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WORK TITLE: Northland
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1972?
WEBSITE:
CITY: Brooklyn
STATE: NY
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born c. 1972, in New York, NY.
EDUCATION:New School, M.F.A., 2004.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and editor. Has taught at Columbia University School of the Arts; MacDowell Colony fellow, 2016; has written film scripts.
AWARDS:Western Press Association award, 2014; MacDowell’s Calderwood Foundation Art of Nonfiction Grant; Lowell Thomas Award.
WRITINGS
Editor of the literary travel writing journal Nowhere; contributor to periodicals, including the Believer, Outside, Men’s Journal, National Geographic Adventure, Powder, TheNewYorker.com, TheParisReview.com, Salon.com, Narrative, the Literary Review, Northwest Review, Third Coast, Conjunctions, and the New York Times Magazine.
SIDELIGHTS
Porter Fox is an American writer and editor. Raised in Maine, he completed an M.F.A. from the New School in 2004 and has taught at Columbia University School of the Arts. Fox is the editor of the literary travel writing journal Nowhere. He has contributed articles to a number of periodicals, including the Believer, Outside, Men’s Journal, National Geographic Adventure, Powder, TheNewYorker.com, TheParisReview.com, Salon.com, Narrative, the Literary Review, Northwest Review, Third Coast, Conjunctions, and the New York Times Magazine. He is the recipient of numerous awards for his writing and was a 2016 MacDowell Colony fellow.
Fox published Northland: A 4,000-mile Journey along America’s Forgotten Border in 2018. Fox journey along the expansive U.S.-Canada border from Maine to Washington over the course of two years to gain a greater understanding of one of the longest national boundaries in the world and how it has changed over the years. Fox gathered his gear, a canoe, a tent, some books, and maps and set out on his journey, chronicling his experiences in parallel with the seventeenth-century explorations of Frenchman Samuel de Champlain in the same area. Fox also recounts the history of the border zone, including stories the U.S. government’s shady dealings with Native Americans, the Continental Army’s failed invasion of British Canada in 1775, and the oil pipeline protests in North Dakota. Fox frequently references the way the U.S. manages its borders with Mexico and Canada and talks to the people along the northern border to get a sense of how they see the situation.
Fox shared his motivations for writing this book in an interview with Peter Kray in the Gear Institute website. He acknowledged that “with all of the news about the southern border, I wondered what was going on in the north, where I grew up. What I found was a boundary that is more than twice as long as the US-Mexico line, is many times more porous, and has a lot more at stake. It is a ‘borderland,’ which means both sides are highly interconnected.”
In an interview in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Fox talked with Frank Bures about the most surprising thing he encountered throughout his journey. Fox admitted: “I was surprised at how pristine the northland still is. A friend once said that the northland was ‘a place that didn’t change between the American Revolution and 1970.’ It has changed quite a bit since 1970, but the wilderness is as it always was: rugged, primal, untouched. With so much changing and so many threats to the natural world these days, it was nice to see nature winning for a change.”
Talking with John Williams in an interview in the New York Times Book Review, Fox shared what he found most surprising while writing and researching the book. Fox confessed that he was most surprised by “the depth of history, all the things that happened along the northern border, from the Age of Discovery to colonization to the timber trade to the ice trade … Lewis and Clark, James Polk and the Oregon Treaty. I took U.S. history. I’m a reader. But I didn’t understand how America was created piece by piece. It was exciting, because it happens chronologically from east to west, literally mile by mile, from Maine to the Northern plains to the Pacific. Every hundred miles, you’re covering a decade of U.S. history.”
