Northland_A 4,000-Mile Journey Along America's Forgotten Border

by Porter Fox

  Some light pushed through the clouds, and shadows ran across Spokane Valley. Two hours later a silhouette of the final obstacle between me and the ocean lifted off the horizon. The Cascade Mountains run north–south across Washington, from the Columbia River in the south to the US-Canada border in the north. The range makes up the northern backbone of the American Cordillera, a twelve-thousand-mile chain of peaks stretching from Chile to Alaska. The mountains were not an obstacle to Washington’s early settlers. The last miles of the Oregon Trail passed through the Columbia River Gorge to the fertile, well-watered western slope of the Cascades. The first whites to follow Lewis and Clark were “Nor’wester” explorers, trappers, and businessmen. Protestant missionaries followed and sent out a call to their followers to join them. Around 1850, the first flood of homesteaders arrived on the Oregon Trail. One was George Washington Bush, one of the few multiracial pioneers of the era. Bush and five white families traveling with him had planned to settle in Oregon. After the provisional government there passed a discriminatory law forbidding blacks from owning land, they continued north to Washington.

  Bush’s father was born in India and was of African descent. His mother was an Irish maid who worked with Bush’s father at the home of a wealthy Philadelphian named Stevenson. Stevenson left his fortune to the Bushes when he died, and they left it to their son when they passed. George Bush moved to Illinois in 1799 to start a cattle-ranching business, then moved the business to Missouri. He fought in the Battle of New Orleans for Andrew Jackson during the War of 1812. After the war, he trekked into the northland to try his hand as a voyageur with the Hudson’s Bay Company.

  At age fifty, Bush married a white woman in Missouri, despite antimiscegenation laws. The Bushes had five sons and brought them all on the trip to the Northwest. Bush had always been generous with his wealth and fronted the money for six wagons to make the two-thousand-mile journey. Rumor has it he built a false bottom into his and carried $2,000 in silver with him.

  The family settled on Puget Sound near Tumwater, on a homestead they called Bush Prairie. They operated a free boardinghouse there and were influential in creating America’s land claims north of the Columbia River. The British had a strong foothold in Oregon Country when American settlers began arriving. Overlapping land claims and hostilities between the two nations led to the Treaty of 1818, which mandated cohabitation of the region. The plan was unpopular from the start, and in 1844 James Polk was elected president on a promise to pursue manifest destiny and revoke the agreement.

  When Britain refused an offer to draw the border along the forty-ninth parallel, Polk pursued a northern border of fifty-four degrees and forty minutes, near Alaska’s current southern border. The boundary would have given America two-thirds of the continent and incited the rallying cry “Fifty-Four, Forty or Fight!” across America. Then war erupted with Mexico along the southern border, and Polk and Congress quietly walked their proposal back to the forty-ninth, again. The British agreed, and the official border was decided on in the 1846 Oregon Treaty.

  IT WAS FORTY-EIGHT DEGREES and raining when I headed into the North Cascades to see the final leg of the northern border. Two women driving a Chevy Suburban stopped me as I turned off the Mount Baker Highway onto Forest Service Road 3065.

  “Where you headed?” they asked.

  “Twin Lakes,” I said.

  “Rain rutted out the road,” she said. “We got high-sided and almost couldn’t get out.”

  “How far up?”

  “They’re four feet deep,” she said. “Your car will disappear.”

  The woman was right. My little sedan disappeared in the first gully. Luckily, the wheelbase was so short that the car scooted out the other side without getting stuck. I drove around the edge of the next ravine, then floored it through the third, bouncing up the other side. The dirt road worsened from there. Water rushed through the trenches so fast that I could feel it pushing the front tires. The grade turned vertical. I teetered along a five-hundred-foot cliff for the last half hour. Then the road flattened, and I coasted into the Twin Lakes campground in the half-light of dusk.

  There was one campsite left on the shore of upper Twin Lake. I set up my tent in the dark, cooked a quick meal, then read by lamplight until I fell asleep. Six hours later, songbirds announced the second-to-last day of my journey.

