But what's six hours SOUTH of Phoenix?

Seriously.

San Diego is about 6 hrs. to the west. Las Vegas about 6 hrs. to the north. Albuquerque, New Mexico is 6 hrs. to the east.

For those of you who had social studies after your high school's open lunch hour and you were stoned during that class, one does not need a passport to visit New Mexico.

South is another story. You'll wind up somewhere in Mexico... but that's possibly dangerous, they don't all speak English and it's hard to find a Starbucks. Oh, and you shouldn't drive at night.

It's all true. Starbucks is very overpriced for that market, very few speak English and you shouldn't drive at night because there are dogs, stray farm animals and local vehicles on the road with no lights.

Yeah, and you might get robbed. But that can happen on the street near the Phoenix Airport or lots of places!

It's sort of the same as the attitude people in Wisconsin and Minnesota have about visiting Chicago. It's dangerous.

Great, buy into that idea and you get to stay home and watch whatever's on cable. Catch up on the weather channel and watch the steady diet of fear on the news channel of your choice. What's the threat level today? How many more died in Iraq? (Sure, these things are all important but for most of us only the first one might have a significant impact on your next 48 hours...) Oh, and be sure to believe it all.

I don't buy it - not completely. I have a healthy respect for risk but I'm not going to let fear run my life.

A real issue about exploring six hours south of Phoenix is that it may well take you six hours to get back into the USA. You might sit on the road overnight stopped in traffic on the Mexican side of the border.

There's not much of a middle class in Mexico. (There's less of one here in the USA every day - every time a kid drops out of school, every teenage pregnancy, every new gang member and every new Wal-Mart that opens squeezes our middle class more and more - but I digress.) So the border is real easy to cross heading south but not so much in the other direction. But paradoxically you see a fair number of Mexican-registered cars on the road in Arizona - I notice one or two each day.

You notice something about all those cars too - they are fairly new or at least very well-kept. I.E. the vehicles that get across are owned by corporations or by relatively wealthy people. A VW Jetta is a hell of a lot more expensive in Mexico due to taxes, keep that in mind the next time you see one on the road with Mexican plates.

The seed had been planted for this whole process while I was standing in line at the San Ysidro crossing between San Diego and Tijuana. The cars/travelers in the SENTRI commuter lanes do cross faster.

As the Customs and Border Patrol website says... it's a privilege and not a right to cross. It was interesting to see the demographic when I went to register myself and my car to use the express lanes going northbound. It's a seductive offer. Sell your soul to the man - give up a bunch of information - and get a faster trip north at the end of your travels. Even more seductive for their target demographic - wealthy Mexican citizens.

For me it's already a foregone conclusion. To live in Uruguay I had to give a set of fingerprints to the FBI so they could in turn tell the Uruguayan police I didn't have a record. Visa is everywhere you want to be - and Uncle Sam's nose is following the money every time that machine outside the US says "aprobado" and you sign the slip. Wire transfer? They collect that information too. So it's not like they're asking for anything new.

It DOES tie it all to a couple of RFID's. One goes on your car and the other goes in your wallet.

Signing up with The Man entails a trip to a border post. Nogales is closest but it had no times that were convenient to my schedule. I chose to go to Calexico instead.

They give you an approval letter that you print off the internet. You print it yourself and bring it with you. It has a succinctly worded list of documents you have to bring - if you're employed by someone. If you're self-employed as I am, it's more of a grey area.

The place is damn hard to find.

I've never been to a government office and encountered a representative that didn't speak English fluently. I am not one of these people who pisses and moans about bilingual education and adamantly says English First or English Only. Hardly. But it was a hell of a surprise when the gatekeeper/cashier for the whole process could not put together a coherent sentence in English.

It was a bit like a visit to a government office south of the border. Much more well appointed - US tax dollars at work to have the place air conditioned and as well finished as a retail store. Not a typewriter in sight, lots of high tech equipment. What it DID have is a lot of employees standing around with lots of idle time and an unclear process.

I had called to try to find out exactly what documents were necessary if you've been an employee half the year and self-employed the other half of the year. To borrow a phrase from the media "A telephone call requesting comment was not immediately returned."

So it began with the gatekeeper. Show her the letter and start asking about documents. It becomes clear that this conversation is not going to go far in English. We're clearly going to have a heated conversation about documents and I'm more accustomed to doing that in Spanish anyway.

I'll translate bits and pieces. It's not an unfriendly conversation, more a battle of wits. It's adversarial but sugar coated and respectful.

"What is all this? Where is your business license?"

"This is it. It's proof that I've registered with the state of Arizona and my tax ID numbers for federal and state."

"But you need a business license!"

"Not according to my CPA. This is as close to a business license as I have or need."

"You need a utility bill to prove your address."

"It doesn't specify that in the letter. It said rent or mortgage receipts - those are two recent ones. I have my voter registration card which was issued December 7th, 2007 in the state of Arizona. It was mailed to me."

"But you need a utility bill, everyone needs a utility bill"

"It doesn't say that in the letter. If anyone ever answered the phone here I might have known that. Instead I have this brand new voter registration card mailed to me by the state of Arizona."

"Ok. But your bank statement has to be the original it can't be printed off the internet."

