The Line between Canada and the US Cuts through the Haskell Free Library

I remember the line. It ran diagonal to the grain of the library’s hardwood floor. It escapes me whether the line was black paint or black electrical tape back in the ’80s and ’90s, but it’s tape today—scuffed and trodden upon, as though it were just some line to be stepped on that didn’t matter very much. Which it is. Or was, anyway. Donald Trump, the forty-seventh president of the United States of America, has called the border between Canada and the United States “an artificially drawn line.” In this, he is aligned with my eight-year-old self standing inside the Haskell Free Library and delightedly leaping over that line on the floor, transporting myself from Stanstead, Quebec, to Derby Line, Vermont—from Canada to America—and then back again. The Haskell Free Library was my library. It was where I first borrowed books that my parents read to me and, later, chapter books I would read myself to pass the long summer days on the family farm just up the road. And finally, as a sullen teenager who would have rather been back in the big city than down in the Eastern Townships for another summer, it was where my cousin and I borrowed VHS cassettes: Monty Python, Blackadder, and other British comedies that I pretended I was sophisticated enough to appreciate. It was just a library.

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But the Haskell Free Library is no longer as free as it once was. It has become ground zero for a somewhat less friendly approach to Canada by American border patrol and homeland security officers. It may also be the first hundred square feet or so of America’s attempted annexation of Canada. Is that hyperbole? I’m not sure yet. I think if there’s one thing Canadians will remember about the apparent collapse of one of the most mutually beneficial relationships between countries in the world’s history, it will be that exact feeling: Am I overreacting? They’re not going to do that, are they? Eventually, every Canadian will be able to point to a place and time when it became real that things were no longer the same. A moment when the past between Canada and America, whatever their memories of that may be, was gone, replaced by something new and uncertain, frightening and enraging. A moment when they realized that a line had been crossed. For many, the line will be metaphorical—a new threat from the president, a report of a new horror from a rogue administration. Or it will be real yet distant—detaining a Canadian woman trying to cross the border for work, or abducting a former Fulbright scholar simply for writing an op-ed in support of Palestinians. For all of us, it will hit home somehow. For the residents of Stanstead, Quebec, and the surrounding area, that line is neither distant nor metaphorical. It’s already been crossed. It’s marked with electrical tape and runs diagonal to the hardwood floor. And it was the head of the US Department of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, who crossed it on January 30, 2025. Lea-Kim / Wikicommons The Haskell Free Library was founded in 1904 as a co-operative endeavour by Stanstead and Derby Line, two small towns that share a border and have shared a lot more over the years. The building itself is stately and beautiful—a massive Victorian manor built with local Stanstead grey granite on the outside and native woods inside, with impressive street facades at its entrances and stained-glass mosaics on some of its windows. It’s a building designed to inspire and to be a portal that connects two communities. Citizens of both Stanstead and Derby Line, and their surrounding areas, have been free to use the library for more than 120 years without needing to check in at the nearby border crossings, even though the front entrance of the library is clearly in the US and most of the books reside in Canada. When performers appear at the attached Opera House, they are on stage in Canada, while many in the audience watch them from the US. The library is an international non-profit organization, funded by grants and donations from businesses and community members, and is staffed mostly by volunteers from both sides of the border. The arrangement has simply worked to the benefit of all. In March 2016, as then president Barack Obama welcomed then prime minister Justin Trudeau to the White House, he pointed to the Haskell Free Library as a beacon of co-operation between the two nations: “A resident of one of these border towns once said, ‘We’re two different countries, but we’re like one big town,’” Obama said. “We are two different countries,” he went on. “But days like this remind us that we are one big town . . . and Americans and Canadians will always be there for each other.” In the community around my family’s farm, this brief shout-out was, naturally, a source of pride. But it was also a validation. This was not only how they felt but also how they lived. In the years before security ramped up in the wake of 9/11, before passports were strictly required at the border, traffic between the two communities was so effortless as to be unimaginable today. We were pulled over, told to park, that we could be arrested, fined thousands of dollars, and face jail time. I learned to swim at Lake Salem, about a twenty-minute drive over the border, in Vermont, where we spent almost every hot summer afternoon. The border guards would sometimes see our car coming and simply wave us through. When I attended 4-H camp at the same lake, my dad drove over the line—what we called the border back then—to bring me some comics to read when I couldn’t sleep. American and Canadian children would walk or drive across the border with their parents to play at different parks, shop at different stores, or simply meet at the library. A couple of years after Trudeau’s visit with Obama, during the first Trump administration, the library became a national story. During that period, the Haskell was a physical loophole—a liminal space, existing somewhere outside the formal rules governing immigration policy and visa approval, as well as the racist scrutiny of customs officials. That made it something of a refuge for families, separated, due to Trump’s travel ban, from their children attending school in the United States, to connect with their loved ones for a few precious hours. It was at that point, amid a heartwarming story born of cruelty, that the