  Dawn put pieces of the sky back together. Clouds hugged the Nooksack River valley, and a few lingering stars were reflected in the Twin Lakes. Goat Mountain was a black cone. I could see the Skagit and Picket Ranges from my campsite. To the south was Mount Sefrit and the glaciers of Mount Shuksan. The mother of them all, Mount Baker, looked like an ice cream scoop dropped on the thick forests of northwestern Washington.

  The sound of falling water was constant. There was a surprising amount of snow in the peaks for the middle of September. Dirty white streaks of it were tucked into north-facing couloirs and crags. The first light came from the west, not the east. Thick bands of blue and pink wrapped around the horizon. A few summits poked through the puffy ceiling below. The campsite was set at five thousand feet, but it felt like three times that.

  I packed a few books, the cookstove, and a couple cans of food into my knapsack and headed out on the trail. It was just light enough to see bear grass and ladies’ tresses growing between the trees. The sun crested the peaks, and yellow light painted the fields auburn and green. I was hoping to stay in a fire lookout that night on Winchester Mountain. I had read about fire lookouts in the North Cascades for years, specifically in John Suiter’s book Poets on the Peaks, which documents Gary Snyder’s, Phillip Whalen’s, and Jack Kerouac’s time as Forest Service lookouts in the Cascades. They spent months alone in the huts, practiced Buddhism there, and wrote some of their best work.

  Private clubs have since restored many of the lookouts and rent them out. Guests can stay at the Winchester Lookout on a first-come, first-served basis, so I hiked quickly. Forty-five minutes in, I crossed the tree line on a loose gravel path. Bristle bladder ferns grew in the talus. The pitch was incredibly steep. The trail hugged a drop-off so sheer that I would fall a thousand feet if I lost my footing.

  I was wearing running shoes and slipped a few times. The trail wrapped around a ledge and up the backside of Winchester. Then it passed through a few boulders to the summit. I scrambled on all fours the last fifty feet and made it to the top.

  Out of nowhere, the lookout appeared on the highest point of the peak. Twenty paned windows—five to a side—wrapped around the square hut. A half-dozen wooden struts held up planked wooden shutters. A haze hung over five long ridgelines leading to Bellingham and Seattle. Valleys in between were choked with humidity and smog. North was the dark schist of the Picket Range. Sunlight bleached the scene white and pale blue.

  A young couple had just left the hut, and a family was camped next to it. “It’s all yours,” an eleven-year-old from Spokane told me as his parents packed up and headed home. I rested on a long, green bench built into the southwest wall. A rough-hewn table in the corner held a stack of guidebooks. The walls were covered in green, horizontal planking. A small shelf in the opposite corner supported a two-burner propane stove. Below that, a steel locker held extra food, fuel, and a half-smoked joint left by another camper.

  Two miles north of the lookout, the line I’d been following for two years ran between American Border Peak and Canadian Border Peak. The cut crossed over the pass, then dropped toward Tomyhoi Creek and the Fraser River. The segment was one of the most difficult to mark on the northern border. The Northwest Boundary Commission began the task in 1858. Nearly two hundred cooks, Indian guides, horsemen, laborers, and messengers were hired to do the job. Axe men cut ahead of the astronomers, and laborers followed, leaving iron markers and piles of stone along the forty-ninth.

  When the commission hit the highest peaks of the North Cascades, they called on Swiss-born Henry Custer to explore them. Custer was an experienced mountaineer and trekked the Nooksack and Chilli
wack River drainages, the Picket Range, and Ruby Creek for three years. He climbed dozens of unnamed peaks and ridges and paddled whitewater rivers in dugout canoes with guides from the local Stó:lo- tribe.

  James Alden was hired to follow Custer and sketch and paint watercolors of the range. While Alden painted, Custer recorded topography with three compasses, a barometer, a sextant, and prose: “No mortal pen could be found to describe this grand and glorious scenery properly and justly. This endless variety of shapes and forms, these thousands of different shades and colors.”

