Published on Wandering with Val
Canaan Line House
In 1991, my father-in-law purchased a modest three-bedroom bungalow in Kennebunk Beach, Maine, USA, as a 60th birthday gift to himself—a retirement haven nestled 470 kilometers from Westmount, Quebec. It was, and still is, the closest ocean to Montreal. The dollar was at par. The drive south, winding through New Hampshire’s rugged Dixville Notch State Park, was as much a part of the journey as the destination itself. The mountains were the overture to the sea.
The driving route traces a dizzying map of backroads, crossing the border at a ramshackle outpost between Canaan-Hereford Road in Vermont and Saint-Herménégilde, Quebec. There, the Canaan Line House, a sagging two-story relic straddling the international boundary, stands as a monument to a bygone era. Its splintered walls once buzzed with Prohibition-era revelers—Americans slipping through the internal door to the Canadian side for a legal drink, then back again, smuggling laughter and liquor under the radar. A century later, the building’s decay has elevated it to folklore, its warped floors, broken windows, and sagging roofline whispering secrets of bootleggers and blurred borders.
Back then, crossing into the U.S. felt like stepping into a neighbor’s kitchen. A driver’s license—or a Bloomingdale’s card, or a grocery receipt scrawled with your name—was passport enough. No one scrutinized the apples in your trunk for forbidden stickers, or asked about firearms, or cared how long you’d stay. The trust was implicit, the camaraderie effortless. But on June 1, 2009, the rules tightened. Passports became mandatory, and the line between “us” and “them” thickened like a fog rolling in off the Atlantic.
Kennebunk itself is a study in contrasts. A few miles from our bungalow, the Bush family estate, Walker’s Point, juts into the sea, all granite rock and New England grandeur—a symbol of generational wealth. Yet our corner of the cove near Mother’s Beach clings defiantly to its unpretentious charm, sheltering working artists, lobstermen, and families who call it home year-round.
Wherever you find yourself, sandpipers dart through tide pools, bald eagles circle above, and periwinkles cling to rocks untouched by manicured hands. The garden in front of our house mirrors this duality, a steadfast contrast to the ocean’s restless expanse: a collection of fairy houses, dozens of bird feeders, and rosa rugosa battling invasive bittersweet. At the entrance, two hand-painted wooden birdhouses stand sentinel: one adorned with a Canadian maple leaf, the other with American stars and stripes. By the water, a flagpole flies both nations’ colours—the U.S. flag always higher, a nod to geography, though the Canadian one dances just as fiercely in the salty wind.
When my father-in-law passed away, we inherited more than a house. We inherited the garden: a borderless bird sanctuary for all to enter. We also inherited sand dollars scattered like porcelain coins at low tide, a little deck where we’d watch storms roll in, and the rhythms of a town where neighbours still share clambake recipes and spare keys. Kennebunk’s soul lies in its volunteer garbage removal on Gooch’s Beach, its lobster boats chugging home at dusk, its annual debate over the price of a lobster roll. People are kind. They drop off cookies, haddock soup, and tomatoes from their gardens. They lend wheelbarrows. We’ve never been separated by our nationality. Yet even here, change gnaws at the edges.
For years, I told myself the garden’s magic—its defiant whimsy, its binational birdsong—was immune to politics. The flags, after all, had fluttered in harmony through decades of diplomatic spats. But lately, the world beyond the cove feels unmoored. When border agents began rifling through phones, when “America First” curdled into hostility toward old allies, when Donald Trump took aim at Canada—tariffs, insults, the unraveling of a century’s trust—I felt the ground shift. “Governor” Trudeau was an unforgivable slight. I’ve never been more proud of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. He unites us all when, hand over heart, he says, “Canada will not become the 51st state.”
But uncertainty is no longer confined to politics; it seeps into the air, the water, the land itself.
And so that little sandpiper—a newly endangered species—once a metaphor for resilience, now seems an omen: a creature scuttling from encroaching tides and climate change, its habitat vanishing, never certain where the next wave will break.
Yet the little ocean garden persists. The fairy houses still gather moss, Elmira Gulch’s red bicycle rusts poetically in the shadows by the woodpile, and the bittersweet claws its way through every crack, speaking the language of invincibility. Maybe borders, like shorelines, are not fixed but negotiated—day by day, storm by storm. I can still sprinkle Piskey dust in the wishing well and plant another rugosa, its thorns a quiet promise: roots run deeper than fences. The flags still fly. The eagles still circle. And somewhere in the Canaan Line House, a loose floorboard still creaks beneath the weight of history, a reminder that even the most rigid lines can, in time, bend.
Tears blur these words, the saltwater kinship with the sea. Deep down, I feel it—the fracture, the cracks, irreversible, like a sand dollar shattered beneath a boot. Yet here I stand, clinging to love’s stubborn algebra, its relentless proof that fractions can still become whole. They must. As Hemingway wrote, we need to find our power in the broken places. For what else can we plant in the cracks but seeds of belief, seeds of trust, seeds of love?