"Your agency's own acceptance letter is printed off the internet. My bank doesn't send statements, it makes them available for download. This is very common."

She thought she had me. "You don't have your last year's tax return for your business. You have your own but there is nothing here for your business showing it paid taxes."

"My incorporation document shows that my business did not exist before August of 2007. Therefore there is no tax return for it for 2006 because it did not exist then."

Pause.... "So where are your tax reciepts then?"

"Here is the report from my payroll service showing the thousands of dollars in federal and state taxes."

"I've never seen anything like this."

"The dollar amounts on the report match up with the deductions from the bank account, I'm not hiding anything." She looks at me as if I have more to say but I remain silent.

It is at this point that I have to give thanks to the employees of the Uruguayan "Departamento" (state) of Canelones - particularly in the Atlantida and Pando offices - for training me to argue so well. Without help from them and other experiences I would have been intimidated and given up early on - or at least been beaten back to return a second time just because of the cross-examination.

Finally she assembled everything together into a file folder and handed me a "welcome packet" explaining the program. I'd gotten past the first step. "Ok take a seat, we'll call you."

It wasn't quite over but it was looking good. I was still VERY surprised that I'd just had to justify my existence and income IN SPANISH to an official of the US government.

Ok, time to regroup. Wonder what's going on in the outside world... The TV is of no help. Crystal clear picture, I thought it was a DVD. However the rabbit ears are concealed behind a fake plant on top of the cabinet where the TV is. The TV is showing channel 5 from Mexicali - Mexican television. I see a toy commercial showing a URL at the end - something at mattel.com.mx. Ok, it's childrens programming... Any messages on my cellphone?

My phone is roaming on Telcel, one of the Mexican services. Five bars of signal too! Must not be any T-mobile signal. This'll cost at least twenty bucks on next month's bill.

Then I get called for phase two of the inquisition. This officer has already been briefed about the weak spots in my documentation. I politely but firmly hold my ground. THIS conversation is in English.

"Well, ok, you do esentially have everything but you just have your business bank statement here. We need your personal one too."

This eventually got resolved. All I will say is they were willing to work with me.

So after that negotiation was finished, "one more thing..." It's a double sided questionnaire about previous travels. It's some of the same information that I was required to provide online at the start of the process - i.e. they're verifying if I was really the same person who filled out the online questionnaire. The questions would cause privacy advocates to foam at the mouth.

If you live in the USA you simply don't have any privacy. No sense raising the alarm about all the horses being missing when the stable door has been open for years.

They even ask about tattoos and piercings. I'm not kidding.

As I fill out the questionnaire I glance at the TV. I get distracted for a minute while I see one MX government ad about "transparencia" and then another touting (and reminding viewers of) human rights.

I turn the questionnaire in. They look it over. "Why were you in Uruguay so long?" I answer the question. "Write it down on the form just like you said."

Finally we're finished. The officer takes a picture of me with a little webcam they have attached to the workstation. They have the same little machine that foriegners entering the US encounter - the fingerprint reader. Again, I don't care about giving up the prints. Did it already to BE in Uruguay that long.

"Go pay the cashier." She points at the same lady where you start the process. I go pay the $97.50 fee. I get a receipt and get told to go back to the officer's station. This back and forth is eerily reminiscent of Latin American bureaucracy at its finest.

She hands me a card with a very bad picture of me. It outdoes my Arizona driver's license for having a bad picture. It simply says "SENTRI" - the name of the trusted traveler program and has some other information on it. The card is an RFID. There's a pamphlet that explains what the reader looks like in the "Sentri" lane at the border crossing and how to hold the card so the reader is most likely to correctly interrogate it.

"This card is not proof of citizenship. You still have to have your passport. You're going to get a card in the mail at some point in the future that IS proof of citizenship."

Then come the teeth in the process.

The officer hands me the "Know before you go" pamphlet. It's on the web. "Sign this." It's an acknowledgment that I've received a copy and will read/abide by it.

"You will get a faster crossing experience. However, be sure to declare everything. Now that you're in the program it's zero tolerance. If we catch you with an extra bottle of undeclared liquor it's going to be the full penalty the first time. You will have to pay 30 times the US value of that bottle AND have to pour it out. Ordinarily the first time we catch something like this you just forfeit it. Understand?"

"Yes, I understand." What am I gonna do at this point? Protest?

"Ok, last step, go out and pull your car up to the yellow area by the building entrance. I need to verify that the vehicle matches the registration and insurance documents and put a sticker in the windshield."

I go out to the parking lot. My car is the only one in the SENTRI parking area with US registration. It's also the oldest car in the parking lot, by a good five years.

I pull up. The cuteness of the dog is noted (yeah Shaggy went with). The numbers are verified. A sticker is put inside my windshield. When there is bright light shining through the sticker you can see the embedded radio antenna inside it. Otherwise its completely nondescript. No markings. Much thinner than one of those toll transponders.

I'm not sure in retrospect how I feel about the whole thing. But its done and whats more - I have nothing to hide. I might feel a lot different if I'd never gotten Uruguayan residency - but if I'd never been there I wouldn't speak Spanish. I'll write about what Shaggy and I find six hours south of Phoenix in the future when we make the trip. Gotta get her papers in order next.