Imaginary Line

Life on an Unfinished Border

Jacques Poitras

• Publisher: Goose Lane Editions
• Year: 2011
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9780864927033
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

Shortlisted, Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing and Democracy 250 Atlantic Book Award for Historical Writing

Once, a single francophone settlement shared both sides of the Saint John River, until a political trade-off between countries split it down the middle. From that inauspicious start, the Maine-New Brunswick border, the first boundary to be drawn between the two nations, has served as a microcosm for Canada-U.S. relations. For centuries, friends, lovers, schemers and smugglers have reached across the line. Now, post-9/11, mounting political paranoia has led to a sharp divide, disrupting the lives and welfare of nearby residents. An elderly Canadian couple's driveway touches the border, leading to a Kafkaesque overreaction by Homeland Security. The Tea Party political movement advocates complete border shutdown. Once friendly neighbors have become increasingly isolated from each other. In this timely exploration, Jacques Poitras travels the length of the border, from Madawaska and Aroostook counties through Passamaquoddy Bay to a tiny island still in dispute to uncover the arbitrarily drawn line that shouldn't be there, almost wasn't there, and can be difficult to find even when it is there. The stakes are high as New Brunswick and Maine re-imagine their relationship for the 21st century and communities strive to stay together despite the best efforts of parochial politicians, protectionists, and overzealous border officials.

PART ONE

DRAWING THE LINE

C’est la langue des ancêtres du Maine.

C’est comme un rêve, ces mots étranges

qui chantent comme les flocons . . .

— Laurence Hutchman, “Driving to Fort Kent in a Mid-Spring Snowfall”

I thought that if the commissioners themselves, and the King of Holland with them, had spent a few days here, with their packs upon their backs, looking for that ‘highland,’ they would have had an interesting time, and perhaps it would have modified their view of the question somewhat.

— Henry David Thoreau, The Maine Woods, 1864

1. WICKED CLOSE

THE LOON'S CRIES HAVE FADED somewhere behind us as our canoe moves up the narrow channel. The river widens, opening up into the bottom of a wide, long body of water called Beau Lac. Ahead, a young eagle skims the treetops, following the edge of the water. The bird carves a long arc in the blue sky, then flies away in a straight line up the middle of the lake. There is silence as the engine stops. The treetops of a distant hill appear to slide behind a closer hill, an illusion created as the boat, seemingly still, drifts in the current beneath the noontime sun.

The borders of Québec, Maine, and New Brunswick meet at the bottom of Beau Lac.

It feels as if nothing here has changed for centuries: loons, eagles, and beaver dams. The water, flowing south. And the trees. There is no sign whatsoever of what we call civilization.

Earlier, downstream, on Glazier Lake and Grew Pond, we saw a scattering of small boats, each of them holding one or two people fishing close to the western or eastern shore. They were all locals: the Saint-François waterway is largely unknown except to a small number of serious fishermen and to residents of nearby towns, of which there are few. Even they rarely venture to where we are now. There are no good roads leading this far, and the trip by boat took about forty-five minutes — and that was after getting to the lakeshore in the first place.

We also glimpsed markers on each shore, white reference monuments used to measure the precise location of the invisible line we followed up the Saint-François waterway. It is this line, an artificial, invisible construct, that I have come to “see.” I am right on top of it now: it runs from bow to stern below the canoe. And there is another line cutting across the lake to meet it. It, too, exists only in treaties and on maps, so I do not immediately realize, as we sit here in the current, that we have reached our destination.

A voice behind me breaks the silence. “Maine is there,” says the other man in the canoe, and I glance to the left, to the western shore, perhaps twenty feet away. “And New Brunswick is here,” he adds as I look to the right, to thick trees at land’s edge, twenty feet in the other direction.

I turn in time to see Dr. Yves Carrier point a few feet farther up the same eastern shore. “And Québec is there,” he says at last. “So this is the spot.”

Depending on your perspective — and here, I am learning, much depends on your perspective — this is where New Brunswick’s Madawaska panhandle thrusts itself between the hinterlands of Québec and the United States, or where the northern tip of Maine is wedged into the narrow meeting place of two Canadian provinces. Either way, this is where the international boundary between New Brunswick and Maine begins. Any exploration of that boundary has to begin here as well. And when I asked around for someone to bring me to this starting point so I could see the exact location with my own eyes, I was told to contact Yves Carrier: physician, community activist, environmentalist, and forceful defender of the Rivière Saint-François.

