Terrorist foiled on Southern Ute Reservation

In light of the somewhat recent threads on being pulled over by the cops and the demand for "your papers, please" I thought I'd relate a bizarre incident in which I played a starring role a couple of days ago.

I was on one of my trips over to western Colorado and had dropped down to Farmington, NM to see a Pow Wow celebration put on by the Navajo Indians. It was a pretty cool scene with lots of great dancing and drumming, yummy Navajo fry bread, and very nice, friendly people. By time I left to go back up to Colorado it was beginning to get dark and as I crossed the Colorado line, it started to rain. The slick, wet road caused a big accident which closed off the main road and traffic was routed over a side road into the Southern Ute reservation headquartered in Ignacio, Colorado.

I really didn't want to go to Ignacio, it was the opposite direction from where I needed to go and it also has a bad rep for being the epi-center of lots of drunk driving accidents on weekends and holidays. I decided to check my maps and make myself a sandwich and figure out which road I needed to take. I didn't want to just pull my car off on the narrow shoulder of a winding mountain road in the dark and the rain, so I found a gravel side road and pulled off on it. There were no "No tresspassing" signs, nothing that said it was a private road or anything like that.

I turned off my headlights and was looking at my map under the dome light of my car when suddenly two thugs disguised as Colorado State Patrol officers drove up and blinded me with their lights. They had me get out of my car and while they didn't search the car, they looked in at the contents with their flash lights through the windows. Then they began to interrogate me. Where was I from? Where was I going? Why was I there? What were all those plants inside my car? (I'd gathered some sage as a favor for a Native American friend of mine who wanted to make sage bundles and likes the kind of sage that grows only on the Western Slope). Was I the owner of the car? What was my complete name and address and where was my ID?

I explained that I had just stopped to make a sandwich and look at my maps. I couldn't find my day timer which had my driver's license in it because it had slid under the pile of sage and camping gear I had in the back of my car. They told me I was near a gas pumping field and they had been alerted that there was a possibility of sabotauge to the gas wells in the area. I told them about being routed off the main road due to the accident (which they must have heard about on their car radio), and showed them my half eaten sandwich and my map. They had to have recognized the sage for what it was. It grows everywhere down there and bears no resemblance to any illegal plant. As a middle aged white woman, I find it hard to believe I match any terrorist profile. Never-the-less, I could see them getting ready to haul me in when I couldn't find my ID. I was saved by a message that suddenly came over the radio about a domestic violence call from a trailer park in Ignacio. The thugs were diverted by this, and departed, first ordering me to go to Ignacio to finish my sandwich. Probably, they wanted to know where I'd be so they could collar me after they got through with the domestic violence call.

I watched them go and then high tailed it back over the state line to New Mexico (only 10 miles away), and escaped their clutches.

The moral of the story: When on the Ute reservation, never eat a sandwich; or if you do, at least make sure your papers are in order. Isn't it nice to know that homeland security is working so well?