RE-ENTERING THE RED ZONE

There’s an unofficial understanding that, as a Canadian, I am not supposed to be travelling in the United States. I have a few friends who have refused to cross the border for many years, probably dating back to Trump’s first term as president. To them, the U.S. seems like a scary place or, at least, a place that is extremely foreign compared to Canada where citizens seem to be considerably more tolerant of differences and much less inclined to discuss political opinions. We express our views at the voting box (or via mail-in ballots), not loudly at a table at a local café. The “unofficial” avoidance of going to the U.S. officially began around the time of Trump’s second term when he started taking pot-shots at Canada, stating it should be the 51^st state and rushing to impose tariffs on one of what are traditionally the closest allies of the U.S.

 

A year and a half later, Trump still occasionally mentions the 51^st state thing to rile Canadians, distract Americans and be a commonplace menace. Many Canadians continue to choose other countries to visit.

 

I don’t have a choice. I go to the U.S. because I lived there for sixteen years from 13 to 30. My family continues to live in Texas and Colorado. I’m the only one who decided to return to Canada. My boyfriend, whom I met in Seattle in 2022 during Biden’s presidency, also lives in the U.S., currently Colorado as well. I’ve viewed visiting American friends as a luxury and have thus avoided trips to Boston, Cedar Rapids, Tulsa and Los Angeles, but I will not end my relationship with Evan just because Americans put Trump back in the White House. A president will not be the end of us. So, yes, hello again, Colorado.

 

It used to be that my parents would fly to Vancouver to visit me and I would fly to the family cottage in Ontario to fit in a second visit with them. But all that changed a couple of years ago. My parents, now eighty-six and eighty-nine, are done with navigating airports and flying places. They also can’t handle the altitude in Colorado so they’ve stopped visiting my sister and their granddaughter here. 

 

In order to see them, I must do so on American soil. I can no longer avoid entry to Texas. This is an early Father’s Day visit, five days in completely air-conditioned spaces because outside temperatures rest in the thirties (in Celsius, not that Texans or Coloradans or other Americans, for that matter, know anything about that scale). Basically, it’s going to be very, very hot for the entire time I’m there so I’ll find “relief” immersed in very, very cold artificial indoor conditions. 

 

Oh, if only temperatures were the only significant adjustment for this Canadian.

 

My parents voted for Trump in 2016, 2020 and 2024. My mother purports to be an “Independent” but, when I ask if she’s ever voted for a Democratic candidate for president in the forty-eight years she’s lived in the U.S., the answer is no. (She did once vote for third-party hopeful Ross Perot.) 

 

Over the years, we’ve had some heated phone calls when anything political comes into conversation. I think the only issues we’ve ever agreed on are gun control and Queen Elizabeth II had ugly purses. There is no other common ground. 

 

This wouldn’t be so problematic but for the fact my parents are news junkies. When I step out of the guest bedroom in the morning, a news program is on. It may well have already been playing for an hour and it will continue for at least another hour. I sit in a chair in the living room, ostensibly to be social, biting my tongue every time either parent adds their own commentary about the news. I have a rebuttal at the ready, but I’ve learned it’s better to search for new Instagram followers instead and “like” the latest photos from Lake Bled in Slovenia and the striking landscapes of the Lofoten Islands in Norway.

 

All is well as my parents step out onto the balcony for breakfast and I take my rental car to a local café to write, the one with a biblical quote from Luke taking up a whole wall. 

 

Evenings are dicier. My parents tune in for another hour of news, first on Fox News—yep, that network—and then on CBS. My mother always chimes in about fairness of Fox, especially when it comes to her favoured news anchor, Bret Baier. Typically, I sit through one Fox newscast per visit. I’m genuinely curious about what biases it is feeding my parents. (The days of unbiased news coverage officially died when Trump first campaigned for president, the final nail in the coffin coming when Kellyanne Conway repeatedly talked straight-faced of “alternative facts.”)

 

After my first sit-through of Fox News, I retreat to the bedroom for subsequent broadcasts of the evening news. I read the news as presented by CBC (the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) and scan the headlines on CNN’s website. I’m as up on the news of the day as much as I want to be. 

 

Given our striking differences in almost everything political, my parents and I have reached an unofficial détente whereby we don’t engage when one of us expresses a political view. This came to be a few years ago during my parents’ last trip to Vancouver. As I popped up to my parents’ room after dinner in the hotel restaurant, my mother stepped into the bathroom and, by the time she stepped out, my father and I were yelling at one another, my father insisting that Hunter Biden was wholly relevant to the assessment of Joe Biden’s presidency. I was incensed that he would see things that way and he was equally incensed that I didn’t.

 

After decades of no-win political disputes, enough was enough. Under no circumstances would my parents change my opinions and the same applied to my own impassioned arguments. The impasse would always be. 

 

The dynamics can be tricky in a newsy household as it’s two against one during my visits. I tell myself that, when my parents express a political view, they are conversing with one another, not me. I don’t ask them to turn off the news or to even watch a little less. I will always be the guest now on visits. It’s their home. They have their own habits and make their own choices about how to be informed and entertained.

 

It's only five days. I’ve got this. 

A DIFFERENT WORLD

Okay, I survived my visit to Texas. My family relations are intact. Still, there were parts of the trip that mystified me. Why, for instance, does a chopped-up highway, much of it under construction, have a speed limit of 75 miles per hour? Just keeping with the flow of traffic as I navigated a parade of semis felt like taking my life in my hands. If Texans can’t drive 55, how about 60…or even 65? (“There’ve been lots of bad accidents on that road,” my father said. No kidding!) 

