“Have you been to Canada before?”

I babbled something about the time I went to Hamilton back in 2018 (or was it 2019?) because a short film I wrote had somehow slipped its way into the city’s film festival.

“What are you doing in Thunder Bay?”

I babbled something about hiking and exploring, failing in the moment to mention any specific places of interest.

“Have you ever been fingerprinted for anything in the U.S.?”

I didn’t babble anything this time. I simply muttered yes, and gave them the date of my lone arrest.

“I see.”

The Customs officer scribbled something on a yellow slip of paper, stuffed it in my passport and handed it to me.

“Okay, I’m gonna have you pull over to the left and park under that canopy. When you step inside the building an officer will talk to you.”

For the first time in 9 hours of travel, I was starting to feel uncomfortable…

***

Let’s back up a bit. What was I doing in Thunder Bay? I had no special reason to choose this place. It was just a city on a map; one that happened to exist a comfortable 8.5 hours by road from my hometown.

I was feeling the itch again. It had been a long time since I drove a great distance for the sake of exploring a new city. My personal stressors had been piling up; I had just undergone a breakup and was feeling burned out from work and undernourished creatively. And that’s not to mention the chaos in the outside world…

I had six precious days off work. I didn’t know where I wanted to go but I had a few parameters:

–I wanted to get there by car. That, of course, was a given.

–I wanted to get there in a single day; that way I would have ample time to soak up my environs.

–For some reason, I really wanted to travel North. Though I have many fond memories in latitudes below the Great Lakes, the upper regions have always held a special place in my soul. There’s nothing quite like the thrill driving up and feeling the air get cooler and cooler, watching the rolling pastoral hills give way to thick pine forests and pristine lakes…

So I scoped out Airbnb rates in cities along the Northern Wisconsin/Minnesota/UP Michigan axis; Duluth, Marquette, Door County and the like. On a whim I looked up Thunder Bay, Ontario – just over the Minnesota border and snuggled nicely along the shores of Lake Superior – and was stunned to learn it was about half as expensive to stay up there.

How could this be? Were that many Americans scared to cross into Canada? Was this city of 100,000 or so actually a dump, or had I accidentally uncovered a hidden gem?

Choosing Thunder Bay would have been the riskier option, but the more I sat with it the more I realized that this was exactly what made it so appealing. Coming in mid-June of 2025, this felt like both the worst and best time to visit our neighbor to the North. Trump’s boneheaded tariff threats had sunk US-Canadian relations to an all-time low, and the looming threat of an Iranian war was further tarnishing my country’s image. I became seduced with the prospect of experiencing all this tension from the opposite side, to reflect on my tainted American-ness as a foreign interloper, perhaps even to offer an apology…

***

I often find that big decisions can be agonizing, but once you make them and firmly commit to them you’ll know right away whether they were correct. This had been the case with my breakup the previous month, and so it was with choosing Thunder Bay. In the days leading up to my departure I had an intuitive sense that this was right, this was where I needed to go.

I even had a pharmacological discovery which I interpreted as a bestowal from God. On the way back from babysitting my nephew one evening I stopped at a small-town liquor store and noticed a small orange pill on the pavement. It took about two microseconds for my brain to register it as a 20mg dose of Adderall, and half that time to decide to pick it up.

I’ve had a curious relationship with Adderall over the years. I’ve dabbled with this performance-enhancing drug since college (sometimes too much, I’ll admit), and it was during my first cross-country road trip in 2013 that I discovered how immensely useful it can be in the context of auto travel.

This is of course not without risk; I remember one time back in 2015 I had to pull off the side of the road because a too-high dosage of addies – combined with an ill-advised energy drink and cigarette – caused me to experience a panic attack. But under the right circumstances the stuff can make the lonely hours on the road pass by like wind through a prairie plain, and even the dullest landscapes feel like the French riviera.

I certainly didn’t need Adderall to get to Thunder Bay, but I felt compelled to include it in my arsenal. After all, how could I insult God by refusing his gift?

 ***

I only took half the pill on my way up to Ontario; it was just the right amount and it had done its job effectively.

But the other half of the pill (stuffed lazily into my backpack pocket) was on my mind as I tepidly stepped into the Canadian Border Service Agency building. This was the only contraband I had bothered to sneak into the country; beyond that I was clean as a whistle. But it’s hard not to feel paranoid when dealing with authority figures, and I had to suppress a nagging thought that any moment now my car would be searched from top to bottom and my gift from God would send me to a Canadian prison (or, worse yet, back home).

A plain-looking female officer took my passport and asked me a series of questions. Where was I staying? What were my plans? What kind of job did I have back in the U.S.? Does my employer know that I’m gone?

(I found it amusing to consider the possibility of bolting to Canada without telling my bosses. What would they do, extradite me?)

They asked me again if I had ever been fingerprinted in the States, and I freely admitted that at age 17 I had been busted for an OWI. At the time this was a misdemeanor in Wisconsin and it has long since been expunged from my record, but I figured it was safer to appear honest…

The officer told me to have a seat. I sat with my legs crossed, absorbing the eerily quiet energy of the room. There were no other border crossers there, only a handful of cops who seemed nonchalant as they casually cracked jokes about fishing. It was not the aura of defensive arrogance I was used to from American lawmen.

Still, I couldn’t help but wonder what I had done wrong.  This hadn’t happened when I crossed the border back in 2018 (or was it 19?). Maybe something about my vibe was off, or maybe this was a side effect of the uptick in international tensions. Shit, maybe they were being extra vigilant on account of the recent political assassinations in Minnesota, the perpetrator of which hadn’t been caught by that point.

Whatever it was, I didn’t like it. I tried to stay cool, but the lingering effects of the Adderall were not making that easy. To deflect from my own anxiety I stared at a counter where a large teddy bear had been fitted with a Mountie’s hat. I wondered what I would do if I were turned back over the border, if all of the hopes, dreams and planning I’d invested in this trip were to come to naught.

About ten interminable minutes later the lady officer returned. She asked me to sign my passport, a step I had apparently forgotten when I renewed it last year. Then she sent me bid me safe travels and sent me on my way. I never dared asked why they flagged me in the first place.

 It was over, but even still I could not feel safe. I spent the next 35 minutes driving toward Thunder Bay with my cruise control set at the absurdly low speed limit of 90 km/hour, even though the highway was practically empty.

Yes, empty. I had remembered this from my last drive through Ontario; that time in the Southern part of the province. Whereas the American landmass is (for the most part) sprawled out to the point where you can reliably expect a town or a farm or at least a truck stop every 20 minutes, in Canada the cities exist as small speckles interrupting an otherwise barely-touched mass of dense wilderness. It’s almost daunting in its serenity, although I was definitely glad I stopped for gas in the last town South of the border…

It was only once I settled comfortably into my Airbnb and I confirmed that my cellular travel plan would actually work up here that I finally allowed myself to relax. I was free, truly free, for I was in a country which felt more like a true democracy than my own.

The world at large might be going to hell, but I was determined to carve out my own little slice of paradise.