I really liked this line (about your spouse's friends): "The land had no judgment of them, but the political regime most certainly did."
When I was little, borders were magical to me. I remember having elaborate fantasies about everything suddenly being fundamentally, metaphysically different on the other side, like crossing into Narnia. I would even project this onto state and town lines. I was especially taken with the story of the opera house in Derby Line, Vermont, where according to legend a fugitive spotted by the authorities managed to escape by appearing in a play where half the stage was in Canada, so they couldn't apprehend him as long as he didn't cross the center line. (Apparently, this remains one of the few border crossings that still makes an effort to resist militarization):
As I grew older, I became more aware of the sinister dimensions you describe so vividly above. Even as a white naturalized U.S. citizen without a criminal record, there is something unnerving about the sheer weight of national security implied in that fleeting encounter, like tiptoeing under a hovering boulder. Niagara Falls (75 miles from where I live in Canada) is such a circus that walking over the bridge is more like being let into a bar. But the hammer is still there somewhere, and given the right triggers it falls on the wrong people.
I wonder about the difference between borders and boundaries. Boundaries strike me as being part of the natural world, like a cell membrane or between the earth and atmosphere, and also part of what makes up healthy relationships. Borders may be necessary and useful as well, but they are manmade and artificial, social constructions as you say.
Beautiful post. Made me think of The Dispossessed, of course. Also made me think about an episode of This American Life about walls, https://www.thisamericanlife.org/extras/walls. And how the wall between north and south Ireland is partly responsible for the peace between those places, iirc. Or at least that’s how the locals feel about it. If you tear it down, the troubles will come back.
Mesmerizing piece for all us afflicted with wanderlust. When you visit ...our neighbors (human and wildlife) to the south have much to share with their family’s to the north...but a large wall is there . Militarizing as we speak.
I can attest to the emotional aspect of borders. Every time I have come back into Portugal and passed through border control, I get overcome with the same flood of emotion and tears as the first time. It's almost embarrassing, weeping while standing in line with friends as we return from a holiday in the UK, for example. I get anxious that the person checking my passport and residence permit over will find my sobbing suspicious. I have no control over the intense mixture of feelings of fear and relief and safety, because Portugal is my home now, my safe place, and each time I approach her gates with my passport clutched in my hand I am reminded of the first time I reached her safe shore and the horrors of the country I escaped and the relief I felt on arrival and being let through the border. I have nightmares about being deported back to the U.S.
I have read about how European country's open borders have been slowly closing to one another and it grieves me to see that happen. We should all have the freedom to leave and to stay. Borders are an evil form of imprisonment.
The “psychological architecture” of crossing borders. Will be thinking about this for a while. I don’t have much experience, but it does remind me of how my blood pressure goes up when I go through TSA at the airport. And as always, love your words, your stories, and your audio readings. And love that you have a group of friends that go cross country skiing together. #goals
Thank you, Nia! Borders are so much more than physical barriers, as you’ve so eloquently described. They’re metaphors as well for so much of what’s wrong in our world.
Your pieces always give me so much to think about, and it always feels too hard to distill it in a comment. But thank you for your beautiful, provoking writing.
I’m working on a piece on how the border defining Christianity feels like other peoples stories (and fears) written into my life, rendering my own story incomprehensible. I’ve undergone a pretty disruptive faith shift, and in conversations with loved ones I’m always dancing around the question, are you still a Christian? Which side of the border are you on? And wherever that border is considered sacrosanct, I’m unknowable, because my story is submerged beneath a story with more social power (i feel this really acutely because it’s at play in almost every irl relationship). So I’m trying to throw open a border, turn a line on a map into a habitable region, then invite people in so I (and we) can actually be known.
I find so much resonance with your work. And while it may seem like I’m writing metaphorically about a theme you are addressing literally, I think our two projects are actually much more the same. Because, as you say, all borders are metaphorical. They are all stories written over land and bodies, to equip powerful people with a sense of invulnerability, while rendering the stories inherent in land and bodies incomprehensible.
And our visions merge on the commons (vocabulary you’ve supplied me with, obviously:). Because when I despaired of church as a social project, I despaired of all social possibility. All I could see was capitalist communities, and to be spiritual just meant to have a fantasy future, which only makes a community more dangerous and harmful. My despair was my body rightly telling me that there’s no “better” way to do capitalist communities. I will never feel at home in the borders we’ve drawn. I don’t want another church (I know I’ve said this before:); I want a return of the commons.
