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

by Porter Fox

  Passamaquoddy Bay appeared in flashes of cut blue light as I drove north on Route 1. I passed Saint Croix Island a few miles beyond Eastport and pulled over to take a look. The island sits a half mile offshore from the Saint Croix Island International Historic Site. It is layered in granite, seaweed, woodbine, and sedge. There is a small boathouse on the northern tip and a granite outcropping to the south, where Champlain built the cannon battery. A bald eagle flew over the river, and for a moment it seemed odd that so much in the world had changed while the island remained exactly the same.

  I wanted to start my journey at the head of tide in Calais, Maine, but two hydroelectric dams blocked the way. I continued thirty miles north instead and put in upstream of the Grand Falls dam. An older man with silver hair and a blue work jacket was cleaning a sluice door when I arrived at the dam. He stood on a ribbon of concrete spanning the river, holding a long aluminum pole. I called to him over the roaring water a few times, pointed to my canoe, the car, the river, myself—trying to ask permission to launch the boat and park my car there. He looked up once and went back to what he was doing. I called out a few more times, and eventually he put down the pole and walked over.

  “It’s smaller than I expected,” I said.

  “This ain’t the dam,” he answered.

  “What is it?”

  “Auxiliary canal,” he said. “Over that hill you’ll see the real thing.”

  I told him that I wasn’t looking for the dam, that I wanted to canoe the Saint Croix to Loon Bay.

  “Loon Bay is ten miles north,” he said.

  “Can I get there by dark?” I asked.

  “River goes south.”

  I pointed to the canoe again.

  “So you’ll be going upstream,” he said.

  He was right. Maine is shaped like a guillotine blade, pitched a few degrees toward the ocean. Nearly every major river in the state—the Kennebec, Penobscot, Androscoggin, and Saint Croix—spills from highlands in the west, east to the sea. Inland commerce followed gravity in colonial America, and Maine’s rivers were conveyor belts that floated commodities downstream. Timber, pelts, minerals, and grain trickled down the fifteen-hundred-square-mile Saint Croix watershed. Shipwrights, tar gangs, riggers, and sailmakers worked Calais’s shoreline, prepping oceangoing ships bound for Europe, Africa, and Asia.

  Explorers, trappers, and log drivers used ten-foot black cedar shafts, harvested from bogs, to pole up the Saint Croix almost as fast as they could make it down. I had known I’d be traveling upstream and considered poling the way it used to be done, until a short, barrel-chested salesman at the Old Town Canoe factory told me: “They had muscles we don’t have.” Mainers have a way of making a point in few words, and that afternoon I bought a used five-horsepower outboard to mount on the back of the canoe.

  I pulled the motor out of the trunk and showed it to the dam worker. He seemed amused. “No problem about the car,” he said. It took a half hour to unload a ridiculous amount of gear: three dry bags, groceries, cooler, computer, GPS, map, life jacket, two paddles, tent, sleeping bag, cookware. From Loon Bay, I wanted to canoe twenty miles to a small outpost called Vanceboro. From there I would continue thirty miles across Spednic, East Grand, and North Lakes to the Saint Croix’s headwaters at Monument Brook. The entire trip would be on the border. It would also pass through some of the most remote wilderness in the Northeast.

  The man watched me mount the engine on the stern, push off, and spin in a complete circle. He didn’t move as the canoe drifted toward the sluice door. I finally got the engine started, and the canoe shot forward out of the canal. It was surprisingly stable under power. It was a sixteen-foot “square stern,” with a hard chine and a flat bottom to prevent tipping. The first square-stern canoe was built in the 1930s sixty miles upstream on East Grand Lake, though its exact origin continues to be debated. A fishing guide there took a saw to the stern of his canoe, fit it with a transom, attached one of the first outboard engines ever made, and—I am postulating here—vowed never to pick up a paddle again.

  My GPS read seven miles per hour as I crossed Grand Falls Flowage. Five minutes later I was on the boundary. There wasn’t a person or border station in sight. One foot to the east was Canada, one to the west was America. I scanned both shores for patrollers, cameras, sensors, drones. There was nothing but flat, dark water under a pale-blue October sky. The leaves were changing, burned red and gold, and a few floated on the surface. The sun was so bright and clear that it lit up the shoreline like a spotlight.

