The most obvious thing one can say about international borders, although not therefore an uninteresting thing, is that they are fictional. I was born in Northern Michigan, around 70 miles as the crow flies from the border that divides Lake Superior between the United States and Canada. If I were to sail those 70 miles to the point on Lake Superior where the border is supposed to be, there would be nothing. There are no naturally-occurring lines on the ground or water that differentiate the United States from Canada (or any country from any other). There is nothing that makes the land on one side “Canada” and the other side “not Canada,” except for the fact that a lot of people got together and agreed to treat it as such.

Humans often mark political borders where they can, and those markers make the borders, in some sense, concrete and visible. In every forested place along the long land border between the United States and Canada, for example, the two governments have cleared the trees and brush for a 20-foot width along the borderline, creating a visible line. But what you see is a clearing in the woods; the thing being marked remains imaginary. If the trees were allowed to grow back, the land would once again be undifferentiated.

In Northern Maine there is a hiking trail that, for a short distance, follows the Canadian borderline exactly. A hiker could zigzag back and forth, touching a Canadian tree and then an American tree, and then a Canadian one again. Nothing changes for the hiker as they do this. They are in the same clearing in the woods, not two different places.

Though borders are fictions, it doesn’t follow, at least not exactly, that borders are not “real.” Fictional things, imaginary things, can shape reality and build worlds if enough people agree to give them that power. But they remain in their essence intangible, on the verge of disappearing if everyone would only look away.

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Author Laila Lalami says in the book Conditional Citizens, “The border is an in-between space, where laws that seem settled elsewhere may not always apply.” Here is one instance: Small non-commercial boats that cross the border from Canada to the United States on Lake Superior are required to report their arrival to Customs and Border Protection. However, if a boat departs from the United States, sails over the border to Canada but never lands, and then returns to the United States, its occupants are not required to report this border crossing to officials at all. It is an established principle of U.S. law that if someone departs, crosses the border, but returns before being officially admitted to another country, they have never left at all. Legally, even though they crossed the border to Canada, they remained in the United States. These types of journeys are called “cruises to nowhere.”

Just as it is possible to leave the United States without legally leaving, it is possible to enter it without entering. The shipping container is one example. The essay “border box,” published on the now-defunct website Border Town, by architects Stephen Becker and Rob Holmes describes the possible path of a shipping container unloaded in Norfolk, Virginia and transported 200 miles by train to the Virginia Inland Port. Only there, when the container is finally opened, does the cargo it contains finally “enter” the United States in a legal sense.

According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, “Imported goods are not legally entered [into the country] until after the shipment has arrived within the port of entry, delivery of the merchandise has been authorized by CBP, and estimated duties have been paid.” If this happens at Virginia Inland Port, it is after the cargo has already traveled hundreds of miles inland and been within U.S. borders for an indeterminate amount of time, maybe days. Virginia Inland Port is one of several such facilities that are located inland from the coast as a way to lessen the congestion at container ports.

Per Becker and Holmes, the shipping container, the walls of the container itself, function as “a miniature, portable, re-definable border. When it is sealed, goods are frozen in their country of origin, and cannot be removed from that country through any physical operation short of breaking the seal.” The shipping container is on an extended “cruise to nowhere,” until someone finally decides it has arrived.

This is true for people too, in a way. Because people seeking entry at the border of the United States have fewer rights than those already acknowledged to have entered the country, courts have to determine when a person has officially entered. The answer has surprisingly little to do with whether or not the person was within the country’s borders. Instead, it generally turns on the question of whether such a person has been free from “government restraint” while on U.S. soil, that restraint itself forming a kind of border that has nothing to do with the border that appeared on maps.

The examples are numerous, drawn from court cases that have shaped U.S. immigration law: A person denied entry at Ellis Island was not considered to have entered the United States, even though Ellis Island is within the United States, because they were perpetually under government restraint while there. A group of men who walked a short distance past the Canadian border south into New York, but were being surveilled by immigration agents from the time they crossed until they were apprehended, had not entered the United States because the surveillance constituted government restraint. On the other hand, people who managed to escape from government restraint, such as two people who snuck out of an airport lounge where they were being held awaiting deportation, had suddenly managed to cross an invisible border and “enter” the United States.

