Tag Archives: Canada

Border Crossing – Part I

This morning I crossed the border into Canada.

Does everyone feel as nervous as I do when making that subtle yet formal transition into a foreign country?

It isn’t bad enough, seeing that big, ominous gate looming before you; the guards cloaked in near-invisibility in their shadowy booths.

It isn’t bad enough, being subjected to those increasingly suspicious questions, the ones that make you feel as if your privacy is being invaded, but legally, so that there’s nothing you can do about it.

“What is the purpose of your visit?”

“How long will you be in our country?”

“Where will you be staying?”

And my personal favorite, uttered with furrowed brows and an accusatory pointing finger: “What’s in those boxes?”

“None of your damn business” never seems like a particularly smart answer. But sometimes it sure is tempting to give it.

No, the worst part of crossing a border is the fact that no matter how many miles you have already traversed with seemingly boundless impunity, suddenly you have to obtain permission to move from one bit of land on one side of some imaginary line onto another bit of land on the other side of it. It seems a rather illogical affront to one’s freedom of movement. And, of course, anytime you have to request permission to do something, there is a chance, however unlikely, that that permission will be denied.

I don’t like being forced to answer questions I don’t want to answer, but that still isn’t as galling as being subjected to the whims of some random authority figure who gets to decide, based on the uprightness of my carriage and the shiftiness of my eyes, whether my truck or my person gets searched or whether I need to be detained for further questioning. What happens if the guard doesn’t believe my highly implausible tale of a memoir-in-progress – or doesn’t approve of it?

“Nope, sorry; we don’t want your kind up here in Canada. Turn around and go back.”

But then at least you’re stuck on your own side. What really fries my nerves is not wondering whether they’ll decide to let me come in. What if they won’t let me back out?

I don’t do well with confined spaces, even when they’re the size of the Great White North. I don’t think I could live on an island – even a very lovely one, like Hawaii – because there would be no other place to which I could escape. It’s silly, right? Practically speaking, in my everyday life I rarely travel more than thirty miles from my own home. But I would absolutely flip out if someone told me I couldn’t. It isn’t the amount of space; it’s the fear of being trapped that I find so disconcerting.

(This, incidentally, is why I’ve never wanted to get married. I’m not opposed to commitment. I just don’t understand why I would ever want to form a legal attachment to someone that would make it difficult for me to disentangle my life from theirs should the need arise. There are two terms for spending all of your time confined to a room with one other person. If it’s voluntary, you’re in love. If it’s involuntary, you’re in prison.)

Photo by meeshypants at http://www.flickr.com/photos/moosharella/ and licensed under Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/legalcode

Perhaps I’ve simply watched too much film noir, but it’s hard for me not to wonder whether I might be detained on some technicality; perhaps a case of mistaken identity. What if I’m “The Wrong Man”? What if I took the wrong “Detour”? Even worse, what if there’s a decades-old warrant out for my arrest?

I learned something in my senior year of high school that – much like the opening scenes in a fatalistic film noir – would set in motion a seemingly inevitable chain of events. My friend C. dropped this particular tidbit on me so casually that one would never have guessed that it would hit me with all of the force of one of those nuclear weapons we kept expecting the U.S.S.R. to send screaming into our midst.

“Yes, Canada,” she repeated, her voice muffled by the gargantuan chemistry textbook into which her nose was solidly stuck. “My cousin’s going to have a party in Montreal for his birthday. I guess you can drink there if you’re eighteen.”

My own chemistry tome clattered from my hands and onto the unfortunate tail of the family dog, sending him yowling under the bed. “You can?”

I wouldn’t say that the plot formed immediately in my mind. In fact, I’m not even sure that it was my idea. But somehow I knew that we were onto something here, something truly special. So I tucked that magic lamp back into some dusty corner of my brain and let my subconscious go to work on cleaning and polishing it.

And perhaps this was why, some time later, the plan sprang forth so simply and naturally from our collective minds; a fully formed Athena who turned and thumbed her nose at the older and wiser Zeus the second the proper opportunity arose.

“Are you guys going to that thing in Boston that Key Club’s doing?” C. said one day over a cafeteria lunch of warm tuna and cold pizza.

I set down my sandwich – my non-rodent teeth needed a rest from gnawing on that tough roll anyway – and shrugged. “Wasn’t planning on it. Plus I seriously doubt my mom would let me.”

“I don’t want to do the event,” my friend A. mused, tilting her pizza sideways in a futile attempt to drain the puddles of grease the pepperoni had deposited on her slice. “But I wouldn’t mind making a trip to Boston.”

“It would be neat to go,” I admitted. I had been to Boston before, but never on my own. “I dunno, maybe I should ask… Mom’s been less of a control freak since her surgery.”

My mother had had the first of two planned foot operations and for weeks had been largely confined to the rocking chair in our den. Not only had she been forced to consent to me getting my license, but she had also had to ease up on the discipline. I suppose that, even in her mental state, she realized that being physically incapacitated gave her a rather tenuous hold on a teenager with access to a car.

