Report: A Brief Cross-Border Excursion

 

For someone who’s made as many trips across the Canadian-US border as I have, it’s been strange to feel not only constrained, but apprehensive about the prospect. During the pandemic, we didn’t go to the US for more than a year because we couldn’t — the border was closed — but that felt totally different. More recently, in December and early January, we took trips to visit family and friends in the US. But after the inauguration, the threats against Canada, and the reports of people being hassled, intimidated or detained at the border, we have deliberately stayed put.

I received a document last week — a final piece of my father’s estate — that had to be notarized and returned to the US. I called the US Consulate here in Montreal to make an appointment to see a notary there, and was told that they no longer offered that service. My choices were to go to Ottawa, a two-hour trip each way, and pay something like $70 for the service at the US Embassy, or drive to the town clerk in Champlain, NY, where I’ve been before, and have the document notarized for free. Yesterday, that’s what I did.

 

The reward was a beautiful drive on the day when the leaves were coming out. I enjoyed seeing the flat fields awaiting spring planting, some with their incredible, black earth just plowed, and the tender yellow-green and reddish haze of tree buds just beginning to burst.

I took my regular phone, thinking the chances of it being examined or seized were pretty small; I’d looked through it pretty carefully ahead of time.

At the border — this was the Champlain crossing — there were no cars. Literally. I saw one or two others coming behind me, but that’s unheard of — often the lines have stretched half a mile back from this major crossing into New York State. I pulled into the NEXUS lane, which has an automatic scanner, rolled down my window. The border agent, a woman, asked me where I lived and the reason for my visit; I said I was going to the town clerk’s office in Champlain. She said, “Thank you, have a nice day,” and that was that.

Of course, on her screen she can see that I’m a dual citizen, born in America, and have a record of hundreds of crossings with no red flags. But the main thing she sees and hears is an older white person with an Anglo name, speaking unaccented American English. I’m not proud of that privilege. I’ve always been aware of the profiling that happens at the border. Now it can be a matter of freedom or detention, imprisonment, disappearance, or even death.

At the town offices, the clerk used my American passport as ID, and when she’d finished she quietly asked, “How was the border?” “No problem,” I said, “but there were basically no cars there.” “Yes, “ she said, pursing her lips in concern. “They say the traffic is way down.”

 

Yesterday was also the day that Columbia University student Mohsen Mahdawi was freed on bail by a federal judge in Vermont. After mailing my document at the post office in Champlain, I almost drove across the bridge to Vermont, just to stand in my former home state for a moment or two. I hadn’t heard the good news about Mahdawi yet, but I’ve been proud of our congressional delegation and of the thousands of Vermonters who’ve been standing up strongly for democracy and free speech, and against the cruelty of these kidnappings and detentions. I turned around to head home straightaway instead, knowing I’d probably get hung up in Montreal’s rush hour traffic later on — which I did.

At the Canadian border, after our inital “bonjour-hi”, the agent asked me why I’d been in the US and for how long (“less than an hour”), and whether I’d bought anything (they are charging tariffs on everything purchased in the US now, including gas). I truthfully answered “no” — usually I’d have a full tank of gas and a bag of groceries, but all I had bought was a doughnut, which was long gone, and not worth mentioning. He asked me to roll down my back window, took a cursory look from his booth, and nodded an OK. Then he told me they had had reports of a car driving the wrong way on the highway ahead, and to please be careful. “Merci,” I answered, and went on my way.

 

I didn’t even pull off to take any pictures, although the landscape was particularly beautiful. This morning, though, I pulled out some images from a year ago and did the quick oil pastel you see here, which captures some of the tremulous quality of yesterday’s early northern spring in the countryside. No wonder the student protests in Egypt some years ago were called “The Arab Spring”: that’s the hopeful energy you feel in nature right now. I wish we could harness it! Resistance is definitely growing, though, as more and more people wake up to reality and realize they need to do something. Opinion polls show negative approval now among a majority, regardless of party affiliation. The courts are holding firm in most decisions, as are more institutions. Still, the damage is rapid and massive, and the pushback agonizingly slow.

I’m relieved that everything went so easily on my short trip, though I don’t take it for granted; if we need or want to visit our American friends and relatives I’ll feel less apprehensive about it. The reticence remains, however. In the grocery store this morning, like everyone else, we read the labels and chose products from Canada, Mexico, and countries other than the US.. We’ll spend our vacation dollars elsewhere. How sad it is to feel slapped in the face by your best friend — and, in my case, by my own homeland! Let’s hope this state of affairs gradually resolves, though the sense of betrayal, loss of trust, and anxiety will linger, I’m afraid, for a long time.

Comments

[Roderick Robinson]

Over the last fortnight my life has changed radically and not for the better. But not in a way I would care to write about even if I were still blogging regularly; mainly because I don't have the right. I thought I'd wander through other less stressful lives, looking for normalcy.

Only to find that that your "normal" life is in no way free from stress. The generalised headlines and the more hysterical claims in YouTube have narrowed down into something personal. Self-questioning is abroad, apprehension arises even if it is a mild case. And you enter a landscape that has changed tinily yet is faintly ominous.

Borders are particularly attractive to writers of spy fiction. The awfulness of transition; politics become tangible. And the senses are even more fraught when the border is defined by a coastline. More than once our holidays in France have been affected by industrial action at the French Channel ports. The atmosphere is heightened by involving another nation.

Two decades ago we were allowed off the ferry but confined to Calais; there were rumours but no facts. British drivers (identified by GB plates on the car rumps) were turning away from the barriers manned by individuals who radiated a special kind of fervour. But I go to France to speak French; it's almost an aggressive state. Here would be conversation that differed from discussing my daughter's cystitis at the pharmacy.

No doubt about it, the guy's face outside the car's lowered window had a pop-eyed quality. Luckily, even after many years tuition, my French remains stubbornly non-idiomatic; formality meet for the occasion. En francais, then. "M'sieur, as you can see I am English. I only seek information. I am told that the barriers will be removed at six o'clock tomorrow morning. Is that true?"

For several seconds he was silent, mouth open. Obviously he was primed to deliver a verbal avalanche about the left-wing solidity of his comrades (which I secretly approved of); here was a perfectly reasonable request. In his own language."That is true, m'sieur."

"Merci m'sieur. Et bonne chance pour la grève."

As if I had told him that the moon was provably made of blue cheese. I had silenced a Frenchman. Legitimately and without cruelty.

OK, it was fun. While you have been left with considerations that will not depart in the foreseeable future. All I can say both our events took place at a forbidding location where fearful changes are always possible. I was lucky; you, less so, though now better informed. Perhaps I was also being cathartic.