Last month, I did the unthinkable. Unthinkable to many Canadians anyway. I traveled to the United States. Around the same time, CTV News reported a 31.4% drop in Canadians crossing the border and CBC News told me the number one reason for that drop is fear. If this is true, that means for every ten Canadians who hear I crossed the border, a little fewer than three will gnash their teeth, wail in horror, “You did WHAT?!!?” and hit the ground in a faint.
I can hear my data researcher friend, Mike, groaning at CTV’s “31.4%” now.
“Why the decimal point, CTV?!” Mike would cry, shaking his fists at the CTV news app. “Who CARES about the decimal?? It’s thirty-one percent!! Thirty-one I tell you!!!”
Whichever percentage you are working with, this much is obvious. Many Canadians are avoiding the United States, and that fear CBC talked about seems to be stoked by the thought of one man. President Trump. Or, as my local butcher and grocery store cashier liked to call him last week, Orangeman.
“Orangeman?!” I thought as I left the grocery store, refusing the five-cent bag and balancing a brick of butter and two lemons on a head of Romaine lettuce. “Sounds like a comic book super villain! Is that what President Trump is? A comic book super villain??”
Thinking my three prayer challenges on Hallow were causing me to miss something of death ray proportions, I scoured the headlines for news of President Trump’s evil plan. I primed my search by first reading Google’s “Best Ten Evil Plans from Superhero Villain Movies”. Try as I might I could find no breaking stories of President Trump trying to cull all mutants, destroy Superman, assume control of Spiderman’s body, or annihilate half the universe. That meant one of two things. That President Trump is not a super villain named Orangeman or that he is and has not hatched his plan yet. Doubting that one thousand Canadian dollars, no longer enough to buy two weeks of groceries and gas in this country, would impact anything President Trump had planned, I booked a flight for my son, Julian, and me to visit my sister in New Hampshire.
“Do you think you will have trouble crossing the border?” a friend asked when I told him where I was headed for the weekend.
I had not thought about that. However, many Canadians have, and it is no wonder with Global News, CBC, and even the Canadian government parroting unfounded Facebook rumours of U.S. Border Control Officers throwing innocent foreigners in holding cells, searching smartphones for AOC retweets, and inflicting psychological torture on would-be travellers by screaming into their faces, “DO YOU LIKE DONALD TRUMP?!!?” and hoping the wrong answer gives them an excuse to put Canadians in cuffs.
“Where are you going fishing?” the U.S. Border Control Officer asked Julian after I had told him we were traveling to New Hampshire so Julian could fish with his uncle, and I could visit my sister.
“Why is he asking that??!” my mind screamed while my eyes darted fearfully around the room. “Who wants to know??!”
“Not sure,” Julian answered, looking into the camera for the mandatory photo. I braced; waiting for border officers to swoop in, beat us with batons, and threaten us with a body cavity search if we did not cough up the name of that lake.
Instead, the Officer folded up our passports and popped them back on the counter.
“All done,” he said, smiling. “Have a great time.”
Huh. I guess all is normal at the border. Someone should tell the CBC and those immigration lawyers they interviewed back in April. The ones who advised Canadians to treat their trip to Newark like an MI5 mission to North Korea by “packing a burner phone” and practicing backing away from men with guns while casually saying, “It’s okay. I don’t want to travel today.”
If crossing the border proved one story about the United States to be false, one weekend in New Hampshire debunked a volume’s worth of tales about environmental calamity, dirty cities, and rude Americans. New Hampshire is green and gorgeous, Boston’s cleanliness puts Toronto and Montreal to shame, and Americans are friendlier than the cashiers at my local grocery store. In fact, after my weekend visit, I now believe that if Canadians should fear anyone in the United States, it should not be President Trump or Americans. It should be the Satanists.
It was on the second day of the visit, with Julian and his uncle gone fishing, that my sister asked if I would like to go to Salem, Massachusetts.
“I am not sure if you will like it,” my sister cautioned. “But I can’t think of anything else to do on a rainy day.”
I knew about the Salem witch trials. Sixteen months of mass hysteria that started in February of 1692 and led to the townspeople murdering twenty people. Eight in one day! Other than the history of witch trials, and a smattering at that, I did not know anything about Salem.
“Why?” I asked. “Is it run by Satanists or something?” I was half joking.
“Well, there are a lot of psychics and tarot cards,” my sister answered.
I touched the Blessed Virgin Mary medallion around my neck and grasped the rosary beads in my purse.
“It’s okay,” I said. “We can go. I just won’t go into any of the shops.”
The skies cleared as we drove away from my sister’s home in New Hampshire. Puffy white clouds parted to expose patches of brilliant blue.
“The day is improving!” we sang as we exited onto the highway that led to Salem. Like a scolding from the heavens, the clouds closed in, and traffic slowed to a crawl. When we finally pulled into town, the sky was dark slate, and a swirling wind was buffeting trees and picking loose garbage up off the sidewalk.
“It’s like The Witches of Eastwick!” my sister laughed nervously.
A town can have a vibe, communicated even to the interior of a car. If you drive past some pretty buildings, smiling people, and charming bridges crossing sparkling creeks, that vibe can call at you to park the car, look around, and find a spot for lunch. Salem had some pretty buildings. But with the sidewalks dominated by scowling people in Satan t-shirts and goth gear, the only call I heard was to lock the doors, douse the car with holy water, and find the quickest way out of there.
Still, we needed lunch. My sister parked the car while I looked down a side street at a row of occult shops. A shop called Pentagram announced itself with a giant metal pentagram and Pride flag, both swaying in the wind above the door. As my sister turned off the engine, two women shuffled up the sidewalk beside our car, looking like they had just been cast in a television commercial for a shop called Pentagram.