A Publishers Weekly contributor claimed that “this is a worthy travelogue that explores the beauty of America’s untouched land.” A contributor to Kirkus Reviews stated: “Richly populated with fascinating northlanders, Native Americans, and many border patrol agents, this is highly entertaining and informative travel literature.” Writing in the Christian Science Monitor, Peter Lewis noted: “Not so forgotten that an errant slip of the paddle, let alone a campsite, on the wrong side of the line – if you get caught – isn’t enough to get you into a lick of trouble. But Fox can’t help but trespass pretty much all the way from the coast of Maine to Minnesota’s Boundary Waters as the border is poorly marked if long in the making … giving that touch of jump and sparkle that every good travelogue needs.” A contributor to Shelf Awareness reasoned that “Fox is an amiable, entertaining guide to the past and present of this porous, rugged border with Canada. While Northland touches on various political disputes … it is more an engaging travel memoir that highlights the lives of those who dwell on our northern edge.” In a review in Paste, B. David Zarley mentioned that “the liminal land in between two titans is a place in and of itself. In a time when no borders should be ignored—when ICE and ice are indifferent to human lives—a travelogue like Fox’s, freighted with history and hope, blood and bone and snow, is all the more important.” Writing in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Peter Geye insisted that the book is “timely that a book about a U.S. border should come along at a moment in our history when the national conversation about borders is nearly ubiquitous…. If it seems like the current discourse is particularly divisive, Northland is a powerful reminder that it has always been complicated.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Fox, Porter, Northland: A 4,000-mile Journey along America’s Forgotten Border, W.W. Norton (New York, NY), 2018.
PERIODICALS
Christian Science Monitor, July 3, 2018, Peter Lewis, review of Northland.
Kirkus Reviews, May 15, 2018, review of Northland.
Minneapolis Star Tribune, June 15, 2018, Frank Bures, “Author Porter Fox Digs into Fascinating History of the Northland along ‘America’s Forgotten Border’;” July 6, 2018, Peter Geye, review of Northland.
New York Times, July 22, 2018, Porter Fox, “The Northland’s Forgotten Border,” p. 10(L); July 29, 2018, John Williams, “Tell Us 5 Things about Your Book: The American Border (Not That One).”
Publishers Weekly, May 28, 2018, review of Northland, p. 89.
ONLINE
Gear Institute website, https://gearinstitute.com/ (July 3, 2018), Peter Kray, author interview.
Paste, https://www.pastemagazine.com/ (July 5, 2018), B. David Zarley, review of Northland.
Porter Fox website, http://www.porterfox.com (October 13, 2018).
Shelf Awareness, https://www.shelf-awareness.com/ (July 3, 2018), review of Northland.
Porter Fox was born in New York and raised on the coast of Maine. His book Northland: A 4,000-Mile Journey Along America's Forgotten Border will be published by W.W. Norton in the summer of 2018. He lives, writes, teaches and edits the award-winning literary travel writing journal Nowhere in Brooklyn. He graduated with an MFA in fiction from The New School in 2004 and teaches at Columbia University School of the Arts. His fiction, essays and nonfiction have been published in The New York Times Magazine, The Believer, Outside, Men's Journal, National Geographic Adventure, Powder, TheNewYorker.com, TheParisReview.com, Salon.com, Narrative, The Literary Review, Northwest Review, Third Coast and Conjunctions, among others. In 2013 he published DEEP: The Story of Skiing and the Future of Snow. The book was featured on the cover of The New York Times Sunday Review and in both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. Fox has been anthologized in The Best American Travel Writing and was a finalist for the 2009 Robert Olen Butler Fiction Prize. He was a 2016 MacDowell Colony fellow and a recipient of MacDowell's Calderwood Foundation Art of Nonfiction Grant. He won a Western Press Association award in 2014 for a two-part feature about climate change and a Lowell Thomas Award for an excerpt from Northland. He has written and edited scripts for Roger Corman and several documentary filmmakers. He recently completed his first collection of short stories and an anthology of short fiction with poet Larry Fagin. He is a member of the Miss Rockaway Armada and Swimming Cities art collectives in New York and collaborated on installations on the Mississippi and Hudson rivers, Venice Biennale (2009), Mass MoCA (2008) and New York City's Anonymous Gallery (2009).
