Leonard Woodward, 96, woke up early on the final day of his Canadian honeymoon last month. He had to catch an early Greyhound bus back to his home in Provo.

Alone.

An immigration snafu had forced him to leave his bride behind in Canada.

The trip from Raymond, Alberta, is nearly 1,300 miles straight south on Interstate 15, and it took more than a full day. But Woody, as his friends call him, gets along well enough to make his own connections, despite his virtual blindness. He switched buses in Butte, Mont., for the ride to Salt Lake City. But the bus broke down just north of Ogden -- in the middle of the night.

Woody and the other passengers had to wait for another bus to come and get them, and he arrived at his home on Provo's east side at about 9 a.m. the next day.

It was an exhausting ordeal, both physically and emotionally.

Woody has been alone before, and he doesn't like it. After his first wife died in 1986, he remarried a few months later. His second wife died in 2005, when he was 93, and he began looking for a new companion almost immediately. "He's just not one to be alone," said his son, Leon Woodward of Mapleton.

It took Woody three years to find Doreen Buttery, a youngster of 73, at the Eldred Senior Center in Provo where they both lunched occasionally. She had come from Canada to serve a part-time service mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and they fell in love.

After their marriage in the Provo LDS temple, which was reported last month in the Daily Herald, Woody was sure his loneliness was over. "It's not good for a man to be alone," he said.

For Doreen, it was an opportunity to help a close friend have a comfortable life. She expected to spend much of her time caring for Woody, and was excited about living in Provo, close to her daughter and away from the harsh weather of her hometown. She likes it here so much, she said, that she'd been trying to figure out how to stay.

She said she wouldn't have considered marriage at first, but the more time she spent with Woody the more she liked him. Eventually it was hopeless. "He's very honest, and he's a good person," Doreen said of her new husband. "We get along really well. We enjoy each other's company, and we have some of the same interests." Neither felt too old to be married again.

For their honeymoon, they spent four weeks in Canada -- to sell Doreen's house there and prepare her to move to Provo permanently.

But the U.S. government isn't shy about getting in the way of love if it's not accompanied by the proper paperwork. Earlier, Doreen had crossed the border using only her passport and stayed with her daughter Wanda Scheetz in Provo. To the government, that's a temporary visit. Once she married an American, the whole game changed. Now it was her intent to become a permanent resident.

When Woody and Doreen arrived at the U.S. border crossing in Sweetgrass, Mont., she showed her passport as she had done several times before. The customs agent asked the usual questions about her reasons for visiting the U.S., and she said she planned to move to Provo to live with her new husband.

The information set off figurative intruder-alert lights at the border crossing. In an almost perverse twist of policy, at a time when illegal immigrants are frequently tolerated in the U.S. and with talk of easy paths to citizenship for illegals living in the country, Doreen Buttery was informed that she could not re-enter the United States without an immigrant visa.

She was forced to turn back. Luckily, she was able to move in with her daughter, Brenda McLean, in Lethbridge, Alberta. But she was unable to continue her church mission and, worse, she was separated from her husband.

With a heavy voice, a discouraged Woody said from his home in Provo: "I'm just back to bach'-in' it."

Intent to immigrate

Larry Overcast is port director at the Customs and Border Protection entry point in Sweetgrass, an unincorporated community of gas stations and duty-free stores along I-15, just on the Montana side of the border. He said he remembers Doreen's declaration of her intent to live in the U.S. indefinitely. He had to deny her request to enter the country because she did not have the correct visa.

Rules are rules, after all.

"We tried to provide her as much guidance as we could," Overcast said, "where she could get the forms and what she needs."

The document that would allow the spouse of a U.S. citizen to enter the country temporarily is called a K-3 visa. But that is just the beginning of a complicated process that would allow her to legally immigrate. To continue living here indefinitely, she'll need a resident visa that can take many months to get, or even longer depending on bureaucratic delays.

Part of the process is an interview in which an immigration agent asks detailed information about the marriage, such as whether the husband snores at night, to determine if the prospective immigrant is actually married to the citizen in question.

The interview is meant to catch marriage fraud -- people who marry only on paper as a way of getting into the country. If the candidate passes the interview, permanent resident status may be granted.

