Northland_A 4,000-Mile Journey Along America's Forgotten Border

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

  NO 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 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 close to America’s northern border shapes communities there. There are river valleys near the boundary where everyone speaks French, others that fly the British flag. Locals speak with a Scottish-Acadian-Massachusetts brogue that inverts a’s and r’s—distorting the word “karma” into kah-mer. General stores in the North sell poutine and rappie pie. Markets on the coast stack their counters with the same salted cod sticks and pickled
hogs’ feet that British colonists once preserved.

  My father was a boat builder, and we spent half the year in the North Atlantic, close to where the line begins. It was an exotic place to come of age. Fog bends the light in the morning and turns seawater green black. Wisps of it curl through the streets and strafe thick stands of pine and spruce. In the winter, nor’easter gales make the rain gutters sing and blow the front door in. In the summer, the ocean is a wide, blue basin, in constant motion and brushed by the wind.

  We drove three hours farther north every summer to a hunting lodge that my great-great-grandfather built in 1909. It is seven miles from the Canadian border. Half the town is from Canada, half from America. People there rarely agree with one another, but they are quick to laugh. They tell stories in the old style, rooted in dark, underlying irony. (Mother-in-law falls off a lobster boat. Lobsterman hauls her in with twenty lobsters hanging off her dress. Lobsterman’s wife yells, “Set her again!”) They are quicker to talk about you when you leave the room. It is a small room, the northeastern corner pocket of the country.

  When I was old enough to leave home, I wandered west—first to Vermont, then Wyoming. I inadvertently moved along the line, always above the fortieth parallel, and found something familiar there: ethnic communities with centuries-old histories, small towns that modern America skipped over, forgotten industries and Old World professions that rely on hands, not machines. There are fewer houses and longer stretches of nothing in between. Some of America’s last herds of wild game live in the northland. Predators roam the centerline of empty highways. Forests of old-growth hemlock, fir, birch, and rock maple; wild rivers; unnamed mountain ranges; and some of the largest roadless areas in the US cluster along the northern border like dust gathers against a wall.

  Every news report I heard about pipelines, border walls, droughts, and security crackdowns along the northern boundary made me want to visit the northland again, before it changed for good. I wasn’t sure how I would get there or how long it would take to cross the country. I didn’t even know if my arcadian concept of the northland existed across the continental US. I knew I wanted to follow the Hi-Line from Maine to Washington. The border would be my guide, but I planned to tour all of the northland, ranging within a couple hundred miles on the US side. I didn’t make an itinerary. There was no timeline. I started the way every other northland explorer had for the last four hundred years: I packed a canoe, tent, maps, and books and headed for the line.

  PART I

  THE DAWNLAND

  1

  THE LINE EMERGES FROM A CLOUD OF LIGHT. It is invisible. Nothing distinguishes either side. It runs across the Gulf of Maine before cutting west around the gabbro bluffs of America’s easternmost shoreline. From there, it passes into Passamaquoddy Bay and the Saint Croix River watershed before vanishing into the woodlands of northern Maine.

  The wind blows constantly on the coast. It smells of pine, salt, decomposing fish, sea lavender, clam flats, seaweed. The tides are so powerful that they create the largest whirlpool in the Western Hemisphere. One hundred days of fog a year—not so much a mist as a permeable ocean above the ocean—and five-story sea cliffs make the coastline an ironbound dead end. The sound of trees and grasses hissing, swells hitting rock, is so constant you stop noticing after a while. The rumble blocks everything out. It envelops you, cuts the edges off the scene, and transforms it into a photograph. What you see in the picture is the edge of America and the beginning of Canada. A few trawlers motored along the line my first day there: one to the north, two in the south. Winds were out of the west at twelve knots. Seas two to four feet.

  Three clapboard wharves, two rotting piers, and the Lubec town dock form a rickety barrier between America’s easternmost town and Canada. Lubec occupies a rocky peninsula that divides Johnson Bay from Lubec Channel. Nearly every direction you look from the eastern tip, there is water.

  At 4:45 a.m. in early October, a layer of ice coated the town dock. The air temperature was twenty degrees Fahrenheit, sea temperature forty-two. Across Quoddy Narrows, Canada’s southern shore was a charcoal sketch. There were no lights, but I could hear voices. At the bottom of the ramp, a hand came toward me. “Milton Chute,” a large man said. Milton had white hair and a white goatee and was wearing a baseball cap that read “Captain” across the crown. I shook his hand, and his sternman announced himself: “Roger.”

  An awkward moment passed. No one seemed to know why I was standing there. I’d met Maine Department of Marine Resources Sergeant Russell Wright the day before. He suggested that Milton might guide me along the first few miles of the border. Milton worked in one of the northland’s dying trades. He was a fifth-generation fisherman who had purse-seined, fish-dragged, urchin-dragged, clammed, and scalloped in Passamaquoddy Bay for fifty years. After four centuries of overfishing, the North Atlantic fishery was nearing extinction, and many of Maine’s iconic fishing communities were dying with it. I had called Milton at 6:25 p.m. to ask if I could drag for sea urchins with him the next day. “If you’d called five minutes later,” he said, “I would have been asleep.”

