Part 20 (2/2)

Aha! So we've been speaking a different language all along. Those snowplow drivers and car mechanics and waitresses and fellow travellers were all being polite. We were being rude and pushy. They didn't ask us about ourselves because to do so would be to poke their nose in somebody else's business. Their lack of curiosity was a show of respect.

I have misunderstood their silence. Th.o.r.eau was right. Such misinterpretations are the tragedy of human intercourse, whether played out between a husband and wife in an Echo or between two countries that have shared a border for more than a hundred years.

WHAT do I think of when I think of America? The question, proposed by Ian Jack in Granta, seems an impossible one, for when I think of America I can no longer think of any one thing. I think everything of America. America is everything at once. No sooner do you have a conversation with a friendly waitress in a restaurant than you see a pickup truck in the parking lot with ”Freedom Isn't Free!” on the tailgate, and you wonder which of the laughing, boisterous good old boys at the next table owns the truck. Or you think the country you are driving through looks just like Canada, until you see a billboard proclaiming, in ten-foot letters, Firearms for Sale: No ID Required! And you are reminded that you are in a country whose Declaration of Independence claims that ”all men are created equal” and whose const.i.tution contained a clause allowing its citizens to own slaves.

Partly, I still think what I thought before we made this trip, because those thoughts were based on the image America projects to the outside world: its overweening sense of its own rightness, its casual a.s.sumption that it can buy or sell whatever it wants, its ability to proceed as though everything were on the table, its refusal to learn from its own history.

I cannot forgive America for what it forced my great-grandfather to do. Or for what it has done to its rivers and forests and mountains and deserts, which seems to me to be almost on a par. Oh, but every country has done that, I might say; Canada has done that, and that is true, but that does not mean we should forgive. We should be implacable in our refusal to forgive, no matter how sweet the inducements to do so. But we cannot go back, and we cannot be unmoved, and so we must move on.

Am I still anti-American? No, and I suspect I never really was. It is not anti-American to wish America had been better than it was, or to want it to be better than it is. Perhaps because I am Canadian I have a sense of the value of an official opposition; Americans love their country nonetheless for hating what the government of the day does to it. America has an unofficial opposition in its writers, many of whom have come to mind during the course of these travels. They, too, have wondered at the sensitivity and strength of America's culture, and celebrated the honesty and humour of its people, and ground their teeth at the perfidy and inept.i.tude of its corporate and political leaders. Foreign writers have come and chided or mocked; American writers have stayed and wrestled and burned. As a Canadian, I feel somewhere between, chiding and burning, admiring and, essentially, being irrelevant.

The green light comes on, and I drive up to the customs kiosk.

”Pa.s.sports, please,” the officer says. Unlike the American official in Was.h.i.+ngton State, this Canadian representative of the government doesn't leave the shelter of her kiosk. It's snowing. Not hard-a gentle, Christma.s.sy kind of snow.

”How long have you been in the States?” she says. She is a pet.i.te woman, with nicely permed hair and reading gla.s.ses. She looks more like a librarian than a border guard. She's not wearing a gun.

”About two months,” I say.

”What's the value of the goods you're bringing back?”

I tell her. I have the sheaf of receipts in my hand, but she doesn't seem to want them.

”Any alcohol or tobacco?”

”Two bottles of wine,” I tell her, ”and I just bought some scotch at the duty-free.”

She hands me back one of the pa.s.sports.

”Would you mind telling me what that white powder is on your pa.s.sport, sir?” she says, looking stern.

”White powder?” I say, holding the doc.u.ment open in the feeble, yellow light coming through the winds.h.i.+eld from a lamp above the kiosk. Sure enough, there is a whitish film on the leaves. I know what she's thinking. ”I have no idea. Really.”

”Let me see that,” Merilyn says, taking the pa.s.sport from my trembling hands. She inspects it closely. She sniffs it. Then, to my amazement, she swipes her finger through the powder and licks it.

”I didn't mean for you to taste it, ma'am,” the customs officer says sharply.

”Hmm,” Merilyn says. I stare at her in horror and admiration. We are going to be arrested, but we will be arrested together. ”It's coffee whitener. We've been keeping the pa.s.sports in the glove compartment.”

”Coffee whitener,” says the officer, breaking into a smile. ”That's what I thought, too.” She hands me Merilyn's pa.s.sport. ”Welcome home.”

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.

IT took two countries to write this book: one to raise us and one to welcome us as travellers. To all those who shared their lives and stories for a moment or more, we extend our thanks. Particular appreciation to Russell Thompson, Mike Fischer, and Ron and Lauren Davis for their hospitality.

We would also like to thank Stella Harvey and the Vicious Circle for bringing us to Whistler, British Columbia, as writers-in-residence, thus giving us the time and a place in which to complete the ma.n.u.script.

As always, our grat.i.tude to our agent, Bella Pomer, for her constant faith and tireless efforts on our behalf, to Rob Sanders for being such a generous and willing publisher of Canadian writers, and to Nancy Flight for her editorial ac.u.men.

We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which provided a grant for the writing of this book.

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