Escapades in a Weird and Far-off Place

This is the story of a young and beautiful Canadian girl who miraculously packed at least 3 truckloads of clothing and shoes into 2 suitcases and set off from the land of hockey and government subsidized health care and traveled a ridiculous high number of km (which is a slightly less ridiculously high number of miles) to the sunny commonwealth of Virginia, where large plantation homes remind us of more prejudiced times and where opossums roam the streets in frightening numbers.

The story begins on a blistery winter morn at the airport in the Northern city of Calgary, which carries a slight smell of cattle in the air and is known mostly as the setting of the Jamaican Bobsled team’s inspiring Olympic debut. The day was November 8th, and the task ahead of out heroine, Theresa Miller, was Operation: American Eagle. However, despite the best laid plans of mice and men, the operation met complications from the beginning: instead of passing through immigration in Calgary, as originally planned, Theresa was not scheduled to reach customs until she arrived in Toronto, over half a continent away from the comfort of home. But Theresa, being the intrepid, and slightly crazy, adventurer that she is, decided that because she had already packed and drove to the airport, she might as well carry through with the original plan, even though there was a good chance that she would be stopped in Toronto and subsequently become stranded in that great metropolis, having wasted the hundreds of dollars that she could have been refunded if she had be turned back in Calgary and without hope. The decision was, to say the least, daring, and became a source of great anxiety to her husband, as well as to herself, when she finally realized the gravity of her choice somewhere over Manitoba.

When our heroine arrived at her layover and presented her passport to the authorities, an alarm was immediately raised and she was forcibly escorted into that little room reserved for hardened criminals and illegal immigrants, which may or may not have been room 101. In this detention area, with a bright lamp pointed directly into her face, and sitting opposite a desk to a gruff detective who wore suspenders and a fedora and who had the habit of repeatedly rolling up his sleeves and smoking a bent cigarette, Theresa was given the “good cop, bad cop routine,” until well after her connecting flight began boarding. Finally, after thoroughly searching her bags and examining her documents, the immigration officer decided to let her pass, but only if she could answer riddles three. Unfortunately for Theresa, this particular officer was a cousin to one of UVa’s law professors, and the riddles actually came from one of her previous exams*. The riddles were:

1. I'm thinking of a number between 1 and 10. Tell me what it is.

2. Imagine that a train engine is passing by a house, and sparks from the train ignite the roof of the barn. Now imagine that that train is actually from the future, the barn is made of dark chocolate instead of wood, and instead of throwing sparks, the train engine is spitting out knives. Is the defendant still negligent?

3. Give me some magic language and repeat it at least 3 times.

Luckily, Theresa was able to answer the first two questions correctly by saying, “11” and “yes, because the United States is a country where every rediculous lawsuit should be rewarded, the Defendent is always guilty, no matter how contrived the Planitiff's story is.” She avoided the last question by punching the immigration officer in his ample gut and running out of the room and across the entire airport with her shoes and belt in her hands and her pants almost falling down. At the very last moment, our hero was able to board her departure by jumping from the gate and grabbing onto the airplane door, just as the flight attendant was closing it. (She did, however, drop her package of fireworks, which exploded and caused mass claims against Air Canada for negligently encouraging her to jump onto a moving plane, which was subsequently dropped because the previous description of America's love of frivolous lawsuits does not also describes Canada's policies).

Theresa scrambled onto the plane and this story ends happily for all; Op. AE was a complete success and Theresa arrived safely in Virginia Wednesday night, much to the gratitude of her husband and just in time for the couple’s 6 month anniversary on Nov. 13th.

*provided by a fellow student, used with permission
**Story co-authored by Theresa Miller and may be slightly exaggerated (Seriously though, Theresa was interrogated thoroughly in Toronto and almost missed her connecting flight).