The coyotes took us to this ramshackle hideout made of wood. It looked like the kind of place an ax murderer would use as a vacation home. Sometime around 1:00 a.m., we woke up to be told that there were border guards patrolling with machine guns nearby, and we had to be quiet.

"They'll shoot first, and they don't ask questions."

To this day, I have no idea if they were just fucking with us or not, but we sure shut the hell up. Pro Tip for new parents: If you want your kids to quiet down, convince them armed soldiers will murder them for speaking. It works!

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"Uh-oh, looks like Shanksgiving might be coming early this year."

We also had to use coyotes on the trip from Honduras to Guatemala, but my mom was running low on funds at that point. Thankfully, she met this really nice guy who also just happened to coyote from time to time. He was a pretty cheerful dude, with a nice wife and four kids. He was the Ned Flanders of international crime. (Remember, I said some people that smuggle human beings for a living weren't very nice. Some are just delightful.) They took us into their home for a week while they gathered supplies and people to cross the border with us.

The border crossing itself was awesome. My mom was able to cross with her Panamanian passport, but my brother and sister couldn't, so the plan was that she would meet us in a small town just across the border after we crossed over with Honduran Flanders ... on horseback. How many illegal horseback adventures did you have before the age of 13?

Is it more than one? Whoa, really? Well la-di-da, Billy the Literal Kid. Get your own article.

The phrase "Mexican border jail" probably conjures up mental images of dingy cells and knife fights accompanied by wild mariachi music, but it wasn't like that at all. Everything was stainless steel and very clean.

It wasn't that bad when you remove the abject terror that we all felt about the possibility of being separated. I was horrified that my younger siblings might be sent to the U.S. (their American passports were actually valid) while my mom and I were sent back to Panama. There were posters around that assured us this wouldn't happen, but the policeman who released us said differently. When in doubt, take the word of the guy with the gun over the marketing campaign.

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The nice saleslady up north may say "Give me your tired and your poor,"
but down south the armed guard still wants to see your papers.

We were already suitably terrified, and then my baby brother fell into the water. I felt my stomach drop to the god-damned ground. And then I dropped to the god-damned ground to try to grab him.

Luckily, either the coyote was a remorseless sociopath who enjoyed needlessly terrifying children (likely) or that bit of swamp wasn't "drown a grown man" deep. The water only reached up to his shoulders. After we got him out of the water, we all hugged him, and I gave him a piggy back ride until we reached solid ground. My back was gross, and the water smelled like a bag of soggy grandpa ass tossed into a Taco Bell dumpster.

William Thomas Cain/Getty Images News/Getty Images
So, you know, like a regular Taco Bell.

At the Mexico-U.S. border, my mom scouted for another coyote. She was even considering trying to cross the Rio Grande on a giant tire. Tubing is a great way to beat the heat in the summer, but it's a somewhat less great way for small children to sneak across a national border. If we'd tried, we might have ended up being a few more of the over 2,000 illegal immigrants who died crossing between 1999 and 2012.

PBS
"Actually, the PC term is 'migrant.'"
-person who didn't almost die crossing the border and whose opinion totally matters

When derring-do ended up looking a little too daring, we eventually employed the oldest and most effective coyotes of all: "walking" and "asking nicely." We made our way to Ciudad Juarez, and I told my mom to let me do the talking: See, my mom has a very thick accent, but my English has been pretty much accentless since I was in third grade. We came to the border crossing and I strolled up to the cop with my family in tow and told him we wanted to go home. I said "please." He asked if we had any food that we needed to declare, I said no, and we were in America. He didn't even ask for any paperwork, maybe because I didn't have an accent, my siblings were both white and blond, and my black mom looked like she could have been our maid or nanny or something.

After all that, the big climactic crossing ended up being: "Hey, can I come into America?" and "Sure, so long as you don't bring any weird food in here."

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"That bean could breed and eat our corn!"