I grew up in Washington (1970s), with family in Bellingham and one cousin across the border in Canada. Crossing back and forth was so commonplace that we saw nearly as many Canadian license plates on the roads as Washington plates. The biggest issue in crossing the border was likely wait time. When I traveled to Europe with my children and husband in the 00's, it never occurred to me to worry about entry or exit. I assumed my freedoms and took them for granted and never questioned what borders were or were for. They felt both fixed and fluid, simultaneously. A few years ago, my daughter met and married a man from a Scandinavian country. For nearly 2 years, she has been living here while he lives there, waiting for a decision on her visa application, their life together on hold, and I know in new ways that borders are not fluid and none of us are free in the ways I once thought we were. After watching what happened with borders during the first year of Covid, I know how easily everything we know could change. I try not to spend too much time in the what-ifs of my fears. But they are there.
Living south of Tucson, AZ, I am stopped frequently by border patrol 'checkpoints' that stop every vehicle, even though you have no plans to cross a border. I first experienced close-to-border checkpoints in Northern Ireland, in the '90s, and never imagined I'd be encountering it in my own country.
Thank you for this, there’s a lot to think about here. I traveled internationally quite a bit in my 20s. The only place I got stopped by customs and almost got sent back was Canada. That was before 2001, at a time when I could drive across the border from Seattle, without even really stopping. But I had flown from San Francisco to Toronto, forgotten my passport, with a box of T-shirts for a meeting we were having, and that landed me in customs scared to death. I don’t really know what that feels like when it could upend your life or end your life.
Wow, Nia this is so beautiful and I fucking love your coffee sign! And as others have said--the MFA program! Just no. How dare they squash someone's fire? You can write whatever the hell you want and it will be fantastic. We're all here to prove it. :)
When I was a child I remember traveling to Canada and was fascinated by the concept of borders and being in a different country. You can imagine my utter confusion that it wasn't something 'real.' Then when my partner and I moved to Alaska, we had to cross the border twice--the first over the WA border they had to unpack our whole car (?), while the second rural checkpoint at Alaska the US agents asked us if we had 1500$ in cash. We were grad students--needless to say, we did not. I was then held again on a flight from the UK to Oregon through Canada by US agents who were suspicious when I had a passport stamp from Jordan, after my archaeology dig. All of it sent cold shivers down my spine--the overt power over, by white men, was really chilling. Especially when I was returning to my own country, supposedly, in both instances. My son gets annoyed at me because I get really triggered by TSA now after items being compensated and the theater of it all--I try to stay cool but it's just so incredibly frightening, when people hold and seem to ENJOY wielding power over others in real time--in stakes that aren't even as high as what you and so many others in the comments below have shared. It's frightening, truly. I feel it in airports keenly each time I'm there--all of these arbitrary points in space that can so swiftly change the course of life. It's maddening, frightening, and insanity.
And in truth, I have way too many nightmares about being on planes and finding my passport or my family's missing. I need to get my son's renewed and want them in order in case things get weird in the US, and my dreams of fleeing to Scotland could maybe come to fruition. Ooof. It's a lot. But I'm grateful for you writing about this. 💜
I didn't cross a border until I was Twenty-two, and since then I've always felt this intense anxiety when crossing borders. Maybe it has to do with all the cops I dealt with as a teenager. I always think something is going to go wrong.
When I was 35 I took a trip from Syracuse to Montreal, except I got stopped at the Canadian border. When the border patrol asked me if they were going to find anything "dangerous" in my trunk, I said there were some books in there. Were those dangerous. They searched my car and sent me into the waiting room, where a family sat with their child. After a while a border patrol agent took me into an interrogation room. When he asked me if I'd ever had legal trouble I told him about my two DUIs, both of them fifteen years-old. Turns out I'm not allowed in Canada because of those DUIs. "I know you're not a danger to the country, but it's just policy." I never made it to Montreal.
This makes me think of enclosure, and how concepts of enclosure led to the national park system in the U.S., which in turn led to land being stolen from Native Americans. Boundaries, like you said, are necessary and healthy. Borders? Not so much.
Thanks so much for this thoughtful piece. Your writing is, as always, beautiful.
As someone with a “not 1st class” passport, I have stories to tell, and as a recent green card holder, I have more stories to tell hah.
But I agree with you, nothing is more exciting than a land border crossing..
I really liked this line (about your spouse's friends): "The land had no judgment of them, but the political regime most certainly did."
