Jimmie (J.J.) Walker was on Letterman tonight, complaining about how he was hassled by the TSA while trying to fly home from Costa Rica through Houston. Apparently, they had searched his luggage and found notes for his comedy routine. They thought he might be a terrorist because he had made a cryptic notation about the Christmas Bomber and Tiger (Woods). The TSA has no sense of humor and could not fathom any reason for the references in a comedian's notes/outline. He was annoyed. It reminded me about my own experience with suspicious airport authorities wanting me to explain the contents of my luggage.
I don’t think I look like a terrorist, but, since 9/11, how many people must have thought this even as they were molested in a pat-down, had the inside of their shoes examined, and were otherwise subjected to intense scrutiny, simply for trying to get from one place to another via a commercial airline? Shortly before 9/11, I was surprised when I was once caught up in the kind of search that we now take for granted when flying.
In 2000, Jack and I were in Mexico. We’ve been going to Chiapas, an impoverished state in Mexico, since 1995, when Jack was five years old. This was our second long trip and we had been in Mexico for two months. It was late June and Jack had to return to the United States to spend the rest of the summer with his father. I was escorting Jack to Atlanta to meet John. We took a taxi to the airport in Tuxtla Gutierrez, the capital of Chiapas, where we would fly first to Mexico City, and then on to Atlanta. I planned to stay overnight at my cousin’s house in suburban Atlanta and then return to Mexico for another five weeks.
There are two airports in Tuxtla Gutierrez. Which one is used depends on the weather, as there can be perfect conditions at one airport while the other is flooded from the summer storms that occasionally sweep through the area. We usually go to “Aeropuerto Teran,” next to a large military installation near the center of the city (the other airport, whose name I never discovered even when passing through it, is about 20 miles north of the city on the Pan American Highway). Teran is the preferred airport, as taxi rides to and from it are substantially cheaper. However, one never knows from which airport one’s flight will leave; it is always wise to arrive at Teran at least an hour before the scheduled departure time, as, if Teran is closed, the other airport is still 30 minutes away. Recently, we arrived at Teran an hour early, only to have them close the airport just before our plane was supposed to depart; all of the travelers were diverted to the other airport in a convoy of taxis, which the airline paid for. We careened wildly through a flooded Tuxtla, speeding through streets with water deep enough to threaten to swamp our taxi. Our fearless driver never halted and we arrived at the other airport just in time to board the plane.
This time, the weather was fine, but we were still sent to the far airport. It has a pleasant little restaurant that overlooks the tarmac. It is located right above the gates, so we could while away any extra time by having a last meal before departing Chiapas. I was bringing several bags to leave at my cousin’s house, which I would pick up on my final return. I had bought enough souvenirs that it would have been impossible for me to bring it all home in one trip. These bags contained many of the treasures that we had come to love while living in Mexico.
Chiapas is known for its unique textiles, pottery, amber, chocolate, and coffee. I usually bring a kilo of coffee back, even though I don’t drink it. My friends tell me that Chiapas coffee is delicious: strong and very smooth, without any bitterness, so I always bring some home. Chocolate is my passion, and I have the hips to prove it. I’ve always loved chocolate. Chocolate has been grown for export on the Pacific coast of Chiapas for over a thousand years. Both the Classic Maya and the later Aztec Empire used cacao beans, the large seeds that are roasted and ground to make chocolate, as money. Counterfeit cacao beans (made of ceramic) have been found, mixed with the remains of real beans, in Maya graves. In my opinion, chocolate makes more sense than gold.
In modern Chiapas, cacao pods are allowed to ferment, then the beans are removed, roasted, ground, kneaded with sugar, and formed into disks that are somewhat larger than a silver dollar; the final product is called “table chocolate.” Jack and I had discovered that a disk of table chocolate, chopped to powder and divided between two big mugs of hot milk, makes the best hot chocolate in the entire world. It is rich, not too sweet, with a hint of spiciness that cannot be found in commercial chocolate. Topped with Mexican cream, which is thicker than American heavy cream, it is ambrosia, while “Swiss Miss” is an abomination straight out of out of hell. The occasional bit of cacao shell in the bottom of one’s cup does nothing to detract from the essential lusciousness of this drink.
I had purchased two kilos of table chocolate, “Excellencia de Chiapas” brand, which was made in San Cristóbal and quaintly packaged in small wooden crates. I had encased the wooden boxes in ziplock bags; otherwise, my belongings would have been flavored by the rich chocolate scent. I then wrapped the packets in clothes in the center of a duffle bag. In this way, we would have plenty of chocolate for the following winter. Since one of my friends had problems with a light-fingered baggage handler on a previous trip, I had secured the zippers of our duffle bags with small padlocks and placed any desirable items (like my mini maglite and my Swiss army knife) near the center, too.
