THE PARTLY CLOUDY PATRIOT (11 page)

C
anada haunts me. The United States’s neighbor to the north first caught my fancy a few years back when I started listening to the CBC. I came for the long-form radio documentaries; I stayed for the dispatches from the Maritimes and Guelph. On the CBC, all these nice people, seemingly normal but for the hockey obsession, had a likable knack for loving their country in public without resorting to swagger or hate.

A person keen on all things French is called a Francophile. One who has a thing for England is called an Anglophile. An admirer of Germany in the 1930s and ’40s is called Pat Buchanan. But no word has been coined to describe Americans obsessed with Canada, not that dictionary publishers have been swamped with requests. The comedian Jon Stewart used to do a bit in which a Canadian woman asked him to come clean with what Americans
really
think of Canada. “We don’t,” he said.

Keeping track of Canadians is like watching a horror movie. It’s
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
in slow-mo. They look like us, but there’s something slightly, eerily off. Why is that? The question has nagged me for years. Asking why they are the way they are begs the follow-up query about how we ended up this way too.

There’s a sad sack quality to the Canadian chronology I find entirely endearing. I once asked the CBC radio host Ian Brown how on earth one could teach Canadian schoolchildren their history in a way that could be remotely inspiring, and he answered, “It isn’t inspiring.”

Achieving its independence from Britain gradually and cordially, through polite meetings taking place in nice rooms, Canada took a path to sovereignty that is one of the most hilariously boring stories in the world. One Canadian history textbook I have describes it thus, “British North Americans moved through the 1850s and early sixties towards a modestly spectacular resolution of their various ambitions and problems.” Modestly spectacular. Isn’t that adorable?

One day, while nonchalantly perusing the annals of Canadian history, I came across mention of the founding of the Mounties. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, called the North-West Mounted Police at its inception, was created, I read, to establish law and order on the Canadian frontier in anticipation of settlement and the Canadian Pacific Railroad. In 1873, Canada’s first prime minister, John Macdonald, saw what was happening in the American Wild West and organized a police force to make sure Canada steered clear of America’s bloodbath.

That’s it. Or, as they might say in Quebec, voilà! That explains how the Canadians are different from Americans. No cowboys for Canada. Canada got Mounties instead—Dudley Do-Right, not John Wayne. It’s a mind-set of “Here I come to save the day” versus “Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker.” Or maybe it’s chicken and egg: The very idea that the Canadian head of state would come to the conclusion that establishing law and order
before
large numbers of people migrated west, to have rules and procedures and authorities waiting for them, is anathema to the American way.

Not only did the Mounties aim to avoid the problems we had faced on our western frontier, especially the violent, costly Indian wars, they had to clean up after our spillover mess. In a nineteenth-century version of that drug-war movie
Traffic
, evil American whiskey traders were gouging and poisoning Canadian Indian populations. Based in Fort Benton, Montana, they sneaked across the border to peddle their rotgut liquor, establishing illegal trading posts, including the infamous Fort Whoop-up, in what is now Alberta. You can’t throw a dart at a map of the American West without hitting some mass grave or battleground—Sand Creek, Little Bighorn, Wounded Knee—but it’s fitting that the most famous such Canadian travesty, the Cypress Hills Massacre, happened because American whiskey and fur traders were exacting revenge on a few Indians believed to have stolen their horses. The Americans slaughtered between one and two hundred Assiniboine men, women, and children. Never mind that the horse thieves had been Cree. That was 1873. The Mounties were under formation, but they hadn’t yet marched west.

The most remarkable thing about the Mounties was their mandate: one law. One law for everyone, Indian or white. The United States makes a big to-do about all men being created equal, but we’re still working out the kinks of turning that idea into actual policy. Reporting to the force’s commissioner in 1877, one Mountie wrote of Americans in his jurisdiction, “These men always look upon the Indians as their natural enemies, and it is their rule to shoot at them if they approach after being warned off. I was actually asked the other day by an American who has settled here, if we had the same law here as on the other side, and if he was justified in shooting any Indian who approached his camp after being warned not to in advance.”

Word of the Canadians’ fairness got around. Some northwestern tribes referred to the border between the United States and Canada as the “medicine line.” Robert Higheagle, a Lakota Sioux from Sitting Bull’s band, recalled, “They told us this line was considered holy. They called that a holy trail. They believe things are different when you cross from one side to another. You are altogether different. On one side you are perfectly free to do as you please. On the other you are in danger.”

To Canada’s dismay, the northern side of the medicine line became an attractive destination for American Indians, including the most famous, most difficult one of all, Sitting Bull. On the run after Little Bighorn, Sitting Bull and entourage settled near Canada’s Fort Walsh, under the command of Major James Walsh. Walsh and, as he called him, Bull became such great friends that the Canadian government had Walsh transferred to another post to separate him from Sitting Bull. Sitting Bull was an American problem and the Canadian government wanted to boot him south. Walsh even defied orders and went to Chicago to lobby on Sitting Bull’s behalf, but to no avail, ensuring that Sitting Bull would die south of the medicine line.

