If I asked you to think of the place that defines America, you might think of Washington, D.C., or Chicago, or Los Angeles, or monuments like Mount Rushmore, or Mount Vernon, or the Statue of Liberty. But for Andy Hickman, there is no place more American than the woods of upstate New York, where he grew up, and where he writes from for this month’s installment of his series, “Falling Back in Love with America.”
For the past month, Andy and his wife Keturah have been peering over the edge of America into Canada, from their perch in Churubusco, way up in New York State. Below, you’ll find his reflections from a less-talked-about border zone. There, as Andy writes, he “wondered what makes a nation a nation,” and his own place within it. Read his essay on finding what to be grateful for in the “fallow fields gnarled with skeletal brakes and briars.” And please let us know where you spent Thanksgiving, and why you were grateful to do so, in the comments.—Suzy Weiss
The camera clicks as we step toward the line. Though we are in one of the most isolated places in the American Northeast—we are being watched. We found ourselves this October near the end of Lost Nation Road, where the United States Border Patrol seems to have a thermal imaging camera behind every bush. My wife and I shrink back: “Do we have our passports on us, just in case?”
Here, a simple afternoon stroll could cause an international incident if one doesn’t watch where they’re walking. This is Churubusco—a hamlet of 466 people that sits at the extreme northern edge of the state of New York, directly on the international border with Canada.
We’re in New York, the same state as Jay-Z and Wall Street and MoMA, but they’re far from here. To get to Manhattan from this village, you’d have to drive for about six hours straight. A man walking on 34th Street could sooner be in Los Angeles or Dublin than here in Chateaugay. And consequently, New York and the metropolis with which it shares a name are like completely different worlds.
One is a slick, sleek, suave playground for the Power Elite; the other is a hell-raisin’ parochial backwater full of dirt roads, shotgun shells, six-month subzero winters, and boots caked in cow shit. Insofar as state politics is concerned, the former manages the latter like a distant and bitterly-hated colony. In what amounts to a vaguely medieval arrangement, northern upstate New York pays taxes to a government in which it has no real political representation. This is because by sheer population density, downstate voters, who are overwhelmingly Democrats, call the vast majority of shots in state-level politics. Rage against the big city, and its taxes, and gun bans, and red tape is omnipresent here.
To our east, tall white-stone border monuments stand like gravestones: “UNITED STATES.” To our west, an empty baby carriage lies abandoned in the brambles. It stands as an eerie artifact of a crisis in a seldom-seen American border zone—the northern one—and a reminder that we are in a place where someone might pick up their baby and run. Everywhere along the lonesome intersection of Lost Nation and Frontier roads, one finds clothing, shoes, and portal-like pathways in the bush made by illegal immigrants sprinting north or south toward whatever future they’re after in the United States or in the Dominion of Canada. Unlike the U.S.-Mexico border, where illegal immigrants all head northward, here, there are migrants heading north as well as south. Canada’s liberal immigration laws attract refugees from all over, while high-dollar incomes in the States draw others to points south. Sometimes, they wave as they pass each other on Lost Nation Road.
Above us, the sky is gray. A perpetual dome of high-gravity gloom, these skies yawn without color—and here, the wind blows at a constant gale. Deep in, in my opinion, America’s closest analogue to Siberia, way up in northern upstate New York, we stood by the border in the eerie silence and wondered what makes a nation a nation. Is it a fence line and a few cameras? A detention center and some SUVs with floodlights and armed men? Or is it something else?
Above us, the bald eagle circles overhead, veering into Canada, then to the United States—back and forth. Meanwhile, the windmills behind us spin like weird geometrical shrines of a foreign religion. Electrical wires dangle from cockeyed poles; rusty vans sink into the muck, and wild dogs wander dirt roads in the billowing sleet. The villages hang on by a thread, with peeling-paint Victorian grandeur and fallow fields gnarled with skeletal brakes and briars—northern New York State sulks like a beautiful apocalyptic painting that Oswald Spengler might’ve displayed above his desk.
Yet the decline of this place has not ruined it, nor has it bled it of its potency and patriotism. Flags hang from the barns and power poles and porches; it seems the men out here are often as proud as they are poor. Though the Quebecois fleur-de-lis hung amongst the maples in the distance, my feet were planted on unquestionably American soil. Standing in that silent field, I felt the acute sense that a nation is not a simple, reducible, rational sort of object, but a sticky, living, breathing organism—a thing that resides in the heart. Here, the cameras and the boundary fences are only a stand-in for the voice and hands of one who has admitted his American-ness and chosen to let it thrive within him like a ghost. Without this, those cameras would blink for no reason at all. The border itself would be meaningless.
