Write Team: A report on our northern border

I took a fishing trip recently with seven good friends. We drove all day to International Falls, Minnesota, and crossed our northern border that evening at Fort Frances, Ontario.

The next day, we drove five hours north to the town of Red Lake. On the third day, we crammed gear, supplies and ourselves into a small float plane and flew north. Within an hour, we landed on Keeper Lake. The fishing was wonderful, the week’s weather was fair, and the company was outstanding. The euchre games got heated occasionally.

That trip deserves more words than I am allotted here. I’ll tell you more about it in my blog. What I want to focus on is the privilege we enjoy as Americans to travel freely. Take that border crossing for example.

International Falls and Fort Frances are on opposite sides of Rainy Lake, a huge body of water that separates the U.S. from Canada in that area. You can barely tell the towns apart. They share a common language and culture.

It’s hard to figure out what gas costs in Canada, however, since they sell it in liters. Americans are still thrown by the metric system.

At the Canadian border facility, we encounter a friendly young border official. We hand him our passports in one pile through the car window and respond to his questions. Pretty simple drill.

While he is swiping the smart page of our passports through some computerized gadget, he asks us a few questions: Where are you from? How do you know each other? Where are you going? How long you staying?

We smile and answer.

He asks if we’re carrying firearms. We aren’t. More important to him, because duty is paid on it, is how much liquor we’re bringing in. We’re under the limit of a quart per person. Or is it a liter? We don’t owe anything. He gives our passports back and welcomes us to Canada.

We breeze through in a matter of minutes. No visa required, nothing stamped in our passport, no real scrutiny. We weren’t surprised. We’re Americans who expect nothing less.

That’s not how it works for everybody in the world. An outfit called Passport Index ranks the earth’s national passports using three criteria: the number of countries that can be visited without a visa, the number that typically grant visas upon arrival and those that require visa applications in advance. I’ve crossed a lot of borders and consider the ability to do so a measure of planetary freedom.

U.S. and U.K. passports are no longer the best, but we’re near the top. The United Arab Emirates holds down No. 1 by itself with a power rank of 180. Most of the European Union is ranked from 176 to 174. The U.S. is ranked 173 along with Canada and Australia.

Taken as a whole, the list is largely a divide between developed and developing countries. It’s not exactly rich versus poor, but it’s close.

At the bottom is Afghanistan at 41, Syria at 42, Iraq at 43 and Pakistan at 47. Citizens from there are very limited in travel opportunities. You might feel you were unwanted if you lived there. North Korea and Libya are at 53, Iran at 57 and Haiti at 62.

You get the idea. A crude name for these countries surfaced years ago in the news, even though fine people live there. We divide ourselves broadly by nationality rather than individually by merit.

That’s how it goes when one’s fate is determined by geography. I’m glad to report that our northern border is a very friendly place. Down south? It’s a different story.

Dave McClure lives in Ottawa. He is a long-retired director of a local private agency. He also is a blogger. You can read more from Dave at https://daveintheshack.blogspot.com.