If you don’t think cultures can change themselves radically in a short time, then look no further than the West’s complete paradigm shift on tobacco smoking to be proved wrong. I’m little more than a spring chicken, but I’m still old enough to remember when every restaurant had a large smoking area, and every bar was full of the haze and stink of cigarette smoke. But now, we fear tobacco smoke as if even seeing it across a room will rip our lungs out of our bodies and leave us, instantly, spluttering vainly for air. Areas where smokers can pursue their vice have been narrowed down almost to extinction.
               And yet, the very nature of smoking, of smoke itself, makes it an act almost impossible to confine by restrictions and divisions of space. At the Starbucks I go to most often, there are five outdoor tables; three are along the window of the store, and the other two are set out in the sidewalk to suggest a caffeine fix to passersby. Of these tables, three bear conspicuous NO SMOKING stickers. One table is neutral on the subject. And one, the farthest from the door of course, is so libertine as to offer an ashtray. But, as today’s rain tumbles down hard and cold, the disheveled man in toque and stubble who is nursing his coffee and chain smoking a pack of Export Lights at the ashtray table is making a mockery of smoking and non-smoking sections by sending his smoke indiscriminately across all five tables. I can smell it quite strongly at the door, which is supposed to be a safe-zone from such pollution.
               I prefer sitting out with the smokers. Even though I rarely, if ever, smoke – an act I find more dull than disgusting – it’s still a little way to kick at the sort of benevolent totalitarianism that tries to put the healthy in one place and keep the unclean off in their corner. Like any such attempt to impose a clear distinction between this and not-this, shunting smokers to their separate corner ignores the reality of grey areas in life, and as the non-smoker in the smoking section, I rather enjoy being the variable in the equation. Smoke knows that boundaries, like the invisible line between smoking and non-smoking, are ultimately meaningless; my neighbour is on one side and I the other, but he puffs away and I am wrapped in smoke. The forests of Quebec burn one hot June, and a hundred kilometers or more away the city of Montreal disappears into a wood-scented brown haze. I am I, he is he, but his smoke breaks down the distinction. This is forest, this is city, as far from each other conceptually as the east is from the west. Yet now the city smells like the forest, and no protest of their difference can change that. The wind goes where it will, and nothing we can do will change it.

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I grew up in a house full of old books, and I spent most of those years exploring them. I remember, in an article on Canada from the 60s, seeing a picture of a house that straddled the USA-Canada border. The laundry line in the yard stretched from one country to another. Such trivialization of the border seems impossible now, in our post-World Trade Center era of terrorism and paranoia. But living in a border town, as I do, the line between the two countries seems insignificant even now. I am Canadian, yet I spent four years at college in the United States. I go to a Canadian church, yet the congregation has more than a few Americans who drive across the line for the day every Sunday. People are like smoke; they find a way to go where they want.

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On my last day in the States, at the end of my college years, I climbed the little mountain outside of town with some friends and looked down from the top on the rolling Idaho hills beneath me. Moscow Mountain is no Everest, but it is high enough (or perhaps the rest of Idaho is flat enough) that we could see for what seemed like endless miles. At the bottom of the mountain, the pines of the slopes faded into the patchwork of the fields to show how far human hands had come. The different browns and greens of the farms notched together neatly, changing instantly at the boundaries between fields and properties: a vast, mechanical grid, as far as the eye could see. The wind whipped around me, and as the sun set off to my right purple clouds went scudding across the sky in disorderly heaps of light and shade. Their shadows moved with them across the grasses, trespassing heedlessly into one farm and then another. As the wind bent the grasses, they caught the light in different ways, and I watched the shape of the air currents move from here to there, twisting and writhing from one field to the next. Far away, a farmer was burning a pile of brush, and from the tiny tongue of orange licking at the sky a breath of smoke whispered out and drifted silently away on the breeze.
               “Life,” the preacher of Ecclesiastes wrote, “is a vapour... to try to control it is like shepherding wind.” Just when we think we have control over who and where we are, the wind shifts, and we go with it. The next morning I packed the last of my things and left Idaho. I crossed from Idaho to Washington, and from Washington to British Columbia without restraint. I stood, first on one side of the border and then on the other, and I could feel no difference. I was the same person on both sides, the same vapour blown somewhere else by the same wind, and no lines on a map could stop me. And the morning after that, I went to church and found the embraces of my old friends, still myself and yet, like a wisp of cigarette smoke, sent out on the wind and wrapped vapour-like around something else.