A group of border agents are sitting on a beach in the southern Turkish seaside resort town of Antalya. It’s a working holiday – they are in town for the International Immigration Workers Conference, held at a five-star hotel where they are staying.
You may be wondering why we are here eavesdropping. I mean, nobody likes border patrol agents. Well, didn’t it ever occur to you, reader, that immigration officials are people too? With immigration dominating the headlines these days, it makes plain clear sense that these people could use a break from their demanding chores of protecting our borders. What might they do when they go on holiday? Let’s have a look, shall we?
The agents come from all over the world, and they are easily identifiable by their matching close-cropped haircuts, Ray Ban sunglasses and burmuda shorts. They are virtually all male.
“Look at that one over there!” says a certain Hernandez, who works the Arizona-Mexico border. Their eyes focused on the lithe torso of a Ukrainian girl walking near the waterline clad in only bikini bottoms. Nearby, several other girls were lying topless in the baking, late summer heat.
“Oh man, her tits are amazing!” agrees his associate and new friend, Chambers, a foreigner’s police officer from London.
“Amazing!”
“Awesome!”
“They just let ‘em all run around topless,” Hernandez goes on. “Man, I think I’ve died and gone to heaven!”
“Why don’t we have these girls in our line of work? Man, I’d let say, “Welcome to England!” Chambers said, to the delight of his associates.
“Right on, brother! Cheers mate!”
The conference is for three days, and most of them have left the wives and kids back home. Earlier that day, the conference focused on topics such as Treating Asylum Seekers, Proper Detention of Terrorists and the Argument for Strong Walls. Also, there were workshops on interrogation techniques and how to compassionately separate children from their families.
After the conference, a “Top Gun” style beach volleyball contest was planned, but it was too hot for volleyball. So they were just taking it easy on the beach, drinking beer and taking in the scenery.
“Yeah, we ought to retire here,” enjoined a guy everybody just called Jack, as another lithe girl, a brunette this time, emerged wet and shining from the sea. Jack sported a red Trump baseball hat. Earlier, he had impressed his colleagues with a story about how he and two other agents back in Florida had beaten up a 12-year-old Cuban boy suspected of wanting to join his family in Miami.
“Aw, that’s nothing, mate!” Chambers, the Englishman countered and went on to relate a hilarious tale of breaking the jaw of a Syrian migrant who’d had the temerity to lose his passport in the Mediterranean Sea.
“Man, oh man,” Jack said, laughing. “You just gotta get tough with ‘em sometimes, right? I mean, who do these people think they are?”
“Yeah, why don’t they just go back where they belong?”
“Would make our lives easier!”
“I hear that!”
Just then a small boy, no more than 5 years of age, approached the men. The boy was Syrian, bare-footed on the hot sand. He asked the men for a change.
“Oh, no, no, no,” went several voices. “Give me a break, will ya kid?”
“Go on, beat it!”
“Aint nobody gonna hit me up for change on my beach!” This last was from the beloved Jack.
“Where’s a cop when you need one, eh?” They all laughed.
“These Syrians are lucky I ‘aint workin’ over here – I wouldn’t be as nice as these Turks!”
“Amen to that!”
It was then that they all struck upon an inspiration. Why not just put up a wall, to keep out the kid panhandlers? Of course! If any of the girls wanted in, that was a different story. They could have “auditions.”
“You mean, ‘background checks,’” joked one clever official from Germany.
Working together beerfully, showing great cross-jurisdictional cooperation, the vacationing border agents joined together their beach chairs to act as pillars. Then they build sand-castle walls between them, about three feet high. The whole process went surprisingly quick and well, considering how much beer they had drunk, and soon they had themselves a fine beach border wall.
“Send a photo of that to Trumpey, eh?” said the Englishman Chambers, a strong Brexiter himself.
They took several photos of the Wall, and shared them (along with numerous others of the topless beauties) to various border agent social groups on Instagram and Facebook, earning lots of likes from jealous colleagues all over the world.
“I think you fellas have just built the world’s first YouTopia (sic)” posted a border agent from Texas.
“That is BEAUTİFUL!!!” enthused another, from Jordan.
“Paradise,” was the one-word verdict from an agent in France, who also added several hearts and hand-clapping emoticons to indicate his approval.
The relaxing border agents popped open more cans of Efes, and toasted their masterwork.
“How to keep out unwanted peoples on holiday: now there would be a great topic for the conference!,” posited the irresistable Jack, earning him a round of high fives.
By then it was early afternoon, the sun was still very bright and hot.
In their fortress, the men got nice and drunk. Topics were bounced back and forth. Trump’s wall, Brexit, the problem of Syrians, family separations, and those “goddamned bleeding hearts” who care more about immigrants than they do their own countrymen:
“They oughta try and do our job!”
“Wouldn’t last two minutes, the fuckers!”
“They oughta go and live somewhere else seein’ as they love it so much!”
Ah, border agents the world over would have it so much easier if people just “got their heads out of their asses!”
Towards about two-thirty, the happy agents were all roaring drunk. Sure, they had conference dinner that evening at the hotel, but “fuck it!” was the general consensus. One by one, they began to fall asleep, pass out on their towels.
What these gentlemen did not know was that the high tide was coming in. As they snored in their fortress, the waves of the Mediterranean began to creep up slowly. It was very hot out by then, so many of the bathers had retreated either under the shade of beach umbrellas, or else gone back to their hotels to rest and wash up for dinner.
Suddenly, a particularly strong wave struck the fortress. The walls collapsed, burying the sleeping agents in several feet of heavy wet sand. They were trapped! Most of the other remaining bathers, half-dozing down the beach, failed to notice this potentially tragic development.
Fortunately though, the Syrian boy, the one who had been panhandling earlier, happened to be passing back along that strip of beach when the wave came and the walls collapsed. The boy ran approximately a hundred yards, catching the attention of a lifeguard. The lifeguard, at first thinking the boy was bothering him about money, was ready to chase the lad away. But then understanding the boy’s rudimentary Turkish, sprang to attention. He ran down to where the boy had indicated, and began furiously digging. By now others had noticed the commotion and got up to assist the lifeguard.
Within a few minutes, the men had been rescued. Choking on sand, many of them vomiting up their beer onto the beach, the men were gently assisted to a nearby ambulance, which had been alertly summoned by one of the beachgoers. But the now-sober agents did not need to go to the hospital. They were taken slowly back to their hotel to sleep off their frightening encounter.
Everyone else on the beach, including the young topless girls (who had by now covered themselves and were getting ready to leave), was shaken by the incident. They talked among themselves, shuddering at the close call with tragedy. They struggled to put the pieces together:
“How dreadful it would have been had they died! How did it happen?” one asked.
“Their sand wall collapsed when the tide came in,” theorized another.
“A sand wall? Well, that was perfectly stupid! What kind of morons would build a sand wall on a beach around them and then go to sleep?”
“I know, some people – they just shouldn’t be allowed to travel!”
“I know, right? Why don’t they just go back wherever they come from!”
Ah, alas. Holiday-goers the world over, it seems, are cursed with such displays of incompetence by touristic amateurs.
Note: No border agents were harmed during this episode. It should be further noted that all braved headaches and dehydration to attend the next morning’s conference, which focused on Proper Cage Maintenance.
James Tressler, a former Lost Coast resident, is a writer and teacher. Admittedly, he too at times should be put in a cage. He lives in Istanbul.