  I had visited the St. Croix International Waterway Commission two days before in Saint Stephen to ask advice about canoeing the border. The commission is a bilateral partnership between the US and Canada responsible for “planning and facilitating management of the Saint Croix boundary water system.” Former executive director Abby Pond acted as a liaison between border authorities and civilians. When I set up the meeting a week before, she told me that paddling the border might not be as easy as I thought.

  Abby’s desk took up a third of the commission’s three-hundred-square-foot office. She shared the space with a secretary, who answered approximately seventy-five phone calls in the twenty minutes I was there. “In the old days,” Abby said, “everyone treated both shores of the river the same.” The border patrol didn’t mind boaters visiting, picnicking, or spending the night on either side. Since 9/11, though, drifting across the boundary could land you in jail. “No one really knows what they’re supposed to do,” she said.

  Maine shares the second-longest border with Canada—six hundred miles—of any state in the Lower 48, after Michigan. One hundred eighty US Customs and Border Protection agents watch the line from twenty-four crossings, using pickup trucks, ATVs, snowmobiles, planes, boats, and helicopters. There are still plenty of ways to slip across, though. Agents on the northern border apprehended three thousand people in 2016, including a thirty-nine-year-old Quebec man who was charging $8,000 per person to walk them across the line. That same year the New York Times reported that two parties near Swanton, Vermont, were caught on video sneaking over the boundary. One of the groups was dressed in camo and appeared to be armed. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) didn’t get to the location in time and never found either group.

  CBP is the largest federal agency in the US, commanding sixty thousand agents and a $12-billion budget. It states that its primary function is “keeping terrorists and their weapons out of the U.S.,” though, statistically, there is no significant terrorist threat on either border. Drugs and human trafficking make up nearly all of the arrests along America’s northern and southern perimeters. In its effort to “keep terrorists out,” CBP sends most of its resources south to the Mexican border, even though the only known terrorists who did sneak across a US border came from Canada. One had illegally crossed at Ross Lake in Washington State, in June of 1996. He was shot by the NYPD months later, while preparing a bomb to detonate on the New York City subway. Three years after that, an Algerian man was stopped at the northern border; he later confessed to having been on his way to blow up LAX airport in the “Millennium Plot.”

  CBP and the Canada Border Services Agency work together on the Saint Croix River, Abby said. Crossing illegally can get you jail time on either side of the line. A man who paddled across the river on an inflatable mattress in 2016, to see his pregnant fiancée in Saint Stephen, was sentenced to two months in prison. A month later, two men were arrested after helping an Ecuadorian woman use a paddleboat to cross the Saint Croix. “The real problem on the river is that there is no border,” Abby said. “It is unmarked. So you don’t know what side you are on unless you are on land and you are really familiar with it.”

  HAVING SPENT YEARS PADDLING canoes against headwinds and currents, I felt like the outboard engine was an invisible hand pushing the boat along. It was so easy to drive that I started looking for things to do. I checked the map and aligned it with the compass. I played with the time-lapse settings on my camera. If there was an
obstacle ahead, I nudged the tiller an inch or two and the canoe turned around it.

  The boat zipped east over the flowage, and I put my feet up on a thwart. It was impossible to know which side of the border I was on. It runs along the deep-water mark, but deep-water marks are carved by nature, not humans, and they shift constantly. I was trying to follow the line north toward the American shore when the engine hit a rock so hard that the propeller kicked out of the water and the motor stalled.

  I hadn’t noticed how much the wind had picked up until the canoe glided to a stop. Heavy chop slapped the gunwales and pushed it toward Canada. The engine started again, but the propeller wouldn’t turn. I tilted the engine up and reached back to free whatever was caught, but the blades were clean. The shore was only a hundred feet away, and I tried to paddle back into the flowage. The wind and waves were too much, though, so I turned around and paddled toward a small dock in Canada.