“Give me a minute,” I said to my sister who was starting to open her door. “I think this might call for the prayer to Saint Michael.” I made my ninety-second plea to God’s Archangel to defend us in spiritual battle, and we were ready to hit Salem’s Mexican restaurant for lunch.
The streets were busy with people. In my typical fashion, I looked for chances to smile or offer a friendly hello to strangers. There was no cheerful laughter, happy chatter, or “Can you take our picture?” to open the door for a friendly exchange. And as for eye contact, raging extrovert speak for close friendship, it was hard to glean “I’m up for a cheery bit of chit chat” from someone with purple contact lenses, charcoaled eyes, white face, and black lips at two o’clock on a Saturday afternoon.
After half an hour of wandering, my sister and I arrived at the same conclusion. While a few windbreaker-and-sneaker-wearing people in Salem were curious visitors like us, the vast majority, looking grey and unhealthy, dressed for an adults-only Halloween parade, and prowling in and out of dark magic shops with the seriousness of people late for an afternoon sacrifice, were there for different reasons.
By the time we completed our one attraction, the Witch Dungeon Museum, featuring what our guide called a “mostly” accurate witch trial reenactment and a dungeon tour that would make Dracula’s skin crawl, I was shivering from a cold that had nothing to do with the outdoor temperature.
“This town is lost!” I thought, leaving the museum in despair, rounding a street corner, and giving a wide berth to another row of occult shops. “CBC is right! Stay home, 31.4%! The world outside your bubble is a scary place!”
Just as I was thinking my next Substack would be titled “Fear Everything”, we turned another corner and saw Jesus.
He was floating in clouds above a modest, red-brick church, his left hand raised in a blessing, his right gently touching his tunic where his heart would be, and rays of soft pink and blue light streaming from the place where his fingers met the cloth. He was on a billboard, installed on the bell tower of Saint John Paul II Shrine of Divine Mercy, a Catholic church flanking the main square and facing the section of Salem we had just toured. Despair left me as quickly as if the good Lord had caught up to me on the sidewalk, grasped my elbow, and whispered into my ear, “Be not afraid.”
“I have to go in,” I told my sister and finding an open side door, we climbed the short flight of stairs to the nave of the church.
The sounds of wind and cars were swallowed by a still silence as we entered a warmly lit space. A small group of parishioners kneeled in pews, heads bowed, and hands clasped in prayer. On the altar was a golden monstrance holding the Blessed Sacrament, what the secularist might call a large bread wafer and what Catholics call the body and blood, soul and divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ. Believing Catholics understand that Jesus Christ was in that church, surrounded by witch trial museums, black magic shops, dark clouds, and a whipping wind, and whispering peacefully to anyone who listened, “Be not afraid.”
I kneeled in a pew behind them, thinking that maybe Salem was not lost after all, that here was a reason for hope. I carried that feeling back to my sister’s place until my son asked, “Did you go to Salem?”
“We did,” I answered.
“Did you visit the Satanic Temple?”
When I responded with a disbelieving snort, he showed me the Google listing. The Satanic Temple, religious destination in Salem, Massachusetts and international headquarters for modern Satanists.
“I was kind of wondering when you said you were going there,” Julian said.
That explains all those people! That explains the chill of Salem! That explains a town that seemed to revel in the dark! With one Google search, hope was gone, and I was a CBC News consumer gnashing my teeth and ready to hit the floor in a faint.
It was G.K. Chesterton who knocked me out of it when I was finally home and reading one of his essays. Chesterton writes that just as someone drawing on canvas or a blackboard knows their surface is white or black, “We, as Christians, should always believe that this is a white world with black spots, not a black world with white spots. I should always believe that the good in it was its primary plan.”
Read too much news and you start to see a black world that keeps you at home watching more news. Focus on the number of psychics and tarot decks for sale and you start to see a black town you might choose not to visit. But it was only by going to Salem that I stumbled on the church and maybe it was because of Salem’s black spots that the white world was so clear, that I was properly struck by the light of God.
So, yes, I fear the Satanists because just as much as they revel in the dark, so can I. I might not have the purple contact lenses, black lipstick, and Satan t-shirts but I do have 24-hour news, the ability to fear, and the temptation to scowl at the world and burn people at the stake. Sounds like a version of Satanism to me.
Me? I am cancelling my order for that burner phone, booking another trip to see my sister, and going to Mass in the morning. In the unlikely event that 31.4% of Canadians are correct and Orangeman is bent on annihilating half the universe, I can only hope that when he points his plasma cannon on me, I am laughing with people I love or kneeling in a pew, head bowed and soul calm with the only One who matters grasping my elbow and whispering in my ear, “Be not afraid.”
Author’s note: The day before publishing this article, Canada’s national newspaper, The National Post, published two front-page articles about the Canada-U.S. border. The first, about a Vancouver firefighter denied entry to the United States, headlined the firefighter’s catchy quote, “Good enough to fight their wars but not good enough to cross their border.” Most readers would stop there and miss the details further down the article. Like the fact that the firefighter is not, in fact, Canadian, but a British subject with permanent residency in Canada. That he requires a special visa to travel to the United States and that his visa had expired. The second story tells of a 70-year-old man deported for kicking a border guard dog. The few readers that read to the end of the article would have read that the kick sent the poor animal flying and forced it off the job for five days. The 70-year-old-man’s suitcase, the one the dog had been attempting to sniff, was full of contraband food.
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