The Other American Border Towns

If I asked you to think of the place that defines America, you might think of Washington, D.C., or Chicago, or Los Angeles, or monuments like Mount Rushmore, or Mount Vernon, or the Statue of Liberty. But for Andy Hickman, there is no place more American than the woods of upstate New York, where he grew up, and where he writes from for this month’s installment of his series, “Falling Back in Love with America.”

For the past month, Andy and his wife Keturah have been peering over the edge of America into Canada, from their perch in Churubusco, way up in New York State. Below, you’ll find his reflections from a less-talked-about border zone. There, as Andy writes, he “wondered what makes a nation a nation,” and his own place within it. Read his essay on finding what to be grateful for in the “fallow fields gnarled with skeletal brakes and briars.” And please let us know where you spent Thanksgiving, and why you were grateful to do so, in the comments.—Suzy Weiss 

The camera clicks as we step toward the line. Though we are in one of the most isolated places in the American Northeast—we are being watched. We found ourselves this October near the end of Lost Nation Road, where the United States Border Patrol seems to have a thermal imaging camera behind every bush. My wife and I shrink back: “Do we have our passports on us, just in case?”

Here, a simple afternoon stroll could cause an international incident if one doesn’t watch where they’re walking. This is Churubusco—a hamlet of 466 people that sits at the extreme northern edge of the state of New York, directly on the international border with Canada.

We’re in New York, the same state as Jay-Z and Wall Street and MoMA, but they’re far from here. To get to Manhattan from this village, you’d have to drive for about six hours straight. A man walking on 34th Street could sooner be in Los Angeles or Dublin than here in Chateaugay. And consequently, New York and the metropolis with which it shares a name are like completely different worlds.  

One is a slick, sleek, suave playground for the Power Elite; the other is a hell-raisin’ parochial backwater full of dirt roads, shotgun shells, six-month subzero winters, and boots caked in cow shit. Insofar as state politics is concerned, the former manages the latter like a distant and bitterly-hated colony. In what amounts to a vaguely medieval arrangement, northern upstate New York pays taxes to a government in which it has no real political representation. This is because by sheer population density, downstate voters, who are overwhelmingly Democrats, call the vast majority of shots in state-level politics. Rage against the big city, and its taxes, and gun bans, and red tape is omnipresent here.