The Forty-ninth Parallel ran directly through my childhood, dividing me in two. In winter, in the town on the Whitemud, Saskatchewan, we were almost totally Canadian. The textbooks we used in school were published in Toronto and made by Canadians or Englishmen; the geography we studied was focussed upon the Dominion, though like our history it never came far enough west or close enough to the present to be of much use to us. The poetry we memorized seemed, as I recall it now, to run strongly toward warnings of disaster and fear of the dark and cold. The songs we sang were “Tipperary,” “We’ll Never Let the Old Flag Fall,” “The Maple Leaf Forever,” and “God Save the King”; the flag we saluted was the Union Jack; the clothes and Christmas gifts we bought by mail came from the T. Faton mail-order house. The games we played were ice hockey and curling; our holidays, apart from Thanksgiving and Christmas, which were shared by both countries, were Dominion Day, Victoria Day, the King’s Birthday.

But if winter and town made Canadians of us, summer and the homestead restored us to something nearly, if not quite, American. We could not be remarkably impressed with the physical differences between Canada and the United States, for our lives slopped over the international boundary, which was the south boundary of our homestead, every summer day. Our plowshares bit into Montana sod every time we made the turn at the end of the field. I trapped Saskatchewan and Montana flickertails indiscriminately and spread strychnine-soaked wheat without prejudice over two nations.

Full Story >>