Winter Wonderland

We've been hearing all these horror stories about Mexico lately, with drug cartels rampaging in the streets, so if you ask me, this Canadian thing seems a little overblown.

Snowmobiles? That shit sounds enterprising. We keep talking about the spirit of this country, but when you see guys rocketing through the border on snowmobiles with haybales of weed, that's not just talking the talk, that's walking the walk.

Of course the "downer" aspect is they are trying to crush this entrepreneurial spirit. Maybe we ought to leave them alone and just go all out against Mexico? These Canadians aren't shooting anyone, at least not walking right down the middle of the street and shooting anyone. In fact conquering Mexico outright might be a good plan because it's warm down there. I would not have an interest in conquering Canadia. This winter has sucked big time.

Border Patrol agent Glenn Pickering slowed his rumbling snowmobile to a stop and eyed two trails of churned-up snow running down a riverbank.

A recent government report says the terrorist threat from Canada is greater than from Mexico, and that only 32 miles of the border is adequately patrolled.

They were snowmobile tracks leading out onto the ice of the frozen St. Lawrence River that runs between upstate New York and Canada. At night smugglers race across the ice with bags of marijuana. Pickering shielded his eyes with his hand as the wind covered the tracks; he couldn't see whether they went all the way across the border.

"There are all these islands out here, and the snowmobiles just come shooting across," Pickering said. "It's a constant battle."
This is the United States' forgotten border, where federal agents and police play cat-and-mouse with smugglers and illegal immigrants along 4,000 miles of a mostly unmarked and unfortified frontier with Canada. Unlike the southern border with Mexico, where drug-related violence has exploded in recent years, the northern border rarely makes headlines.

That changed this month after the U.S. Government Accountability Office released a report warning that the terrorist threat from Canada was higher than from Mexico because of the vast swaths of unprotected frontier. Just 32 miles of the 4,000-mile border have an acceptable level of Border Patrol security, with agents available to make on-site arrests, the report said.

[Associated Press]