  A Canadian flag hung from a cabin just behind the dock. I tied up and, though there was seemingly no reason to sneak, I sneaked across the tiny front lawn and knocked on the door. No one answered. No boats or patrol cars pulled up. It was five in the afternoon and already getting dark. The temperature had dropped to around freezing. The waves on the lake were too big to safely paddle a loaded canoe, but I couldn’t stay where I was. An hour into my cross-country adventure, it looked like my trip was about to come to a sudden, humiliating end.

  I pulled the engine off the canoe and unscrewed the propeller. Three severed sections of a shear pin fell onto the dock. Growing up in the northland, you get to know shear pins. They act as a clutch between the propeller and the driveshaft and shear if the prop hits something hard. Every outboard carries a few spares under the engine cover. The used motor I bought did not.

  I looked through my gear for a bolt or screw that would suffice, but there was nothing. I tried to paddle away from the dock again, but the overloaded canoe was so low in the water that the waves pushed me back after fifty feet. Back on the dock, I gathered the broken pieces of the pin and jammed them between the shaft and the propeller. I figured if I kept the engine in forward, the pressure would hold them in place. Miraculously, it did, and the canoe lurched off the dock.

  The Saint Croix was a dark shadow by the time I made it off the flowage and back into the river. The wilderness around it was dense and primitive. A beaver waddled to the shoreline and swam around the canoe like it had never seen a human before. A few stars appeared, and the channel narrowed. The current was more powerful than I’d expected, especially for October, when water levels are typically low. The engine struggled, and the current knocked the bow sideways every few seconds.

  A set of rapids broke over the gunwale, and freezing water poured into the canoe. The map said Loon Bay was seven miles away. It was too far. I tilted the engine halfway up and made better headway. When it got too dark to see rocks, I steered blind—using muscle memory to react to subtle movements of the bow. I don’t know how long I drove like that or how far. I was lost in the effort, frozen, inching forward. At some point, the roar of the river died down, and the canoe slid into a wide eddy.

  I spotted a campsite in the woods. I wasn’t as far north as I wanted to get, but the site was perfect. A three-foot pile of dry cordwood sat next to a fire ring. There were two tent sites and an outhouse. I tied up the canoe and lit a fire. A beaver whacked its tail; the report sounded like a gunshot. It got so dark I couldn’t see the canoe or the river. The canopy blocked the stars. I stayed close to the fire and kept my headlamp on. It was spooky to be alone so far from civilization. On a map the boundary is a line. On land, it passes through impossible places—ravines, cliff bands, bogs, waterfalls, rocky summits, whitewater—that few people ever see. Ninety percent of Canadians live within a hundred miles of their southern border. Twelve percent of Americans live in the northland, and most of them in cities like Seattle, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, and Cleveland.

  Camping thirty feet from an international border was unsettling as well. It struck me that if someone was trying to sneak across, their greatest find would be an unarmed solo camper, with a boat and enough gear and food to survive for a month. No matter what CBP and Abby had said, no one was watching this section of the boundary.

  An hour later, a beam of light shot through the trees. The glare was too bright to be a flashlight. I thought it might be a vehicle, and I crept to the riverbank to see. The beam came from the opposite shore. I walked upstream a hundred yards and looked again. Across the river I saw that the light was coming from the crest of a full moon, rising over the treetops.

  Silvery light filled the forest. My hands were silver. The Saint Croix was silver. I saw my shadow on the forest floor. It was unnatural. The glow was too bright to be the moon. Astronomers call the edge of sun- or moonlight passing over the Earth a terminator. Or a twilight zone. The zone moves a thousand miles an hour on the equator. It travels at half that speed in the northland. At the North Pole, you can walk faster than the terminator, creating your own sunrises and sunsets.

  An otter slipped between my feet and disappeared into the river. I watched it for a moment, then walked back to my tent and stared at the changing light until I fell asleep. The emptiness of the northland was unfamiliar to me. It was devoid of light, cars, people, trails, and roads. Clouds of stars glowed through gaps in the tree cover. The forest was pure black where the moonlight was shaded. I grew up in this country, had explored it for thirty years, and thought I knew it. But this was different. The closer I got to the line, the more primal the terrain became.