Still, I was surprised when, scowling, she nonetheless agreed to let me go. So much so that I began to wonder whether I was taking full advantage of this unanticipated grant of liberty.

“Seems like such a waste… spending the whole day in Boston,” I complained after telling my friends the good news. “Too bad there isn’t somewhere more exciting we could visit.”

“Hey, if we were eighteen, we could go to Canada and drink!” C. joked.

It was true; none of the three of us had hit that magical eighteen-year mark, which was undoubtedly the passport to a garden of earthly delights – in Canada, anyway. But did it matter? I wondered. I had already had some success in passing for twenty-one – the legal drinking age in the U.S. – so how hard could it be to pretend we were eighteen?

Now, of course, it’s impossible for me even to conceive of selling booze to any teenager, because anyone who is under the age of thirty looks ridiculously young to me. In fact, I’m continually wondering who keeps handing out driver’s licenses to all those middle school kids. But as a high schooler, my frame of reference was not other adults, but awkward and pimply freshmen. And next to them we looked mature, indeed.

“Don’t you think we could pass, though?” I said thoughtfully.

A. perked up instantly. “Bet we could!”

I could see my friend’s mind working, her eyes sparkling at the thought of hatching a plot of unadulterated evil that was guaranteed to get us in a heap of trouble.

“I wouldn’t want to drink there,” I added hastily. “Not when we have to drive home the same day.”

We all agreed that partying it up over the border was not the most sensible idea. But the seed had been planted, and, wetted by the drool dripping from our tongues, it would naturally grow – into a weed. We would be doing something in Canada, all right – something far more illegal than trying to weasel a drink at a bar.

I don’t recall who said it first. I don’t know who to credit or to blame for the harebrained scheme that flowered from that idle discussion. But two weeks later, we were leaving Massachusetts with a few hundred dollars and a plan to smuggle a boatload of booze back over the border.

To be continued…

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If you would like to see more photos from my cross-country travels, please follow my new Pinterest account at http://www.pinterest.com/lorilschafer/.

For updates on my forthcoming memoir The Long Road Home, which I am drafting during this road trip, please follow my blog or subscribe to my newsletter.

North Dakota, I Hardly Knew Ya

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I flew through North Dakota like there was a storm chasing me… which, as has been the case for most of this trip, there has been. You see, I’ve been anxiously checking the forecasts for the last several weeks, in anticipation of my arrival in Canada. I had good reason to be concerned. One of the primary reasons I decided to reroute my trip was because of the weather. Looking at the latest forecasts shortly before I left home, I discovered that the weather was going to turn to crap towards the end of August in Canada and, of course, Alaska – right around the time I would be arriving.

I confess that this put me in a bit of a bind. I may live on the West Coast now, but I still take pride in being born and bred a New Englander, and I’m quite capable of managing the occasional storm or cold snap. I grew up with thunder and lightning; they don’t frighten me the way they do people in the Bay Area, where several years might pass between thunderstorms, and the natives literally start screaming when one does occur. I don’t mind walking in the rain, or even trudging through the snow. But I really, really dislike having to drive in bad weather; I always have. Gosh, I remember one nasty snowstorm when I was living in West Springfield in which I literally walked the two miles to work in my snow gear rather than having to drive over those slippery, frosted streets. The hour of walking was an adventure. The twenty minutes of driving would have been a nightmare!

Anyway, when I first began planning this trip, I was willing to take my chances that it wasn’t going to snow before the middle of September up north, which, although not a sure thing, isn’t a terribly risky bet. But spending weeks driving around in the rain with temperatures in the upper fifties doesn’t exactly sound conducive to relaxing and enjoying myself. That’s what the weather is like in the Bay Area in the middle of winter. Pretty comfortable for midwinter; not so much for late summer.

It was my own fault, really. I delayed my trip too long; I should have gone in July, as I had originally planned. But I didn’t. I’m not particularly sorry about it, because I got some things done that desperately needed to be done, and now I at least have slightly less stress while I’m away. And that is the beauty of the driving trip, after all; I can change my plan whenever the heck I want. Good thing, too, because I did!

It was a good plan, though. I had originally figured on going straight north through Oregon and Washington, then up through British Columbia and the Yukon and Alaska. Then I thought I would head east into the Northwest Territories (now that is nowhere-land!) before cutting south into Alberta, then Montana, and finally wending my way home.

It would have been a long trip. A good eight thousand miles, if not more. Not so shocking when you realize that the driving distance between Whitehorse in the Yukon and Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories is sixteen hundred miles:

Some pretty rugged territory, too; far from an easy drive. Yet there was something about it that appealed to me – so much so that I found the idea very difficult to let go.

I literally waited until the day I left to make up my mind. Even as I was getting on the freeway, I wasn’t entirely sure what I was going to do. Even as I began heading towards Sacramento, I debated with myself about whether I wanted to take I-5 when I got to the capital, or head east into the mountains.

It was South Dakota that finally decided me.