When I was little, borders were magical to me. I remember having elaborate fantasies about everything suddenly being fundamentally, metaphysically different on the other side, like crossing into Narnia. I would even project this onto state and town lines. I was especially taken with the story of the opera house in Derby Line, Vermont, where according to legend a fugitive spotted by the authorities managed to escape by appearing in a play where half the stage was in Canada, so they couldn't apprehend him as long as he didn't cross the center line. (Apparently, this remains one of the few border crossings that still makes an effort to resist militarization):
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/12/26/inside-the-library-where-you-can-read-in-two-countries-at-once
As I grew older, I became more aware of the sinister dimensions you describe so vividly above. Even as a white naturalized U.S. citizen without a criminal record, there is something unnerving about the sheer weight of national security implied in that fleeting encounter, like tiptoeing under a hovering boulder. Niagara Falls (75 miles from where I live in Canada) is such a circus that walking over the bridge is more like being let into a bar. But the hammer is still there somewhere, and given the right triggers it falls on the wrong people.
I wonder about the difference between borders and boundaries. Boundaries strike me as being part of the natural world, like a cell membrane or between the earth and atmosphere, and also part of what makes up healthy relationships. Borders may be necessary and useful as well, but they are manmade and artificial, social constructions as you say.
Beautiful post. Made me think of The Dispossessed, of course. Also made me think about an episode of This American Life about walls, https://www.thisamericanlife.org/extras/walls. And how the wall between north and south Ireland is partly responsible for the peace between those places, iirc. Or at least that’s how the locals feel about it. If you tear it down, the troubles will come back.
Mesmerizing piece for all us afflicted with wanderlust. When you visit ...our neighbors (human and wildlife) to the south have much to share with their family’s to the north...but a large wall is there . Militarizing as we speak.
I can attest to the emotional aspect of borders. Every time I have come back into Portugal and passed through border control, I get overcome with the same flood of emotion and tears as the first time. It's almost embarrassing, weeping while standing in line with friends as we return from a holiday in the UK, for example. I get anxious that the person checking my passport and residence permit over will find my sobbing suspicious. I have no control over the intense mixture of feelings of fear and relief and safety, because Portugal is my home now, my safe place, and each time I approach her gates with my passport clutched in my hand I am reminded of the first time I reached her safe shore and the horrors of the country I escaped and the relief I felt on arrival and being let through the border. I have nightmares about being deported back to the U.S.
I have read about how European country's open borders have been slowly closing to one another and it grieves me to see that happen. We should all have the freedom to leave and to stay. Borders are an evil form of imprisonment.
No particular comment just yet as I am now a once a week consumer of Substack. Your writing is always thoughtful. this was no exception
The “psychological architecture” of crossing borders. Will be thinking about this for a while. I don’t have much experience, but it does remind me of how my blood pressure goes up when I go through TSA at the airport. And as always, love your words, your stories, and your audio readings. And love that you have a group of friends that go cross country skiing together. #goals
Thank you, Nia! Borders are so much more than physical barriers, as you’ve so eloquently described. They’re metaphors as well for so much of what’s wrong in our world.
Your pieces always give me so much to think about, and it always feels too hard to distill it in a comment. But thank you for your beautiful, provoking writing.
I’m working on a piece on how the border defining Christianity feels like other peoples stories (and fears) written into my life, rendering my own story incomprehensible. I’ve undergone a pretty disruptive faith shift, and in conversations with loved ones I’m always dancing around the question, are you still a Christian? Which side of the border are you on? And wherever that border is considered sacrosanct, I’m unknowable, because my story is submerged beneath a story with more social power (i feel this really acutely because it’s at play in almost every irl relationship). So I’m trying to throw open a border, turn a line on a map into a habitable region, then invite people in so I (and we) can actually be known.
I find so much resonance with your work. And while it may seem like I’m writing metaphorically about a theme you are addressing literally, I think our two projects are actually much more the same. Because, as you say, all borders are metaphorical. They are all stories written over land and bodies, to equip powerful people with a sense of invulnerability, while rendering the stories inherent in land and bodies incomprehensible.
And our visions merge on the commons (vocabulary you’ve supplied me with, obviously:). Because when I despaired of church as a social project, I despaired of all social possibility. All I could see was capitalist communities, and to be spiritual just meant to have a fantasy future, which only makes a community more dangerous and harmful. My despair was my body rightly telling me that there’s no “better” way to do capitalist communities. I will never feel at home in the borders we’ve drawn. I don’t want another church (I know I’ve said this before:); I want a return of the commons.
