'Northland' Explores Life Along That 'Other' U.S. Border
The U.S. border with Canada is the world’s longest international border, yet it receives very little attention. For three years, writer Porter Fox traveled that border.
Fox (@PorterFox) writes about his travels in the new book “Northland,” and joins Here & Now‘s Peter O’Dowd to talk about the book.
Book Excerpt: ‘Northland’
by Porter Fox
No one knows where America’s northern border begins. It is somewhere near Machias Seal Island, twenty- five miles off Jonesport, Maine. Most know where it goes: six hundred miles around Maine’s panhandle; across New Hampshire, Vermont, and New York; west along the Saint Lawrence River; through four of the five Great Lakes; into Minnesota’s Boundary Waters; and straight across North Dakota, Montana, Idaho, and Washington on the forty- ninth parallel.
On paper, the boundary looks like a discarded thread— twisted and kinked in parts, tight as a bowstring in others. Much of the line was drawn before modern surveying technology was invented, so it follows things you can see on a map: rivers, lakes, latitude, longitude. Where the boundary tracks a
