Retracing the walk across the border from North Dakota to Manitoba
The first thing you notice is the sky.
That’s because stepping onto Highway 81 on the outskirts of Pembina, N.D., is kind of like what I imagine entering outer space must be like: flat, vast, endless and awesome.
Between Pembina, on the North Dakota side, and the Manitoba community of Emerson, the landscape is as empty, lonely and silent as a place can get.
In the summer of 1986, I didn’t make the exact walk that migrants are making into Canada from the U.S. right now. They’re doing it in the middle of a western Canadian winter, but I had the same end goal in mind.
The difference was it was my home: I was able to walk along the highway, up to the border, safe in the knowledge that there was no way they’d reject me at customs, even if I was down to my last $20, whereas thanks to a quirk of Canadian immigration law, the migrants must travel overland in order to bypass customs and claim refugee status from inside the border.
The migrants — from places as far away as Ghana and Somalia — are at what they hope to be the tail ends of journeys that have taken them around the world.
Back then, fresh out of college, I was returning from a road trip that took me to New Orleans, northern Mexico and back to Texas — where I was stuck with $40, not enough money to pay for a one-way trip home on a Greyhound bus.
I had one choice, which was to hitchhike from the Texas-Mexico border, where I spent a night in the San Antonio suburbs with a “coyote” — another name for a human smuggler — whose people hadn’t arrived when I stumbled across him standing on the shoulder of Interstate 95 one sweltering afternoon on the outskirts of Laredo, Texas.
In those days, it was migrants coming from troubled Central American countries such as El Salvador and Guatemala, who hoped to find a better life in the U.S.
These days, Laredo stands just as good of a chance of being the launch point for the same migrants who are wandering off the roads in North Dakota and through the frigid, waist-deep snow that connects North Dakota and Manitoba’s unprotected border.
Four days after I set out from Laredo, I had made it all the way north to Pembina.
I had no reason to be nervous about crossing the border on foot back into Canada, unlike those refugees whose lives are on their backs and futures completely uncertain — but I was nervous just the same.
Maybe it was the endless June sky. Maybe it was the awesome and impressive silence that engulfs you as you walk up a lonely four-lane blacktop a few kilometres back to your homeland. Maybe it’s just the sound your footsteps make, crunching gravel as you keep to the shoulder of the road.
I do know what snow sounds like when you trudge through a deep drift of it, because I grew up playing in it, and know how to dress for it, how to wrap the scarf just so that your breath can warm your face and you can use the tail end of it to cover your nose to prevent frostbite.
I doubt those Somalis know that, though.
It never occurred to me then that 30 years later, people might one day travel halfway across the world in February to get dropped off in a field before walking for 12 hours through snow and -30 C temperatures to start new lives.
Well, here we are.
Two words: layer up. Don’t let the sun in the high, blue Prairie sky fool you.
Canadians — particularly on the Prairies — are pretty nice, but the winters they endure are downright nasty.
