Breakfast At The Exit Cafe Part 20

"Is everything okay here?" the waitress says. She looks a little worried. "Sorry, we didn't have any hash browns. The cook made you country home fries-I hope that's okay."

Country home fries. You get what you ask for, and I've been asking for the wrong thing all along.

WHAT was important," writes Ryszard Kapuciski, "was not the destination, the goal, the end, but the almost mystical and transcendent act of crossing the border." We are on the I-81, just south of the Canadian frontier, and I'm beginning to feel like Kapu sci nski. For the last little while we've been following Merilyn's yellow highlighter through Onondaga, Cortland, and Oswego Counties, all of which were incorporated in 1792 under the name Mexico. Now it applies only to a small town squeezed between the interstate and Lake Ontario, close to an even smaller hamlet called Texas. It seems we're destined to relive the entire trip in our last thirty minutes in America.

"Want to go to Mexico?" I ask Merilyn.

"No, thanks," she says cozily. "Let's just get home."

As we near the border, I wait for my chest to tighten and my bowels to loosen, but so far I feel good. At least we're not crossing at Cornwall, where a few years ago we had some difficulty with a few undeclared bottles of wine. The swaggering youth at customs and immigration who pulled us over held us there for an hour, telling us he could confiscate our car if he wanted to, and then he let us go. Since then I've decided to declare everything, down to the last chocolate bar, the merest sliver of soap. I've kept every receipt we've been given, and last night I took them all out, added them up, and stapled them together. They're safely in the glove box with our pa.s.sports. We're well under the allowable limit. We could even stop at the duty-free and pick up a few more items.

"Want to get some perfume?" I ask. "Or a scarf?"

Merilyn looks at me in alarm. Normally I try to talk her out of buying anything at these places. "Declare everything, have nothing" has been my motto. But now I think no border guard will believe we've been in the States for nearly two months and have nothing but a few books and two bottles of Virginia wine to show for it. In any case, I'm not worried. Really. I'm not wearing two pairs of pants. I checked.

"All right," Merilyn says. "And you can get some Scotch."

When I put the Scotch in the trunk, I see the cardboard carton holding Merilyn's novel resting on top of a bag of books, and I take off the lid and read the first page-guiltily, since she still hasn't told me I can read it. It's good. I read the next page, standing bent over with my head in the trunk. It's good, too.

"What are you doing back there?" Merilyn calls.

"Just organizing a bit," I say, closing the carton. When I'm back in the car I turn to her. "You know, when we get home, the first thing I'd like to do is sit down by the fire with a gla.s.s of this Scotch and read your novel. Would that be all right, do you think?"

To my consternation, Merilyn's eyes tear up. "Of course it would be all right, you goose. I've been dying for you to ask."

"Really?" I say, nonplussed. "I've been waiting for you to ask me to read it."

We sit in the parking lot for a while, patting each other's hands. Then I start the car and we drive the last two miles to the border.

MY heart leaps at Wayne's suggestion, not because I want him to read the novel, which of course I do, but because it thrills me, it opens me up, to know that what I am, what I do, is of interest to him.

It's what we want from our friends, from our neighbours, too: a conversation that flows both ways. As we near the line that keeps Canada distinct from the United States, it occurs to me that the two countries have not been very good friends. Sure, we help each other out in times of crisis, but mostly, we're the kind of neighbours who look the other way rather than walk across the lawn for a chat.

"I've been thinking about all the people we've met, and you know what?"

"What?"

"I can't remember anyone who asked us about Canada. They asked where we'd been in their country, how we liked it, and where we were going. They were full of suggestions about things we should see in the United States, but not one person asked anything about our country. Isn't that strange?"

"Maybe Diana Athill had it right. In Stet, she says that Americans just aren't interested in Canada. We're not on their radar."

"But wouldn't you think that when they're discussing how to improve their health care system, people might be curious about what it's like to have universal health care? We told those snowplow drivers and that store clerk we were used to Canadian snow: wouldn't it be natural to ask where we were from, how much snow we get?"

"Americans don't seem all that interested in anything but themselves."

I scowl. In general, I hate generalizations, but this one seems true. We've met wonderful, kind, generous people on our travels in America, as we do everywhere. In many ways, people are all the same, no matter what flag flies overhead. But the landscape, the history, and the culture people are raised within can't help but affect their values, the way they think. Not all Canadians are self-effacing and community-minded, but as a culture we generally hold that the group is at least as important as the individual. If every person within a society is not looked after, then society itself fails, and the individuals will, too. Similarly, not all Americans are self-interested bullies, but as a culture, they have a history of aggression, of being blind or hostile to the values and beliefs of others. Maybe it's because they lack curiosity about what lies beyond their borders. For all the interest Americans have in Canada, we might as well be that vast blankness marked on ancient maps as Terra Incognita. They don't seem to care if there be dragons there. They a.s.sume there aren't. And maybe they're right: it's just mild-mannered Canada.

I look over my shoulder at the retreating nation of America and think: It's the U.S., but it's not us.

"How can you be friends with somebody who doesn't ever ask how you are, or who you are?" I say, more to myself than to Wayne.

"Men do that all the time."

