Beating the Bounds

I was five, on a rare family vacation to visit relatives in Portugal, when I crossed my first international land border.

I must have been on someone’s lap, because we were six in the car, backseat safety belts hardly a concern, driving through a vast park that hugs the Norte region of the country. I recall very little of this road trip; I couldn’t tell you what the trees looked like in Peneda-Gerês National Park, if the shrubs bled onto the pavement, could not describe for you the tint of mountains in the distance. I can’t remember if we drove with the windows rolled down, if I shut my eyes against the wind in my face, or if I tried pressing an arm into the rush of air, making waves with my hand. What I do remember is a luminescent green blur of landscape, and how when my ever-nonchalant uncle announced coolly that “by the way, we’re in Spain right now,” this information felt enormous and incomprehensible to me.

In the atlas in my brother’s room back home, every country was shaded a different color, the places where they touched traced by a thick band of red or black. In Spain that afternoon, I remember my eyes moving frantically from windows to windshield, searching for a line in the terrain that spread out in all directions, for any evidence that could corroborate my uncle’s wild talk. The only other border I had experienced up to that point was between Portugal and Canada, contrasting points of family emigration and deportation stretched across an ocean, and it took an entire sleepless night of travel in a cigarette-smoke-filled plane to cross between the two places. Already by that age I understood that the movement between countries was a source of stress. But what is a border you can’t see or feel? That doesn’t slice thickly through a landscape in clean, clear division? That doesn’t make itself screamingly known?

A couple years earlier, in 1985, a handful of countries in Western Europe had signed the Schengen Agreement, abolishing the border checkpoints between them, but this wave of free-movement-Europe wouldn’t officially reach this far south until the ’90s, when Portugal and Spain signed on. (My mother, who was not on that road trip, crossed the Spanish border only once, long before I was born. “There was a cod shortage on our side at the time,” she explained when I asked recently, and I tried not to laugh at the Portuguese-ness of the scenario. She recounted checkpoints, authorities, restrictions, and having to get out of the car to walk across the dividing line to buy her salt fish.) I don’t know how deep into Spain we...