I wonder how much more exciting it would be to experience the crossing of land cared for by different peoples but without a hard border. I'm wondering if I've ever experienced that anywhere, if any of us have really, and what we lose by being denied it.
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.
That line — I was thinking of Lauret Savoy’s book “Trace” and how she talked about seeing the Grand Canyon for the first time and really absorbing the reality that nature isn’t racist.
Ooh, Narnia! You could really write a whole book on borders and these in-between spaces where we cross over to other worlds. Your story reminds me of Tim O’Brien’s “The Things We Carried” and his writing about canoeing up to the Canadian border to get out of being drafted and sent off to war. I should reread that. I hadn’t heard of this library, amazing!
“ 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.” EXACTLY. And as a naturalized citizen, too, if you lose your papers that can be worrying. (That happened to my dad. Messy divorce, my mom wasn’t too happy and, uh, disposed of his naturalization papers.)
One of the Harsha Walia talks I watched was with another woman who said she’d been thinking a lot about “queering” borders. They then talked about this exactly thing for quite a while, the difference between boundaries—like territory managed by Indigenous peoples—and hard borders. The other presenter was First Nations, Anishinaabe maybe? And they talked about how lack of militarized borders doesn’t mean you don’t know where your and others’ boundaries are.
Definitely plenty to say about land from intersectional and queer perspectives! I'm in a graduate program that emphasizes critical and cultural psychology, and there's theoretical work in some of those circles on "borders," "liminality" and related experiences (not so much queer theory but potentially related). Some of it is pretty high-concept and focused on symbolic meaning-making not policy, but there is also empirical research. E.g.:
Gaza comes to mind as an extreme case where the borders are not designed merely to keep people out, but also keep people *in* - to essentially keep them trapped and powerless, in a kind of bubble. (I suppose reservation territory functions the same way). That puts a whole other spin on things, too.
Not to trivialize any of this, but my favorite satire of the "border" mindset is Super Troopers 2 where a legalistic adjustment of the Vermont/Canadian border sets off a dispute between the Canadian and U.S. border patrol. Maybe if you need a break from all the darkness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEed-o8fVpM
Those papers look fascinating. I might have to spend some time with them. And yes, that makes a lot of sense about Gaza. And you're right -- especially when reservations were first created, it was actually illegal for Native people to leave them without permission. I think the rules were even stricter in Canada than in the U.S. Horrific practices. And as another commenter pointed out here, a lot of the anti-abortion laws being passed in different states prohibit leaving the state for medical care involving pregnancy. How is that enforced? Do you start patrolling the state border and checking for women and insisting they take a pregnancy test? I'm sure many of the legislatures would like to force that on people.
I don't think Super Troopers trivializes it. Science fiction, whether lighthearted or not, is a great way to bring these kinds of ideas to masses of people who might never think about them. (Also, I always need a break from the darkness. I've never seen that movie. It looks hilarious!)
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.
I have GOT to reread The Dispossessed. It keeps coming up!
The Ireland one is interesting because it's like, that physical border is what is helping keep violence from erupting again, over a social-religious border. And then there's Hadrian's Wall, which is always interesting to me more as a mark of the furthest the Romans could manage to control. Beyond that wall, they never were able to achieve what they wanted.
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.
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
Yes! And TSA people are usually friendlier to me than the border patrol agents, or at least if they're not they're more threatening than grumpy. But I've never been pulled from the line. My spouse has. The agents who do the pulling are less friendly.
I hope you find some of those friends! I'm such a loner I didn't move back to my hometown expecting to find friends, but several of them are people I was friends or friendly with in high school, and I've been surprised and delighted to find among them true, close friends--of whom I have very few and value highly--with whom I look forward to growing old with. That's something else!
Yes, they always have to pull us to double check the wheelchair and even to the adorable 8 year old they are not very friendly!
Old friends are such a gift. I have a few that are precious and take the place of sisters in my life - though they are not as outdoorsy as me 😂 - and I wouldn’t trade them for anything.
