“So, are we in Canada or the U.S.?” he asked, confused but earnest.
“What's the difference?” answered his friend. “It all looks the same from here.”
It was a birthday party, but the tourists didn't know that either. There were no balloons, no cake, no pin the tail on the mountain goat.
Instead, the kids - all sixth-graders, half from Canada and half from Montana - were lined up in two rows facing each other, shaking hands.
“In the name of God,” they said in unison, “we will not take up arms against each other. We will work for peace, maintain liberty, strive for freedom and demand equal opportunities for all mankind. May the long-existing peace between our two nations stimulate other peoples to follow this example.”
That's the sort of thing kids say at a birthday party for the world's first international peace park.
When these kids, and the folks who brought them here, talk about the park, they're actually talking about two parks. For 75 years, since 1932, Glacier National Park and Waterton Lakes National Park have been joined in a very special way.
Glacier bumps hard against the Canadian line from the south, and Waterton pushes down from the north, the only separation in this wildly preserved landscape an artificial boundary drawn by politicians.
Drive across it and the border is solid, stark, armed, well-defended. Fly over it, though, and it disappears. The mountains march north and south here. The rivers flow north and south. The critters migrate north and south, and not one gives a thought to the international line. Here, the world does as it pleases.
That was a fact not lost on “Kootenai” Brown and “Death-on-the-Trail” Reynolds, two of the first to join hands across the border here.
John Brown, a failed gold-rusher, became first boss at Waterton when that Canadian park was established in 1910. Henry Reynolds, a former logger, became the first ranger to patrol the borderlands when Glacier was made a park in 1911.
Old “Death-on-the-Trail,” as his name suggests, was hell for walking, and often stomped north to visit with Brown. They became fast friends, and together were the first to suggest erasing political boundaries in this place so far removed from social seats of power.
“Geology recognized no boundaries,” Reynolds once said. He lived at the south end of Waterton Lake, in Montana, and Brown on the northern shore, in Alberta. “No man-made boundary could cleave the waters apart.”
Brown agreed, saying “it might be well to have a preserve and breeding grounds in conjunction with the United States Glacier Park.”
And they were right, of course, but well ahead of their time.
“They were the original spark,” said Doug Thornton, a Canadian and member of the Rotary Club. “But it took the Rotarians to help see it through.”
In 1931, the first world war was over, the Great Depression was looming, Europe was simmering with potential strife and “the Canadians began talking about peace,” Thornton said.
They also were talking about parks, because parks were all the rage. The Great Northern Railway, in an effort to market its passenger lines, was building its great hotels - Prince of Wales in Waterton, Lake McDonald Lodge in Glacier - and the North American road trip was born.
People from both sides of the border were crossing the international line, exploring the mountain parks. It was striking, perhaps, after all those years of warfare, that two countries could share such an open border, and Rotarians from both sides of the line wanted a way to celebrate this new neighborliness.
They met in Waterton, a perch from which both countries could be seen spread out in alpine wonder, then met some more, cajoled and lobbied and by 1932 pushed the notion of the world's first international peace park through both federal governments.
In 1812, the countries had been at war. Slightly more than a century later, “we were joined in a spirit of peace and cooperation,” Thornton said. “That cooperation continues today.”
The international line was the first to bisect this landscape. Then came states and provinces, Indian reservations and counties and cities and national forests and private properties and, finally, parks.
It is difficult, at best, to maneuver through this tangle of jurisdictional complexity, and so Jack Potter and Bill Dolan spend a lot of time talking to one another. Both have maps in their offices - Potter's in Glacier, Dolan's in Waterton - that show the landscape as it was a couple centuries back. There are no straight lines, no arbitrary boundaries.
This is how these land managers like to think about their shared ecosystem.
They imagine, Dolan said, “people, wildlife and ideas passing freely across the boundary between two countries, two protected areas.”
The two parks coordinate administrations, with joint training, joint staff meetings, mutual aid agreements. They work together to provide visitor services, a linked trail system, shared permitting duties. Glacier and Waterton conduct scientific research together, manage fire together, monitor the native ecosystem together. They exchange staff now and then, take high-level hikes together, build combined educational programs.
Every day, Potter said, phones are ringing across the border. It's a modern-day version of those long walks “Death-on-the-Trail” took to see his friend “Kootenai.”
