Imaginary Lines of Paper
By Joshua James Amberson
I was 18 the first time it happened. I was on a Greyhound bus, leaving San Diego, and we stopped on the side of the highway. The bus became flooded with men in uniforms. I didn’t figure out until they made it to the back of the bus and checked my ID that they were immigration officers. Some of the bus was already outside in the hot midday sun at that point. When they had checked everybody, we drove away, leaving fifteen or twenty people that had been our fellow bus riders on the side of the road. I looked back frantically, thinking the driver had made a mistake. Those people were being led into a large army-style tent and everyone who was left on the bus sat calmly. I noticed many already had their eyes closed and were working on getting back to sleep.
My heart racing, I tried to make sense of what I had just seen. The next stop was outside a prison and a short-haired man in a white shirt took the open seat next to me.
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For years my Great Aunt Elsie worked the Visitor’s Center in Bellingham, Washington, largely welcoming Canadian travelers into the United States. She was originally from Canada, spending the first 10 years of her life on a farm in Elfros, Saskatchewan before moving to the Icelandic settlement of Blaine, Washington, a small town on the Canadian border that had one of the largest concentrations of Icelanders in North America. At one time it was almost like a country within a country (that bordered another country).
It wasn’t until a few years ago that I found out how she held Canadians in disfavor. As a rule, she didn’t much like them as a group of people. How she had friends she’d known for close to 60 years that didn’t know she was born there. When I asked her about it, all she said was, “being from there has always just been such a hassle.”
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He said, “I haven’t done that since high school,” so we went. From his grandma’s fancy house in La Jolla, we took a train to the border and walked into Tijuana, Mexico. I hadn’t been since I was 6 years old and my mom and I had taken a bus tour. For some reason I vividly remembered a woman who sold blankets and the open desert on the outskirts of the city, but little else.
We imagined the day would be the biggest party we had ever been a part of. We assumed we’d have to get a room there, that we wouldn’t make it back before the last train. We went to a large two-story bar where we were two of maybe ten people and ordered margaritas. We toasted and each took a gulp. I felt metal against my teeth and quickly put the drink down. “I think there’s something in my drink,” I said. I stuck a spoon in and scooped up a blade from a blender. “Oh fuck this, we’re out,” he said. My friend was force ful and insistent, so I let him do the talking. But they were even more insis tent and refused to give our money back, but instead give me another drink. Defeated, we waited for my drink to be made in a blender with at least one less blade than it should have. As we sat, a man in a soccer referee uniform ap peared, loudly blowing a whistle. He grabbed the head of a father sitting with his teenage son, tipped it back, and started pouring tequila in. They laughed, the father gave the man some money and he moved on. He approached our table and my friend shook his head furiously and made a stop sign with his hand to let the man know we were uninterested. But he didn’t stop and just blew his whistle more frantically. The man grabbed my friend’s head, but my friend wouldn’t let his head get tipped back. The man, unrelenting, just started pouring. My friend realized he could have it on his shirt or in his mouth, so he gave in and drank. When he was done and the man demanded money, my friend wouldn’t give in. This went on for a long time. My new blade-less drink came and we sat in silence. The sun started to go down and I remember hurry ing over the long walkway that took us back to our country or origin, thinking about how nothing turns out the way you imagine it.
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As the cars lined up - all in a row, engines running – our family picnic began to feel out of place. An oddity for travelers, those leaving one country and going into another, to gawk at out their windows. My Grandma carried a look that I knew well, a hidden nervousness that meant a situation wasn’t going as planned and she didn’t know how to make it better. Half my family has a way of putting rose-colored glasses on in even the most depress ing of situations and the other half calls it like it is. As it is with most things in life, I exist somewhere in the middle. And even as a 10 year old sitting on slightly damp grass under a giant white monument, I was in the middle. Trying to enjoy Icelandic deserts and be proud of the peace between Canada and the United States, the white arch symbolizing why our family was in the North west part of the U.S. and not the acrid plains of Canada, or the barren glaciers of Iceland. But also unable to avoid the smell of exhaust as I pretended to like desserts that looked like chocolate, but were made of prunes. Trying to think of it not as a cruel joke, but as heritage.
The line of cars grew. We ate quickly. Some of us wondering why a park had been put at a border crossing, or how it could take so long just to cross an imaginary line.