  CHAMPLAIN SURVIVED UNTIL THE SPRING of 1605 and traded for fresh meat with an encampment of Passamaquoddy Indians. By June, just forty-four of the original colonists were alive. Champlain was undeterred. He sailed the coast as far south as Cape Cod, mapping it and making alliances with Indian chiefs. He was a natural emissary and approached Indians confidently, without being threatening. He performed rituals with them, smoked with them, danced, and compared maps of the region. He followed messengers blindly upriver for days to meet with their headmen. He was an anthropologist as much as an explorer. His desire for discovery, knowledge, and salvation gave him a higher purpose, as well as incredible drive and endurance.

  De Mons was not as inspired. He was so put off by the s­auvages—especially after a conflict in 1605 near Cape Cod that left one Frenchman and two Nauset Indians dead—that he decided to move the French colony not south, but east to Nova Scotia. The lack of French presence in the Northeast over the next few decades encouraged the English to establish settlements from Massachusetts to Maine. One small skirmish in the summer of 1605—that took no more than a few hours to unfold—moved the line between New England and New France more than four hundred miles north, leaving it almost exactly where it stands today.

  The Nova Scotia settlement fared far better that winter, but de Mons’s investors back in Paris did not. They wanted to move the colony out of the forbidding northland and south to the Caribbean. Champlain and the settlers were recalled to France, and for a moment, the dream of New France was dead. Two events brought it back to life and extended the colony’s boundary farther west. The first was a renewed British effort to establish permanent settlements in America, beginning with Jamestown in 1607. The second was a fashion trend gaining momentum on the streets of Paris. Felt and feathers were out. Animal fur was in. Beaver pelts were most in demand. They were used to make cavalier hats popular with nobility, and later for Puritan capotains and top hats. The supply of beaver in northern Russia and Scandinavia was nearly exhausted, driving demand and prices up. Thicker furs like white fox, lynx, marten, and otter also fetched a higher price, and animals with thick furs live in the north.

  Fur traders were already sailing to the northland, and Champlain and his sponsors proposed a monopoly to Henri IV. The promise of large profits swayed the king, and he supported another effort. Three ships set sail from the Seine on April 13, 1608. This time Champlain sailed with the title “Lieutenant for th
e Country of New France.” He sent one ship to the Nova Scotia settlement and took the other two to the Saint Lawrence River. At sixty thousand square miles, the mouth of the river is the planet’s largest estuary. It drains 350,000 cubic feet of water per second, mostly from the Great Lakes, and produced more pelts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries than anywhere else in the world. Champlain founded Quebec on high ground southwest of Île d’Orléans. His crew built a fortification quickly but were again unprepared for winter. The first snow came November 18, and by January, signs of scurvy and dysentery had appeared. Men died. Champlain ordered autopsies. The surgeon dutifully carried them out until he, too, fell ill and passed away.

  News traveled across the Atlantic with surprising speed for the time, on fishing and trading boats. The hard winter did not go over well with investors, and that spring, orders arrived for Champlain to return once again to France. He wrote back that he would comply after he completed a mission of “certain explorations in the interior.” His ambition all along had been to continue exploring America, and he had no intention of returning home before getting a chance to follow the great river farther inland. Instead of packing up, he gathered a team and sailed in the opposite direction.

  Champlain wanted to extend French control as far west across the northland as possible. Constant war among Indian tribes made establishing allies, and colonizing New France, nearly impossible. The Mohawk Indians of the Iroquois Confederacy—Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and, later, the Tuscarora—were at war with almost every other tribe in the Northeast. Champlain thought that a sudden and decisive defeat might forge a lasting truce. Since his first trip up the Saint Lawrence in 1603, he had spoken to local tribes about inland rivers and the far-reaching “sweet-water seas” that the Saint Lawrence flowed from. The Huron Indians suggested that there was an even greater body of water to the west, which Champlain thought might be the Pacific. Legends of a Northwest Passage across America—and a route to the riches of China—had beckoned explorers to the Northeast for two centuries. If Champlain could find it, the future of New France would be sealed.