  Custer mapped a thousand square miles of mountain country that had never seen a white man before. No one would follow in his footsteps for a dozen years. His forty-seven-page account of the area was included in the boundary commission’s final report, but the report was somehow lost before it could be published. In 1907, Congress commissioned a new survey, and another team started all over again.

  AT SUNSET, THE SKY turned dark blue. I tried to remember the color of the stones, the cool air, the auburn sunlight touching my forehead. I thought about the first day of the trip at West Quoddy Head in Maine and tried to memorize the dark spires, rounded massifs, and marshmallow flanks of Mount Baker’s glaciers. I thought about all the parts of the northland—oceans, rivers, lakes, plains, cities, reservations, and towns—and how they linked from east to west. It was indeed its own territory: a forgotten belt of wild, old America delineated by iron monuments, rock piles, and clear-cuts.

  The full moon rose quickly. The valleys filled with shadows. Then Mars appeared, and a deep-blue shell slid to the horizon. Straight down from the summit, I could see orange campfires burning in the Twin Lakes campground. A dull, pink glow marked Bellingham and, south of that, Seattle. An approaching storm filtered the starlight. I lay down on a cot and closed my eyes. When I opened them the next morning, the moon and stars were gone and a steady rain pelted the hut.

  The weatherman said the storm was a hundred miles across when it boomeranged around Bellingham and headed for the North Cascades. It would drop a quarter inch of rain on Winchester Mountain before noon, he said. Another inch and a half would fall throughout the day, likely washing out the Forest Service road and much of the trail.

  I packed quickly and started down. Rivulets of rainwater made the path slick. The downpour started near the tree line and didn’t let up until I got to the car. Water hadn’t filled the gullies yet, and it was easier driving down than up. I eventually pulled onto the Mount Baker Highway and followed the swelling Nooksack River west toward the end of the line.

  The road twisted through old-growth Douglas fir and red cedar. Old-man’s-beard lichens grew on west-facing limbs and trunks. The river was pale blue with sediment from the East Nooksack Glacier on Shuksan. I followed an old pickup truck onto I-5 just before Bellingham and headed north to the Peace Arch Border Crossing in Blaine. Illuminated signs announced how long the wait at the westernmost border check in the mainland Lower 48 would be: less than five minutes at 3:00 p.m. on a Thursday. The east side of the highway was thick with trees, broken every now and then by a meadow. The west side was layered with mackerel sky as the storm wandered onshore.

  I parked near half a dozen picnic tables at Peace Arch Park. A path led west and then north, past a few sculptures and a rose garden. A border patrol agent wearing a bulletproof vest and a 9-millimeter pistol watched me. He did not look relaxed. Visitors are allowed to walk across the border in Peace Arch Park. That’s why the park was created. You can lounge on the lawn with your feet in Canada and your knees in America, if you want. You can jog laps between the two countries, as the Blaine High School cross-country team was doing when I arrived. The original intention of the park was to show good faith between two friendly nations. In the modern era of high security it had become a giant headache to those in charge of policing it.

  I walked into Canada, past three tourists taking pictures of themselves with one foot in either country. It felt strange crossing the forty-ninth—like I should explain myself. I did about two minutes later, to an agent standing nearby. I told him I had traveled the entire border from Maine to Washington. He listened politely, scanning the park.

  “What are you looking for?” I asked.

  “There’s a guy that we are watching,” he said.

  I asked which one, and he didn’t answer. A woman walked her poodle between two rose gardens. Another woman, in a business suit, sat on a bench. A lone, dark-skinned man wearing a suit that was too large for him walked in circles while he spoke on his phone. Little houses with carports and swinging deck chairs crowded the northern edge of the park. Anyone could feasibly walk across the border and into one of the houses if no one was looking.

  I left the agent and passed the last border monument on the western edge of the lawn. The continent ended at a rocky beach strewn with kelp and seaweed. Beyond that was the Pacific. I could see three or four islands, a red navigational buoy, the backside of the Blaine Harbor jetty. Streaks of light reached down to a small island on the Canadian side of the border. A fishing boat headed in from sea. Another steamed out through a bright circle of sunshine. I could see the boat’s rig and a tall wake peeling off its stern.

