A Canadian Motorcycle Diary

On Sunday my charming local bookstore hosted an event featuring esteemed Canadian author, Derek Lundy (The Bloody Red Hand, The Way of a Ship). Lundy was reading from and discussing his most recent book, Borderlands: Riding the Edge of America (Knopf Canada). This author has been prolific in producing intelligent, well-researched books on a wide variety of topics. Books that cut beautifully to the very essence of the matter at hand.

This time out, Lundy did it up old school, loading his gear onto a Kawasaki 650 cc “Thumper” motorcycle and heading for the open road. The road in question was vast and daunting: in all a “15,000-kilometer trek to observe and explain the American obsession with security.”

Lundy, who is Canadian but started out Irish, brings a delicate eye and a seasoned pen to his travels as he motors along the very bottom and top of America, thinking about how things were and are and how they still might be.

“The periphery of a place can tell us a great deal about its heartland,” Lundy writes, “along the edge of a nation’s territory, its real prejudices, fears and obsessions -- but also its virtues -- irrepressibly bubble up as its people confront the ‘other’ whom they admire, or fear, or hold in contempt, and know little about. September 11, 2001, changed the United States utterly and nothing more so than the physical reality, the perception -- and the meaning -- of its borders.”