Author Porter Fox digs into fascinating history of the northland along 'America's Forgotten Border'
Author finds that the wild endures along border from Maine to Minnesota.
By Frank Bures Special to the Star Tribune June 15, 2018 — 8:58am
Rutherford Studios
Porter Fox, author of "Northland."
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While the southern U.S. border may grab most of the headlines, most Minnesotans know the northern one is bigger and wilder — the third longest international border in the world.
This fact was not lost on travel writer Porter Fox, who was raised in the northland and who set out on a journey along it for his new book, “Northland: A 4,000-Mile Journey Along America’s Forgotten Border,” which recounts his fascinating trip through this overlooked wilderness. Fox talked in a recent interview about what makes the region different, about mapping the border through the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness and about whether a northern wall will ever get built.
You grew up near the northern border in Maine. What drew you back to it?
I heard stories about increased border security there after the Sept. 11 attacks. People thought that some of the attackers had crossed the Maine boundary, near my family home, but the rumors were not true. Before 9/11, half of the 119 border crossings between the U.S. and Canada were unguarded at night. Since then, the Department of Homeland Security has increased the number of agents there by 500 percent and installed sensors, security cameras, military-grade radar and drones. But I still walked and boated across many sections of the boundary unhindered. What the added security actually has done is to impede cross-border business, trade and travel, and cut off many communities, families, Indian tribes and ethnic groups from their Canadian counterparts. That was what initially drew me back. Then I found many more compelling threads like oil pipelines, water wars and the fascinating history of the northern border to follow.
How is what you call the “northland” different from other parts of the country?
It’s colder, more remote, less developed and less populated. The landscape is wild. Many of the nation’s largest roadless regions and wilderness areas are located in the northern tier. Much of the flora and fauna there live at their northern extreme, creating natural boundaries as well. The climate is more brutal than anywhere in America. People living in the northland often follow the traditions of the boreal homesteaders who first settled there. It is a place where they can get away from the fast pace of modern life, crowds, traffic and sometimes even the law. It is a place that has been largely forgotten by the rest of the U.S., including the U.S. government, which gives the region a somewhat autonomous feel.
“Northland: A 4,000-mile Journey Along America’s Forgotten Border” By: Porter Fox Publisher: W.W. Norton & Co., 336 pages, $26.95
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Is there a common sense of “northness” that holds from Maine through to Minnesota?
There were similarities in architecture, economies, agriculture, pastimes and even diet. Most of the towns are small and are still centered around the ethnic core that settled them: German, Scandinavian, Irish, Native American, English, Russian, French. The landscape varies but the seasons are similar. The cold really shapes communities up there. Mainers told me they had two seasons: “winter and July.” Minnesotans had two seasons as well: “winter and road construction.”
Native communities featured heavily in your travels. Was that by design?
I had no idea that a dozen Indian tribes straddle the border and that many others were situated close to it. For thousands of years there was no hard border there. Then Europeans arrived and drew one right through the middle of the Indians’ land. The tribes did not lose this land to the U.S. Army in a war. The U.S. Congress stole it by offering peace treaties and then going back on them. Most of the northern border exists at the tribes’ expense. It only seemed right to tell that underreported part of the story.
I was surprised the border in the Boundary Waters took so long to survey. Why was that?
I grew up in Maine’s lake country, but I’d never seen anything like the Boundary Waters. Nor had the first surveyors who explored the region in the 1820s. They had to wait for winter in some sections so they could walk across neck-deep bogs after they froze. To triangulate a single position on the Pigeon River, they had to trek for days and scale sheer cliffs. The 1783 Treaty of Paris that created the first half of the border failed to define which of three trading routes in the Boundary Waters the border should be drawn along, meaning surveyors had to draw three borders before one was selected. They often walked where no American or Canadian had ever been, without the luxury of being able to choose the path of least resistance. They had to follow the line.
What surprised you the most on your trip?
