Pictured above: Many portions of the U.S.–Canada border are simple cuts made through thick forest, including this one, slicing through Maine and Quebec.
It’s a springtime Saturday morning at the cottage. From the spot where I’m weeding the garden, I can hear the kids shouting on the trampoline, the newly arrived songbirds calling to each other from the trees at the edge of the field, and, coming in from the east, the intensifying roar of a border patrol helicopter. It flies very low, and right overhead, so the agents in the chopper can get a good long look at all of us down here on the ground.
The choppers have become frequent since last fall. Our cottage is about 200 metres south of the border in Vermont, making it right within the ribbon of land that border patrols on both sides are determined to police with historically unprecedented vigilance. Like most of the Canada–U.S. border, this section is very rural, and the international boundary line itself, when it isn’t marked by a checkpoint, is maintained as a cutline through the woods. In the past, ATVs and snowmobiles have used the cutline as a trail. We’ve walked along it many times looking for wild mushrooms and listening for interesting birds.
But I’m not sure that’s such a good idea anymore. At the local pub the other night, I mentioned to some neighbours that I was concerned increased foot patrols of the cutline meant that I’d be questioned on one of my walks. I’ve been a dual U.S.-Canadian citizen my whole life, and the thought of being intimidated by a border agent bewilders me, given this privileged status that I cling to. “Yeah, I’d check about that,” a man sitting next to me said. “Ask them if they think you’re safe walking back there.”
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When you cross from Canada into the U.S., subtle differences are visible right away: different snacks at the gas station, different logos on the ballcaps. But zoom out, and our two countries tend to look pretty similar: old logging trails running through deep woods, swimming holes, long winters. This is not at all the case, however, along the remote border between Quebec and Vermont where I do most of my crossing.
Quebec’s Eastern Townships make up some of the province’s most sought-after cottage country. The hilly roads connecting the villages, beloved by weekend cyclists in bright high-performance outfits, are dotted with vineyards, cider orchards, exceptional bakeries, and gracious homes surrounded by gardens landscaped with native plants. The scene changes immediately when you cross into Vermont’s Franklin County, where our cottage is located.
Vermont’s northern counties are its poorest and its most conservative, forming a “red wall” of Trump voters hard up against their Canadian neighbours. Many Canadians think of Vermont as a kindred place—Bernie Sanders, maple syrup, and all that. Franklin County does not comfortably fit this picture. Everyone on my road in Vermont owns not just one, but many guns. They shoot them year-round, for any number of reasons—I would never ask, it’s none of my business. Several have indicated that, should “anything ever happen” over at our place, unarmed and vulnerable as we are, they’re just a text away. Our own private standing militia is the mildly troubling implication. There’s not a lot of economic opportunity in Franklin County, which is partly why we ended up there: it was the only place within driving distance of our home in Montreal where we could buy land.
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It was also a choice that I made because being close to the border is where I feel most at home. I was born and raised in Montreal to American parents, and my dad returned to the States when I was a kid. I spent my first 18 years being driven, and then driving myself, back and forth across the border. For people like me—and we are many, we border people—the checkpoint has always been a friendly formality, a mild inconvenience over holiday weekends, but never a worry or a site of intimidation. It’s where my two halves meet.
Less than a century ago, northern Vermont and southern Quebec more or less shared an economy. They certainly shared a population, if the French last names are any indication. That’s a distant memory now, and even more so now that the U.S. has decided to make the Canadian border a site of expansionist innuendo and intimidation.
My Vermont neighbours have different views and habits than I do, and I feel lucky to know them. I’m proud to feel just as much at home drinking a cortado at the cafe around the corner in Montreal as I am drinking Coors in my neighbour’s garage in Franklin County. The notion that we would be at odds because our countries are in some kind of standoff is beyond ridiculous to me. Bad U.S.-Canada relations, to me, are simply not acceptable as real life.
But then, it’s never been clear exactly what’s “real” when it comes to controlling our shared boundary. Until 2001, most border checkpoints closed at 10 p.m. and were “guarded” by an orange cone that you could move out of the way in order to pass. An old-timer from the Eastern Townships told me that his local crossing had a ledger that you could write your name in, on the honour system, if you crossed after closing time. Everyone who lives along the border has stories of times they’ve crossed over undetected late at night.
The border enforcement norms of today were born with the Patriot Act passed by the Bush administration after 9/11. On that day in 2001, there were as many American Border Patrol agents posted in the city of Brownsville, Texas, as there were on the entire U.S.–Canada border. The lopsidedness of the United States’ attention to their two boundaries provided a useful way to stage an enforcement crackdown. While none of the terrorists who carried out 9/11 had come through Canada, or had any link with the country, tightening enforcement rules and tripling the number of agents stationed along the northern border made the government seem proactive and serious about America’s safety. That there was never any threat to begin with was beside the point.
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Conditions today are the same but different. The past few years have seen unprecedented rates of illegal crossings from Canada into the U.S., as the U.S. has cracked down on immigration and Canada has remained relatively open. (This has meant that migrants come to Canada first, and then cross into the U.S. from the north.) But it’s only been since the Trump administration has baselessly blamed Canadian border laxity for the flow of fentanyl, and has begun interrogating and, in some cases, detaining people for their speech, that the culture of the border that I know has changed. My friends ask me if they need to wipe their phones of any dissenting views before crossing at the rural checkpoints I’ve been using for years. Some friends prefer not to cross at all.
More than 20 years ago, when I was in university, I drove an American friend up to visit Canada for the first time. We were both deep into reading post-colonial theory at the time, and as we pulled up to the checkpoint, my friend turned to me from the passenger’s seat and declared, in mock-defiance, “Borders are fake, dude!”, cracking me up. It’s become a family joke to declare, “Borders are fake!” as we approach the checkpoint, one that my kids join in on. They have no idea how real this border has become in the years since we first made that joke.
No matter who is in power, I will keep exercising my right to move freely between the two countries, tending my garden in Vermont on the weekends and going to work in Montreal during the week. But it has gotten lonely and paranoid along the border. The helicopters don’t help matters, and I haven’t taken a walk along the cutline since my neighbours warned me not to. This uneasy feeling has taken on a life of its own, has come to justify itself. Maybe that was the plan all along. It’s dispiriting to watch a region, unique in its longstanding ability to transcend the boundaries and limitations of so much of contemporary life, fall into the trap of binary thinking, of “friend” versus “enemy.” People have been crossing back and forth for centuries now. What a tragic waste for such a gift to be sacrificed for the sake of political theatre.
This article was originally published in the August 2025 issue of Cottage Life.
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