From behind the sunglasses perched on his impish face, Carrier watches and waits a good long time to let me take in the moment. Only when I signal that I have absorbed it does he fire up the motor, turn us around, and point the nose of the canoe straight down the Saint-François. We ease up to cruising speed, following the current, and the border, back towards the Saint John River.

The Saint-François flows down from a line of hills in Québec that separates the St. Lawrence watershed from that of the Saint John, which is why Carrier is among those who believe the United States got a raw deal in the Treaty of Washington, the document which, in 1842, drew the international boundary along our path. The debate over the border, which almost led to a war, was based on a single word, “highlands,” in an earlier treaty of 1783. The American interpretation — that the drafters of that previous agreement clearly meant the line of hills Carrier referred to — would have given the United States everything below those highlands, including both shores of the Saint-François and of the Saint John.

But London, Carrier says, played a clever game by muddying the waters. “The British always interpreted it like it was confusing, but it wasn’t confusing at all,” he calls to me over the hum of the little motor at the back of the canoe. “Everyone knew the highlands because of the portages. You rowed up the streams of the St. Lawrence, you got out, you did your portage and you got back in. Those were the highlands. Everyone who’d been through this area, from Champlain on down, knew that area as the highlands. It was a good way to draw a border. It was logical, because whoever controlled the watershed controlled the territory. Champlain met natives around what’s now Saint John, whom he’d met at Tadoussac, and they told him about the Madawaska portage. But when it came time to interpret the treaty, the British said it was a mess. It was ‘confusing.’” He pauses for effect. “Everyone knew where they were. No contest. But it created a fight that went on for decades.”

The Saint-François River and the Upper Saint John River Valley.

Other than as an obvious physical barrier — though in some narrow sections, it is barely that — there is nothing about the Saint-François that makes sense as a border. It is so arbitrary that a local legend holds that it was an accident, or worse. One story has it that when surveyors arrived in Clair, New Brunswick, on the Saint John River, to mark the line in the 1842 treaty, they spent too much time drinking at a local inn before continuing on their intended course southwest up the Saint John. And whether by mistake, or encouraged by crafty Americans who saw a chance to snatch some extra territory, they found themselves staggering northwest, surveying the Saint-François, believing it to be the Saint John. “Now this is a story and I will not vouch for it,” Jim Connors, a descendant of some of the early settlers to the area, recalled once in an oral history interview with researchers from the University of Maine.

The story is, in fact, fiction. The Treaty of Washington specifies that the border runs up the Saint John to the mouth of the Saint-François, then veers northwest to follow that river. The line is where it was supposed to be, and is not the result of insidious motives. But the folklore surrounding it is a measure of its illogical configuration and the chicanery that went into its creation.

Dr. Yves Carrier keeps to the Canadian side on the Saint-François River.

Carrier keeps the canoe to the left, close to the Canadian shore, as we continue downstream, though at times he uses a flick of his paddle to steer us into American territory when he needs to avoid shallows or navigate rapids. There is a risk of arrest, though if U.S. border officers suddenly come crashing out of the woods, it will take only a moment to nose back into Canadian territory. On our way up the river, Carrier points out the mouth of a stream on the American side. In the years after Prohibition, a local Canadian set up a floating cottage there to cater to lumbermen from Allagash, a Maine logging town that remained dry. They would travel up a logging trail to the lake and take a small boat out to the cottage. “They played cards and had a few drinks,” Carrier says. “And when U.S. Customs were around, they anchored themselves across the line so that U.S. Customs had no jurisdiction. And when the RCMP were around, they’d go back across to the other side of the line.”

I met Carrier earlier in the day at his house near the village of Clair, and we followed Route 205 along the north bank of the Saint John River, deeper into the panhandle, towards the mouth of the Saint-François. Across the river, Maine’s Highway 161 followed the south bank. Carrier, raised in Edmundston, the largest nearby city, loves this remote part of Madawaska County: as a young medical intern in Toronto, he heard a song about the region one night on Radio-Canada, and decided to come home. He eventually immersed himself in the history and the natural beauty of the upper Saint John, an outdoorsman’s paradise of green hills and concealed lakes.

It is also a landscape shaped by an international boundary. Since 1842, the border has defined the local timber industry, the practice of religion, and the language spoken among friends. It spawned a smuggling empire in the small villages on the New Brunswick side. “Until the Second World War, the border was really a suggestion,” Carrier says. “The guys from over there came to see the girls over here, and the guys from over here went to see the girls over there. There were marriages of people from both sides. But after the war, the border became stricter. Visas were harder to get.” Even so, as a young man, Carrier paid it little heed. He often crossed the bridge from Edmundston, which had no public pool, to the town of Madawaska, Maine, to go swimming. His first girlfriend was from there. Today, he refuses on principle to order a passport, which the United States now requires of visitors, even those who, for decades, considered the American side of the Saint John to be part of their homeland.

