ONE WAY TICKET
It was one of those blazing hot days. The sun was relentless and its rays stung when they hit my skin. My boots left impressions in the dusty soil of the Sonoran Desert, reminding me of Armstrong’s footprints left on the moon. The weight of my holstered Glock 22 pistol against my hip felt like a warm reassurance in the remote area that had trails for drug and human smuggling running through it like veins through a body. The sparkling reflection of my polished badge danced on the sandy wall of the dried-out riverbed they call a “wash” down here. This was Southern Arizona, some 40 miles north of the border with Mexico, and I had responded to a 911 call from a hunter, who said he had found human remains.
Two questions we often used to make fun of the perceived oddity of a situation popped into my head. Where am I? And how did I get here? The thought made me smile. But seriously, how did I get here? If someone would have told me 20 years ago, sitting in a German pub, that I would be a deputy sheriff in Tucson, Arizona one day, I would have immediately asked for whatever drink that person just had. Back then, there was no feasible scenario that would have landed me in the Sonoran Desert.
So how did this German guy from a town in an area known as Eastern Westphalia, Germany, called Gütersloh end up in Tucson? First, since English speakers often have trouble with the pronunciation of the German umlaut, we’ll refer to it from here on out as “G-Town.” Or you can do as my mother-in-law does and call it “Gootersburg.” Either way, I invite you to come along. Slip into my shoes. Walk in my boots. Sit down for a ride-along with this deputy sheriff with the Pima County Sheriff’s Department.
Let me start with an introduction. For that purpose, I’ll take you back to the month of June 2001:
I walked up to the ticket counter in Frankfurt International Airport and felt my heart beat faster, producing a notable thump in my chest. It was not out of anxiety. As an Enterprise Account Manager working for a U.S. software company, I was used to flying. Based out of Frankfurt, I visited my customers in London and New York, flew for business meetings to Paris, and attended training classes in Mountain View, CA. But this time was different. For the first time in my life, I was flying on a one-way ticket. We were headed for Boston, MA, and a whole lot of anticipation, questions, and uncertainty were traveling with me.
The first time I had visited the United States was three years earlier, a year after I started dating my current wife, who is a natural-born U.S. citizen. One day, she showed up at my apartment near the Bavarian city of Würzburg. She had arrived in Germany only three weeks prior, on orders from the U.S. Department of Defense, and was looking for a permanent place to stay. I was in the process of moving to Cologne, approximately a 3-hour car drive northwest of Würzburg. A year earlier, my then-wife had left, and taken our 3-year-old son, Tobias, with her. Too much in that place reminded me of family life and the disappointment I had experienced. I was ready to move on.
The apartment was a nice, typical, Bavarian-style house on a hillside in a small village called Greussenheim and had been advertised for rent in the local German newspaper. Annie, the woman I should fall in love with and later marry, had brought her commander’s secretary with her to take a look at the place. The secretary was German and supposed to act as an interpreter if needed. Outside of my apartment door, I heard Wolfgang, the German landlord, greet the two women at the front door.
Months later, I learned from Annie how they had stood outside waiting for the door to be answered. They looked at the name plate beside the doorbell. Seeing my last name, Peine, Annie said she thought to herself, “How in the hell do you pronounce that?” Little did she know that two years later, she would have to spell out that name virtually every single time she would provide her new last name.
I heard a knock on the apartment’s door and said, “Come in! It’s open.” Not wanting to interfere with Wolfgang showing the place and trying to put the time to good use, I had decided to scrub the ceran-plated stove. The visitors seemed impressed by the layout, size, and location of the apartment. Good! Maybe I could get out of here faster than anticipated. As they continued their walk-through, I heard Wolfgang spilling niceties in broken English all throughout the visit. “Zee apahtment has a prrretty view frrrum ze bellcony.” In response, a thick, American-English accent splashed through the apartment and made me feel eerily comfortable. It sounded so interesting; just like in the movies.
Once the tour was completed, the two women said their goodbyes and left, chatting all the way down the driveway. Wolfgang came by to quickly say thank you. He would hear from them hopefully by tomorrow.
The next day, he came downstairs and shared the news that the American seemed interested. She wanted to come back tonight, the commander’s secretary in tow, and talk in more detail about a possible rental contract.
The next day, they showed up again. Annie and her German entourage, who I later learned, had grown up in a neighboring village and was yearning to gain another look at Wolfgang, a former police officer and my landlord. Wolfgang left to go upstairs and prepare the paperwork, as it seemed Annie was intent on renting the place. She and her interpreter, who really was not needed nearly as much as anticipated, sat at the dining table and, being a true German gentleman, I offered a beer. Both gladly accepted, and this magic Germanic potion helped to move negotiations along blissfully.
“The curtains over there?”
“Sure.”
