Bordering on the Inane
Crossing the US-Canadian border without reporting to customs is never a good idea. But what happens to you if you don’t even know where the border is? In some Quebec and Vermont towns it can be in the middle of your local library--or even your house!
How I got a border-patrol duty tour of the Vermont-US Border
Tomifobia is not a fear of Tomcats or tom-toms or guys named Tom. It’s a tiny village with an Abenaki name on the Tomifobia River, in the picturesque Anglo/French/Yankee Eastern Townships region of Quebec, a three-mile walk from the world’s longest unguarded border.
Memphré the Lac Memphrémagog Monster
I had landed in this hilly Celtic-looking countryside with its own lake monster called Memphré and its own “Border English” (with colorful phrases like “Boil it till it assholes” for making maple syrup candy) ... I had landed here—to sit a dog and a house.
I was house and dogsitting for friends who were vacationing in Norway. I thought it would be a simple errand to drive from Tomifobia to the nearest town, Rock Island, Quebec to buy some dog biscuits for Kiwi, the perky Wheaton terrier.
I drove to the IGA supermarket and grabbed a bag of Alpo and a few cucumbers, and exited the parking lot. But when I made a U-turn to go back in the direction from whence I came, I was startled to see 50 feet in front of me a Canadian customs and immigration station.
"Ou demeurez vous? Where Do you Live?
Quand...how long have you been gone?
Did you buy or acquire anything?"
“Well yes, some cucumbers .... concombres - and tomates - tomatoes, dogbones and er... les tampons. But I bought them in Canada. At least I think I did.” (I reached for the Tampax box to see if the writing was in French or in English...)
I felt so confused, not knowing when—and where— I had left Canada I certainly wouldn’t think of crossing the border without my U.S. passport and my Canadian landed immigrant papers. I had no proof that I was a Canadian landed immigrant. I had to do some quick explaining to this customs officer staring at me. I told her all about Kiwi and the dogbones...about the computer I’d left running in Tomifobia...about the Montreal Gazette deadline I was rushing to meet.
The border guard had not seen me parked in the IGA, and thought my story rather odd. (Apparently, locals who shop at the IGA know how to get back home without leaving Canada.) Somewhere between the grocery parking lot and the U.S. Customs office lay the unmarked international boundary line.
By making my U-turn, I’d left Canada but didn’t know it—because the U.S. Customs station was further down the road. I’d driven into the “no-man’s-land” between the US and Canadian border stations, and now I had to re-enter Canada after unknowingly having left Canada. Had I been in the U.S. illegally? Without knowing it?
What a mess.
I thought the this border setup was absolutely cockamamie. Between Rock Island, Quebec, and Derby Line, Vermont was a no-man’s-land where you could end up in one country or another without meaning to. I don’t think the border agent realized how easy it was for a non-local to get so confused, and I was so relieved when the she let me back into Canada. I think my broken Québécois French might have saved me. I raced back to my computer, fed the doggie and met my deadline.
The next day I crossed the border again—this time with my US passport and Canadian landed immigrant papers— to pester the U.S. border guards. I wanted to know why there were no signs announcing the border. Nothing to warn you - en français or in English - that if you took a wrong turn coming out of the IGA, you’d end up with tomatoes to declare.
Before I knew it, I was being invited into the border-patrol office to watch the row of closed-circuit TV cameras which monitor the comings and goings of every single vehicle, from bicycles to tractors. All day, all night, a man stared at this gray TV screen...
“There's no place along the U.S.-Canadian border as strange as this,” border patrol officer Ben Bachelder said with a mischievous grin. “The international boundary line was supposed to be drawn along the 45th Parallel, but it’s off quite a bit. So it cuts right through the middle of roads and rivers, buildings and houses. Have you seen the Haskell Free Library? A black line across the wooden floor of the reading room tells you whether you’re browsing in Canada or the U.S.
“And the old Romanesque Revival Haskell Opera House built in 1904 straddles the boundary line too. I think the stage is in Vermont and the audience applauds in Quebec—or is it the other way around? And these delapidated 19th century factory buildings.... boy was that complicated, taking mechanical parts from one warehouse room to another, one country to another.”
“It's is pretty confusing,” Bachelder continued, “but people around here just roll with the punches. One house has the driveway in the U.S. and the house in Canada. Another's got the toilet in Quebec and the bathtub in Vermont. And in some houses, you cook your meals in Canada and eat them in the U.S.
