They closed off one of the coolest libraries to Canadians

So stupid

The Haskell Free Library and Opera House. By Srinivasan Ramaswamy - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=73284075

I’m a big fan of the US-Canada border. I think it’s really swell that it exists exactly in the place that it does and that there’s absolutely no reason to change it whatsoever. Canada for Canadians, I say! But I also love the border because of all the weird little quirks about it. In fact, I created a whole video about this exact subject, running through my very favorite oddities. And now, one of those oddities is gone… mostly.

Along the Quebec-Vermont border is a tiny little town called Derby Line. This town, which has been around for almost as long as the United States has been a thing, sits right on the border. Some buildings even straddle the border as if it were just an imaginary line drawn in the sand. Don’t believe me? Here’s Google Maps for you:

That, right there, is the US-Canada border with six whole buildings that run across the border. But the most important one? The Haskell Free Library and Opera House. The southern half of the library is, of course, in Vermont while the northern half is in Canada. But here’s where things get a little sticky: the door into the library is located in the southern part of the building, meaning it’s in the United States.

But here was the neat thing about the Haskell Free Library and Opera House: it was open to both US and Canadian citizens without ever needing to go through any sort of customs or immigration. Canadians could walk along a sidewalk next to the library and then just pop on into the library, fully in the US at this point, for a look around the books. US citizens could also enter and "hop” over the border inside the building and legally be in Canada. It made for a fun trip and a really cool geography fact. In a world where borders often dictate where we can and can’t go, it offered a little light heartedness amongst it all.

Of course, though, we’re no longer allowed to have nice things. Because of Trump’s crusade against and and all forms of immigration (and apparently tourism) as well as his bizarre and grossly erroneous fixation on Canada and its sovereignty, the sidewalk pathway for Canadians is now closed. Apparently, the US is justifying closing it as a way of curbing drug trafficking. Ya, because Vermont’s tiny little library was such a haven for drug smuggling. 🙄

All this is to say, this sucks! The Haskell Free Library and Opera House was a great way to show the bonded-ness of the two countries. Yes, we have a border… but, at one point, we didn’t really need one, or so the library implied. We were such good friends and so close culturally and economically that a hard border was simply not needed in this very special place. Now though, just two very long months later?

So, once again, I must apologize to my Canadian neighbors. In the grand scheme of things this might seem like a small slight. But when you stack it up against everything else going on, it carries far more geographic weight.