I was surprised at how pristine the northland still is. A friend once said that the northland was “a place that didn’t change between the American Revolution and 1970.” It has changed quite a bit since 1970, but the wilderness is as it always was: rugged, primal, untouched. With so much changing and so many threats to the natural world these days, it was nice to see nature winning for a change.
Do you think we will ever build a wall across the north?
I would love to see them try.
Porter Fox was born in New York and raised on the coast of Maine. His book Northland: A 4,000-Mile Journey Along America’s Forgotten Border was published by W.W. Norton July 3, 2018. He lives, writes, teaches and edits the award-winning literary travel writing journal Nowhere in Brooklyn. He graduated with an MFA in fiction from The New School in 2004 and teaches at Columbia University School of the Arts. His fiction, essays and nonfiction have been published in The New York Times Magazine, The Believer, Outside, Men’s Journal, National Geographic Adventure, Powder, TheNewYorker.com, TheParisReview.com, Salon.com, Narrative, The Literary Review, Northwest Review, Third Coast and Conjunctions, among others. In 2013 he published DEEP: The Story of Skiing and the Future of Snow. The book was featured on the cover of The New York Times Sunday Review and in both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. Fox has been anthologized in The Best American Travel Writing and was a finalist for the 2009 Robert Olen Butler Fiction Prize. He was a 2016 MacDowell Colony fellow and a recipient of MacDowell’s Calderwood Foundation Art of Nonfiction Grant. He won a Western Press Association award in 2014 for a two-part feature about climate change and a Lowell Thomas Award for an excerpt from Northland. He has written and edited scripts for Roger Corman and several documentary filmmakers. He recently completed his first collection of short stories and an anthology of short fiction with poet Larry Fagin. He is a member of the Miss Rockaway Armada and Swimming Cities art collectives in New York and collaborated on installations on the Mississippi and Hudson rivers, Venice Biennale (2009), Mass MoCA (2008) and New York City’s Anonymous Gallery (2009).
By John Williams
July 29, 2018
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Credit
Credit
Patricia Wall/The New York Times
There’s no shortage of reporting and opinion about the border between Mexico and the United States. Much less often in the spotlight, the border between the United States and Canada nonetheless offers Americans an instructive window onto their past, present and future. It’s the longest international boundary in the world, and was the setting for a great deal of momentous early American history. To write his new book, “Northland,” Porter Fox spent three years traveling about 4,000 miles from Maine to Washington, meeting the region’s people, studying its history and learning its natural contours up close. “I didn’t make an itinerary,” Mr. Fox writes. “There was no timeline. I started the way every other northland explorer had for the last 400 years: I packed a canoe, tent, maps and books, and headed for the line.” Below, he talks about what he learned on his travels, his obsession with certain historical characters and more.
When did you first get the idea to write this book?
It was in a conversation with my editor and agent. We were batting around ideas for something to write about. The northern border came up and I just jumped on it. It’s the border that nobody talks about. There’s so much written about the southern border; it’s in the news all the time, presidents use it as a bargaining chip and a rallying cry. The northern border was our first border. It has such a deep history, which tells the story of how America was created.
I grew up in northern Maine and spent summers five miles from the Canada-U.S. border. I just knew the Northern tier of the U.S. so well. I felt comfortable there and knew the people. It would be a great adventure, and I knew I could do it.
What’s the most surprising thing you learned while writing it?
The depth of history, all the things that happened along the northern border, from the Age of Discovery to colonization to the timber trade to the ice trade — which was incredible to read about — Lewis and Clark, James Polk and the Oregon Treaty. I took U.S. history. I’m a reader. But I didn’t understand how America was created piece by piece. It was exciting, because it happens chronologically from east to west, literally mile by mile, from Maine to the Northern plains to the Pacific. Every hundred miles, you’re covering a decade of U.S. history.