You're considered a legal resident of the country where you sleep. But most houses have more than one bedroom! Imagine paying Canadian taxes, power, water and sewer, for one side of the house—and U.S. taxes, electricity, water for the other. It’s nuts!”
Bachelor then decided to give me a US-Canadian history lesson. “It’s like this,” he began. “At the Treaty of Paris in 1783, the 45th parallel halfway between the Equator and the North Pole was designated as the boundary marker between British North America and the newly-formed United States of America. But American and Canadian officials haggled over whose reading of the 45th was more accurate, and the crude equipment and surveying techniques of the time didn’t help matters much.
“In 1796 the Vermont General Assembly claimed that the 45th parallel was too far south, that parts of Quebec really belonged to the U.S. In 1805 Vermont gathered new data to prove that the border was 13 miles too far south. But Canadian surveyors insisted the border was too far north. To settle this border squabble, the U.S. and Canada appealed to the King of Netherlands—of all people. In 1831 he decreed that the 45th parallel be moved to a new position—smack dab in between the two lines claimed by each country.
“But Nancy, that still didn’t settle it. The Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842 ruled that the original 45th parallel boundary surveyed between 1771-74 by Thomas Valentine and John Collins be respected. Suggestions that Valentine and Collins were drunk when they surveyed the land were wrong. It was the primitive equipment and rough terrain that created the zig-zagety boundary line have today.”
“Would you like to see it? Would you like to ride with me on my border-patrol duty patrol?”
“Can I write about it?”
“We’ll see.”
A town divided
Our first stop was Canusa Avenue in Beebe Plain, Quebec where the white line down the middle of the road divides Canada from the U.S. Legally, Madame Blanche could not legally cross the street to borrow a cup of sugar from Mrs. White without first driving miles to report to customs. But the for sake of friendly relations between resident Canadians and Americans, and the border patrol, things are kept pretty loose. [Until post 911, and now the pandemic that is...]
“When a new border-patrol officer starts working here it's fun to watch,” Bachelder said. “Until he gets to know the locals and the cars they drive, he tries to enforce everything. It ridiculous.”
Bachelder drove around pointing out “blind spots” where TV monitors can’t reach, and hot spots where people smuggling goods or illegal aliens from Quebec try to sneak over and hightail it to Vermont Interstate 89.
“We’ve got our motion, metal and heat sensors in the ground and in trees and bushes along the boundary line. They relay the information to the border-patrol office and to patrolling officers, who then chase suspect cars and people. But you don't have to go into the woods to find good smuggling ground. There are lots of places on blacktop where it's easy to attempt it. ”
Driving up Church Street Bachelder said “Wave to the camera, Nancy.” (Where it is, he doesn’t tell me.) “If a car coming through here heads for Interstate 89 instead of customs, then we have fun! Let's face it, smuggling is a game. Smugglers change their locations, and we move our sensors. It's a real merry-go-round.”
Bachelder showed a hunter’s canny instinct. He was sensitive to every fresh track and broken branch within a fifty-mile radius on his daily route, whether in his car or on foot. “See these tire tracks?” he said as we pull off a back road. See how this fence has been pulled apart? If I see a trail developing here, I'll install a sensor.”
One night Bachelder hid for hours in the bushes waiting for a Montrealer he thought likely to deliver illegal aliens across the border that night. When he finally saw the man coming, he leaped up and growled like a bear.
“Nancy, I laugh about that poor guy to this day. He dropped just like I'd shot him. Later he told me ‘You took 10 years off my life!’ ”
Working the Canadian border is a piece of cake compared to the Mexican border, Bachelder said. New border-patrol officers are broken in down there, and Bachelder enjoyed returning for an occasional tour of duty, just for the action.
“Every day hundreds of Mexicans and Central Americans try to sneak across the border, any way they can. Once a couple tried to sneak across, pretending to be a cow. They had cut the legs off a cow and strapped them to their feet - so their footprints would look like a cow’s. But they didn't know how to walk like a cow, and we caught ‘em!
“Another Mexican who’d tried to sneak across at least ten times in one day asked me how he could avoid being detected by the heat sensors. I jokingly told him he could cover himself in tin foil from head to toe. He did exactly that, and when we hauled him in again, he complained.
‘But Pedro,’ Bachelor laughed, ‘with the sun shining on you, we could spot you miles away! ’ ” ####
