One of the unique thing about living in Kingston is the proximity of small town USA. Most border crossings in eastern Canada are either city to city like at Detroit or Buffalo, or they are into wilderness like Maine and New Brunswick. That part of the border between Ontario and New York State along the St. Lawrence, however, is a largely made up of small towns like Watertown, Massena and Ogdensburg facing Kingston, Cornwall and Brockville. It is an interesting arrangement. I watch WWTI TV from Waterville, 30 miles due south, for the weather as the bit of eastern Lake Ontaro we share is something of a tropical micro climate. The other day it snowed north, east, south and west of here but not here on the coast.

It has not always been so nice. This corner of the Great Lakes has been an area of flux for as long as humans have been passing through. The Algonquins, Hurons and Mohawk all clashed here as did the French and English. Fort Frontenac in the middle of the City must be the longest continuously serving military base in North America, being under the gun since 1678. Three nations - France, Britain, Canada - have use its walls to guard the mouth of the Cataraqui river, the route to the north from the Lake. In the War of 1812 there were many ugly battles in the area on both side of the border and, at the end of the war, one-half of the US navy and one-third of the US army was based at Sackets Harbor just south of here. By the end of the 1800's, the frontier had cooled and the naval stations at Kingston and Sackets Harbor shut down.

The armies, however, stayed and the neighbour to CFB Kingston is Fort Drum, a huge US base just east of Waterville. Listening to North Country Public Radio this morning, I hear that about 680 local smalltown reservists and National Guard are training as part of the deployment to Iraq of 100,000 to replace the first wave of soldiers who fought their way in. Watching sports reports about the local NY high school football and the unending ads for far more car dealerships than a small town would otherwise warrant, it is clear a lot of these kids are neighbours, folks who I would have been sitting among at Syracuse v. West Virginia this afternoon had I not gotten sick.