The Border That Forgot Itself

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I’m standing here technically looking north, toward Toronto and its needle of a tower, but my consciousness has already slipped south across a border that, for me at least, has begun dissolving like sugar in hot coffee.

Borders are peculiar inventions. Somebody drags a ruler across a map and suddenly the wind is expected to carry a passport. The birds apparently never got the memo.

So there I am on this patch of grass, raising two easygoing shakas to the skyline like a man greeting an old joke. Four Adirondack chairs behind me sit in a row like brightly colored philosophers waiting for a punchline.

In my mind I’m designing a tarot card.

The Acadian Oak.

Not kings, not queens—just a big old tree whose roots wander wherever they damn well please. Roots that don’t care about the forty-ninth parallel or customs officers or whether your vowels bend French or English or something older and wiser than either.

My own roots go back far enough that the family tree begins to resemble a thicket. Early seventeenth century mud. Some whisper of Chippewa ancestry diluted through centuries of wandering bloodlines. Not enough to claim anything, but enough to remind me that history is less a ladder than a compost pile.

Religion, politics, mathematics—they’re all games humans invented to keep the universe from getting bored. Systems you build like Lego towers, knock over, then rebuild sideways just to see what color the rubble turns.

Meaning matters less than music.

Listen to the way languages travel. French drifting down through Louisiana and turning into Cajun fiddles. Indigenous languages that were already ancient when the first mapmakers showed up with their tidy little rulers.

History books pretend everything was organized. Armies marching in straight lines. Borders behaving themselves.

But real history is people wandering around, switching sides, crossing lines, trading hats, and occasionally burning down the White House just to keep things lively.

The American Revolution, the War of 1812, traders hopping north, loyalists sliding south, Indigenous nations choosing whichever empire looked slightly less ridiculous at the time.

Pirates with paperwork.

Which is why politics makes me laugh.

Standing here beside Lake Ontario, I’m thinking the planet might function better if borders were treated the way Adirondack chairs treat gravity—acknowledged, but not taken too seriously.

Maybe one passport leads to two. Two leads to three. Canada, the United States, Mexico. Drift south like a migratory daydream—Colombia, Brazil, Chile.

Eventually the passports pile up so high the borders start to look embarrassed.

And then one afternoon you realize the real country was never the land anyway.

It was the wind.

And the wind, bless its unruly heart, has never respected a line on a map.