After 11 Minutes in America, I Got Hit by the Crime Wave

Before the blessed release of full-dose vaccination, I spent much of the pandemic in Norway and Canada, dodging COVID-19 waves and rising violent-crime rates in American cities. Both of my hideout countries managed infection well, and their residents very rarely kill each other. (Today Norway marks the tenth anniversary of one of the exceptions to this rule.) But I missed America, so earlier this month, back I came, over the Rainbow International Bridge from Niagara Falls, Canada, to its sister city of the same name in upstate New York. A Customs and Border Patrol officer waved me in at 12:10 a.m.

Eleven minutes later, a man tried to rob me at gunpoint.

I was in a rented Toyota Corolla, driving with three family members who were also returning to America: a woman and her two children, a 9-year-old and a toddler. Soon