Down at the University of Montana in Missoula, and up at the University of Calgary, professors are collaborating to study all sorts of transboundary issues. They look at international boundaries, private-public boundaries, tribal boundaries, park boundaries.
The students, said UM professor Len Broberg, are trained to understand both sides of the border, a wonder in this American-centric world where at least some Canadians call the line “the world's longest one-way mirror.”
The idea, Broberg said, is “thinking in a larger scale. The parks are very central to this project. They are the hub, in many ways, of the entire program.”
Broberg keeps referring to “the parks,” but the Rotarians, like those sixth-graders up on Logan Pass, insist it is simply “the park.” Glacier is not a World Heritage Site, and neither is Waterton. But together they are.
It is a hopeful way of seeing the world, and it is growing.
In 1988, there were just 59 groups of adjoining protected areas straddling international borders. By 2001, the number had increased to 169, involving more than 660 individual protected areas.
“Boundary wars have been resolved by creating shared protected areas,” said Steve Thompson, an organizer of the Waterton-Glacier birthday party.
Peru and Ecuador have agreed to establish a transboundary park in the disputed Cordillera del Condor area. Others include Costa Rica and Panama (La Amistad National Park), and Costa Rica and Nicaragua (the Si-a-Paz project).
Even the embattled Middle East has found a measure of peace in shared parks: The 1994 peace treaty between Israel and Jordan includes joint protection of coral reefs that sprawl across the two countries' border. Similar solutions have been proposed for such unlikely places as the Golan Heights and the demilitarized zones between the Koreas.
The most striking examples of peace parks as part of the peace process, however, are in war-torn Africa. Those protected areas straddle Namibia, Botswana, Zambia, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Mozambique and Swaziland.
Already, peace parks have sprung up among Macedonia, Greece and Albania, between Czechoslovakia and Poland, between Yugoslavia and Croatia. Many of those parks were parts of larger peace accords; likewise, many peace park negotiations helped lead to broader peace accords.
One of the most optimistic proposals rolling today would use the peace park concept to help mend a longstanding rift between Pakistan and India, two nuclear powers that are battling over the wild and disputed border area of Kashmir.
“And it all started right here in Waterton-Glacier,” Thompson said, his red “Canada” hat flapping in a stiff north wind. “People come here from all over the world to understand the idea of peace parks.”
All these kids here on the pass wrote essays, drew pictures, penned poems, describing “What's so special about your place?”
It was a transboundary contest intended to supplement a mapping project Thompson is coordinating for the National Geographic Society. The idea is to identify the natural, cultural, historical and social highlights of the shared region, and to look for ways of preserving them.
It is a map of heritage, and like the wild animals here it recognizes no boundaries.
If people take their home ground for granted, Thompson said, they run the risk of losing what makes it special. Seeing it on a map makes it real, provides a shared sense of place that transcends personal opinion, political party or international boundary.
“It's about us,” he said. “These are still real places with real people.”
Likewise, “we take our peaceful relations for granted at our own peril. We need to remember now and then to celebrate and reaffirm peace and cooperation between these two nations.”
We need to do that because Canadian Rotarian Kevin McIsaac was late for the ceremony. Seems he was hung up by border agents on his way to celebrate unity.
“Not all borders are so easily crossed,” he said.
Unless, of course, you're 12.
“They're just exactly like us,” said Johnniann Thompson, a contest winner from Lincoln. “We're the same.”
The night before they traveled to Logan Pass, these kids from two countries and one cultural ecosystem sat down together and learned about the park's natural history. They learned about the history of the peace park, and about its future, too.
They sat around a campfire ring with no fire, which everyone understood here in the dry days, and then they played truth or dare together, late into the evening, because they are 12.
“They're my friends,” young Stephen Hockstein said of his new American acquaintances. “We like the same things. We do the same things. I didn't know the parks were a peace park before this, but I think it's good. I don't want wars happening between anybody here.”
In fact, he figures it might be a good idea to build a peace park between Iraq and Iran, and between Germany and, well, whichever country borders it.
“I don't know,” he said. “It's just got me thinking about it, and I think peace parks could make a lot of changes in the world.”
And with that he's up the trail, shoulder-to-shoulder with his new American buddy from Kalispell, exploring the place they both call home.
Could be Canada. Could be Montana. Doesn't matter. It all looks the same from here.
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