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[Read Porter Fox’s account of a canoe trip along the U.S.-Canada border]
The thing that really hit me was how Jefferson planned Western expansion so long ago, and how they planned to dupe the Native American tribes that were living there. They knew they could not conquer them at that time, militarily, so they created a strategy where they didn’t have to fight them on the battlefield; they could just trick them into signing these treaties — more than 300 of them — and just ignore the treaties. The more I got into it, the more disbelief I felt about this country we call home.
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Porter Fox
Credit
Sara Fox
In what way is the book you wrote different from the book you set out to write?
I set out to write a book about the border. I was researching surveys and the history of how it was created. But from the get-go, I started wandering away from the border, staying within about 100 miles of it. I discovered this concept of the northland, this singular region in the U.S., which I hadn’t read about before. I realized it was this giant swath of territory that’s defined by climate, very old ethnic communities — many of which descended from the first settlers — massive wildernesses and roadless areas. I found so many similarities across the region. I started meeting some characters and going deep into the woods and up these rivers. It went from being a border book to more like “Great Plains,” by Ian Frazier; more of a set piece about a region.
Who is a creative person (not a writer) who has influenced you and your work?
Samuel de Champlain. He was the first character I read about, just getting ready to start the trip. I dove so deep. He was a Renaissance man at the tail end of the Renaissance. He was a humanist who had a vision of creating a new world from the ashes of what France and even Europe had become at that point, in the late 1500s or early 1600s.
He could write and sketch. He started a dinner club, during the third year of his settlement in America. People were dying left and right of scurvy and whatnot, and to boost morale he starts this club. Whoever cooked the best meal got some kind of reward. People went scavenging through swamps for something to add a little flavor to their meal.
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I was totally obsessed with Champlain, and of course his navigation and sailing skills, which totally baffle me. My dad was a boat builder, so I really get into the boating stuff. These guys were going into the forest and just building a 40-foot boat. With an ax. And then sailing it 500 miles. It’s so insane.
Persuade someone to read “Northland” in 50 words or less.
It’s about this very wild, forgotten corner of America that witnessed so much major history. There’s a lot happening up there right now as well, in terms of natural resource issues, indigenous rights issues. It will shape the future of this country for the rest of the century and beyond.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Follow John Williams on Twitter: @johnwilliamsnyt.
Northland
A 4,000-Mile Journey Along America’s Forgotten Border
By Porter Fox
247 pages. W.W. Norton & Company. $26.95.
Northland: A 4,000 Mile Journey Along America's Forgotten Border
Publishers Weekly. 265.22 (May 28, 2018): p89.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Northland: A 4,000 Mile Journey Along America's Forgotten Border
Porter Fox. Norton, $26.95 (336p) ISBN 978-0393-24885-2
In this contemplative narrative, Fox (Deep) travels the United States' border with Canada, following the footsteps of pre-Columbus Native Americans, European explorers, mountain men, and 18th-century government surveyors. The narrative is more ruminative than eventful--aside from a red fox defecating on a lawn or some sidelong glances from patrol agents, there's not a whole lot that actually happens during Fox's three-year exploration; in ways, the inactivity itself reflects the stasis of this borderland area. Fox has a keen eye for flora, fauna, geology, and meteorology (North Dakota is equidistant between the North Pole and the equator, making it "the most extreme weather zone in the world"); he's also adept at conveying his knowledge and capturing the natural beauty and ancient landscapes of the borderlands ("Minnesota's Boundary Waters is still primitive, carved by nature and untouched by humans"). Fox's travels uncover a secret: this largely ignored border is key to the U.S. economy as it is home to an abundance of water, oil, and natural gas, and it will loom large if and when America's more easily accessible natural resources become depleted. This is a worthy travelogue that explores the beauty of America's untouched land. (July)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Northland: A 4,000 Mile Journey Along America's Forgotten Border." Publishers Weekly, 28 May 2018, p. 89. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A541638855/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f059c7fa. Accessed 22 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A541638855
Fox, Porter: NORTHLAND
Kirkus Reviews. (May 15, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Fox, Porter NORTHLAND Norton (Adult Nonfiction) $26.95 7, 3 ISBN: 978-0-393-24885-2
The life and times of America's other border.
