The America I loved is gone

The first impression America gave me was gentle carelessness. We were driving down from Canada to visit family friends in Texas sometime in the mid- to late 1980s, and a young border patrol agent at a booth, crouched over a newspaper, leaning back in his chair, carelessly waved my family’s station wagon across without looking up. You didn’t even need a passport to enter the United States until I was 33.

You need clear eyes at the border today. Europe and Canada have issued travel advisories after a series of arbitrary detentions, deportations to foreign jails without due process and hundreds of valid visas pulled or voided amid a sense of general impunity. While I have crossed the border a hundred times at least, sometimes once a month when I lived there, I cannot say when I will see America again, and I am quite sure I will never return to the country I once visited.

The America I knew, the America I loved, has closed.

And so I find myself like a man who has been admiring bubbles floating in the air, trying to recall their shape and swerve and shine after they’ve popped.

Once, in 1999, I was coming back into the states with my new Canadian girlfriend (yes, really), and once we endured a gantlet of irrelevant questions from the fine folks at the Blaine, Wash., crossing, she turned to me as B.C. 99 turned into I-5 and said, "Do they really think I'm sneaking into your country to take advantage of your fabulous social programmes?"