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.
(I was thinking about you over the weekend, or rather a colleague of yours. And wondering what the weather is like in Kentucky because my college roommate, who lives in Covington, might be coming to visit.)
Thank you, Nia! ❤️ All over ehe place right now. We had 5° a couple of mornings ago with heavy snow and now heavy rain, and it’s going up to 60 tomorrow. We haven’t had a “normal” winter in quite a while.
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.
"I know in new ways that borders are not fluid and none of us are free in the ways I once thought we were." I suppose we all learn this at different times and for different reasons. Thank you for sharing this story; it really resonates with me. And echoes so many people's experiences with borders over the decades, however they're created and enforced.
It does, often, but I stopped thinking of "get back to writing fiction" as an annual goal purely because I never managed to make the time for it. Frustrating but I know it'll happen when it happens! At least the whole experience didn't drive me away from writing completely. I knew too many people that happened to. :(
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.
That's an incredible story, Karen. Experiencing it even once, even in the least threatening circumstances, is enough to drive home the power of it, isn't it?
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. 💜
And yeah, MFA programs can sometimes be supportive, but I've heard stories like mine more often than not. Worse are the writers I knew in the program who were actually wonderful writers but assumed they weren't "writers" and never pursued it after we graduated. Makes me sad.
These are such chilling stories, and I feel what you're feeling viscerally (also remembering countries where we were advised to get our visa stamp on a separate piece of paper because otherwise you'd be on a U.S. list forever; I'd forgotten about that), especially the "when people hold and seem to ENJOY wielding power over others in real time." It is, indeed, maddening, frightening, and insanity. I hate that it exists.
We used to go to Canada a lot when I was a kid, to go camping, and what I remembered was the remarkable cleanliness of the lawns because of no dog poop! I don't know why that sticks in my head.
I keep my kids' passports up to date, too, and get super anxious the years their British ones need renewing because that's on my spouse, who's not quite as organized as I am. They're lucky to have that citizenship and it's always in the back of my mind. Not that Europe or Britain feel like very safe places right now. Nowhere really does. But still. Scotland looks nice and I like it there!
I get those nightmares, too. Luggage and passports. It's a recurring one and no fun at all. Be kind to yourself. 💖
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.
My neighbor had the same issue with a DUI from a long time ago. He hasn't had a drink in over 20 years. His father was Canadian. It took him a while and a lot of paperwork, but he got a copy of his father's birth certificate and ultimately Canadian citizenship. Now he can go kayak fishing for salmon on the ocean side of Vancouver Island.
It's all so arbitrary.
Not sure I ever mentioned that to get my green card back in around '88, I had to have an AIDS test.
that is so wild! I know I *can* get into Canada- I would just have to spend thousands of dollars and hire an immigration lawyer, which as of yet hasn't been feasible.
I am really glad you brought it back to parks and Native American people. "Border & Rule" gets into that, how the borders are enforced internally as well, and it's all radicalized no matter where the physical lines are.
What an *awful* story. A friend of mine lies on her visa applications to places like Russia--when you could still go there--for a similar reason. To be barred from vast places of the planet for a teenage mistake. Your intense anxiety isn't unwarranted. I'm so sorry. 🧡
Thank you for a very important piece. The politics of fear and nationalism treat the border like the collective epidermis of the protected type. Freedom would mean it being open, but they've redefined that word long ago.
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 wonder how much more exciting it would be to experience the crossing of land cared for by different peoples but without a hard border. I'm wondering if I've ever experienced that anywhere, if any of us have really, and what we lose by being denied it.
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.
That line — I was thinking of Lauret Savoy’s book “Trace” and how she talked about seeing the Grand Canyon for the first time and really absorbing the reality that nature isn’t racist.
Ooh, Narnia! You could really write a whole book on borders and these in-between spaces where we cross over to other worlds. Your story reminds me of Tim O’Brien’s “The Things We Carried” and his writing about canoeing up to the Canadian border to get out of being drafted and sent off to war. I should reread that. I hadn’t heard of this library, amazing!