It's true. Men aren't curious in the same way women are. What does it mean to be curious? When we stop for lunch, I find a place with Wi-Fi and spend some time looking up the word, though I'm fairly certain I already know what it means. Curiosity, as defined by the British sources, is the desire to know and learn. That's exactly how I understand it-an honourable trait, one that leads to enlightenment. But when I check the modern American dictionary sites, I find something completely different. Curiosity, to Americans, "implies a desire to know what is not properly one's concern." The same example is cited more than once: "curious about a neighbor's habits."

Aha! So we've been speaking a different language all along. Those snowplow drivers and car mechanics and waitresses and fellow travellers were all being polite. We were being rude and pushy. They didn't ask us about ourselves because to do so would be to poke their nose in somebody else's business. Their lack of curiosity was a show of respect.

I have misunderstood their silence. Th.o.r.eau was right. Such misinterpretations are the tragedy of human intercourse, whether played out between a husband and wife in an Echo or between two countries that have shared a border for more than a hundred years.

WHAT do I think of when I think of America? The question, proposed by Ian Jack in Granta, seems an impossible one, for when I think of America I can no longer think of any one thing. I think everything of America. America is everything at once. No sooner do you have a conversation with a friendly waitress in a restaurant than you see a pickup truck in the parking lot with "Freedom Isn't Free!" on the tailgate, and you wonder which of the laughing, boisterous good old boys at the next table owns the truck. Or you think the country you are driving through looks just like Canada, until you see a billboard proclaiming, in ten-foot letters, Firearms for Sale: No ID Required! And you are reminded that you are in a country whose Declaration of Independence claims that "all men are created equal" and whose const.i.tution contained a clause allowing its citizens to own slaves.

Partly, I still think what I thought before we made this trip, because those thoughts were based on the image America projects to the outside world: its overweening sense of its own rightness, its casual a.s.sumption that it can buy or sell whatever it wants, its ability to proceed as though everything were on the table, its refusal to learn from its own history.

I cannot forgive America for what it forced my great-grandfather to do. Or for what it has done to its rivers and forests and mountains and deserts, which seems to me to be almost on a par. Oh, but every country has done that, I might say; Canada has done that, and that is true, but that does not mean we should forgive. We should be implacable in our refusal to forgive, no matter how sweet the inducements to do so. But we cannot go back, and we cannot be unmoved, and so we must move on.

Am I still anti-American? No, and I suspect I never really was. It is not anti-American to wish America had been better than it was, or to want it to be better than it is. Perhaps because I am Canadian I have a sense of the value of an official opposition; Americans love their country nonetheless for hating what the government of the day does to it. America has an unofficial opposition in its writers, many of whom have come to mind during the course of these travels. They, too, have wondered at the sensitivity and strength of America's culture, and celebrated the honesty and humour of its people, and ground their teeth at the perfidy and inept.i.tude of its corporate and political leaders. Foreign writers have come and chided or mocked; American writers have stayed and wrestled and burned. As a Canadian, I feel somewhere between, chiding and burning, admiring and, essentially, being irrelevant.

The green light comes on, and I drive up to the customs kiosk.

"Pa.s.sports, please," the officer says. Unlike the American official in Was.h.i.+ngton State, this Canadian representative of the government doesn't leave the shelter of her kiosk. It's snowing. Not hard-a gentle, Christma.s.sy kind of snow.

"How long have you been in the States?" she says. She is a pet.i.te woman, with nicely permed hair and reading gla.s.ses. She looks more like a librarian than a border guard. She's not wearing a gun.

"About two months," I say.

"What's the value of the goods you're bringing back?"

I tell her. I have the sheaf of receipts in my hand, but she doesn't seem to want them.

"Any alcohol or tobacco?"

"Two bottles of wine," I tell her, "and I just bought some scotch at the duty-free."

She hands me back one of the pa.s.sports.

"Would you mind telling me what that white powder is on your pa.s.sport, sir?" she says, looking stern.

"White powder?" I say, holding the doc.u.ment open in the feeble, yellow light coming through the winds.h.i.+eld from a lamp above the kiosk. Sure enough, there is a whitish film on the leaves. I know what she's thinking. "I have no idea. Really."

"Let me see that," Merilyn says, taking the pa.s.sport from my trembling hands. She inspects it closely. She sniffs it. Then, to my amazement, she swipes her finger through the powder and licks it.

"I didn't mean for you to taste it, ma'am," the customs officer says sharply.

"Hmm," Merilyn says. I stare at her in horror and admiration. We are going to be arrested, but we will be arrested together. "It's coffee whitener. We've been keeping the pa.s.sports in the glove compartment."

"Coffee whitener," says the officer, breaking into a smile. "That's what I thought, too." She hands me Merilyn's pa.s.sport. "Welcome home."

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.

IT took two countries to write this book: one to raise us and one to welcome us as travellers. To all those who shared their lives and stories for a moment or more, we extend our thanks. Particular appreciation to Russell Thompson, Mike Fischer, and Ron and Lauren Davis for their hospitality.

We would also like to thank Stella Harvey and the Vicious Circle for bringing us to Whistler, British Columbia, as writers-in-residence, thus giving us the time and a place in which to complete the ma.n.u.script.

As always, our grat.i.tude to our agent, Bella Pomer, for her constant faith and tireless efforts on our behalf, to Rob Sanders for being such a generous and willing publisher of Canadian writers, and to Nancy Flight for her editorial ac.u.men.

We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which provided a grant for the writing of this book.

end.