Northeast Passage

AMC Outdoors, April 2006

Dick Anderson turns his back to the icy wind and lights a cigarette. “Don’t do anything crazy,” he warns me. “They might have a camera on you.” I look at the decommissioned customs house in front of us-now a private residence with pretty floral-print curtains-and double check for my passport. It’s a windy Monday in January and I’m standing on the international boundary between Mars Hill, Maine, and New Brunswick, a 40-foot-wide clearcut post-holed with moose tracks and barbed with red osier dogwood. But we didn’t come to the world’s longest undefended border to cross it. We’re here to walk it.

From this forgotten outpost to the U.S.-Canada border crossing at Fort Fairfield, the frontier serves as a key section of the 1,300-mile International Appalachian Trail. As its founder, Anderson routed the trail along the border to get people to think beyond political boundaries. But doing so in this remote corner of Maine still requires a substantial shift in perspective. Even the landscape has chosen sides; towering rows of spruce and red pine hem the Canadian side-the fruits of a government reforestation program. The American side is bounded by stands of native poplar that have taken root in the abandoned potato fields of Aroostook County.

In spite of its porous appearance, this 12-mile stretch of trail comes with specific marching orders. Northbound hikers are required to alert U.S. Customs and Border Protection before stepping foot on the boundary. Once on it, they have to watch their step, sticking to the American side of the waist-high granite monuments that mark the boundary centerline until clearing customs. And while a row of conifers seems to be the only thing preventing me from an end run into Canada, I decide to err on the side of caution. “There are sensors all over the border,” Anderson reminded me before starting out. “But they’ve never had a problem with hikers.”

Wearing flannel-lined jeans and green rubber boots buckled into a pair of outsize wooden snowshoes, Anderson looks nothing like the breed of ultra-fit, long-distance hiker his trail serves. He has tousled gray hair and deep-set blue eyes and appears alternately younger and older than his 71 years, depending on the incline of the trail. Nevertheless, the former Maine conservation commissioner seems to know every square inch of the IAT. This strikes me as nothing short of remarkable since, by his own admission, he’s never been much of a hiker. “Some people say Dick Anderson never walked up a mountain he could drive to the top of,” he says. “And I have been up some wicked mountain roads.”

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