Jacques Poitras
Warning: If you're one of those people who can't fathom why anyone would linger on the destiny of a land grant from 1621, if your eyes glaze over at the very mention of Jay's Treaty (1794), if you don't care a whit about the implications of the Treaty of Ghent (1814) for Moose Island, then move on. This book's not for you, and this review isn't either.
Then again, if you like to explore the nooks and crannies of the Canada-U.S. border, if you know the idiosyncrasies of more than four border crossings (the Ambassador Bridge and the Peace Bridge don't count), and if you think that the National Film Board's Between Friends/Entre Amis (1976) is one of the great coffee-table books (and cultural statements) of all time, then Imaginary Line: Life on an Unfinished Border deserves a place on your nightstand.
Back and forth, back and forth, then back again, Jacques Poitras crossed the border between Maine and New Brunswick, examining border markers and the artificial line that separates the Brayons of Madawaska County from the Acadians of Aroostook County. He crossed so many times that I lost count. Good thing there was no toll. But there is a story worth telling.
It comes down to this: The official seal of the United States carries a beloved Latin motto: E pluribus unum. It means "Out of many, one." The Canada-U.S. border, at least in that remote but resonant place, asserts the very opposite. Out of one, two – two countries, two currencies, two legal systems, two sets of tax forms. (But not two baseball loyalties. They're all Red Sox fans. If you doubt it, stop by Kathleen Booth's home in old Milltown, now part of St. Stephen, on the Canadian side. You'll see a replica of Fenway Park's famous Green Monster wall.)
The implications are political and cultural. On one side the people fight fiercely to retain their language and ethnic character. On the other they fight just as fiercely to assimilate. "There is one culture here," Poitras says, "but the border has created two different approaches to it."
Readers who weren't put off by the warning in the first paragraph know that the United States and Great Britain went to war over the Madawaska territory in 1839. The dispute ended formally in 1842 — and here we introduce that old favourite, the Webster-Ashburton Treaty — which more or less settled things, though some warts and sore spots endure. Daniel Webster always denied there was anything more than inconvenience involved in splitting Madawaska, arguing – and he was a man who argued more and argued better than anyone in 19th-century America – that "the international line need not interrupt social and family relations."
That's a sentiment we can all agree upon, Poitras more ardently than most. One of the points of this book is that the two sides remain a community, but a community divided.
Over the years, the border has prompted disputes about smuggling, booze (which during the U.S. imposition of Prohibition meant basically the same), taxes and other issues. The border is a stubborn thing, and in some cases the border is a stupid thing.
One example: Russell Road, where the eastern border of the street is in Canada and the western is in the United States. In the old days, we used to celebrate that sort of colourful eccentricity. No longer. Not long ago, Marion Pederson found herself backing into her driveway (in Canada) to avoid the American Border Patrol (standing a foot away in the United States).
Then again, the pro shop of the Aroostook Valley Country Club is in the United States but the clubhouse is in Canada. This sort of thing isn't as comfy and cozy as it once was, and as time has passed (especially after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11) new restrictions have transformed life along Russell Road from pleasantly unusual to unusually unpleasant.
"The United States has spawned a security-industrial complex of vast scope and power, forceful and uncompromising," Poitras writes, "but ultimately it is a blunt instrument that reveals a fundamental American weakness: the inability to recognize and respect the dignity of the individual citizen."
Poitras argues that this has worsened since the advent of the Tea Party movement south of the border and the growth in prominence and power of American militia groups. "Something about Maine's remoteness and its large expanse of forest seems to attract, or breed, a free-thinking spirit that combines with skepticism of big government, big business, big anything," he writes.
Let me conclude with an additional thought. The danger here – and this is the point of Poitras's book – is that all this is jeopardizing a big idea, perhaps the biggest idea in all of North America. That big idea is that two people can share a continent with contentment. It was the point, after all, of Jay's Treaty and Webster-Ashburton.
David Shribman, executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of U.S. politics.