FORKS — After being a registered immigrant for 26 years, Brenda Carlsen is thinking about a change.
A Canadian who lives and works in Forks, Carlsen is so delighted with Barack Obama’s election that she wants to become a U.S. citizen.
“I’ve got to get it together,” in order to vote in the next presidential election, said Carlsen, 53 and a carrier of a “resident alien” card since she moved to the United States in 1982.
Obama’s presidency ushers in “a whole new era, a wonderful era,” Carlsen believes.
Her family in Canada feels as she does that the United States is ready for new leadership. They haven’t always been fans of the U.S. government.
And when Carlsen met Eric, the man who’d bring her to the States, her parents were perplexed.
“You just don’t marry an American. It’s like jumping ship,” she said.
Brenda said the stereotypical view held by some Canadians goes like this: Americans believe they’re at the center of the universe; their nation rules the globe, but its people don’t know much about world geography.
Where’s Alberta?
For example, Brenda added, when she’d tell Washingtonians she went to nursing school in Calgary, the capital of Alberta, she often heard: “Where’s that?”
Carlsen laughs about all of this, and says she loves her life in Forks.
It was August 1981 when she met the young American intent on wooing her.
Her cousin’s wedding in Vancouver brought them together; after their first date, “he sent me a beautiful card and a ticket to the Port Townsend ferry,” Brenda remembered.
So she drove. And drove. To Bellingham, then all the way to Forks.
“That was before computers, so you had to write cards and letters. You had to drive. It was really scary,” to a 26-year-old who’d grown up in Regina, Saskatchewan.
But Eric and Brenda clicked. They were engaged the following February and married in October 1982.
“My dad really doesn’t like Americans,” Brenda said.
“But he loves my husband.”
Two cultures
The Carlsens raised their children, Alex, 22, Brittany, 20, and Ciara, 15, in two cultures.
They’ve driven together through blizzards at Christmas and Easter, to visit the Canadian side of the family.
Ciara, however, has been told she “talks funny.”
It’s that Canadian thing again: Brenda says serviette instead of napkin, soother instead of binky and chesterfield instead of couch.
She calls her mother Mum, and says she cannot get her mouth around the American “Mawm.”
Bonnie McGee is another Canadian who fell for an American — too fast for her family to protest.
Bonnie and Steve met at the University of Saskatchewan; he was from Fairbanks, Alaska, and she was from Saskatoon.
“It was love at first sight,” Bonnie said. She offered to type his graduate thesis. They went out for Chinese food to discuss that, supposedly.
“While we were sitting there, I felt this wave. It was like a hot flash, but I was 24 years old. I thought, ‘I am going to marry this man,'” Bonnie remembered.
They wedding came in January 1979 in Fairbanks, and the couple later moved to Juneau.
Bonnie taught school and became a U.S. citizen in order to vote and, she said, “to be a good role model,” for her students.
More reserved
When asked about cultural differences between her Canadian family and Steve’s Alaskan clan, Bonnie said her folks are on the reserved side.
“Alaskans were very warm and open. My family is Scandinavian in origin; people didn’t walk in the door and hug. Where I came from, it was more prim and proper.”
And if somebody showed up around dinner time at Steve’s house, the family just “threw another plate on the table.”
Bonnie was taught one really ought to have an invitation.
Brenda, meanwhile, said her people are another story.
While Canadians in cities such as Victoria or Vancouver show their province’s proper British influence, “the farther east you go, the wilder it gets,” she said, adding that in the Eastern European immigrant community where she grew up, people loved their cabbage rolls and perogi, not tea and dainty sandwiches.
So like the United States, Canada is a salad bowl of ethnic groups and cultures.
Bonnie, with all her reserve, didn’t hold back when discussing the American election.
“Bush was seen as a bully,” by many of the Canadians she knows.
With President-elect Obama, “I’m hoping the whole world will see our country as a better country.” This, Bonnie added, “is a glorious moment of hope.”
For both Bonnie and Brenda, immigrating to the United States in 1979 and 1982, respectively, was a relatively straightforward process.
Crossings ‘more nervous’
But border crossings have become, as Bonnie puts it, “more nervous.”
“We travel back and forth to visit my family, and in the last few years, the border has become less comfortable than it ever has been,” she said.
Americans who want to marry Canadians today must apply for a visa for the immigrant bride or groom, and the wait can last five months, said Sharon Rummery, spokesperson for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (www.USCIS.gov) .
A $930 fee covers the applications for legal residency and a work permit, while another $80 is for “biometrics,” aka fingerprinting, for the immigrant.
In 2006, the most recent year for which Rummery had statistics, 339,843 immigrant spouses moved into the United States.
Brenda, a nurse at Forks Community Hospital for two and a half decades, has always celebrated both the American Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of November and Canadian Thanksgiving on the second Monday in October.
Canada’s holiday is “more about the harvest,” with no attendant Plymouth Rock-pilgrims story, Brenda said.
As one who’s long been active in the Forks community, she’s well-acquainted with immigrants from the opposite border.
When asked for her thoughts on immigration policy, Brenda expressed a hope that the undocumented people who’ve come here to work be offered some pathway toward legal status.
“I think something should be worked out for the ones who’re already here. You cannot send every single person back,” she said.
Brenda added that she knows migrants who, hoping to escape desperately poor lives in Mexico, spent thousands of dollars to come north in the back of a truck.
“We don’t know what they’ve been through,” she said. “If they can become legal, that could increase involvement of Hispanics in the community, because they would no longer be hiding.
“It makes better business sense, for goodness’ sake. If it wasn’t for them, there is a lot of work that wouldn’t get done. It’s just reality.”
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Editor Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