Somehow I felt very strongly that I wanted to go to South Dakota, and it was doubtful, if I went up to Alaska, that I’d be able to make it back that far east on my way home before autumn came to the mountains, because even if I avoided the Rockies, I’d still have to cross some mountain range on my way home.

There was something else appealing about going that way, too. If I went back to the Dakotas, then I could head up into Manitoba and Saskatchewan, where I’ve never been before. And when I studied the maps in my road atlas, the idea became more and more exciting. You know what’s in northern Manitoba? Nothing!

It isn’t really nothing, of course. Most of northern Manitoba is occupied by Lake Winnipeg, and Lake Manitoba, and dozens of other lakes – so many, in fact, that one might consider it a rival for Minnesota’s honorary title of Land of Ten Thousand Lakes.

I’m presuming that the few villages that exist in the upper reaches of Manitoba exist primarily for fishing. It must be quite a vacation destination, some obscure lake in some obscure region of Canada, a hundred miles from anywhere. To me, of course, fishing doesn’t hold much appeal. I’ve already seen enough dead fish to last me a lifetime.

But I liked the look of it, this vast region containing many bodies of water and few bodies of humans. It suited my theme of skirting the edges of civilization that I’ve taken this trip. No, it wasn’t what I had originally planned. But it was a darned good alternate plan. When would I have the chance to make that trip again, either?

However, a few days ago, once again consulting the forecast (amazing how important weather becomes when you’re traveling, isn’t it?), I discovered that my weather problems were far from solved by changing my trip. In fact, it looks as though by Sunday, the day before Labor Day, storms will be rolling in all over the countryside. And I don’t know that I need to be driving hundreds of miles through the middle of nowhere in a foreign country on the edge of some long, cold, foggy lake when it’s pouring rain.

So I hurried. I suppose I didn’t really need to spend much time in North Dakota, anyway. I’ve been here before. It isn’t really much different from South Dakota; just a bit colder. Otherwise, it has very similar features. Fields of hay. Fields of cattle. And not a heck of a lot in between.

I did learn one thing about the state, though. All these years, I’ve had two main memories of North Dakota. One, the incident with the local sheriff that formed the basis for this flash fiction story. And two, how many times I had to clean my windshield just driving through it. North Dakota had the biggest, most numerous bugs I had ever seen, worse than Texas even! The kind that when they hit the glass, their multi-colored guts splatter in visible circles all over your windshield, enough to make you duck instinctively, in case you got splattered, too. But this time? Nothing – or nothing out of the ordinary, anyway. In fact, I would say that North Dakota, compared to some of the other places I’ve been, was comparatively bug-free. Perhaps you only experience the full brunt of them if you travel east-west across the state. Or perhaps they’re only really prevalent at certain times of year. I don’t know. I suppose now I never will!

At any rate, I decided to try to get in and out of the really rural parts of Canada before the storms hit. And if I circle through Manitoba and Saskatchewan, I can duck down into Montana and backtrack to Yellowstone before I head home. This will work out great because I think I’ve decided to make this trip a little shorter than I had originally planned, too. Instead of one long road trip, I think I’m going to try to do a series of shorter ones. If I took a month off around December-January, I could travel across the South, where the weather should be passable. I haven’t done much traveling in the winter. My first year of college, I went down to San Diego to see the solar eclipse – not that January in San Diego can really be termed “winter.” And one year I made a trip to Arizona in December to visit a friend of mine who was working in Globe on a temporary assignment. Funky seeing the Grand Canyon dotted with snow in the winter, and much less crowded, too. Who knows? It might be a neat change, provided I stay out of the frost zone. Might be nice to experience the Gulf Coast when it isn’t blazing hot and sticky humid, and the Southwestern desert when it isn’t as dry as a… um, desert.

And then I think I’ll try to make the trip I had originally planned next summer, earlier in the year, preferably while there’s still midnight sun. That’s one other advantage of postponing it – the day-long daylight, bright enough to read by, even in the middle of the “night.” How I loved the look of it – the way the sun dipped just beneath the mountains on the horizon around two a.m., then popped right back up again. Shouldn’t be too hard to make it, either, if I do it then. I definitely found when I was up there last that thanks to all the daylight, I hardly needed to sleep at all.

No, I may have changed my plan, but I’m not giving up on it – not yet. But I suppose I won’t count my miles until I’ve driven them, just in case. A lot of things can happen in a year. I might not be able to get the time off, if that congressional appointment comes through. There could be a massive revolt among the polar bears, who may finally decide they’ve had enough of the ice melting. Perhaps the Sorbonne will offer me a full scholarship if I finally agree to pursue that doctoral degree in accounting… nah, forget it. I still wouldn’t do it!

But a girl can dream, can’t she? And that’s one more beauty of all that emptiness – plenty of room for dreaming. It takes a lot of dreams to fill up all that big, open space. But I’ve got ‘em.

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If you would like to see more photos from my cross-country travels, please follow my new Pinterest account at http://www.pinterest.com/lorilschafer/.

For updates on my forthcoming memoir The Long Road Home, which I am drafting during this road trip, please follow my blog or subscribe to my newsletter.