ICE FISHING IN AMERICA

...What abides in the North Country, Mosher says, is a "healthy frontier anti-authoritarianism," a "distaste for government bureaucracy," an impatience for the "crybabies out in California," and the "strongest sense of independence...

...A judge would laugh such a case out of court, you know, arresting René, over a few bottles of beer, a small present for his friends across the friendliest border in the world...

...Not to mention their fishing rights...

...In late September of this year, hundreds of farmers from Montana and the Dakotas blocked the border in protest at Canada's dumping of cheap wheat on the American market...

...Briefly recalled here as well is the story of Louis Riel, a French-speaking Catholic métis, who established a provisional government of his own in Rupert's Land in 1869, taking it as his mission to establish a new Vatican in the North American prairies, and whose armed, messianic movement was finally crushed in 1885...

...ICE FISHING IN AMERICA Life on the U.S.-Canadian Border By Preston Jones No one in New York or Washington or even Boston expects to find much happening out along the United States' northern border—and most of the people who live there seem to think that's just fine...

...in Canadian history at the University of Ottawa...

...Mosher observes that there "seems to be an unwritten government agreement to maintain a hands-off policy toward the Akwe-sasne Territory"—which is the main reason this reservation has become a smuggler's paradise...

...North Country is not a profound book...

...And then there is a growing concern among Canadian government officials over the influence of the White Aryan Resistance types who inhabit the little-policed mountains in Idaho's panhandle—men like the one Mosher spoke to, who sported swastika tattoos on his arms, packed a revolver in a shoulder holster, and announced himself devoted to living free of electricity, schools, the devil, and writers...

...But besides fishing, what predominates in this collection of over fifty short essays is the story of the independent-minded men and women who are glad to dwell in out-of-the-way places...

...In 1997, as much cheap American booze was smuggled from New York into Ontario (where alcohol is sold primarily in expensive, government-run stores) as was smuggled into America from Canada during Prohibition...

...Known as the Indian Stream Rebellion," Mosher writes, "this impromptu border-country insurrection lasted until 1842 when, as part of the Webster-Ashbur-ton Treaty, the disputed tip of New Hampshire passed peaceably to the United States...

...ing here, bass fishing there, and salmon fishing on the Pacific coast, "in upper Michigan and Minnesota and Montana and Washington . . . fishing seemed to be the universal North Country sport linking the people I met with their territory, their history, and one another across the generations...

...But it is a fine essay in Americana—a reminder that there are still parts of North America that remain as they have always been: violent, lusty, romantic, dull, patriotic, anti-government, and concerned above all with the next day's fishing...

...in horticulture, who successfully convinced his people to settle their grievances lawfully, not, as they used to do, with home-made bombs...

...This same treaty brought a resolution to a border dispute—actually a series of slugfests remembered as the Aroostook War— between lumberjacks in Maine and New Brunswick...

...No problem," Ti René tells Mosher: "Look, Ti René is no criminal...

...Something along the same lines can be said of the Akwesasne Indian reservation that straddles the New York-Ontario border...

...Then there is six-foot-plus Ti René (Acadian for "Little René"), who would just as soon employ his bush plane to smuggle cigarettes and beer into Quebec as lend his flying talents to local law agencies in pursuit of drug-runners, which he has done on occasion...

...Among the stories told along the border is that of Fred Jackson, game warden in northern Maine's French-speaking Madawaska Republic, who, to trap poachers, has "immersed himself up to his nose in the icy water of beaver runs, huddled under a thin plastic sheet in freezing November sleet, and clung to snowy granite cliffs for hours on end...

...The northlanders—Vermont author Howard Frank Mosher explains in his North Country: A Personal Journey Through the Borderland, newly issued in paperback—are just as pleased to preserve their reputation for dullness...

...The U.S.-Canada border hasn't always been as friendly...

...It is thus somewhat peculiar that Mosher never mentions the crusade for statehood that gained some ground in Michigan's Upper Peninsula in the 1970s and 1980s, or the movement that hopes someday to carve a nation called "Cascadia" out of Washington, Idaho, British Columbia, and Alberta...

...It wasn't until the 1930s that the United States and Canada stopped paying military strategists to maintain plans of attack and defense against one another, and things can still grow tense...

...His borderland is rather a place where regional concerns outweigh the distant national pronouncements of Ottawa and Washington, D.C...

...This reservation was also the site of violence in the early 1980s, with Mohawk factions fighting one another and police on both sides of the border...

...Here Mosher introduces Solomon Cook, a Cornell Ph.D...

...Time and again," Mosher notes as he devotes page after page to trout fishPreston Jones is finishing his Ph.D...

...left in America today...

...In 1832, for example, several hundred American, French Canadian, and Indian hunters, loggers, homesteaders, river drivers, and trappers banded together, raised a militia, wrote a constitution, and declared northern New Hampshire independent of both the United States and Canada...

...But, except for a brief spat with one abrupt Canadian border agent, there are no international hard feelings in Mosher's North Country...

...Mosher, however, does recount some of the borderland's little-known historical independence movements...