One foot in Canada, the other in Vermont

By Jason Szep

DERBY LINE, Vermont/STANSTEAD, Quebec, June 23 (Reuters) - You can sit at a wooden table with one foot in Canada and the other in the United States, and type on a laptop computer resting in both nations, which is what I did.

That is why this story has two datelines and one author. It is told from the Haskell Free Library and Opera House, possibly one of the oddest buildings in North America.

The 102-year-old Victorian brick building sits foursquare on the U.S.-Canadian border. You can enter from Vermont, but its back-door emergency exit is in Canada.

Up a wooden flight of stairs is an opera house where patrons sit in the United States and applaud performances on a Canadian stage. Canadians park on one side of the building, Americans on the other.

There are no immigration officers waiting outside the building's thick oak doors, asking for identification; there are no lines of cars or people. Just the hushed quiet of a library and occasional voices whispering in English and French.

The library has two addresses and two payrolls -- one for U.S. staff, one for Canadians. Some workers speak in English; others in the French-Canadian dialect of Quebec.

Paying taxes, complicated anywhere, is double the work. The north side of the building and land demand Canadian taxes and paperwork; U.S. returns are filled out for the south.

After a day of interviewing locals in Vermont and Quebec about security at a remote U.S. Customs outpost, it was an ideal venue for writing the story. It summed up exactly why tightening the U.S.-Canada border will be so tough.

The building's most notable feature is perhaps its smallest -- the thin black line painted precisely along the 49th parallel to settle a dispute in 1970 between U.S. and Canadian insurers.

The line delineates the border but most staff and regulars pay it no attention, breezing over it or stepping on it.

I couldn't help staring at it: the faded black paint on maplewood floorboards that disappears into white bookshelves full of magazines, reappearing in the hallway.

In a single day, chief librarian Nancy Rumery says she crosses it "something like one hundred times".

"BEATLES CONCERT"

An interview with Rumery is a glimpse into life on the edge of America's 5,500-mile (8,900-km) divide with Canada, where histories, people and economies are deeply interwoven.

Her parents are Canadian. Her husband is American. Her home is in Derby Line, a Vermont village whose Main Street is shared by the two countries.

The library, she says, is a haven from the border politics that often dominate the area.

"I think of this as a bubble," she says from a chair on the Quebec side, inches from Vermont. "It transcends the whole border thing. We're in both countries and in some way we are in neither country."

Built by American sawmill owner Carlos Haskell and his Canadian wife as a monument to strong U.S.-Canadian relations, the building has barely changed in a lifetime. Even the cherubs in a Rococo-themed mural of Venice in the opera house maintain most of their original pink paint.

It is full of legends. Some are real, like the story of library patrons in World War Two carrying identification cards in an effort to guard against spies. Other tales were inflated by time, like the one about the time The Beatles performed.

"The most famous story connected with the building never happened," Rumery said. "A whole generation of kids grew up in this area telling people they played here. It's a myth."

Occasionally, U.S. authorities hold quiet meetings in the library with Canadians they want to question without requiring either party to leave its own country. "Once you are in the building it's a kind of safety zone," Rumery said.

Talk in Washington of erecting a fence on the U.S. border alarms Rumery. But even if security is tightened to the north, she reckons her sanctuary will remain intact. "Unless precedent is broken I don't think it will affect this institution."

(Article is no longer on reuters.com)