“ 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.” EXACTLY. And as a naturalized citizen, too, if you lose your papers that can be worrying. (That happened to my dad. Messy divorce, my mom wasn’t too happy and, uh, disposed of his naturalization papers.)
One of the Harsha Walia talks I watched was with another woman who said she’d been thinking a lot about “queering” borders. They then talked about this exactly thing for quite a while, the difference between boundaries—like territory managed by Indigenous peoples—and hard borders. The other presenter was First Nations, Anishinaabe maybe? And they talked about how lack of militarized borders doesn’t mean you don’t know where your and others’ boundaries are.
Definitely plenty to say about land from intersectional and queer perspectives! I'm in a graduate program that emphasizes critical and cultural psychology, and there's theoretical work in some of those circles on "borders," "liminality" and related experiences (not so much queer theory but potentially related). Some of it is pretty high-concept and focused on symbolic meaning-making not policy, but there is also empirical research. E.g.:
https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/tapa/31/5
Gaza comes to mind as an extreme case where the borders are not designed merely to keep people out, but also keep people *in* - to essentially keep them trapped and powerless, in a kind of bubble. (I suppose reservation territory functions the same way). That puts a whole other spin on things, too.
Not to trivialize any of this, but my favorite satire of the "border" mindset is Super Troopers 2 where a legalistic adjustment of the Vermont/Canadian border sets off a dispute between the Canadian and U.S. border patrol. Maybe if you need a break from all the darkness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEed-o8fVpM
Those papers look fascinating. I might have to spend some time with them. And yes, that makes a lot of sense about Gaza. And you're right -- especially when reservations were first created, it was actually illegal for Native people to leave them without permission. I think the rules were even stricter in Canada than in the U.S. Horrific practices. And as another commenter pointed out here, a lot of the anti-abortion laws being passed in different states prohibit leaving the state for medical care involving pregnancy. How is that enforced? Do you start patrolling the state border and checking for women and insisting they take a pregnancy test? I'm sure many of the legislatures would like to force that on people.
I don't think Super Troopers trivializes it. Science fiction, whether lighthearted or not, is a great way to bring these kinds of ideas to masses of people who might never think about them. (Also, I always need a break from the darkness. I've never seen that movie. It looks hilarious!)
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.
I have GOT to reread The Dispossessed. It keeps coming up!
The Ireland one is interesting because it's like, that physical border is what is helping keep violence from erupting again, over a social-religious border. And then there's Hadrian's Wall, which is always interesting to me more as a mark of the furthest the Romans could manage to control. Beyond that wall, they never were able to achieve what they wanted.
Ah yes, the inspiration for George R. R.’s wall!
Good times!
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.
Thank you, Harry. I love thinking of you with the birds down there.
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
Thank you, Mark!
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
Yes! And TSA people are usually friendlier to me than the border patrol agents, or at least if they're not they're more threatening than grumpy. But I've never been pulled from the line. My spouse has. The agents who do the pulling are less friendly.
I hope you find some of those friends! I'm such a loner I didn't move back to my hometown expecting to find friends, but several of them are people I was friends or friendly with in high school, and I've been surprised and delighted to find among them true, close friends--of whom I have very few and value highly--with whom I look forward to growing old with. That's something else!
Yes, they always have to pull us to double check the wheelchair and even to the adorable 8 year old they are not very friendly!
Old friends are such a gift. I have a few that are precious and take the place of sisters in my life - though they are not as outdoorsy as me 😂 - and I wouldn’t trade them for anything.
Mine are in-between, some more outdoorsy, some less. Mostly more! But they won’t do trail crew with me. 😅
That’s another WHOLE world of experience, is dealing with these things with any kind of disability. Honestly, that particular aspect infuriates me.
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.
So true, and a huge metaphor.
(I was thinking about you over the weekend, or rather a colleague of yours. And wondering what the weather is like in Kentucky because my college roommate, who lives in Covington, might be coming to visit.)
