A Border-Crossing Thanksgiving

BELLINGHAM, WASHINGTON – The U.S.-Canada border used to feel like a technicality. The person in the booth would glance at your driver’s license, ask why you were gracing their fair land with your presence and whether you were bringing in booze, bombs or other contraband, then wave you on through. 

That was before 9/11 and before COVID-19. For much of the pandemic, the border was closed altogether. This mattered to us because we have family in Vancouver, British Columbia: my stepson, his partner and their 2-year-old daughter, whom we had seen when she was born and not since.

Last summer was particularly frustrating. We were in the Pacific Northwest until Aug. 3. The border opened on Aug. 9.

This Thanksgiving week, we were ready to try again. Or at least my wife was. I wanted to go, but my understanding was that post-9/11, one needs a passport to enter Canada. Mine expired last month. I’m still waiting on a new one.

So we hatched this plan: My daughter and her family would spend Thanksgiving with in-laws in Bellingham, 25 miles from the Canadian border. We would fly to Seattle, rent a car and drive to the border, where Schuyler would be waiting to take my wife back to Vancouver. I would return to Bellingham. Then we would all gather in Bellingham on Thanksgiving Day. 

Everything we heard and read about crossing the border made it sound like we had better make darned sure we had all the necessary documents, including proof that we had a negative COVID test within 72 hours of our arrival at the Peace Arch on the Washington state-British Columbia line. Complicating matters is that the requirements for entering Canada keep changing and it’s not always clear which website has the most up-to-date information. 

Just days before our departure from State College, we learned that you need a passport to enter Canada by air, but not by car. A driver’s license and birth certificate will do. 

Birth certificate? Since becoming an adult I have moved more than a dozen times while bouncing back and forth between the two coasts. I wasn’t an organized person when I made my first post-college move to California and I’m not an organized person now, so it seems a minor miracle that I have hung onto my birth certificate through all those moves and was able, after much rummaging, to fish it out of a file drawer last week. My new plan, accordingly, was to spend one night in Vancouver.

The other thing we learned, just days before our departure, was that we needed to upload a bunch of documents and answer a bunch of questions on the ArriveCAN app on our phones. Having done, we thought, all that was required, we had little cause for worry, except that on the flight to Seattle, we watched “Argo,” the 2012 film about the CIA’s rescue of six American embassy staffers from Iran in 1979. The six, posing as filmmakers, make it through customs with fake Canadian passports, but just as they’re about to board their flight, the ruse is discovered and their plane taxis down the runway with a truckload of rifle-toting soldiers in hot pursuit.

Relations between the U.S. and Canada are not nearly as tense as those between the U.S. and Iran, either in 1979 or now, but any hiccups at the border and I was prepared to say to the guards, you know what, I don’t really need to enter Canada right now. What do you say we forget this ever happened and I’ll hang a U-ey and go back to Bellingham?

No such speech was required. Our interrogation took two minutes. No one chased us, yet we felt like we, too, had had a narrow escape.

As for the news that Vancouver was cut off from the rest of Canada and faced shortages because of heavy flooding, we read the same news stories and saw the same dramatic photos as everyone else, but on the ground, things seemed perfectly normal. We got bread from our favorite bakery and takeout from our favorite noodle shop and got to know 2-year-old Elleka in a way that is simply not possible on Facetime or Zoom.  

A day later, I spent another two minutes with the guardians of the border and was soon enjoying the company of my daughter, my son-in-law, 3-year-old Penelope and 4-month-old Beatrice.

With granddaughters within 300 miles of each other in Vancouver and Portland, we keep getting asked if we’re going to move to this part of the world when we retire. Certainly it is tempting not to have to move heaven and earth to see the “bigs” and the “littles” we love so much, but then we’re back to the fires of last summer and the floods of this fall and the sense that it would be easier to contemplate living in this part of the world if it were a little more livable. 

Who knows about next year and the year after? For now, I’m thankful to be out here with so many of our dear ones and wish the same joy for all who read these words.