The Border
Jun. 22nd, 2010 07:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hafoc
It's always been there, for better or for worse, snaking in and out among the islands at the end of the Upper Peninsula.
It is pretty easy to find yourself on the wrong side of it by mistake. When the British evacuated Mackinaw Island, after the Revolution, they built their new fort on their side of the border. Or they thought they did. It was on Drummond Island, which ended up being US territory, so they had to move it again a couple of years later.
Easy to find yourself on the wrong side of the border, and even I did that once. We were out fishing on the boat of a friend of my father's, up somewhere near Munuscong Bay. Pulled into shallow water, caught a couple of bullhead and tossed 'em back. Bullhead are a kind of catfish and supposedly pretty good eating if you can skin them out, but it's a real pain to do it, so we didn't bother.
It turned out we had been fishing in Canadian waters. If they'd caught us, we'd probably have lost the boat and all our fishing gear. That's a pretty high price to pay for a couple of "trash fish."
But nobody caught us. Probably nobody cared. The border never meant much. Both sides of my family settled here after coming through Canada for a greater or lesser period of time. I suppose they took care of the legal formalities of immigration at one time or another; in any case, my parents were born here, and I was born here, which makes us all US citizens by default. Unless certain laws proposed in Arizona should happen to go nationwide, I suppose.
We used to be able to go over to Canada and back without any special documentation at all. Now we need a passport, or at the very least a special driver's license. I have one. It has an RF ID chip inside it, and comes in its own special RF resistant sleeve so that scam artists, or perhaps I should say "scan artists," can't read the personal information the State swears isn't there, automatically, just by my walking past their scanner.
The border never mattered, but I guess it matters now. There is something in that which saddens.
It is pretty easy to find yourself on the wrong side of it by mistake. When the British evacuated Mackinaw Island, after the Revolution, they built their new fort on their side of the border. Or they thought they did. It was on Drummond Island, which ended up being US territory, so they had to move it again a couple of years later.
Easy to find yourself on the wrong side of the border, and even I did that once. We were out fishing on the boat of a friend of my father's, up somewhere near Munuscong Bay. Pulled into shallow water, caught a couple of bullhead and tossed 'em back. Bullhead are a kind of catfish and supposedly pretty good eating if you can skin them out, but it's a real pain to do it, so we didn't bother.
It turned out we had been fishing in Canadian waters. If they'd caught us, we'd probably have lost the boat and all our fishing gear. That's a pretty high price to pay for a couple of "trash fish."
But nobody caught us. Probably nobody cared. The border never meant much. Both sides of my family settled here after coming through Canada for a greater or lesser period of time. I suppose they took care of the legal formalities of immigration at one time or another; in any case, my parents were born here, and I was born here, which makes us all US citizens by default. Unless certain laws proposed in Arizona should happen to go nationwide, I suppose.
We used to be able to go over to Canada and back without any special documentation at all. Now we need a passport, or at the very least a special driver's license. I have one. It has an RF ID chip inside it, and comes in its own special RF resistant sleeve so that scam artists, or perhaps I should say "scan artists," can't read the personal information the State swears isn't there, automatically, just by my walking past their scanner.
The border never mattered, but I guess it matters now. There is something in that which saddens.