In the gas station parking lot in the Village of Chateaugay, New York, men chuckle and smoke with each other, but stare blankly at the foreigner, a designation that might include someone born in the next county over. Car radios blare groovy French-language techno songs on airwaves from nearby Montreal. And women in Tweety Bird pajamas slink back on the picnic tables in the drizzle, sucking on cigarettes and scrolling on their smartphones. A truck growls by with a giant flag bearing the words “TRUMP 2024—NO MORE BULLSHIT,” and it’s followed by a semitruck hauling a putrid load of literal bullshit. The windows on the decrepit old apartment buildings rattle as the trucks barrel by.
Churubusco is named for a battle that took place just outside of Mexico City in 1847 during the Mexican-American War. The U.S. won that battle due to a regiment of volunteers from here, who came home and named their land after their victory. But 123 years after the Battle of Churubusco, another battle would take place—between local farmers and hordes of peace-loving hippies. Seven months after the roaring success of the Woodstock festival in 1969 in Bethel, New York, a handful of concert promoters would begin an attempt to “take over” Churubusco to host a three-day rock concert they called the “Churubusco Live-in.” They printed flyers and tickets; they put money down on 1,000 acres—all they needed was for the locals to tolerate it.
The locals stridently opposed the Live-in—and went to war against the hippies. Lawyers got involved, and the town board passed measures against mass gatherings. The town’s attorney, J. Bryon O’Connell, warned: “That live-in will turn into a lynch-in. People up here aren’t used to long hair. They don’t fool around with legal niceties and they’re not going to put up with any nonsense from college students. If they come up Route 189, they’re just liable to get shot.” The hippies did not, in the end, come up Route 189.
To get to Churubusco, we took the Amtrak to Plattsburgh and boarded the North Country Express, a tri-county rural transit bus line that charged us $1.50 apiece for the privilege of taking a ride to Dick’s Country Store on Route 11. We hopped on the bus with our folding bikes and backpacks and sped west, sitting by Amish boys and roughshod unemployed guys with one too many DUIs.
“I had to get signs made up in Spanish and in some other language, too,” the bus driver told me. While the majority of new arrivals through Churubusco are from Central and South America, a surprising amount of them are Pakistanis, Indians, and even Irishmen. A five-mile walk from the border down Lost Nation Road is all it takes to get to the North Country Express stop, and so as illegal crossings of our northern border have become around 20 times more common in the last two years, the bus has seen an increase in ridership as well, taking migrants from places like Churubusco to Plattsburgh, where you can catch a coach bus to New York City.
But my wife and I were going the other way, north to the border. As the kind bus driver dropped us off, the scene was desolate, with not a car on the road. An old gas pump leaned back, rusting in the reeds, and stern-faced men carried their guns into Dick’s Country Store, where “1,000 guitars and 1,000 guns” are for sale. We unfolded our bikes, loaded them up, and started pedaling north against the wind through a gloomy landscape of weed-choked fields and silent evergreen forests.
We rented a farmer’s attic apartment for the month, directly on the U.S.-Canada border, and our landlord told us that he’d had to drive to Canada more than once to get his cows when they got loose and bolted north. Everywhere, commanding views of Quebec could be seen, for the hillside fields formed immense promontories standing high above the Montérégie region.
I’ve always admired Canada—so much so that more than once, I’ve contemplated moving there.
Only six months earlier, Keturah and I had crossed through Montérégie by train on our way to Newfoundland, finding our northern neighbors to be pleasant company everywhere we traveled. Up in Canada, we found a well-dressed, orderly sort of nation—a country built not by feverish, howling, uncouth eccentrics but by neatly-groomed and ginger-handed gentry. Where America is a land of irrational passions and boomtown delirium, Canada is a realm of sensibility and quietude; a land where stability is prized far more than the passionate sputterings of half-starved madmen.
Pleasant as it was, we sauntered back to the Land of the Free this past July with a new understanding of ourselves as inescapably and blessedly American. In surveying the border once again, this same patriotic feeling surged in us for a second time. This time it felt even stronger.
The road from our apartment to the village was hilly, and the route was 10 miles. We rode it twice a week. We’d pull into Chateaugay, exhausted, and head to the Stewart’s gas station for a slice of pizza and a cold drink. In upstate New York, Stewart’s is not merely a gas station—it’s a sort of ad hoc community center where people linger long to chat and catch up with their neighbors, who often live miles away. Chateaugay’s Stewart’s was a particularly good example; the parking lot was always full, with scores of locals standing around to chat, smoke, and eat pizza or ice cream.