  Fishing in the northland had always been hard, Russell told me. Something about northern latitudes spins nature’s forces out of control. The Bay of Fundy has the largest tides on the planet, rising and falling up to fifty vertical feet twice a day. Storms in the North Atlantic are among the most violent in the world, and the average water temperature around Lubec is forty-five degrees. Lobstermen tie mooring balls, rated to hold twenty-thousand-pound vessels, to weighted traps to keep currents from dragging them away. Every year, a trawler or two goes down, taking with it several Lubec fishermen. At the end of Water Street, next to a double-wide concrete boat ramp, a blue sign reads, “Future Site of Lost Fisherman’s Memorial Park.”

  Lubec had been a border town since the beginning, Russell said, populated by bootleggers, businessmen, snake-oil salesmen, fishing families, smugglers, shipbuilders, and frontiersmen. Half the town looked like it had been built in the 1700s, the other half in the 1970s. Clapboard Georgians and colonial saltboxes sidle up against mobile homes and vinyl-sided shacks. Three-story Victorians overlook work lots packed with RVs, ATVs, skiffs, dories, lobster traps, and giant spools of yellow nylon rope. Something about living with your back against an invisible wall makes people think they’re invincible. Smuggling got so bad in 1791 that George Washington dispatched one of his best men from the Continental navy, Hopley Yeaton, to bust smugglers and enforce tariffs around Passamaquoddy Bay.

  Creating a new border out of thin air was not an easy task. Founding a new nation wasn’t either. The US government depended almost solely on tariffs its first few years to keep the country afloat. Congress created a new division of floating tax men called the Revenue Marine—later renamed the Revenue Cutter Service—and authorized ten new cutters to serve between Georgia and Maine. The slender, two-masted sloops were about fifty feet long and were fast enough to overtake any loaded merchant vessel. Still, Yeaton failed to convince locals in Passamaquoddy Bay that the line they fought for now divided them from their friends, family, and business partners in British Canada—and that any goods crossing the line had to go through a customs house.

  The northland was an interwoven patchwork of commerce at the time. Trees were cut in Canada and milled in America. Fish were caught in America, processed in Canada, and then shipped from facilities back in the US. Two centuries of intermarrying among French, Loyalist, Acadian, Indian, German, Scottish, Dutch, and American settlers created families and a borderland that straddled the line. Around Lubec, smuggling continued unabated until Yeaton received more cutters and troops, enabling him to establish a fragile authority over the bay.

  The Revenue Service became America’s only armed maritime force after the Continental navy was disbanded following the Revolutionary War. Cutters patrolled the coast and blocked slavers from reaching US ports after the Slave Trade Act was passed in 1794. Congress revived the navy that year, and cutters were enlis
ted to fight alongside frigates for the next century. In 1915, President Woodrow Wilson merged the Revenue Cutter Service with the US Life-Saving Service to form the US Coast Guard.

  The Coast Guard doesn’t forget its own, and in 1974, five cadets, a handful of officers, and two undertakers unceremoniously appeared in the backyard of a private Lubec home. Their mission was to exhume the “Father of the Coast Guard.” The home was set on what was once Yeaton’s farm, and he was supposedly buried in the backyard. The cadets dug until they found his remains. The following August, the USCGC Eagle arrived to transport Yeaton to a memorial tomb at the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Connecticut.

  Milton Chute had no use for the Coast Guard, Marine Resources, Customs, Border Patrol, or anyone else who wanted to tell him where he could fish or how much he could catch. It was a small miracle that the urchin market had found Maine fishermen in the first place. The fishing industry was struggling in the late 1980s, when Japanese buyers arrived looking for the thorny crustaceans that northland fishermen had cursed most of their lives. In Japan, the buttery inner roe of the green urchin is a favorite among blue-collar diners. Japanese buyers driving refrigerated box trucks along the Maine coast offered twenty-five cents per urchin at first, then a dollar a pound, then two dollars. When the price hit seven dollars a pound, Milton said, urchin draggers could net up to $8,000 a day for much of the thirty-eight-day season. Milton bought a new pickup truck and a second boat. Then, in a self-defeating cycle all too familiar to northland fishermen, the urchins started running out. Marine Resources stepped in. New regulations cut Milton’s limit from more than twenty crates a day to seven. Now it was getting harder to break even.

  Milton sat on the dock, swung his legs into a skiff, and shimmied onto the seat. He was sixty-nine years old and needed things to get easier, not harder. He was just under six feet and not as limber as he once had been. He had a substantial belly and moved with the slow, powerful precision of a black bear: one foot in front of the other, head bowed, one hand on the railing to steady him. He steered like a bear too, with the palm of his right paw resting on the skiff’s tiller.