ROC and me

2008-03-08T17:45:00.000-08:00

The once-warm afternoon air is rapidly cooling, shadows are starting to stretch across the pasture below the house, and the dogs are following me every time I take a step. This March afternoon is wearing thin, and so are my good spirits as I pack for another in the long series of biweekly trips back east. For the first time in years I’m going on a trip without my rope. The daily stress-relief I find each evening in the course of throwing a couple of hundred loops won’t be there. It pisses me off.

Not a lot I can do about it though. Faced with a choice between leaving my rope behind or allowing the government-sanctioned private security forces to once again grope through my belongings unfettered by any rights individuals in this country used to possess, I’ll leave my rope.

This may sound a bit ridiculous, but to me it’s not. I travel all over the country and the world, to the tune of a couple of hundred thousand miles a year. I go through security checkpoints multiple times a week. My belongings are subject to continual scans and checks. I don’t complain, unless something is way out of whack. The checked baggage inspection at the airport in Rochester, New York, (ROC) is an example of somewhere that things are way out of whack.

Of my last ten trips through ROC, my checked bag has been opened and “inspected” (McNeil Security Inc.’s term for “rifled through, left in disarray, and items lost”) five times. I’m three for three on my last departures. You’d think that there was something about me, or my luggage, that was suspicious. Either that or that 50% was the normal rate for checked baggage inspection on domestic flights.

Neither of these is true, of course. The same bag (a green, common, hard sided Samsonite case), checked in by the same traveler (me), get opened and inspected less than 5% of the time everywhere except ROC. On those occasions when my bag has been opened, everything has been left in good order, and nothing has been missing. That is, with the exception of those occasions when I’ve gone through ROC. Those inspections can best be compared to coming home and finding that your house has been “tossed”, with small items you know were in there (a metal collar stay, a luggage key, a sewing kit) missing.

From now on, my rope stays home when I go to Rochester. It’ll travel with me everywhere else in the world, but not there. Soon as possible, I won’t be going there either.

8 Seconds at a Time

ROC and me