One of the side effects of sitting by an evening fire as it gradually turns into smoke and glowing coals is that things soften and lose their edges. Eventually and inevitably, if you are Uncle Bob, you drift into speculation and philosophizing.
If he sits quietly, perhaps taking a puff or a sip once in a while, and tries to find a line of demarcation between inside and outside, can he actually find one? If not, why not?
The usual stuff. But on this one occasion, Bob lets his mind latch onto the subject of border politics.
Provincial and national borders. Personal identity and the need to prove it with a passport in order to cross an invisible line. Soldiers and weapons amassed on both sides of most of the borders of the world to prevent the wrong people from crossing them in either direction. It seems beyond remarkable that these imaginary lines could direct so much of our collective human energy toward enforcing them. What percentage of the global economy ends up in the service of the administrative zones we call nations? What percentage of air pollution? How much destruction? How many deaths? How much hunger and homelessness?
For a moment, Bob wonders who really benefits when he habitually thinks of himself as “Canadian.” Are the symbols he has learned to identify with, the maple leaf, drive-in doughnuts, beavers, hockey games and Newfie jokes, for example, really what constitutes his identity?
Sitting on a beach in this special place, as the shapes of driftwood lose their definition, Bob realizes that the ocean in front of him is free to wash on the shores of any country in the world, in the same way that the night sky is open to every place on Earth. At least so far, migrating birds, fish and other non-administrative species simply go where they need to go.
And humans? “Something there is that doesn't love a wall,” said Robert Frost, the poet, but you wouldn't know it if you were the proverbial alien here to figure out what makes us tick.
Is it true that the people who profit most from war and the borders that war creates actively work to ensure that the jurisdictions administering both sides of a border have enough weapons to justify their designation as threats to the other side? Do the arms dealers and gun runners of the world sell to anyone and everyone so that they will always profit, no matter who wins when border lines are violently disputed?
“Of course they do,” he thinks as he allows his own edges to dissolve, hoping as he does so that our species will find a way to soften rather than harden the borders that so effectively divide us. If we do come to our senses, it will not be because of anything we are told to do in the “national interest,” but rather because of what we choose to do in the shared interests of all of our fellow earthlings on this tiny planet.
This is crystal clear to Bob as he falls asleep by the fire.
He wakes up in the morning shivering, aware of the sand on his skin. The CBC on his radio is going on about border disputes and tariffs while Bob concentrates on finding coffee. In spite of last night's deep thoughts, Bob takes comfort in the fact that he lives on an island where the most important border is the natural one between land and sea.
In the same way that most of Haida Gwaii escaped the worst of the last Ice Age, providing a refuge for those creatures lucky enough to be here, he hopes it will somehow escape the worst of the border wars currently threatening to engulf the entire world in a military-industrial Fire Age ignited “in the national interests” of all of us.