“There’s a plaque, too. I’m going to go read it,” I said, jumping out of the car as Wayne looked on, aghast. “Don’t worry, I’ll be back before we move another inch.”
The brass plate was framed by two women, each extending her country’s coat of arms to meet in the middle. An eagle and a rampant lion: a scavenger and a predator. The scavenger I understood, but Canada, predatory? Not exactly how I think of my country. Where was the beaver, that amiable, trepidatious rodent that warns his fellows, then dives for cover at the faintest threat?
The words flanked by the women were optimistic: More than a century old friendship between these countries, a lesson of peace to all nations.
I peered at the two women. They were hardly more than girls. The American was fine-boned and pretty. In one hand, she cradled a cornucopia overflowing with vegetables and fruit. The Canadian girl was muscled, as if the sculptor intended to carve a man, then thought better of it and added breasts. She was lugging a huge sheaf of wheat, her arm clearly broken in some agricultural mishap and poorly set.
None of it fit. Our two countries were brethren, or children, or women: which was it? And what kind of friends are we? Squabbling kids who trade loyalties like baseball cards? Men who, like Wayne, play hockey together for years without ever knowing the names of each other’s wives?
No, I thought, as I headed back to the car. The plaque had it right. It’s a women’s friendship. Never an easy thing, especially if one of them is outgoing and pretty.
We’ve left the monuments behind and are zipping over the tidal flats where the United States and Britain drew their final line in the sand. Here, the distinction between one country and another seems arbitrary, inconsequential. The landscape refuses nationality. The same sandy loam sifts on either side of the border; the same clouds scuttle overhead. The birds, looking down, recognize no boundaries. Even I, staring out at the low bungalows along the roadside, at the cars that pass by—the usual mix of American cars and imports, as many BC plates as Washington State—have trouble discerning any difference.
Yet there is a difference. Not out there, beyond the windshield, where a steady drizzle is fingering horizontal lines across the glass, but in here, inside me.
“What do you love about the States?” I ask Wayne.
“The New Yorker, baseball, Star Trek, bourbon, L.L. Bean, John McPhee, Amazon.”
I rhyme off my list: The New Yorker. Sex and the City. The Coen brothers. Richard Ford. Martin Luther King, J r. Sweet potato pie. Oprah. “And what do you hate?”
“Reality TV, Coca-Cola, Homeland Security, the Ku Klux Klan, the National Rifle Association. And you?”
“The CIA, the bomb, aerial spraying, Tommy Hilfiger, Ugly Americans, the fact that they think they own the world. Oh, and Oprah.”
How on earth will we ever see past all that?
“Good travel is like good reading,” Wayne says. “It sucks you into a world and holds you there.”
“Long enough for us to really see?”
He shrugs. “That’s the idea.”
I uncap the highlighter and set the point on the map, on the city of Vancouver, then drag it half an inch south, past the border, the first indication that this line might, at some point, become a unifying circle.
WE stop for a late breakfast in Fairhaven, a settlement on the shore of Bellingham Bay that was once a village in its own right but has been swept into the greater urban embrace of the city of Bellingham. It is a quaint little place, its brick buildings recently sandblasted, its pitted woodwork filled and repainted. It has a persistent, nineteenth-century look about it. Rather than allow box-store malls to suck the life out of its core, Bellingham passed a municipal design bylaw requiring new buildings to be constructed to look old. The instant nostalgia seems to be working; even in late December, in the rain, Fairhaven’s quaint streets are swarming with shoppers. The storefronts along the main street are filled with Christmas goodies: gingerbread men, old-fashioned sleds tied in red ribbon. A recipe for mulled wine is posted on the window of the wine shop in front of which we park the car.
We ignore the seasonal frippery and head for Village Books. We’ve been here before: it’s an establishment worth whipping down from Vancouver for, its shelves burdened with books, both new and used. On either side of the door, plaques embedded in the red brick advise: A Room Without Books is Like a Body Without a Soul (Cicero) and Some Books Leave us Free and Some Books Make us Free (Ralph Waldo Emerson).
“What does that mean?” Merilyn says, puzzled before the Emerson quote.
“Damned if I know.”
Heading for the nature section, I buy Ellen Meloy’s Eating Stone and Ann Zwinger’s Wind in the Rock, both about the American desert, which I am looking forward to seeing. In the mystery corner, I pick out Michael Collins’s Death of a Writer.
“Do you carry Canadian books?” I ask the man behind the order desk on the second floor, a pleasant-looking bookman with short, greying hair and studious glasses. His card says he is the Consignment Coordinator.
“A few,” he says. “Lots of Canadians come through here, and we go up there, too, of course. But fiction, nature, books about Canada—there’s not much interest. Not really. A few break though the barrier, the Margaret Atwoods, the Alice Munros, but not many. I don’t think Americans are very interested in other countries.”
Looking through the shelves, though, I notice several books by Canadian writers: Ron Wright’s A Short History of Progress, Bill Deverell’s April Fool, Karen Connelly’s The Lizard Cage, and Tree, the book I co-wrote with David Suzuki. We are not identified as Canadians; it seems Americans are consuming foreign culture without knowing it. As they say in the ads, Don’t tell them it’s good for them.
Merilyn and I take our loot next door to the Colophon Cafe, which looks like a 1950s diner. There is a framed citation on the wall above our heads: Best Use of Poultry, 1998.
“I think I’ll have the chicken,” I say.
“Nineteen ninety-eight was a long time ago,” Merilyn warns. “Besides, this is breakfast, remember?”
She’s right. And I love diner breakfasts. Merilyn orders the quiche “made nightly by our own bakers.” I scan the menu for bacon and eggs and order the closest thing to it: the Truly Decadent California Croissant, which consists of scrambled eggs, Swiss cheese, avocado, and tomato on a flaky French pastry. Merilyn looks at me askance.
“Why not?” I say defensively. “We’re headed for California.”
At the table across the aisle, a woman and a much younger man are sharing a bottle of wine. Suddenly, I’m a censorious moralist. What’s an older woman doing having a bottle of wine with a young man at twelve-thirty in the afternoon? A Wednesday afternoon? Maybe it’s her son; the boy has that surly, I-wish-I-were-anywhere-else-on-the-planet look about him, and he clearly isn’t used to drinking wine. He holds his glass with his long fingers curled around the bulb and his thumb hooked over the rim.
“No, no, I don’t think that’s why she did it,” the woman is saying animatedly. “I can’t see her