 

Next time, I might take the connector flight from DFW to my parents’ local airport.

 

My parents live in a condo building with oversized units. Theirs is about three thousand square feet, including a walk-in closet to die for. Texas likes things supersized from vehicles to homes. (My nephew, an exception, lives in a “tiny home” near Austin.) I jogged all through their neighborhood which was full of monstrous homes that made me wonder, Who lives there and what in the world do they do with all that space? Do days pass when they never see another family member? Do they sometimes skip meals because the kitchen is too far? 

 

Fortunately, we did drive through some older neighborhoods where the homes had character. Some houses might even have been described as bungalows. Lovely. This also got us off The Loop which circles Tyler and is dotted with strip malls, gas stations, fast food outlets and car dealerships. Yeesh. Zero charm anywhere along the way.

 

One of my takeaways from my visit is the notion that Texans don’t like change. This includes denying a changing world (e.g., global warming) if those changes mean they have to do something differently, however innocuous. Going out for meals, I realized Texas—or the places we went, at least—wasn’t doing anything to consider its environmental footprint. People drank from paper coffee cups even as they stayed and finished their drinks in the restaurant. Everyone had plastic straws. They automatically came with every cold drink. Doggy bags were Styrofoam containers. Can’t remember the last time I’ve seen Styrofoam. Later, as I asked at my parents’ home where to put some recycling, my mother explained (to her chagrin) the condominium complex voted down recycling. No one wanted to haul a big bin out for weekly pickup. I hadn’t realized opting out was an option. How is it people are still resisting recycling?

 

All of this was extremely frustrating. In British Columbia, we go strawless (or use admittedly icky paper straws). Food containers and to-go utensils are made from recyclable materials and are compostable. I know the focus needs to be on what we do as individuals, but it’s mighty maddening knowing that large swaths of the planet are doing nothing. There are easy fixes but Texas won’t go there. To change would constitute a nod to the possibility of climate change deep in oil country. Why have any regard for environmental impact?

 

And so I segue into the political/religious milieu of what I experienced in Texas. To be clear, I did not have conversations with strangers. I did not mention the orange dude’s name and, thankfully, my ears didn’t prick up with others talking about him. Whew. Things were more subtle. On Sunday, I drove along The Loop, stopping at a dozen gas stations and drugstores, on a quest for a copy of The New York Times. Nothing doing. I can only conclude that Tyler, Texas does not carry that paper. Why would it want something representing that dang “liberal media”? Why would it want another point of view? 

 

As I knew would be the case, my parents watched Fox News each night… “but only the broadcast with Bret Baier.” A balanced journalist, as my mother asserted. I tried watching. On a segment about the government shutdown, all their interviews and quotes were from Republicans except for one Democrat whose aired soundbite wasn’t even a full sentence. Sorry. Nothing balanced about that, no matter who the news anchor is. I did not point this out; instead, I went to the guest bedroom and did a Wall Street Journal crossword.

 

At the coffee shop where I wrote on a couple of mornings, there was a Bible quote from Luke covering a full wall. I don’t recall the quote as being particularly polarizing; I’m just not used to having anything biblical in my face as I have my oat milk latte. Stranger perhaps was when I returned my Hertz rental car at DFW. As I got out of the car and greeted the attendant with a friendly, “How are you?” she responded, “I’m great because the Lord Jesus Christ is still my Savior.” Um. What? Is that even allowed from an employee to a customer? Of course it is. It’s Texas!

 

Sheesh.

 

Perhaps the most bizarre moment came during the last twenty minutes of my stay at my parents’. While my father was in his office space, giving away personal information that might well have been part of a scam (“I hung up before I gave away too much.”), my mother entered the living room and began a monologue of news items of the day, each piece delivered with a distinctly skewed conservative bent. Don’t respond, I told myself. But how could I read my novel while she continued to rant? 

 

My mother knows very well how radically different our views are. As she rattled on, I wondered if I had done anything to bring this on. I couldn’t recall making a single political statement. I’d duly admired churches (“nice architecture”), strolled rose gardens and obligingly sampled egg salad for dinner. I can only assume that slipping out while Bret Baier finished his newscast the night prior had left my mother thinking I was missing out. 

 

I really wanted to keep my head down, to stare at the paragraphs of my open book. That would signal I was otherwise occupied. But then I also knew this would be interpreted as ignoring my mother. Guilt trip to follow. I made occasional eye contact, doing my best to keep my facial expression neutral. My mother surprised me with an out of left-field (er…right-field) Margaret Thatcher quote about socialism. Please, I thought, Let this command newscast come to an end. 

 

But not soon enough. I finally had to interrupt. “I’ve had a really nice visit. Can we please not end it on politics?” One more political comment and that was a wrap.

 

Later at DFW airport as I waited for my flight to depart, I scrolled Twitter as a break from writing on my laptop. My eyes caught the name Margaret Thatcher. I stopped scrolling. By god, it was a Fox News tweet—how is that in my feed?—with the exact quote my mother had spewed that morning. And yet she claims she’s not beholden to the network. It was a disappointing ending to the visit. I did my best to shake it off, trying not to think how much a single news source was shaping her views.

 

Oh, Texas. What have you done to my parents? After forty-seven years of them living there, they are most definitely full-fledged Texans. They have always been conservative. Just not so unabashedly so. Still, I feel a sense of triumph. They will not change; rather. Instead, it is up to me to change. I kept my mouth shut for once. I’d like to think they will have nicer memories of my visit. In the end, that’s what counts.