Northland: a 4,000-mile journey along America’s forgotten border

230 Pages·2018·4.89 MB·English

by  Porter Fox

for Sara

CONTENTS

Introduction
PART I
THE DAWNLAND
PART II
THE SWEET-WATER SEAS
PART III
BOUNDARY WATERS
PART IV
SEVEN FIRES
PART V
THE MEDICINE LINE
Acknowledgments
A Note on Sources
Index
INTRODUCTION

N
O ONE KNOWS WHERE AMERICA’S NORTHERN BORDER BEGINS. It is somewhere
near Machias Seal Island, twenty-five miles off Jonesport, Maine. Most know
where it goes: six hundred miles around Maine’s panhandle; across New
Hampshire, Vermont, and New York; west along the Saint Lawrence River;
through four of the five Great Lakes; into Minnesota’s Boundary Waters; and
straight across North Dakota, Montana, Idaho, and Washington on the forty-
ninth parallel.
On paper, the boundary looks like a discarded thread—twisted and kinked in
parts, tight as a bowstring in others. Much of the line was drawn before modern
surveying technology was invented, so it follows things you can see on a map:
rivers, lakes, latitude, longitude. Where the boundary tracks a waterway, the rule
is to follow the deep-water mark, making it look like a very drunk or very old
man drew it freehand—which, in some cases, is very close to the truth. The only
indication that two of the world’s most powerful nations meet on these stretches
is a procession of faded American and Canadian flags on either side, planted in
yards, on porches, and on telephone poles.
The northern border looks like an accident in many places. It runs along the
forty-fifth parallel straight through the Haskell Free Library and Opera House in
Derby Line, Vermont. Near Cornwall, Ontario, it splits the Akwesasne Mohawk
Indian reservation in half, and in Niagara it bisects the largest waterfall on the
continent. Homes, businesses, families, golf courses, wood pulp factories, and a
natural-gas plant straddle the line. Taverns were purposely built directly on the
borderline during Prohibition to welcome Americans on one side and sell them
booze on the other. Where the boundary follows the forty-ninth parallel in the
West, it cuts straight through obstacles like valleys, watersheds, and eight-
thousand-foot peaks—necessitating a chaotic system of rules and easements to
determine sovereignty and access. Pan out 50,000 feet above the line and you
see the shape of America. Zoom in and you recognize the timber yards, kettle
lakes, tablelands, and two-lane asphalt roads of what locals call the “northland.”
Northlanders have little interest in the rest of the Union, and the rest of the
Union has little interest in its northern fringe. There are other names for it:
northern tier, Hi-Line, north country. Academics who study borders call either
side of a new boundary where the line is vague and where the populations on
both sides are still interconnected a “borderland.” As the border becomes more
defined and enforced, the borderland evolves into “bordered lands”—where
movement and commerce are restricted. What was once a singular region
becomes two, and both sides develop individual identities, economies, and
cultures. Land on either side of the US-Canada border exists somewhere
between these two.
At 5,525 miles, including Alaska, the northern border is the longest
international boundary in the world. Without Alaska, the 3,987-mile line capping
the Lower 48 is the third-longest. Politicians, federal agents, pundits, and most
Americans focus on the line with Mexico, even though its northern cousin is
more than twice its length and many times more porous. The only known
terrorists to cross overland into the US came from the north. Fifty-six billion
dollars in smuggled drugs and ten thousand illegal aliens cross the US-Canada
border every year. Two thousand agents watch the line. Nine times that number
patrol the southern boundary. According to a 2010 Congressional Research
Service report, US Customs and Border Protection maintains “operational
control” over just sixty-nine miles of the northern border.
For two hundred years, the northern border was America’s principal
boundary. The history of the continent played out along the line, chronologically
from east to west: the Age of Discovery; the first colonies; the fishing, timber,
and fur trades; the French and Indian Wars; the British Empire; the American
Revolution; Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery; the War of 1812; the Indian
Wars; and westward expansion.
An old friend once described the northland as “a place that didn’t change
between the American Revolution and 1970.” It is true. Bands of Scandinavians,
Russians, French, Scottish, Dutch, and German Americans—descended from
original settlers—still live there in an archipelago of ethnic islands. Some of the
largest remaining American Indian tribes—the continent’s actual first settlers—
live there too, most on exploited and tyrannized reservations. Auto maintenance,
home maintenance, knowledge of weather, fishing, and hunting are essential
skills because there is often no one there to do it for you. You can still put
skills because there is often no one there to do it for you. You can still put
groceries on an account in the northland, run up a weekly tab at the bar, or take
out your neighbor’s fence after one too many as long as you fix it within the
month. The landscape there represents “nature” to people who visit for a long
weekend and then race home. To northlanders, nature is not a thing you go see;
it is the place you live.
It is not all quaint. There are problems like teen pregnancy, domestic
violence, drugs, poverty, obesity, bigotry. Unless there’s oil or gas to drill for,
the economy is typically slow. In many places, there isn’t much to do in the
winter except work, watch TV, go to church, get drunk, get mad, or all of the
above. The winter is long. It gets dark at four in the afternoon and stays that way
until eight in the morning. It gets so cold that streetlights shine straight up
through airborne frost instead of down. Towns smell of woodsmoke, and
windstorms sweeping south from Canada make the forest groan.
When modern civilization finally arrived, the northland changed quickly.
Silvery highways now cut across the backcountry, and high-voltage power lines
slice through remote mountain passes. Tourists wearing safari vests have
overrun centuries-old fishing and mill towns in the Northeast, while developers
have made a killing selling luxury mountain homes in former western ranching
and mining towns. Before September 11, 2001, half of the 119 border crossings
between the US and Canada were unguarded at night. Since then, the
Department of Homeland Security has increased the number of agents by 500
percent and installed sensors, security cameras, military-grade radar, and drones
—cutting off northland families, businesses, church congregations, hospitals,
and Indian nations from their Canadian counterparts.
The northland’s fragile environment has taken a hit as well. In a warming
world, temperatures in northern latitudes are rising faster than southern temps,
threatening snowpacks, rivers, forests, habitats, wetlands, and freshwater
reservoirs from Washington’s North Cascades to the Great Lakes to Maine’s
North Woods. Overfishing and warming waters in the North Atlantic have left
the fishery on the brink of extinction, while pollution and erratic water levels in
the Great Lakes threaten America’s primary supply of surface freshwater. In
North Dakota, a historic oil boom has transformed the state—and America’s
effort to lower greenhouse gas emissions—in a mad dash to pump as much oil as
possible before the end of the fossil fuel era.
I GREW UP IN THE NORTHLAND, on an island in northern Maine. I saw how living