“How about the lamps in the dining room?”
“Okay.”
“Do you want any of the decorations? Oh, and yes, what about the kitchen?”
“The kitchen?”
Annie looked at me with an expression of bewilderment on her face. “Yes, would you want to buy the kitchen as well? Otherwise, I’d take
it with me to my new place.”
She looked at the secretary in disbelief, not quite sure if I was trying
to be funny or if she was seriously supposed to buy a kitchen in a rental apartment in Germany. After being reassured by the secretary that this was indeed customary, we agreed on a purchase price of 10,000 Deutschmarks, which was the equivalent of approximately $5,000 at the time. A steal, considering that I paid about three times that amount when I had bought it three years earlier. And then it happened. Annie looked at me with a slight smirk and said, “Well, I’m not giving a stranger that kind of money unless he at least takes me out to dinner.” And that is how that happened.
Over the course of the coming months, we struggled to make this awkward relationship work. We started a long-distance relationship, separated by a three-hour drive on the autobahn. The fact that I spoke English lulled us into the misconception that there really were not a lot of cultural differences between us. Until the day we almost broke up. “You are always so direct, like a steam train rolling through town,” she said. Light-footedness is certainly not a trait Germans are known for, and my attempts at a literal translation of my thoughts were not conducive to a harmonious relationship, either. But with a lot of love, care, and dedication to make it work, we muddled our way through it all. The German and the Alabamian. That’s a headline for another book right there.
In 1998, my constant nagging and pushing for us to visit the U.S. finally paid off. Annie suggested we travel to the birthplace of it all— New England. That way I could learn about the history and origins of her country, and the flight time wasn’t so bad either. Interesting enough, as a child, my best friend Hans-Peter and I often pretend-played to be U.S. agents. I cannot seem to remember what agency we imagined working for, but it is also entirely possible that we considered such a determination to be unnecessary fluff. Or maybe we just didn’t know what “agencies” were or which ones we could have chosen from. My imaginary character was from Boston and his name was Mike Baxter. I forgot what Hans- Peter called himself. It was probably a John or Jim with a last name we considered being distinctly American. And so, we would spend hours on end, idolizing America and feeling mighty powerful when we called each other by our American first names. The names, by the way, were the only English part of our play, as both of us were still in elementary school. At some point, I told Annie about this. How I had never seen images of Boston, at least not knowingly, but I had in my imagination it was a city of red brick buildings with an almost British look to it. Little did I know that I had actually pictured it quite fittingly.
When I got off the airplane at Logan Airport in 1998 for the first time, I had a strange and very confusing experience. I walked into the terminal building and felt as if I had just come home. An eerily unfitting warmth and familiarity took a hold of me. How could I possibly feel this way? What was going on? It puzzles me to this day. From the first day of setting foot on American soil, I felt right at home. I never experienced a day of being homesick. Yes, at times I missed particular aspects of German or European lifestyle. Decent bratwurst comes to mind. But I never felt homesick.
Never before in my life had I met an American before meeting Annie. All I knew was from what I had seen on TV or in one of the many movies coming from across the big pond. The most personal account I had heard of came from my mother. Born in 1932, she had been through World War II as a child with some very vivid memories. She told me of her fear while they were hiding in the basement at the end of the war. U.S. troops were advancing on their small town in southeastern Germany, Thuringia to be exact. Women and children had taken shelter in the basement of the house and were scared to death of what was about to happen. Nazi propaganda had provided the most horrific stories of raping and pillaging “Yankees” having their way with German citizens. But, my mother said, the worst was how they had told the kids that “negro soldiers eat little children.” Though my mother was already 13 at the time, she said she was about to pee her pants in fear as they were hunkered down in the cold, musky dark of the cellar. She described how suddenly they heard steps on the floor above them and then heavy steps coming down the stairs. She said the basement door was flung open and an African-American soldier pointed his rifle at the group, obviously in anticipation of possible enemy soldiers. As he noticed there were only women and children inside, he lowered his weapon and walked up straight to my mother. She vividly described how she was about to pass out in sure anticipation of her impending demise when the soldier dug with his hand deep into his pant pocket and pulled out a chocolate bar. My mother was bewildered, yet instantly won over and henceforth declared her love for all things American.
Growing up, Americans were the “good guys” in my book. And in 2001, I was not only visiting again like I had in ‘98, but going to live there. In the land of the free and the home of the brave.
As I said, I was standing at the counter inside Frankfurt International Airport checking in our luggage—lots of luggage. Everything we would need during the first four to six weeks was in those suitcases. Annie stood behind me at a distance, snapping a picture to preserve the moment. A short while later, we were sitting in our seats on the plane, looking out the window and racing down the runway. Soon, we disappeared into the clouds over Frankfurt. It would be three years before I would return.