  I watched the water for a while, then walked to the car and drove south. Fifteen minutes later, a reporter on the radio said that the Peace Arch crossing had been shut down. A man had driven to the Canadian border check and told the agent his car was loaded with explosives. He demanded to be let through or else he would detonate the bomb. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police and border patrol evacuated the neighborhood and park. The border was closed for four hours, and the man was put in jail. By 10:00 p.m. it was open again, and lines on either side started to move.

  I SPOTTED A SIGN for the Lummi Reservation as I headed south on I-5. I turned off the highway and drove past a man selling wild salmon out of a pickup truck. A few miles later, the Nooksack River, now a hundred yards wide, rushed under a bridge. Down the road, a red sign with ten-foot-tall letters spelled “PLAY, DINE, SPA, HOTEL” on the side of the Lummi Silver Reef Casino.

  I took a left at a gas station and picked up a young casino worker, named Gary, who was hitchhiking. He had been born on the reservation and lived down the street from Jewell James. He said he grew up somewhere else, after child services took him away from his parents and put him in a foster home. He made his way back as a teenager and ended up in jail after a few brushes with the law. “The elders in there yelled at me for screwing up, for not attending ceremony,” he said. “They said I should know about my tribe. They took me under their wing, and I learned Lummi songs for the first time. I learned the tradition. Blacks, whites, Latinos, Asians all fought in the jail yard. If you were Indian, they left you alone.”

  Gary wore chinos, and his shirt had the casino logo on it. He was six feet and well over two hundred pounds, and wore a long braid down his back. He had a wide, cheery face, a little stubble on his upper lip. When he was young, he had dressed like a gangster. Now he wore slacks and a button-down. He was a painter, specializing in traditional Lummi art. He got into it after he was released from prison and took a drawing class. “From then on,” he said, “all I could see was art. I drew every single day for five years.”

  Gary won every art competition that he entered, and he was awarded a scholarship to a college in Bellingham, where eventually he painted alongside artists like Jewell James. “I was lost before that,” he said. “I had no identity. The artwork let me connect with who I was, let me know how I could help my people, where I should be. There is good energy and bad energy out there. And if you get hooked by the good energy, you do good things. You go out and find a mentor, and then you are a mentor to someone else. I have four kids now. I teach them these things. I was in foster care for ten years. The bad energy draws you in a different direction. At some point in your life you will have a chance to choose between them.”

  Gary pointed to a row of wooden stakes sticking out of the water. “Those are my father’s nets,” he said.
“That’s how we catch the salmon. The nets wrap around the stakes and leave an opening for fish to get in. Once they are in, the fisherman pulls the net closed and up onto his boat. When the water is high, that’s when the crabs are eating. When it goes out, that’s when the silvers come in. We are getting to the end of the season. That’s when the dogfish come.”

  A man standing on a wooden dory a half mile away threw a net. A thin, black circle flew across the white silhouette of Mount Baker. A pink mooring buoy held the man’s boat in place. The proposed site of the Cherry Point coal terminal, which Jewell James and northwestern tribes had beaten in court, was a few miles north. The facility would have loaded fifty-four million metric tons of coal annually to be burned in Asia. A handwritten sign stapled to a telephone pole nearby read: “You Deserve to be Loved.” Another behind it: “Believe in Who You Are.”

  “I’m a father, brother, teacher, student, artist,” Gary said. “I’m everything I wanted to be.” Not all of Gary’s family can say that. He was in a hotel room at the casino six months before with a younger cousin. The kid went to the bathroom and when he didn’t come out, Gary went in to see what was wrong. The boy was dead on the floor. He had overdosed on heroin. “It took me a while to get through that,” Gary said. “I didn’t paint for months.”

  The ocean wasn’t silver anymore. It had turned dark gray. The ridgelines leading back to the North Cascades vanished one by one. Bellingham looked like a cluster of facades, set on the edge of a hill. “Eighty-five percent of the Lummi live below the poverty level,” Gary said. “Over there in Bellingham, there are millionaires.”