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What does it mean to say that borders are fictional? Among other things, it means that they are drawn on maps where they have never previously existed, or described with words in treaties, even though they do not actually exist without these references. They are colonial. They are largely the result of people with power (mostly in Europe as it happens) divvying up the lands of the earth.

Borders, says author and academic Reece Jones in his book Violent Borders, “are treated as if they have always existed eternally,” as natural as mountain ranges or tectonic plates. But in reality, “even the oldest political borders are only a few hundred years old; most are only a few decades old.” As soon as they are decided on, they can be changed.

Growing up, I knew that I had German ancestry (among other kinds). I understood that to mean that my ancestors had come to the United States from Germany. But the country that is now known as Germany has only existed as such since 1871, just over 150 years ago and after most of my ancestors had already left. Throughout recorded history, the territory that is now Germany has been divided dozens, if not hundreds of different ways, into kingdoms, city states, and other designations. Few of my ancestors would have understood themselves to be from Germany. Instead, they were from Prussia, Westphalia, or Württemberg.

Italy (unified and founded in 1861), Belgium (1830), and Greece (1821) have similar histories. Many European countries, particularly in the eastern portion of the continent, are even more recent than that, with most gaining their current names and forms sometime in the 20th century. Some Balkan countries are newly delineated and named since the year 2000. In the United States, we tend to think of European countries as timeless, ageless things, the “old world” that has existed since long before the Declaration of Independence created new borders on the North American continent. In reality, the map of Europe (and the world) has been continually changing.

There is no better illustration of the arbitrariness of colonial borders than the continent of Africa, the modern borders of which were largely determined by a group of Europeans who had never been there. In 1884, European leaders gathered in Berlin in order to reach an agreement about how they would colonize and rule various territorial parcels of Africa—and therefore extract resources from those pieces of land. No Africans were present and few in attendance had ever been to or would ever visit the continent.

Although the conference itself was, on the surface, not meant to be about agreeing on borders, it began a string of negotiations that would ultimately determine the majority of the borders in Africa. Politicians and diplomats negotiated borders and drew them on maps, using geographical features like lakes and rivers, as well as lines of latitude and longitude, to determine where the borders should be. That they had generally never seen the land in question did not matter to them. By 1913, almost the entire African continent was under European control, despite no one in Africa having a say over it. To this day, the majority of international borders in Africa remain those that were drawn by white men a continent away.

Besides all that was thievish, unjust, and inhumane about this, the borders the Europeans imagined for themselves were often incoherent on the ground. They frequently split up the traditional lands of various ethnic groups, sometimes leaving families divided into multiple nations. Existing territorial claims (at least those made by actual Africans) were ignored. The borders in many cases failed to take terrain into account either. Europeans gave “away mountains and rivers and lakes to each other, only hindered by the small impediments that we never knew exactly where the mountains and rivers and lakes were,” according to one politician. To this day many of Africa’s borders have never been surveyed or demarcated on the ground. And borders that arbitrarily divide members of the same ethnic group from each other are more likely to be spots of violence and conflict, as people try to remake their native land in a way that actually makes sense to them.

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Borders exist only because of the agreement to treat them as real. But not everyone is in on that agreement. Many Indigenous peoples of Canada and the United States (and no doubt throughout the world), deny the border, which runs through the ancestral homelands of at least 40 indigenous groups.

It’s a theme that comes up repeatedly in border literature. Passamaquoddy tribal leader Donald Soctomah of Maine told author Porter Fox of his tribe closing down an international port of entry for thirty minutes to protest the border, as related in Fox’s book Northland. “We don’t recognize the boundary,” he said. “And once we do recognize the boundary, we are losing half of ourselves.”

In her book All the Agents and Saints, Stephanie Elizondo Griest gets to know members of Akwesasne, a Mohawk community in upstate New York whose territory straddles what most people know as the United States/Canada border. However, one family tells her they prefer to say “north of the river or south of the river” rather than referring to the United States or Canada. “When you acknowledge the border, you make it real.”

