The Niagara River does nothing by half measures.  It hardly can.  Think your “in-box” is full?  Imagine this: after descending only 30 feet along the 1,000 mile stretch from Lake Superior to Lake Erie, the entirety of the water generated by the 87,000 square miles of the four upper Great Lakes then pours into the Niagara, where it plunges the next 325 feet to Lake Ontario in the river’s scant 35-mile length.  And even this rapid journey is telescoped, with the last 150 feet or so of descent accomplished in one spectacular leap at Niagara Falls.  This is not just a river.  It is a brute fact carved upon the landscape, an elemental force that animates and defines the region around it.

It also divides that region. 

Indeed, the easiest way to imagine the Niagara River is as a natural border given added symbolic power by the thunderous and impassable majesty of the Falls.  Certainly the history of the United States and Canada, rife with conflict and punctuated by the occasional war, offers much to support such a vision.  But this perspective, tempting as it is, captures only one element of the complex and dynamic history of the Niagara Frontier.  If the river is a border, it is also a crossroads, a place of connections.  Its roaring waters make the Niagara a potent symbol of separation ­ but why are the waters roaring?  Because the river links the vast Great Lakes watershed to the Atlantic ocean.  What divides also connects.  With a little imagination, one looks at the Niagara and sees not a border, but a nexus ­ a “middle ground” where cultures, economies, and even geologies have encountered each other, creating a dynamic history and a unique regional identity.  This is the great opportunity presented by borders:  when different peoples come into contact, they do not necessarily compete with each other for dominance in a zero-sum game.  Rather, something new can be created, something that represents not a victory of one side over another, but a joining together of efforts to achieve common goals that could not be reached ­ or perhaps even be imagined ­ separately.