The southern border of the United States gets all the attention, but it's barely half as long as the northern border; its story is "a tale of early mistakes, and more than two centuries of fixes." Fox (Deep: The Story of Skiing and the Future of Snow, 2013), a Maine native (he now lives in New York) and editor of the travel journal Nowhere, took a coast-to-coast, two-year journey weaving in and out of a boundary that, "on paper, looks like a discarded thread--twisted and kinked in parts, tight as a bowstring in others," to see it firsthand and to recount its rich history. He didn't make an itinerary: "I packed a canoe, tent, maps, and books and headed for the line." He began one chilly October morning in Lubec, America's easternmost border town near Passamaquoddy Bay. In June 1604, writes the author, Frenchman Samuel de Champlain entered the bay with two large boats and a crew of 150 to begin his own exploring. Throughout, Fox chronicles in detail Champlain's adventures, good and bad, as well as those of many other explorers and adventurers from the border's past. This gives the book an added richness, providing helpful historical context to the places the author visits. Early on, Fox's trip almost ended when he nearly capsized a small outboard boat in high waves in below-freezing Sandy Bay. He recounts that in 1775, the Continental army attempted a doomed invasion of Canada, and in the 1920s and '30s, a U.S. planning committee even "drew up plans to seize Canada." In Montreal, Fox hitched a ride on a "moving skyscraper," the freighter Equinox, as he traversed the Great Lakes. In eastern North Dakota, he got caught up in Indian protests over the oil pipeline.
Richly populated with fascinating northlanders, Native Americans, and many border patrol agents, this is highly entertaining and informative travel literature.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Fox, Porter: NORTHLAND." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A538293863/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=10b5dcac. Accessed 22 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A538293863
The Northland's Forgotten Border
Porter Fox
The New York Times. (July 22, 2018): News: p10(L).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
Full Text:
The Northland's Forgotten Border
By Porter Fox
At 5,525 miles, the United States-Canada border is the world's longest land boundary, more than double the length of the United States-Mexico line. It passes through remote terrain arrayed with 8,000-foot peaks, millions of acres of wilderness and four of the five Great Lakes -- a lot of it essentially unguarded.
With President Trump's unrelenting focus on the Mexican border and all the dangers he says it poses for America, the nation's northern boundary has remained mostly an afterthought -- even though it is potentially more porous than the southern border. More unsettling, haphazard enforcement and surveillance efforts there have upended commerce with our No. 2 trading partner and have struggled to stop extremists, drug traffickers and illegal immigrants from entering the United States.
''The problem is that we don't know what the threats and risk are because so much attention is given to the Southwest border,'' Senator Heidi Heitkamp, a Democrat from North Dakota, told The New York Times in 2016. She was the author of a bill that required the Department of Homeland Security to develop a threat assessment for the northern border.
Last month, the department announced its latest strategy to secure the border. Its report says that the principal challenge is ending the illegal flow of drugs between Canada and the United States. But there are other issues, like making it easier for people who live in cross-border communities to pass over the line, and speeding up the flow of trade and services -- all while keeping up the country's guard.
I spent the last three years traversing the northern border for a book about that so-called Hi-Line. The northland is a singular place, occupied by the sort of small towns that modern America has skipped over, obscure industries and old-world professions that rely on hands, not machines. It is also a wild place, with forests of old-growth hemlock, fir and birch; wild rivers; unnamed mountain ranges; and some of the largest roadless areas in America.
For much of my journey, it was difficult to discern where the border even was. I unintentionally crossed it dozens of times without seeing an agent or border monument. A French teenager jogging along a beach in British Columbia recently wasn't so lucky. When she inadvertently crossed the unmarked border into the United States, she was detained for two weeks.
What I did see and hear were unhappy citizens on both sides of the line who said that the northern border's ''Mexicanization'' -- essentially, the American government's mimicking of procedures it uses in the south -- has resulted in congestion at ports of entry, invasive questioning at checkpoints, racial profiling and long delays, all of which that have changed life for the worse on both sides of the border.