The timing of that interview is crucial. Under current immigration law, if Woody dies before the bureaucracy schedules the interview, all bets are off and Doreen will be denied immediately and face deportation. There's no appeal -- as a matter of policy her pending application for residency would be promptly denied because she no longer has a U.S. spouse.

If that happened, and because she has already declared her intent to immigrate, she may not be allowed back in the states even as a visitor for fear that she wouldn't leave again.

"It's just arbitrary," said Brent Renison, an immigration attorney in Portland, Ore., who specializes in cases such as Woody's and Doreen's. "It's just a matter of how long it takes the bureaucracy to process her request. It doesn't take into account the marriage or the validity of it or anything like that."

Renison is heading up a class-action lawsuit that aims to change the automatic denial of a petition when a U.S. spouse dies.

Woody has no intention of dying anytime soon. He's a spry gentleman with a mind that's still as sharp as ever. But few minds are a match for U.S. bureaucracy. Woody said he had no idea that Doreen's immigration status would change now that they're married. And Overcast said they're not the only ones that have overlooked such details.

"There are times when people are unaware of the process," Overcast said. "I think sometimes people just think they can do it later, or that it's not that important. They just don't research the process."

Entering the U.S. as a temporary visitor is comparatively simple -- show them your passport and say you plan to stay a short time. Announcing your intent to immigrate, or to live in the U.S. permanently, is another matter.

"It depends on the situation with the country and their relationship with the U.S.," said Mike Milne, a regional spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security. "But in general when a non-citizen wants to marry a citizen and live in the U.S., there's a prescribed way to do that."

He said security has been tightened significantly since 9/11, particularly in terms of manpower and scrutiny at all entry points to the U.S. But immigration law hasn't changed much -- a major overhaul has failed in Congress in each of the last two years. No matter the situation, Milne said -- young or old, married or not -- it takes the right documents to enter the U.S.

"People are required to go through that process," he said, "and we're more than happy to explain it to them."

Alone again

At age 96, Woody is dependent on other people to help him sort this out. "And my help's in Canada," he said wryly. Good immigration lawyers cost hundred of dollars per hour, and Woody says he's "getting on the low side" financially.

He spent five hours Wednesday with a neighbor who has a law degree, trying to prepare all the required documents. "All I know is I have to get these papers all together and get stuff back from Canada and I gotta put $355 with it and send it to Chicago. And they do something with it. It's on a merry-go-round."

Among the documents Woody has to collect are his birth certificate, his marriage certificate, and an affidavit of support (a document showing that they have joint ownership of some things in the U.S. and that Woody will care for Doreen). They've dealt with an alphabet soup of government agencies and piles of number- and letter-coded forms.

"It just doesn't make sense," said Scheetz, Doreen's daughter in Provo. "She's up there and he's down here, so now we have to figure out how to fax things back and forth."

If Doreen had stayed in the U.S., it's possible she could have applied for a change in status. But that's all off. The new couple wanted to visit family up in Canada and sell Doreen's home there, and they didn't consider that she would now be viewed as an immigrant, not a visitor.

When the Daily Herald contacted Congressman Chris Cannon's office to find out whether other options might exist, Cory Norman, a Cannon assistant in charge of immigration issues, began working on a way to expedite the process. Norman said Doreen may be able to re-enter the U.S. immediately under a special situation called parole once her petition for immigrant status has been filed. If not, he said Cannon's office will try to expedite processing of the requisite form so she can re-enter as soon as possible.

Some applicants for entry can pay a stiff fee to have their paperwork speeded up. The expedite fee is $1,000 to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, but it's not clear that Doreen would qualify for that.

Meanwhile, Woody waits; he's alone again. He got up early on Thursday to start boiling vegetables for a stew. That night he pored over paperwork with his neighbor. He has had to ask other neighbors to pick up medicine for him from the pharmacy.

"I'm so tired I can't think straight," he said.

But fatigue isn't what bothers him the most. It's being alone. When he thinks of all the red tape between him and his wife, he gets angry. He said he blew his top when he heard a news report about refugees being brought to the U.S. "They're bringing them in by the carload," he said, "but my wife can't get back in."

A month ago, the couple sat beside each other on a couch in Woody's living room, cuddling like adolescents. She giggled when he called her beautiful, and he said he'd never been so happy in his life. Now, Woody said, he's reached a new low.

"I need her home, bad."