Thank you, Nia! ❤️ All over ehe place right now. We had 5° a couple of mornings ago with heavy snow and now heavy rain, and it’s going up to 60 tomorrow. We haven’t had a “normal” winter in quite a while.
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.
"I know in new ways that borders are not fluid and none of us are free in the ways I once thought we were." I suppose we all learn this at different times and for different reasons. Thank you for sharing this story; it really resonates with me. And echoes so many people's experiences with borders over the decades, however they're created and enforced.
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.
Thank you!!!
It does, often, but I stopped thinking of "get back to writing fiction" as an annual goal purely because I never managed to make the time for it. Frustrating but I know it'll happen when it happens! At least the whole experience didn't drive me away from writing completely. I knew too many people that happened to. :(
Well thank gods for that!!! Your writing has been a very important thing for how this Colorado-living Internet stranger thinks and lives.
That means a lot to me, thank you! (Waves south to Colorado, where I haven't been for far too long.)
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.
So much of what I hear about the border patrol laws and lawlessness and enforcement throughout the southwest is just so infuriating. It's crazy.
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.
That's an incredible story, Karen. Experiencing it even once, even in the least threatening circumstances, is enough to drive home the power of it, isn't it?
The birds we love know no borders ...
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'll get working on that commune in Scotland!
💜 🏴
Haha, I thought you'd like that sign!
And yeah, MFA programs can sometimes be supportive, but I've heard stories like mine more often than not. Worse are the writers I knew in the program who were actually wonderful writers but assumed they weren't "writers" and never pursued it after we graduated. Makes me sad.
These are such chilling stories, and I feel what you're feeling viscerally (also remembering countries where we were advised to get our visa stamp on a separate piece of paper because otherwise you'd be on a U.S. list forever; I'd forgotten about that), especially the "when people hold and seem to ENJOY wielding power over others in real time." It is, indeed, maddening, frightening, and insanity. I hate that it exists.
We used to go to Canada a lot when I was a kid, to go camping, and what I remembered was the remarkable cleanliness of the lawns because of no dog poop! I don't know why that sticks in my head.
I keep my kids' passports up to date, too, and get super anxious the years their British ones need renewing because that's on my spouse, who's not quite as organized as I am. They're lucky to have that citizenship and it's always in the back of my mind. Not that Europe or Britain feel like very safe places right now. Nowhere really does. But still. Scotland looks nice and I like it there!
I get those nightmares, too. Luggage and passports. It's a recurring one and no fun at all. Be kind to yourself. 💖
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.
My neighbor had the same issue with a DUI from a long time ago. He hasn't had a drink in over 20 years. His father was Canadian. It took him a while and a lot of paperwork, but he got a copy of his father's birth certificate and ultimately Canadian citizenship. Now he can go kayak fishing for salmon on the ocean side of Vancouver Island.
It's all so arbitrary.
Not sure I ever mentioned that to get my green card back in around '88, I had to have an AIDS test.
that is so wild! I know I *can* get into Canada- I would just have to spend thousands of dollars and hire an immigration lawyer, which as of yet hasn't been feasible.
It's just insane that you even have to think about that! All of it's just nuts and completely riddled with injustices of all kinds.
Wow.
I am really glad you brought it back to parks and Native American people. "Border & Rule" gets into that, how the borders are enforced internally as well, and it's all radicalized no matter where the physical lines are.
What an *awful* story. A friend of mine lies on her visa applications to places like Russia--when you could still go there--for a similar reason. To be barred from vast places of the planet for a teenage mistake. Your intense anxiety isn't unwarranted. I'm so sorry. 🧡
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
I can't "like" that but ...
We knew it was coming, and more. Still devastating.
Everyone has an opinion. Thanks for sharing yours
Thank you for a very important piece. The politics of fear and nationalism treat the border like the collective epidermis of the protected type. Freedom would mean it being open, but they've redefined that word long ago.
So true. Thanks, Tom.