Since the 18th century, when the northern border was first hastily sketched, the boundary has had the appearance of a scrawl. It divides more than a dozen American Indian tribes, and in Niagara Falls, N.Y., it cleaves North America's most famous waterfall. Homes, businesses, golf courses and factories sit on the border. During Prohibition, taverns were built on the line so that Americans could be welcomed on one side and sold booze on the other.
Before the Sept. 11 attacks, half of the crossings between the United States and Canada were left unguarded at night. Since then, the Department of Homeland Security has increased the number of agents in the north by 500 percent and installed some of the same sensors, security cameras, military-grade radar and drones used on the United States-Mexico line.
The number of apprehensions along the northern border is relatively low compared with those along the southern line -- about 3,000 in the 2017 fiscal year versus about 300,000 in the south.
Even so, every year, millions of dollars worth of smuggled drugs, including large quantities of opioids, like fentanyl, and an untold number of immigrants cross the border illegally into the United States. Motion sensors and cameras detect illicit crossers, some armed, in remote areas, but the agents can't always get there in time to catch them.
Illicit drugs and illegal immigration are not the only concerns. A 2015 report by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs said, ''Some experts also believe that terrorists could exploit vulnerabilities along the northern border to carry out an attack on the U.S.'' and noted that in 2011, Alan Bersin, a former commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, told the Senate Judiciary Committee that in terms of terrorism, ''it's commonly accepted that the more significant threat comes from the U.S.-Canada'' border rather than the border with Mexico.
Today, according to the Department of Homeland Security report, the potential terror threats come ''primarily from homegrown violent extremists in Canada'' who are not on terrorist watch lists and thus can cross into the United States legally.
Beyond the terrorism threat, the government has the challenge of overseeing a border crossed every day by more than 400,000 people and $1.6 billion in goods through some 120 points of entry. According to a 2011 study by researchers at the University of Waterloo and Wilfrid Laurier University, increased secondary searches and unpredictable waiting times at the border were costing Americans and Canadians as much as $30 billion annually. Homeland Security has been working to minimize those waiting times.
Intensified security at border crossings also has disrupted centuries-old international communities that straddle the line. Two centuries of intermarrying among French, Acadian, Indian, German, Scottish and Dutch people created families and communities that span the border. After decades of being able to cross the line at will, families, Native Americans, members of church congregations, and employees at hospitals and small businesses now find themselves confronted with a sometimes impassable and, occasionally hostile, barrier.
In the coming months, Homeland Security will begin to put in place its border management plan, which calls for enhanced border security while also doing a better job of facilitating cross-border trade and travel. Some of the actions proposed to achieved those ends have been suggested before, with little follow-through.
This time, perhaps, our border to the north will get the attention and resources it needs.
______
Porter Fox is the author of ''Northland: A 4,000-Mile Journey Along America's Forgotten Border.''
CAPTION(S):
PHOTO: Norman Lague, a United States Border Patrol agent, walks on a trail that runs along America's border with Canada. (PHOTOGRAPH BY JACOB HANNAH FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Fox, Porter. "The Northland's Forgotten Border." New York Times, 22 July 2018, p. 10(L). General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A547175281/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ece555b0. Accessed 22 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A547175281
'Northland' is an entertaining trip along America's 4,000-mile northern border
Peter Lewis
The Christian Science Monitor. (July 3, 2018): Arts and Entertainment:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 The Christian Science Publishing Society
http://www.csmonitor.com/About/The-Monitor-difference
Full Text:
Byline: Peter Lewis
"You don't know what you've got til it's gone," sang the Canadian musician Joni Mitchell, and she might have been referring to the toy border that used to exist between her homeland and the United States. Howdy neighbor, may I see your license? Well then, have a nice visit.
