By Sarah Schweitzer, Globe Staff, 11/26/2002
ESTCOURT STATION, Maine - Michel Jalbert, a 32-year-old Canadian forestry worker, dipped into this speck of an outpost last month to fuel up with cheap American gas at Oulett's Gaz Bar before setting off on a moose hunting expedition.
He stumbled into an international controversy instead.
Jalbert was arrested and jailed for crossing the border without notifying American officials, and worse, traveling into the United States with a rifle in the back of his truck. Canadians reacted with outrage, fuming that a citizen could be incarcerated for more than a month for a practice that had long quietly carried on, with no consequences for the lawbreakers.
It was, many Canadians said, yet another sign of American heavy-handedness in plugging holes along the 4,000-mile border following Sept. 11 - this time reaching into a highly symbolic pocket of friendship between the two countries, an oddity of a place where some residents sleep with their head in the United States and their feet in Canada.
The incident has caused such diplomatic pique that US Secretary of State Colin L. Powell waded into the issue two weeks ago at a meeting with Canada's minister of foreign affairs, Bill Graham, in Ottawa. ''It is not any kind of pattern, and I don't expect it to be any kind of recurring problem,'' he said when pressed by Canadian journalists.
But Canadians have continued to lob criticism at the United States, even after Jalbert was released from jail on $5,000 bail Nov. 14, the same day Powell visited Ottawa. They have been particularly outspoken on the US attorney's decision to continue prosecuting Jalbert on three charges that could result in more jail time after a trial scheduled for January. Jalbert has pleaded not guilty.
The US attorney's ''small-time mean-spiritedness sends a louder message to Canadians than Powell's vague assurance,'' editorialized the Montreal Gazette. ''Powell might be sensitive to the damage done to US-Canada relations, but the US officials on the ground, it's painfully obvious, are not.''
Jim Michie, spokesman for the US Customs Service in Washington, acknowledged that Americans and Canadians once danced across the border but that enforcement is now tougher - and Jalbert was forewarned by a sign near the gas station saying anyone coming into the United States should report to a customs station.
''Things have changed since 9/11,'' said Michie, contending that Jalbert ventured ''at least 17 meters'' - about 56 feet - into US territory. ''That's why we're requiring them to register at the customs station. All entries are regarded the same.''
But for some Canadians, the Jalbert case is an example of the United States' growing infringement upon Canadian sovereignty in the name of antiterrorism vigilance. Recent months have seen a spate of controversial incidents, including the United States' deportation to Syria of a Syrian-born Canadian suspected of terrorism links and US officials' refusal to allow Canada to interview one of its citizens being held at the US detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Canadians have also reacted critically to a policy requiring that citizens of countries identified as state sponsors of terrorism - Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, and Syria - undergo special checks when they enter the United States, a policy that has since been relaxed. In a well-publicized case after the policy took effect, Rohinton Mistry, a Canadian author of Indian descent, canceled the second leg of a US tour, saying he feared being harassed at the border.
The US-Canada border was once the longest undefended divide in the world and among the most porous, with free trade encouraged by the North American Free Trade Agreement and trading-post malls along the nations' fringes. But terrorist threats have radically altered views of the border, particularly after intelligence suggested that Canada, with a military considered NATO's weakest link, could be a haven for Osama bin Laden's operatives.
While Canada has increased its own border watches, the United States has assigned troops to northern posts and uses military helicopters to patrol the region. The United States has also deployed customs agents specially trained to detect nuclear and biological weapons at the country's busiest seaports of Vancouver, Montreal, and Halifax.
No one in Estcourt Station - population four, and dwindling - believed the watchful government eye would ever train on their township, one of 108 in Maine's Aroostook County, but the most remote, sitting at the northernmost point in the continental United States.
''In all my years, never a problem with the border,'' said Edmund Levesque, 83, a retired railroad worker whose house sits opposite the Canadian customs house.
The township, now little more than one street with a few homes and a store, relies on its Canadian counterpart, Pohenegamook - a logging town with a growing summer tourist trade drawn to its picturesque lake - for nearly all its services, including fire, ambulance, and trash pickup.
Yet American soil offers a place to do what can't be done in Canada.
The footbridge leading from Pohenegamook's center to the American store was dubbed Tobacco Bridge because so many Canadians trekked over the St. Francis River for cheaper cigarettes. A drive-in movie theater once sat next to Oulett's Gaz Bar, back when Quebec banned such theaters.
The theater is gone now, with just the gas station pitched on the spit of land surrounded by dense forest and reachable only from a driveway that begins in Canada and ends in the United States. A sign at the US line warns that crossers must visit the customs office, which sits about three-quarters of a mile down the road, opposite the J. D. Irving sawmill.
For years, Canadians by the hundreds went to the gas station each week, never bothering to let American officials know of their comings and goings - certain of safe harbor because border guards seemed to pay no mind.
''There's not even a fence there,'' said Jalbert, speaking in French as his wife and brothers prepared to go to a pig roast in his honor Saturday night. ''It was an invisible line. And crossing it was a habit.''
But US officials say Jalbert had been warned twice recently that the rules had changed - that he must check with customs. Still, as the news of Jalbert's jailing ricocheted across Canada, landing on newspaper front pages and serving as grist for national call-in shows, talk in Estcourt has turned to logistics. On the American side, residents worry that they will no longer be served by the Canadian fire and ambulance service. Already, they have to carry trash to the Canadian line.
''This is a little Canada,'' said Philip Dumond, 71, a retired game warden who has lived in Estcourt Station for nearly 50 years. ''But what it's come down to is this: You're either American or Canadian.''
Canadians are taking precautions. Visitors to the US inspection station have increased, and the gas station reports only a handful of patrons after 2 p.m., the hour US inspectors go home. Parents have taken to warning their children not to play near a nebulous area that switches from Canadian to US territory.
''The kids don't see the difference,'' said Guy Leblanc, the Canadian customs officer and town councilor. ''To them it's a playground - not a different country.''
Sarah Schweitzer can be reached at schweitzer@....
This story ran on page A1 of the Boston Globe on 11/26/2002.
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2002 Globe Newspaper Company.