So we tramped on. We had a last lunch and finished the ham, the apricots, and the coffee. As one remarkable fact, we met no Canadians on the American side; we met no Americans going to Canada either. Yet there were no restrictions whatever. Out in the Rockies the unguarded line is literally unguarded; no patrols, no excise or passport officers. You can come and go as you please. The United States would encourage Canada to a communion of perfect freedom. Whilst America puts nothing in Canada’s way, Canada for her part could not afford to police a 4000-mile line. All is therefore free.
Still, it is clearly the wild animals that take advantage of freedom, and they abound and are happy in the region about the line. It is a very strange line, straight and absolute on the map, the essence of political division, an absurdity in geography. There is no river, no main mountain-range, no change of the colour of the soil, but only the invisible hypothesis called 54.40—the “Fifty-four Forty or fight” of the boundary dispute. It would have been difficult to find the line but for the fact that a sixteen-foot swathe has been cut in the forest. We had been told to look out for that. We found it at last, and it was afternoon, and we stood in No-man’s land together.
It was a curious cut, a rough glade, an alley through the tall pines. We walked along it a short way; we discerned where it stretched far over a mountain-side, a mere marking in the uniform green of the forest-roof. We came down to where the lake water was lapping on the shore, and the great mountains in their fastnesses stood about us. We found frontier-post No. 276, and then I stood on the Canada side and Vachel Lindsay stood on the America side, and we put our wrists on the top of the post. As we two had become friends and learned to live together without quarrelling, so might our nations! It was a happy moment in our tramping.
Then, as it was four in the afternoon, I proposed having tea, much to the mirth of the poet. For had we not finished the last of our coffee at our last American resting-place? Fittingly we began on tea when we entered the Empire.
There was a change of scenery; fresher air, aspen groves, red hips on many briars. A beautiful mountain lifted its citadelled peak into a grey unearthly radiance. We climbed Mount Bertha, and the hillsides were massed with young slender pines that never grow hoary or old, but die whilst they are young, and are supplanted by the ever-new—forests of everlasting youth. The grandeur of the mountains increased upon us till all was in the sublimity of the Book of Job and of the Chaldean stars. There was nothing petty anywhere—but an eternal witness and an eternal silence.
A Yank and a Britisher walked to the line,
One was a citizen, the other an alien.
“You alien!” said the Yank.
The Yank and the Britisher crossed o’er the line,