The Border: Who Are You Really?

It’s hard to describe what it is like to live in a 4.5 square-mile gated community when the U.S. government via the Dept. of Homeland Security does the gate-guarding. It does mean that Pt. Roberts has a negligible crime rate. Mostly domestic arguments amplified with alcohol and the occasional doltish teenager who is persuaded that it would be worth his/her while to take on the school bus a tidy lot of marijuana in the baggy backpack and deliver it down to Blaine, Washington, where it can make its way to its market.

It also means, since it’s the Dept. of Homeland Security, that you are always having to demonstrate that you are not a political or agricultural terrorist or general civic violator. When you live in a gated community that offers you ocean, trees, food, and gasoline (+ a hardware store—I forgot to mention it before), you might have to get out occasionally for other things: movies, doctors, dentists, restaurants, better food, dry goods, electronic goods, furniture, appliances, etc. …all the things that constitute most trips out of the house if you don’t have to go to work. As far as I can tell, most people here don’t go out of the house to work. There’s no work here and if you are an American, you can’t just go over to Canada and get a job. But there are some who do, and others who go down to the other border (the one that gets you to the main U.S.) to go to school, since we also don’t have any schools.

So, when you have gotten out (via the Canadian border guards who are almost uniformly a pleasant lot who give you no grief or grilling), you have to get back in. On the U.S. side: well ‘uniformly pleasant’--not so much. It’s a mixed bag, like any policing bunch, with some petty tyrants and some who look at you when they are talking to you and are, at least, polite. The lines are pretty much always pretty long at this border crossing because the local Canadians come down to buy gasoline, alcohol, and pick up their U.S. mailed packages at the post office. But to make this viable for the American residents, Homeland Security sells to us for $50 a five-year card to go through a fast lane. This card requires months to acquire because you must first apply and then they must investigate you in all their data bases and then they must fool around a little longer. Eventually, you get a letter that says you may now drive to that “other” border, the one that is a 40-minute drive away, to get your photo taken, to be insulted by their Homeland Security people, and to get your card. My most recent attempt to get a card resulted in the HS people changing my middle name from Wilson to Elizabeth. No paper in the world exists that has the name ‘Judith Elizabeth Ross’ on it, but when I pointed that out to the 25-year-old, non-legally trained agent, he told me to get all my official ID papers changed: passport, driver’s license, bank accounts, credit cards…all of it. ‘Your middle name on your birth certificate is Elizabeth. So that’s your middle name,’ he warned me. He then pointed a hand-held camera (available in some drug stores for about $2.49, I’d guess) that was attached to the computer in my general direction. Within minutes, I had a genuine U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security ID with someone else’s name on it and someone else’s picture on it. At least I assume the latter, since the person in this picture is largely blue and looks like a fish with hair photographed with a wide-angle lens.

That’s one part of living on the border that may be a different sort of life experience than my more urban friends are having. There are lots of others.