HI THERE; I'M HOME. ALTHOUGH I ALMOST DIDN'T MAKE IT OUT OF CANADA.

This is absolutely true: I was on vacation two weeks ago, hanging out on
Wellesley Island, on the St. Lawrence River, at the top of New York state,
and I almost went to a Canadian jail.

I've spent a lot of time in the Thousand Islands region, ever since I was
such a little kid I didn't know what an international border was. It's
always represented my ideal of what a border community ought to be.

The river runs between Canada and the USA, and there are, literally, 1,000
islands or more in between.

Some are U.S. territory; some are Canadian. Most are accessible only by boat
in the summer, only by snow shoes, cross-country skis, or snowmobiles in the
winter.

It's impossible to patrol, and as long as I've been there, nobody on either
side really seemed to care.

But this year the increasingly nasty politics of national borders made its
way to the tiny town of Rockport, Ontario, which is the closest place to eat
and drink from the U.S. island where we were staying.

One afternoon we pulled into Rockport for lunch in my uncle's leaky,
marginally functional boat, and as we left the restaurant, two no-nonsense
customs agents appeared in our path. They seized the boat; they threatened
us with jail. They only let us go after I produced a Visa card and paid a
hefty fine. The rules have changed, we were informed; Canada, the agents
told us, "is a foreign country," and under a new "zero tolerance" policy,
the rules against entering and leaving by boat would be strictly enforced.

We were in no danger, really.

It's not like parts of the border to the south, where nobody's on vacation
and customs agents shoot people and the border is a source of tension and
fear. I'm almost embarrassed to say I've had a problem with border agents;
this was, after all, only Canada.

But it made me sad, because the Canada-U.S. border along the St. Lawrence
River used to be so meaningless that it gave me hope. I'm not a fan of lines
that keep people in or out; I've always thought that the big problem with
trade agreements like NAFTA is that they opened borders to the free flow of
money and capital, but not to people.

And now you can't even go to Canada for lunch.

Small world.

Checked-by: Melodi Cornett