One man we met there was a native of nearby Churubusco, where our apartment was. He told us that, as kids, he and his friends would ride sleds down the icy roads, flying down the hill from America to Canada in what might be the most stylish and thrilling sort of international travel imaginable. Back then, there were no cameras, and no fines for irregular crossings—he told us that the Canadian border inspectors would let the kids warm up in their shanty and give them cups of hot cocoa.
“Those were the days,” he said with a wide grin.
I stepped back inside to buy some tobacco and another slice of chicken-bacon-ranch pizza, where the blue-haired, heavily tattooed cashier was cracking jokes with old farmers buying giant cases of beer. “You like living in Chateaugay?” I asked him.
He looked up and laughed. “Fuck, no—I can’t wait to get the hell out of here. Everyone’s dying to get out of this place.” Afterward, on the ride back, a friendly U.S. Border Patrol Agent stopped us on our bicycles, and we chatted for a while. He told us, “In the springtime, we usually find at least a few bodies up here in these woods.”
“So you’re saying that people are dying to come here?”
He nodded and told us that migrants are sometimes grateful to be caught by border agents. “When we find them, it means they’re not gonna freeze to death.”
It struck me that anyone might be willing to risk their life for a seat at America’s bountiful table. Some, perhaps, come only for the money—but at least a few may come because they truly wish to become American. I was only left to wonder why their definition of America seemed not to include the likes of the North Country. I thought of the cashier’s comment. The irony was almost too absurd; for as certainly as there are men and women willing to risk life and limb for a chance at getting to America, this isn’t the America they stay in or want. They’re going elsewhere. And so are upstate New Yorkers—who lead the nation in flight from their home state. As everyone leaves, decline takes root.
If nothing else, at least decline is honest. This is a place that is, above all, an acquired taste—a place that does not threaten to gentrify or “develop” anytime soon, if ever. That’s altogether a good thing in the minds of the remaining North Country residents, who cling to a simpler way of life.
Here, a poor man can still buy a few weedy acres and cobble together a rude shanty to live in; the elements will govern his actions and his thoughts. Land and man mirror one another here—neither is reduced to a fungible, interchangeable object—the roots are too deep. Icy roads may prevent travel; necessity may force a farmer to make do with what he fashions by hand. The circumstances of weather and distance underscore the blessing found in beef and bread in a manner now lost in our nation’s more “relevant” places. And in the high helium skies of January, a man may raise his head to find God there, laughing above the geese and the crows. His land is a canvas for the labors of an implacable, surly, hardworking seeker of holiness and liberty. In these respects, the North Country still forms a perfect portrait of America—original, old, dogged in her passion for hard-won subsistence and glory.
If Thomas Jefferson or Johnny Appleseed strode up to these parts today, they might find it to be one of the only areas of the United States that is still recognizably American by their standards. The droning homogeneity of elsewhere might only send them into a depression, but here, overgrown orchards and crumbling Monticellos still abound. Upstate New York is, as Edmund Wilson dubbed it, “an anachronism that still flourishes,” a region in which practically everything from the buildings to the farm equipment to the people themselves feels like a long-forgotten yet still-living antique.
As I meditated on these matters and stared at the ghastly white stone landmarks on the border, I was glad to be on this side of it and not the other. For as much as I adore Canada and consider her to be our sister nation, we belong over here. Not only in America, but up here in the distant, icy, somber ruins of former days, where the ghosts of our forefathers still seem to be walking around in the woods.
Our final day came like a rude awakening. It was time to go, and we loaded up our bikes and headed back to Dick’s Country Store to wait at the dusty old parking lot to meet the bus. As we pedaled there, a crew of Venezuelan migrants scurried off into the cattails with their backpacks. Where they were headed, I didn’t know, but they weren’t staying in Churubusco.
And after an hour or so at the store, the little old North Country Express bus chugged up the hill and let us in. Its occupants—barefoot Amish girls, Mennonite farmhands, and tattooed rednecks—looked strangely like a portrait of this region’s future. They are the only demographics who seem to truly thrive in this far-flung place and, so far as I can tell, the future of it is theirs.
No doubt, it is probably ours as well, and at day’s end, I am damned grateful to be from this corner of our country. As haggard as it may be, not only is it mine—it’s one of the most “American” places we have. As I stared out the bus window at the tired farm fields and doddering old villages, I got the acute sense that this place will stay as it is, and that is something to be thankful for.
Follow A.M. Hickman on X @Shagbark_Hick and on his newsletter, Hickman’s Hinterlands.
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