Northland by Porter Fox

At sunset, the sky turned dark blue. I tried to remember the color of the stones, the cool air, the auburn sunlight touching my forehead. I thought about the first day of the trip at West Quoddy Head in Maine and tried to memorize the dark spires, rounded massifs, and marshmallow flanks of Mount Baker's glaciers. I thought about all the parts of the northland--oceans, rivers, lakes, plains, cities, reservations, towns--and how they linked from east to west. It was indeed its own territory: a forgotten belt of wild, old America delineated by iron monuments, rock piles, and clear-cuts.

We ended our trip through the Pacific Northwest last week at the Peace Arch, a monument that stands on the border between the towns of Blaine, Washington and Douglas, British Columbia. A tall white arch stands in the middle of a green park that stretches between both countries, with the entry lines on either side of it, the Canadian to the left, the American to the right. The monument is supposed to be a monument to peace between the two countries; in the middle, there is a ceremonial gate attached to the wall below a sign that reads MAY THESE GATES NEVER BE CLOSED. Just beyond the arch, a sign on the Canadian side reads, "Park Closed."

We saw a woman enter idly from the Canadian side and walk to the American, where she was collected by an official looking man who might have been from either country and directed toward a booth, presumably to be sent off to a black site. A few feet away the park becomes a stretch of carefully tended flowers and picnic benches (and the Peace Arch Park Snack Shack) on the American side. On the Canadian side, the border follows a street where a row of houses look out in to America, their residents only needing to make a few steps out of their door to enter another country. These houses made the stern theater of the border crossing stations seem performative and silly.

Porter Fox ended his journey along all 4,000+ miles of the USA-Canadian border at the Peace Arch, too. By then, the peculiar logic that exists at the Peace Arch has appeared many times: the world's longest peaceful border has, since 9/11, become hardened in ways that have sundered communities and put an end to the free travel that was once common between the two countries. The "Park Closed" signs we saw were, no doubt, the vestiges of Canadian COVID-19 policy, which has hardened the border even more--in many places, trains still can't pass through it. But even a few years ago, when Fox took up the project of canoeing, hiking, boating, and driving from the border's eastern terminus in Maine to its western one in Washington, the border was increasingly contentious.

The thesis of Fox's book is that the area around the border has its own particular identity and existence, as a region he calls "The Northland." He wants to explore the Northland, a region that is, with some exceptions, remarkably rural and remote, and understand how the border has shaped this identity. He begins in Maine, canoeing along the St Croix river, then hitches a ride on a Great Lakes tanker that takes him all the way from Lake Erie to Lake Superior. From there, he drives across the oil-rich boomlands of North Dakota, making a quick and timely sojourn into the protest camps at Standing Rock, which are not really near the border--though the oil in the pipeline is. His journey continues along the "Medicine Line," as the Native Americans who were pushed across it in the 19th century call it, stopping in at the Blackfeet Reservation and through Glacier National Park. In the North Cascades, he sleeps in a fire tower, as Jack Kerouac once did, during one of his most prolific periods.

The book is part travelogue, part social commentary, part history. As Fox travels, he recounts the history of the border, which has always been a contentious one. The 18th and 19th century politicians who negotiated the border really had no idea about the geography of the land they were dividing, and time and time again, created impossible borders that would lead to more contention, and more need for tenacious explorers and surveyors. The creation of Minnesota's Northwest Angle, for instance, the little chopped-off bit on the other side of the Lake of the Woods, exists because the agreed border point--the headwaters of the Mississippi--is a hundred miles south of where the negotiators thought it was. Fox adds to this history a sympathetic portrait of Angle Inlet, the Angle's only community, where schools and businesses have closed over the last few decades because of the stubborn and increasing difficulty of crossing the border--twice. And similar stories are told in Maine and along the Great Lakes.

I appreciated Fox's focus on Native Americans, for whom the border takes on a special relevance. Fox's sojourn to Standing Rock fits uncomfortably with the book's overall thesis (I mean, Google it, it's mostly in South Dakota) but along with his stop at the Blackfeet Nation, it gives an effective portrait of the way the border was placed over the existence of tribal nations, and which has profoundly shaped their existence. Even before the Indian Wars of the 19th century, the border was an indigenous problem, as Fox explains in his recounting of the alliance between Jesuit explorer Champlain and the Hurons against the Iroquois.

We crossed the border four times on our trip: twice by airplane, once by boat, and once on the road. But we experienced only one small part of its four thousand miles. I loved reading Northland while on this trip because it gave me a sense of exploring something larger; not merely of stepping over an imaginary line but passing through a real place on which history works its considerable, sometimes transformative, sometimes brutal efficacy.