But for all the hot air blowing from the White House concerning a southern "wall," the president might consider that "the only known terrorists to cross overland into the US came from the north. Fifty-six billion dollars in smuggled drugs and ten thousand illegal aliens cross the US-Canadian border every year," writes Porter Fox, who entertainingly, and with a wealth of historical storytelling, traverses all 3,987 miles of Lower 48 border (third longest international border [add Alaska and it is the longest], with 2,000 border agents [Mexico has nine times the number, plus private patrols], and all of what the Congressional Research Services deems sixty-nine miles of "operational control.")
Fox's trek along that border is chronicled in the keen-eyed and -eared Northland: A 4,000-Mile Journey Along America's Forgotten Frontier. Not so forgotten that an errant slip of the paddle, let alone a campsite, on the wrong side of the line - if you get caught - isn't enough to get you into a lick of trouble. But Fox can't help but trespass pretty much all the way from the coast of Maine to Minnesota's Boundary Waters as the border is poorly marked if long in the making (border negotiations stared right after the Treaty of Paris was signed), giving that touch of jump and sparkle that every good travelogue needs.
Following the boundary line along Maine and New York, and then again once passed the Great Lakes, into the Boundary Waters of Minnesota, is comically complex canoeing (his canoe is equipped with a motor). "The [Diggity] stream runs to First Lake, then Eagle Lake, which connects to Third Lake, Maudsley Lake, and ten more lakes before reaching a portage that connects to the Saint John River." Meanwhile, we are treated to the history of the Passamaquoddy peoples, the French fur trade of the 16th century, and the exploits of Samuel de Champlain in his early-17th-century attempt to found New France, and find a passage to La Chine and the glories of the East.
A bulk carrier ("The ship is almost the exact size of the sixty-story Carnegie Hall Tower in New York City, leaned over on its side. The bow is a seventh of a mile away from the stern") that makes a circuit of the Great Lakes, picking up iron pellets here and dropping them off there, where it picks of grain for farther along, takes him on the boundary of those giant sweet waters, oceans unto themselves with their own weather systems. For all the hugeness of everything, Fox can be an intimately sharp observer of place, noting, for instance, that the northern cold makes light shine upward through the airborne frost and reduces the landscape to a charcoal sketch.
There is a good, long section where he encounters the Sioux (and company) protesters of the Keystone XL Pipeline running through reservation land, up near the border in North Dakota. Pipelines are notorious for springing everything from leaks to gushers, and the Sioux want no part of it and ignited a nationwide protest against crossing the reservation, desecrating sacred lands, and potentially befouling the major source of water for the reservation. This is Fox in journalist mode, though there is little doubt where his heart lies on the matter.
Additionally, "the protest had morphed into something larger. Things were not good on American reservations. Of the 4.5 million people from 565 federally recognized tribes in the US," 30 percent live in poverty, the alcoholism rate is 500 percent higher than the national average, suicide is double the average (40 percent of the victims are 15 to 24), half finish high school, 40 percent of on-reservation housing is consider inadequate, and the unemployment at Standing Rock, where the protests were centered, stood at 80 percent. If that list isn't shameful, then you have a high tolerance for shame.
The remainder of Fox's journey is as natty and crisp, and quite lighter of spirit than the reservation story. One comical episode has him trying to enter a little snaggle-tooth blip on the straight line to the coast along 49'40" or fight, a eensy piece of the US protruding into Canada, but no way to get there except through Canada. The border patrols are deeply suspicious about why he wants to go to such an isolated spot. Then again, that is the leitmotif of the entire story.
This really is a forgotten land by those from the south, but not by those from the north. The vast majority of Canadians live along the border, but only a trimming of US citizens live there year around. In the US, "Northlanders have little interest in the rest of the Union, and the rest of the Union has little interest in its northern fringe." (Unless fracking hits paydirt.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Lewis, Peter. "'Northland' is an entertaining trip along America's 4,000-mile northern border." Christian Science Monitor, 3 July 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A545270623/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f86548c3. Accessed 22 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A545270623