All I want are my reindeer earmuffs

December 2022

Christmas is upon us and I still don’t have my reindeer ear muffs.

I ordered them weeks ago, way before Halloween, online, from a party supplies place that promised they’d have them shipped the next day. I’d get email updates, they promised, as my antlered earwear made its way from China, over the Pacific, to the port of Los Angeles and then across the country by truck to Hedgesville.

I was thrilled. I had pined for them for years, but thought I’d be embarrassed actually wearing them. Once I entered my golden years, though, I began cultivating a “who cares?” attitude and took the leap. The version I bought even had twinkly little LED lights.

So I logged on to keep track. Yep, the muffs arrived in LA the first week of November. It took four days for them to be loaded onto a Party Express tractor-trailer, but then they headed east, across the Mojave Desert and into Nevada.

The trucker was making good time. And in a few hours I got a note saying he and my muffs   had reached Las Vegas.

Las Vegas?

Nothing, then for five days, until the end of the week when I opened an email that made no mention of the truck but said the muffs were in Tucson.

Tucson?

Another five days, and I called Party Express. Customer service was a little evasive, but promised to get back to me.

“Hello? Yes, this is Dave. You found my earmuffs? Great!”

The voice on the other end was fading in and out. But it seemed to be saying that the muffs were probably in good condition, still in a cardboard box inside a big steel shipping container. But the container was sitting on the ground on the U.S.-Mexico border.

“Where? In Arizona? In the San Rafael Valley?” I said.

The voice continued with something about “border wall,” “illegal immigrants” and “Governor Doozy” but then faded away.

I hurried back to my desktop and launched a search. Sure enough, Gov. Doug Ducey was building a barrier and had so far deployed nearly 1,000 containers, double stacked, along the border.

His plan was to use 3,000 containers to construct a wall nearly 10 miles long and costing more than $95 million. He said he was forced to do it to protect Arizonans, who were getting no help in the immigration crisis from Washington, D.C.

Ducey didn’t say what he was going to do about the other 360 miles of border Arizona shares with Mexico. But I’d guess he’s been trying to low-profile himself about his high-profile wall because of angry people like me. All I wanted for Christmas was a pair of reindeer antler earmuffs --  twinkly ones, yes, I admit.  But other people were probably waiting for far more substantial gift lists.

Alas, I thought, we’ll all probably be waiting a long time, given the fact that the border wall is in a very remote area and hard to reach, even for illegals and drug traffickers. And the whole thing will be tied up in the courts for some time because federal agencies have sued Ducey, saying he’s building on their land and without their permission.

On top of that, environmentalists – even National Geographic magazine – are protesting the damage that’s being done by the construction. They’ll slow things down, for sure.

When the governor started the wall he promised that the containers he’d be buying would be old empties, weighing less than 10,000 pounds apiece. But, by my calculations, it will take 111,000 of them if he finishes the barrier all the way from New Mexico in the east to California in the west, leaving a lot of room for a mistake or two. Here and there in that two-layer barrier, there’s likely to be a container filled with Christmas stuff, hot but intact.

But finding that brick in the wall will be like looking for a needle in a haystack. Do they have some kind of radar for that?

There’s hope, though. Ducey, a Republican, is leaving office early in January and is unlikely to get his project completed. His successor, Democrat Katie Hobbs, says the wall is a waste of money and she’ll probably stop it.

If that happens, it may give us all a chance to go down and look for our muffs and stuff. They say Arizona is nice and warm in the winter.

But if I find my antler earmuffs, I’ll still wear them. I’ll send you a selfie, with one of those big arm-stretched cactuses in the background.