We arrived at the airport with about two hours to spare. I did not want to risk missing the flight and gone to the taxi stand in San Cristóbal quite early. Sometimes, it takes an hour or more to fill a shared taxi from San Cristóbal to Tuxtla, but it is worth it to share, as it costs over US$60 for a personal taxi, while the shared taxi was US$8 per person. Even with two of us, it was still much cheaper to share, but we had a lot of time to kill at the airport. I was overjoyed when we were allowed to check our bags early. Usually, Mexican airports don’t let you check baggage until 30 minutes prior to flight time.
We went to the restaurant to eat lunch; on this trip, I hadn’t taken Jack out to eat as often as he would have liked, as I was on a strict budget. Since I wouldn’t be with Jack for almost six weeks, I wanted to have a last splurge while I still had him. I don’t remember exactly what we ordered; I just know that we feasted. For Jack, this probably meant mole poblano, which is chicken (or turkey) with a spicy chocolate/chile pepper sauce topped with sesame seeds and served with rice, beans, vegetables, and tortillas. It is one of Jack’s (and my) favorite meals. He also liked this restaurant’s club sandwich, consisting of locally-made ham, freshly roasted turkey breast, tomato, and lettuce on squishy white bread, spread with home-made mayonnaise and served with French fries and incredibly sweet catsup. We probably ordered both meals and shared them.
As we ate, I heard an announcement over the airport loudspeaker. Like all public address systems in transportation areas, the voice was nearly incomprehensible, all the more so as it was speaking in garbled Spanish. Whenever I hear one of these cryptic messages, I think that I’m hearing some version of my own name as part of the message, but I’m never actually the person that they are looking for. In this case, the message was so garbled, I didn’t pay any attention. After a leisurely meal, we used the bathroom and strolled downstairs to our gate.
At this airport, there is one large waiting area with about five different exits onto the tarmac. All you had to do was show your ticket to be allowed through the doors and into the gate seating area. We still had about an hour before our flight, and, once again, someone was paged over the public address system. Again, the whole message was severely garbled. I remember looking around and wondering if it had been my name called, but who would be paging me at the Tuxtla airport?
Jack and I played games, watched other planes leave, and chatted about all of the things he was going to do in the United States. He was headed to summer camp with some of his gymnastics teammates for a week, then to Cub Scout camp for another week. The first camp had cabins and indoor plumbing but the second had platform tents and outhouses. Jack had never been to an overnight camp before and I was anxious because he was going off to camp and I wasn’t even going to be in the same country! Finally, they called our flight. We had lined up to exit onto the tarmac when a pair of uniformed men stopped me, one asking if I was Mar-ee-ay Rob-ee-son. I said I was and he asked why I hadn’t answered any of the pages. I was shocked and told them that I didn’t hear it, which wasn’t entirely true, but I didn’t know how to say that I didn’t believe anyone could have been paging me at that airport.
They brought out our luggage and asked if I would, por favor, open the locks. I pulled out my keys and opened the bags. The one in charge quickly located the two lumps in the center of the biggest duffle bag. He unwrapped the clothing and looked at the first wooden box inside the plastic bag, asking, “What ees thees?” I flipped the plastic bag over to expose the paper sticker on the wooden box and said, “Chocolate. Me gusta mucho la chocolate de Chiapas.” He opened the plastic bag, then pried open the wooden box and broke the paper liner to pull out... disks of chocolate. He quickly opened the second box, with the same result. He desultorily sifted through the rest of our bags, but his heart was no longer in the search. We quickly closed up the bags and relocked them, then he thanked me and ordered his subordinate to bring the bags to the plane.
Of course, the plane had loaded all of the other passengers while we were detained. At Mexican airports, they only call passengers for boarding at the last possible minute, so the plane was now in the last stages of preparing for take-off. The men who operate the movable stairs were beginning to pull them away from the plane. All three of us: Jack, myself, and the soldier carrying our luggage, sprinted across the tarmac to the staircase, the poor little soldier greatly burdened by all of our heavy luggage, me gripping Jack by the hand, fearful of losing him in our haste to catch the plane. We got to the foot of the stairs just as they were closing the plane’s door. Jack and I hustled up the steps while the soldier forced the baggage handlers to reopen the baggage compartment. The hostess quickly thrust the usual Mexican candies into my hand for us to suck on (and prevent our ears from hurting on take-off) and pushed us in the direction of our row. The plane took off about ten seconds after we found our seats, so quickly that we had barely time to fasten our seatbelts, never mind unwrap the lollypops. I was baffled by the entire procedure.
It was several months later when I discovered (quite by accident) that chocolate, because of its density, looks exactly the same as plastic explosives when viewed through an x-ray machine. The little crates of chocolate disks, coupled with the nearby batteries in my emergency flashlight, had made airport security very nervous, particularly when I failed to answer their repeated pages. Politics are taken quite seriously in Mexico; the presidential elections were only days away and parts of Chiapas have been in revolt since 1994. For the officials at the Tuxtla airport, no one’s luggage was getting on a plane without being thoroughly checked and my luggage was suspicious. Upon finally locating me, a chubby, clueless gringa accompanied by her cute little blond boy, they must have had doubts about their alarm, but they still had to verify that I wasn’t the terrorist that they feared.
Me - the chocolate bomber. Yum!
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