All the Sitting Bull complications make Walsh my favorite Mountie. But he’s a very American choice—he bucked the system, he played favorites for a friend, he defied policy, he stuck out. (Apparently, even having a favorite Mountie is an American trait. When I asked the twentieth commissioner of Mounties, Giuliano “Zach” Zaccardelli, who was his favorite RCMP commissioner in history, he answered Canadianly, “Every one of them has contributed tremendously to the legacy of the RCMP, and I hope that during my tenure I will be able to add some value to the legacy that those nineteen who came before me left for this organization.”) When Walsh heard that Sitting Bull had been fatally shot in Minnesota, he wrote, “Bull’s ambition is I am afraid too great to let him settle down and be content with an uninteresting life.” This strikes me as almost treasonously individualistic, with American shades of “pursuit of happiness” and “liberty or death.”

Everyone knows what the individualistic American cowboy fetish gets us: shot. It all comes down to guns. The population of the United States is ten times that of Canada, but we have about thirty times more firearms. Two-thirds of our homicides are committed with firearms, compared with one-third of theirs. (Which begs the question, just what are Canadian killers using, hair dryers tossed into bathtubs?)

The famous (well, in Canada) historian Pierre Berton, in his surprisingly out-of-print book
Why We Act Like Canadians
, informs an American friend that it has to do with weather. Having been to Edmonton in January, I cede his point. He wrote,

Hot weather and passion, gunfights and race riots go together. Your mythic encounters seem to have taken place at high noon, the sun beating down on a dusty Arizona street. I find it difficult to contemplate a similar gunfight in Moose Jaw, in the winter, the bitter rivals struggling vainly to shed two pairs of mitts and reach under several layers of parka for weapons so cold that the slightest touch of flesh on steel would take the skin off their thumbs.

Most of the time, I feel Canadian. I live a quiet life. I own no firearms (though, as a gunsmith’s daughter, I stand to inherit a freaking arsenal). I revere the Bill of Rights, but at the same time I believe that anyone who’s using three or more of them at a time is hogging them too much. I’m a newspaper-reading, French-speaking, radio-documentary-loving square. A lot of my favorite comedians, such as Martin Short, Eugene Levy, the Kids in the Hall, are Canadian. I like that self-deprecating Charlie Brown sense of humor. As Canadian-born
Saturday Night Live
producer Lorne Michaels once put it in a panel discussion devoted to the question of why Canadians are so funny at the Ninety-second Street Y, a Canadian would never have made a film called
It’s a Wonderful Life
because “that would be bragging.” The Canadian version, he said, would have been titled “It’s an All Right Life.”

So I mostly walk the Canadian walk, but the thing about a lot of Canadian talk is that it sounds bad. When I went to Ottawa, the “Washington of the North,” to see the RCMP’s Musical Ride, which is sort of like synchronized swimming on horseback, I was telling a constable in the Mounties about a new U.S. Army recruiting ad. The slogan was “an army of one.” It aimed to reassure American kids that they wouldn’t be nameless, faceless nobodies, that they could join the army and still do their own thing.

The Mountie was horrified. He said, “I think we have to try and work as a team and work together. If you start to be an individualist, then everybody’s going their own way. One person might be doing something and the other person might be doing something else and everybody wants to put their word in and thinks, I’m better than him or My idea’s better than his. You need conformity. You need everybody to stick together and work as a team.”

It hurt my ears when he said “you need conformity.” I know he’s probably right, and what organization more than a military one requires lockstep uniformity so that fewer people get killed? But still. No true American would ever talk up the virtue of conformity. Intellectually, I roll my eyes at the cowboy outlaw ethic, but in my heart I know I buy into it a little, that it’s a deep part of my identity. Once, when I was living in Holland, I went to the movies, and when a Marlboro Man ad came on the screen, I started bawling with homesickness. I may be the only person who cried all the way through
Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead.

The Mounties on the Musical Ride dress in the old-fashioned red serge suits and Stetson hats, like Dudley Do-Right. Seeing them on their black horses, riding in time to music, was entirely lovable, yet lacking any sort of, for lack of a better word, edge. I tried to ask some of them about it.

I say, “In the States, the Mountie is a squeaky-clean icon. Does that ever bother you that the Mountie is not ‘cool’?”

He stares back blankly. I ask him, “You know what I mean?”

“No, I don’t.”

“There’s no dark side,” I tell him. “The Mounties have no dark side.”

He laughs. “That might be one of the things that upset the Americans, because we’re just that much better.” Then he feels so bad about this little put-down that he repents, back-tracking about how “there’s good and bad in everybody,” that Americans and Canadians “just have different views,” and that “Canadians are no better than anyone else.”

Another constable, overhearing, says, “Our country is far younger than the United States, but at the same time, the United States is a young country when you compare it to the countries of Europe.”

“Yeah,” I answer, “but you’re a very well-behaved young country.”

“Well”—he smiles—“that’s just the way my mum raised me.”