future should have become evident. In August 2013, I wanted to show off my little library, this incredible place, to my new partner. We drove through Stanstead to the parking lot on the US side. We walked in and looked around at the building, the children’s drawings and the displays of new books enticing new readers, and mostly at that line on the floor. We said hi to the staff and left. And then we drove down the wrong side street, meaning we would have to pass by the border checkpoint to return to Canada. No big deal, as far as I remembered. We hadn’t crossed the border on the way there, so why would we check in now? We just drove past. The siren was loud; the response immediate. We were pulled over, told to park, that we could be arrested, fined thousands of dollars, and face jail time. I went into the border office. The first time, in thirty years, I had ever been inside. I explained who I was and what we were doing. We were from the Heath Orchard, just up the highway. Did they know it? They did. I just wanted to show my girlfriend, who was driving, the amazing, friendly border arrangement we had, and she took a wrong turn. She’s not from here, you know? They let us go. One of the border agents told me he’d better get some free apples when he came by the orchard. Of course, he would; just tell my dad his son is an idiot. It was awkward, and I apologized profusely. They were just doing their jobs. It was over in five minutes. I have thought often in recent weeks about what would happen right now to anyone, especially someone who wasn’t a white farmer’s son from an apple farm just up the road, who made that same mistake. It makes me nauseous. It makes me want to scream. Donald Trump became president on January 20 this year. Ten days later, Immigration and Customs Enforcement—ICE—was making a big show of enforcing Trump’s promise of mass deportations in the northeast, ostensibly paying tribute to a slain border patrol agent, which brought them and Kristi Noem to my little library. Noem, head of the agency responsible for border security as well as immigration and customs (including ICE), stood on the American side of the black tape that runs through the heart of the Haskell Free Library. “USA, number one,” she proclaimed. She stepped over the line on the floor, into Canada. “Fifty-first state,” she said. I picture her hopping across the border the same way I did when I was eight. I imagine her glee as something similarly childlike. A bully’s glee, delighting in provocation. Then she did it again. A performance. The Boston Globe reported the story as Noem trying to “stoke tensions.” To me, it was a warning shot. This administration seems to delight in seeing what, exactly, it can get away with. The act was met in Stanstead with anger. But also with ridicule and dismissal. Nobody in this community of farmers and workers tends to take politicians seriously. It was insulting and offensive. We were angry about it, but then, Noem isn’t from here. She was posturing for her boss. The hope was that her little show was just that; it wasn’t. On March 18, US authorities announced that Canadians without a valid library card would be prohibited from accessing the library unless they passed through a full border check at the nearby crossing. Even those with a card, the library has been told, should carry valid ID, as they would to cross the border, and are also subject to searches by border guards. On March 21, officials from Stanstead and the Canadian government spoke at a rally attended by community members from both Stanstead and Derby Line, held straddling the border—protesting what Stanstead mayor Jody Stone described as a decision that was “motivated by border control considerations and exacerbated by political tensions . . . happening at the expense of the citizens who have relied on this cultural institution.” The US government has blamed reports of drug trafficking and smuggling through the library—which most Stanstead residents and library staff say they’ve never seen—as the reason for these measures. There was, indeed, one famous instance of gun smuggling which, it should be noted, featured guns coming into Canada from America. US Customs and Border Protection cited some twenty apprehensions in the past seven months of drug smuggling “in the area.” There are three operational border crossings nearby, none more than ten minutes away, and one of them is a massive transport thoroughfare. There is a risk of smuggling at every border crossing; that’s what the checkpoints are for. Lea-Kim / Wikicommons In response to the closure of the library entrance to Canadians—who represent at least half of the library’s clientele—the Haskell did what libraries do: found a way to serve its community anyway. It opened a back door, allowing all Canadians to continue to access the library via a small storage room, without crossing the border. Haskell also set up a fundraising drive to renovate this entrance and make it more accessible, asking for $100,000. In under two weeks, it raised $170,000 and counting. The library is essential. The community and the country at large are responding. US authorities say that this status quo will suffice until October 1, 2025—when they will require border clearance for anyone coming from Canada, library card or not, to use the library. It is unclear how this will be enforced. That border clearance requirement will, if it occurs, functionally end everything that works about this little library. About my little library. Not only will readers, young and old, be left navigating border checkpoints just to borrow books, and concerts left snarled in bureaucracy, but the connective tissue of two communities will be severed. I hope to be back in Stanstead this spring, when the apple blossoms bloom and there are few places more beautiful. And I’m sure I will go down to my library and look at the entrance, and maybe sneak in through the back door, a strange sort of fugitive in the place where I learned to read. And for what? Why? What purpose does any of this serve? It’s a line of tape. It’s never, ever mattered before. But I will cross the line, the tape diagonal to the floorboards, while I still can. And I will remember how happy and free I felt when I hopped across it as a child. I’ll remember what it once felt like to cross a friendly border.The post The Line between Canada and the US Cuts through the Haskell Free Library first appeared on The Walrus.