Border Crossings

A couple summers ago, I went back and forth across the Canadian border at a place without a customs post. The way life was working at the time, about once a week, I'd be in Canada for a half hour or so, then head back downriver, past the old border house--abandoned fifty years ago--past the station that measured river flow, out past the waterfall that actually moved in a zigzag, and then to the mudflats, where seals sunned themselves.

All along the Alaska-Canada border, there's a clearcut strip, no trees at all. Most people see this where the Alaska Highway moves from one country to the other, but if there are trees anywhere along the border, they've been taken out. Down into the landscape the river works through, this meant somebody hanging off cliffsides, cutting their way through countryside so thick it even turned back hopeful miners during the great Klondike gold rush--and nothing stopped those people.

But if you don't catch the clear cut, if you're looking up the river, or over to the glacier, you never know when you go from one country to the other.

That's one of the big questions travel keeps kicking back to me. How can you know exactly when everything changes?