The Great Sugar Twin Caper

A creative writing project enhanced with a few fabrications, a vivid imagination, and a little poetic license from a daughter who was probably a little sleep deprived due to a 72 hour, 3000 mile trip with 5 people crammed into a Jeep. In reality, nothing in the least illegal happened.

Sweet Nothings: The story of an American family and their brush with the law

It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon. It was the kind of day where the cloudless sky seems to go on forever and a person would be a fool to go out without their sunglasses. Still, the bags under my eyes, the wrinkles in my clothes and the crick in my neck prevented me from enjoying it. We had already been driving for two days when we reached the little town outside of Edmonton, Canada. I mustered up an inward groan as I heard my mother say, “Here is a good place as any to get the Sugar Twin. We can’t be guaranteed another chance between here and the border.” My jaw dropped. We were actually going to do it, and on Sunday!

We parked in front of the local grocery store and I shuffled in behind my family. I was sure that we already looked suspicious. These Canadians were smart and could probably smell a rat, and a foreigner a kilometer away. My mother handed each of us a basket, and gave us a mission...to find the Sugar Twin, a Canadian product similar to Equal or Sweet & Low. Sugar Twin is illegal to sell in the United States because of an ingredient in it called cyclamate which, according to the FDA, will cause cancer if you consume about 600 gallons of it (number approximated).



I located it first and beckoned to my family. My mom and my little sister came over but my older sister and my dad carefully ignored me. They pretended to be enthralled in a conversation about which brand of graham crackers was better, thus appearing that they were in no way connected with us. Why hadn’t I thought of that? Then my mom could have done her own dirty work! With fast calculations, we estimated how much we could buy with the $100 my grandparents had given us. Breathing became more and more difficult as the boxes were pulled from the shelves. We were going to buy the entire shelf stock.

As we neared the cashier, the hairs rose on my neck. I was sure that everyone in the store was watching. Was this illegal or just gray? Would we get into trouble? Would the fact that we were doing it on Sunday push it into the black area? If we didn’t get in trouble with the law, would a worse fate await us in Hell?

“That’s an awful lot of Sugar Twin,” the cashier observed while ringing up the five baskets.

“My parents are diabetic,” my mother replied. “This kind of sweetener is good for canning, so they ask us to bring them some when we come through Canada.”

“Marijuana can be good, too, but you can’t smuggle that into the country,” I thought to myself. I heaved a sigh of relief when we finally exited the store, but I knew it wasn’t over yet. We still had hundreds of miles to go before we reached the border.

Once out in the Jeep, my mother instruted us to open all the boxes and compact the little packets into as few boxes as we could. Her reason was our lack of space, but I was sure that the real reason was so we would look less suspicious. Foreigners driving through the country with an excess of any product are bound to raise a few eyebrows. We tossed the boxes into the back and made our way to the provincial highway.

As dusk was beginning to appear, we pulled into a gas station outside of Calgary to fill up and stretch our legs. A dented, rusty pick-up pulled into the pump behind us, bringing the smell of manure with it. Out stepped the owner. His stomach was starting to pooch out and the longer hairs on his head were sept over the top to disguise the shine on his scalp. “Someone likes their Twinny, eh?” His accent was the epitome of a mid-western Canadian farmer, thick and entirely indecipherable to teh untrained ear.

“Excuse me?” I asked.

“Someone likes their Twinny, eh?” He spoke as though he had a mouth full of marbles. Even so, this time I understood the words, but his meaning still escaped me.

“What?”

“Someone likes their Twinny, eh?” The Sugar Twin. That’s what he was talking about! How did he know? Would he turn us in? Could we just plead dumb American? What would happen? Would ‘smuggler’ be stamped on my permanent records? I was 18 now, they could try me as an adult! Oh no! How stupid of us to leave the boxes in full view in the back window!

“Uh, sure,” I replied, my knees shaking and all sensation disappearing in my arms from the elbow down.

“Well, have a safe trip.” I quickly analyzed those last words and finding no double meaning, I realized that he was being friendly like every other Canadian we had met along the way. For the second time that day, a sigh of relief escaped my lips.

By the time we reached US Customs, the sky was a dark abyss and each star shone as though it believed itself to be the only one in existence. I savored every detail, knowing that I would probably never see the night again from the prison cell that awaited me. We pulled up next to the booth and the customs official peered into our vehicle, scrutinizing every detail. Little did he suspect that this nice little family from Alaska was really a smuggling cartel. I now felt as though I knew the dread and anxiety that drug runners must feel moments before crossing into safety and the desperate measures they were willing to take, swallowing their precious cargo in balloons or hiding it in body cavities. After sizing us up with his steely eyes, he proceeded to ask the usual questions.

“Where are you folks from?”

“Alaska,” my father answered.

“Where are you headed?”

“Utah.”

“Do you have anything to declare?”

“Don’t believe so.” Well, it wasn’t exactly a lie. After all, the average citizen is aware of only 25% of the law (number approximated), I was willing to rationalize.

“Are you carrying any items such as guns, fireworks or produce?”

“Nope.”

“OK, have a good night.” That was it! We had made it! We eased over the border into Montana and for the third time that night, I heaved a sigh of relief. No more would I have to worry about the immediate ethics behind our escapade or whether or not I would have a police record and the only evidence of our caper would be another notch in my belt.