In the places that matter to Carrier, on the rivers that feed his soul, he can still imagine that the border does not exist at all. At the northern end of Grew Pond, where it narrows into another channel, we come within twenty feet of another canoe. The sun is overhead and two young, beefy guys have their shirts off and their lines in the water. Maybe we stray into their country, or they drift into ours. More likely, the border is somewhere between our two boats. They are close enough to exchange greetings, in the way that men of the river do, without raising their voices.

“Is that a two-stroke?” one of them asks Carrier, nodding at his small engine.

“Yeah, a two-stroke,” he answers.

“Nice day,” says the American.

“You too,” Carrier calls over his shoulder as we continue on.

I spot a web address on the side of their canoe, and a few days after my trip down the Saint-François, I track down the young man in the boat. His name is Benjamin Rioux, and he is a college student from Fort Kent, Maine, who spends his summers tying flies, field-testing L.L. Bean fishing gear, and guiding fishermen on the lakes and the rivers of the Great North Woods of Maine. “It’s almost like you forget when you’re on the water that it’s two different countries,” he says over the phone. “We’ve caught ourselves a few times when we were going to dock on the Canadian side and we say, ‘We can’t dock there, that’s Canada.’

“People who we bring there who’ve never been there before think it’s so cool: ‘That’s Canada.’ They just can’t get over it. They say, ‘I can’t believe that’s Canada — that’s wicked neat.’” And something else is at work on the border, something more intimate, and yet so powerful that even Rioux’s guests notice it. “They sort of comment on how everybody seems so nice, and everybody’s the same, and you can’t really tell that there’s a difference in culture, or in background.”

The last incorporated municipality on the New Brunswick side of the Saint John is named for the nearby river: Saint-François de Madawaska. On the Maine side a few miles further up, directly across from the mouth of the Saint-François, is an American hamlet with an anglicized version of the name, St. Francis, though it was not always called that. “I was coming down the river once and I met a man on the American side who was fishing,” Carrier says. “We started chatting. He was francophone, but I noticed his pick-up had an American license plate, so I asked where he was from. ‘I’m from Saint-François,’ he said. I didn’t know him, and there aren’t too many people I don’t know in Saint-François. I said, ‘You come from Saint-François?’ and he said, ‘Yeah. I live just up there.’ I said, ‘Ah, St. Francis.’ ‘Oui, Saint-François.’ One or two generations ago, it was still Saint-François, even on the American side.”

Lloyd Woods, the former head of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service in nearby Madawaska, Maine, used to ask students on his school visits, “How many here have travelled to a foreign country in the last six months?” Two or three students would raise their hands. “How many of you have travelled to Canada in the last six months?” Every hand in the class would go up.

The border has been here for more than a century and a half, but it still has not completely divided what was once a single settlement. The Upper Saint John is precisely the opposite of Lord Durham’s infamous description of British North America as “two nations warring within the bosom of a single state.” Here, there is a single French culture straddling the imaginary line between two countries. “They’re borders that were put here after the area was settled,” Carrier says. “We have the same language, the same culture. Here it’s become more francisized, and there it’s more anglicized, but the DNA is the same.”

On the New Brunswick side, the francophones who dominate the population of Madawaska County are known as Brayons, a mix of Acadians who came north after the Loyalists moved into southern New Brunswick and Québécois who migrated in subsequent decades. On the Maine side, there is the same heritage, though people tend to refer to their origins simply as Acadian. The towns along the American side of the Upper Saint John — Van Buren, Madawaska, Grande Isle, St. Agatha, Frenchville, Fort Kent — are all part of Aroostook County, the state’s northernmost county and the one most associated with the view of Maine as a great, rustic expanse of forest. In 2000, more than twenty-four percent of Aroostook’s population spoke French at home, a startling statistic to Canadians who see the United States as a cultural melting pot. In Rioux’s hometown, Fort Kent, the largest town and the administrative hub of the area, only fourteen hundred of four thousand residents reported speaking English at home; the remainder spoke Fren...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Other Books by Jacques Poitras
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• List of Maps
• Introduction: Gateways
• Part One: Drawing the Line
• Part Two: Holding the Line
• Part Three: Blurring The Line
• Epilogue: Îsles aux Perroquets
• Acknowledgements
• Endnotes
• Sources
• Index
• Back Cover