In 1927, an appeals court was asked to decide whether U.S. immigration law applies to Indigenous peoples from Canada. They found quite emphatically that it does not, because the border itself does not apply. “From the Indian viewpoint, he crosses no boundary line. For him this does not exist.” By now this has been codified as law. Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, Canadian-born people with at least 50% “blood of the American Indian race” can enter, live in, and work in the United States without immigration restrictions. They are not required to obtain green cards, can work without first obtaining work authorization, and can never be deported or otherwise required to leave. And should they desire a green card for any reason, the law considers it not a status being granted, but acknowledgement of a status that already exists.

This is all perfectly logical, considering that the Indigenous people in question have been on this continent since long before this colonial border existed. (With limited exceptions, no similar treaty or precedent protects the rights of indigenous people in Mexico.) At the same time, Indigenous people who qualify under this part of the law do still have to prove that they qualify, meaning they must prove to border officials that the border does not apply to them. Mohawk scholar Audra Simpson (among others) has documented how difficult this can be at times, with U.S. border guards poorly trained or simply inclined to disregard this part of the law. But with proper documentation and determination, many Indigenous people from Canada can make the border disappear.

This law originally traces back to the Jay Treaty signed between the United States and England in 1794, which guaranteed that Indigenous peoples living on either side of the border could freely cross the line. Unfortunately, Canada hasn’t allowed the same freedom of movement, on the grounds that the Jay Treaty was between the United States and Britain, not the United States and Canada, and therefore Canada isn’t bound to recognize it.

“He crosses no boundary line. For him this does not exist.”

But only when traveling from north to south. On the return trip, that boundary line reappears. Canada insists on telling a different story.

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Perhaps borders are another example of what Resmaa Menakem, in his book My Grandmother’s Hands refers to as “a myth with teeth and claws.” He said this about the idea of race (a surprisingly parallel concept), but I think it may apply to borders as well. To borrow from Menakem further, though, until we recognize borders for the collective delusion they are, they might as well be real. In other words, as long as we continue to treat borders as factual, concrete, real, perhaps it doesn’t do much good to point out that they aren’t.

Yet as Becker and Holmes note in their reflection on shipping containers, because borders are fictional, they are therefore “as malleable as we collectively decide we want them to be.” As borders are drawn, so can they be erased. In the case of the shipping container, the sailboat on a cruise to nowhere, and the immigrant, that malleability has traditionally been used for the government’s convenience. The border is there unless it isn’t, it matters until it doesn’t.

But it is a failure of imagination to think that borders can be ignored, manipulated, redrawn, or erased for shipping containers and pleasure craft but not to allow all human beings the same freedom of movement. As indigenous people across the world remind us, we can imagine the future in part by looking at what came before. In 2009, Mohawk activist Kanietakeron from Akwesasne got sick of waiting for colonial governments to reimagine borders. He used his backhoe to dig up three of the granite obelisks that marked the international borderline within Akwesasne and then took a jackhammer to them.

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The 20-foot strip of cleared land along the United States/Canada border is formally known as the “border vista,” a name which evokes the border as a bucolic setting of charming scenery. So charming, in fact, that there is a vineyard named after it where you can sip Border Vista Rosé. Colloquially, though, the cleared line is known as “the slash.”

In 2013, the United States International Boundary Commission’s acting commissioner, Kyle Hipsley told reporter Julia Shipley of the newspaper Seven Days that the purpose of the slash is to make sure that “the average person” knows they are on the border (and, it is implied, head off any claim that one had crossed the border on accident). And yet why, absent anything else, would a cleared stretch of land be obviously a border? A more likely assumption, when encountering a long, clear strip of land in the woods, would be that it is a trail.

And in a few spots, it is. Dividing Maine and New Brunswick, the border trail forms part of the International Appalachian Trail and the Eastern Continental Trail. Various hikers have shared their impressions of this stretch of trail via personal blogs and forum posts. The dominant theme of many of these accounts is the number of beaver lodges that have flooded the trail in multiple locations, uncontained by any one country.

One hiker named Owen Eigenbrot describes weaving between both countries as I imagined a hiker might, finding himself in Canada without having left the United States, and wondering what would happen if he kept going farther into New Brunswick. But he wasn’t worried. After all, he wrote on the blog Hike for Days, “Who cared about two hikers ping-ponging between countries? Anyone? Not the moose, not the trees, not the beaver. Certainly not the mosquitoes or thunderstorms, which berated us regardless of which country we were in.” Our fictions mean nothing to them.