to kick off that week, maintained a radio silence so deafening it practically hummed with apathy.
As before, on so many occasions far from home, we were reminded of an unchanging truth: as a foreigner in most countries, you don’t count for much—just another shadow passing through, easily overlooked and even more easily dismissed.
Every desperate attempt to summon someone, anyone, with a shred of competence or a modicum of humanity to our cause was met with a void of unconcern. Our visit to the Attorney General’s office—a tragic farce in itself—yielded nothing but two inept imbeciles who appeared in tandem like a pair of overly-attached honeymooners. Panicked and paranoid, they refused to so much as breathe without fear of contradicting each other, though they grudgingly admitted that yes, Sylvia had been an abysmal choice. A poor grasp of legal affairs? Understatement of the millennium. But beyond their collective nodding and hand-wringing, nothing of substance emerged.
Cockroaches stick together, after all—or perhaps it’s better to say: Never wrestle with pigs. You’ll both get filthy, but the pigs revel in it.
And so, after squandering an entire week in Salt Lake City—a desolate wasteland of spineless bureaucrats and wasted hours—we left. Left with a single, fleeting prayer: that a Sodom-and-Gomorrah-level catastrophe would strike the USDA’s offices, condemning every last one of its gutless paper-pushers to an eternal sentence of uncontrollable diarrhoea. Let them wrestle that from their ergonomic office chairs.
As always, when faced with insurmountable challenges and mounting troubles, we did what we did best: we went shopping. Since we were far away from Wayne's Boot Shop in Cody or Lou Tauber's Western Wear in Casper, we headed north through the Arctic cold to the stunning town of Jackson, WY—beautiful only during the quiet winters when there are fewer vegetable-smoothie-slurping vegans clogging up the streets.
How our life—or what remained of it after the brutal demise of our so-called American Dream—unfolded is a tale best saved for next week's story.
Marcel Romdane,
shovelling snow.
When life kicks you in the teeth, smile! Rather chilly around here... Sorry, you cant park here... Damn, it is cold!
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