I grew up in Washington (1970s), with family in Bellingham and one cousin across the border in Canada. Crossing back and forth was so commonplace that we saw nearly as many Canadian license plates on the roads as Washington plates. The biggest issue in crossing the border was likely wait time. When I traveled to Europe with my children and husband in the 00's, it never occurred to me to worry about entry or exit. I assumed my freedoms and took them for granted and never questioned what borders were or were for. They felt both fixed and fluid, simultaneously. A few years ago, my daughter met and married a man from a Scandinavian country. For nearly 2 years, she has been living here while he lives there, waiting for a decision on her visa application, their life together on hold, and I know in new ways that borders are not fluid and none of us are free in the ways I once thought we were. After watching what happened with borders during the first year of Covid, I know how easily everything we know could change. I try not to spend too much time in the what-ifs of my fears. But they are there.
Well writ, beautiful and thoughtful. Thank you!
Don’t let the bastards get you down. Write that fiction, if your heart starts wandering towards that fence.
Living south of Tucson, AZ, I am stopped frequently by border patrol 'checkpoints' that stop every vehicle, even though you have no plans to cross a border. I first experienced close-to-border checkpoints in Northern Ireland, in the '90s, and never imagined I'd be encountering it in my own country.
Thank you for this, there’s a lot to think about here. I traveled internationally quite a bit in my 20s. The only place I got stopped by customs and almost got sent back was Canada. That was before 2001, at a time when I could drive across the border from Seattle, without even really stopping. But I had flown from San Francisco to Toronto, forgotten my passport, with a box of T-shirts for a meeting we were having, and that landed me in customs scared to death. I don’t really know what that feels like when it could upend your life or end your life.
Wow, Nia this is so beautiful and I fucking love your coffee sign! And as others have said--the MFA program! Just no. How dare they squash someone's fire? You can write whatever the hell you want and it will be fantastic. We're all here to prove it. :)
When I was a child I remember traveling to Canada and was fascinated by the concept of borders and being in a different country. You can imagine my utter confusion that it wasn't something 'real.' Then when my partner and I moved to Alaska, we had to cross the border twice--the first over the WA border they had to unpack our whole car (?), while the second rural checkpoint at Alaska the US agents asked us if we had 1500$ in cash. We were grad students--needless to say, we did not. I was then held again on a flight from the UK to Oregon through Canada by US agents who were suspicious when I had a passport stamp from Jordan, after my archaeology dig. All of it sent cold shivers down my spine--the overt power over, by white men, was really chilling. Especially when I was returning to my own country, supposedly, in both instances. My son gets annoyed at me because I get really triggered by TSA now after items being compensated and the theater of it all--I try to stay cool but it's just so incredibly frightening, when people hold and seem to ENJOY wielding power over others in real time--in stakes that aren't even as high as what you and so many others in the comments below have shared. It's frightening, truly. I feel it in airports keenly each time I'm there--all of these arbitrary points in space that can so swiftly change the course of life. It's maddening, frightening, and insanity.
And in truth, I have way too many nightmares about being on planes and finding my passport or my family's missing. I need to get my son's renewed and want them in order in case things get weird in the US, and my dreams of fleeing to Scotland could maybe come to fruition. Ooof. It's a lot. But I'm grateful for you writing about this. 💜
I didn't cross a border until I was Twenty-two, and since then I've always felt this intense anxiety when crossing borders. Maybe it has to do with all the cops I dealt with as a teenager. I always think something is going to go wrong.
When I was 35 I took a trip from Syracuse to Montreal, except I got stopped at the Canadian border. When the border patrol asked me if they were going to find anything "dangerous" in my trunk, I said there were some books in there. Were those dangerous. They searched my car and sent me into the waiting room, where a family sat with their child. After a while a border patrol agent took me into an interrogation room. When he asked me if I'd ever had legal trouble I told him about my two DUIs, both of them fifteen years-old. Turns out I'm not allowed in Canada because of those DUIs. "I know you're not a danger to the country, but it's just policy." I never made it to Montreal.
This makes me think of enclosure, and how concepts of enclosure led to the national park system in the U.S., which in turn led to land being stolen from Native Americans. Boundaries, like you said, are necessary and healthy. Borders? Not so much.
Thanks so much for this thoughtful piece. Your writing is, as always, beautiful.
Aaaand... this just in.
Breaking: Travel bans proposed in Tennessee & Oklahoma
States would send aunts & grandmas to prison as "traffickers" for helping teens
https://jessica.substack.com/p/breaking-travel-bans-proposed-in