On the Border> Author celebrates 50th birthday with insightful personal journey

NORTH COUNTRY: A PERSONAL JOURNEY THROUGH THE BORDERLAND, by Howard Frank Mosher, Houghton Mifflin, 288 pages, $23.

The rugged, natural beauty of this nation’s extreme north — and the hardy people who inhabit it — cast a spell on Vermont author Howard Frank Mosher from the time he was a child.

Among his fondest childhood memories are weekend trips to the Adirondacks with his grandparents and fishing trips to Quebec’s Laurentian Mountains with his father and uncle.

As a boy, Mosher devoured everything he could get his hands on having to do with the north, memorizing the folk tales of Paul Bunyan and reading virtually every word written by the likes of Jack London and Robert W. Service.

In the summer of 1993, Mosher celebrated turning 50 with a coast-to-coast road trip along this country’s northern border. He packed a rental car with such essentials as a single suitcase, half a dozen notebooks and PaperMate refills, his hiking boots and fly rod, a Rand McNally road atlas and a couple dozen of his favorite north country books, and struck off on what he refers to as his “midlife adventure.”

The resulting book, “North Country,” is his personal memoir of a journey through the sparsely populated border territory and his encounters with the colorful characters who inhabit it.

As he meanders through the nation’s border towns — a trek often accompanied by little more than static on his car radio — Mosher gathers insights and anecdotes about life on the border from game wardens and bush pilots, cigarette and drug smugglers, tax resisters, even the Vermont customs inspector who tracked the builder of a super cannon destined for Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

Mosher’s jumping-off point is Lubec, where Old Elisha, a scrappy old-timer, describes the fishing village’s heyday as a prosperous seafaring port from which lumber, potatoes, sardines and blueberries were dispatched to points around the globe.

The Maine leg of his odyssey leads him through the Madawaska Republic and Allagash Territory to Jackman, as well as many small border towns in between, where the international border is but a minor inconvenience.

He introduces readers to Ernest Chasse, a Madawaskan of Acadian descent who speaks lovingly of the founders of the territory he calls the “Louisiana of the North.”

Mosher also speaks of an unnamed Fort Kent businessman who sums up the philosophy of the St. John Valley’s northern denizens with the following observation:

“The Madawaska Republic is really just one big community on both sides of the border. … For years the customs people have just waved us back and forth across the border, which may be unique in the world today in that for us residents of the Republic, it simply doesn’t exist, except on paper,” said the Fort Kent man.

“The fact is that nobody up here’s taken it seriously since the Webster-Ashburton Treaty, a hundred and fifty years ago. On the other hand, we have to wonder how seriously the rest of the state and country take us. Down at the state capital, in Augusta? They’re aware that the Madawaska Republic exists, all right. But to tell you the truth, they seem to feel that their main responsibility is to save us from ourselves, and that’s infuriating.

“As far as the border, I don’t see any border, do you? It’s just a beautiful country with a river running through it,” concluded the man.

Well said.

As the journey moves on to such points as Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, Michigan’s Upper Penninsula, the far northern Great Plains along the Manitoba and Saskatchewan borders, Montana and Idaho to his terminus in Washington state, Mosher offers keen observations about the people and the land, pausing often to reflect upon what he has learned from the border folk he has met along the way and from his northern forefathers.

If you’re not into fishing, the book tends to drag a little when Mosher talks about fly-fishing, which he does a lot of along the way. But there’s plenty more about the book to enjoy.

Mosher’s account of a six-week slice of border life leaves readers with a deeper understanding of what drives the residents of a territory that can sometimes be inhospitable, land that shaped not only the powerful characters he described in such loving detail but also his own life and his writing.