Borders are places on the way to somewhere else. Places you pass through, not places you go. Some are heavily fortified, like the US-Mexico border or the Israel-Gaza border. Others seem to exist only as an idea. But they are liminal zones, neither here nor there, both here and there. And they are home to a unique culture. Remote from their own capital, those who live on borders—borderers—tend to be forgotten, misunderstood, and treated with suspicion.

The border is a line that birds cannot see.

So wrote Arizona State Poet Laureate Alberto Rios, about the border between the US and Mexico: a straight line through dusty hills, bisecting a desert alive with death, providing plentiful carrion for beady-eyed raptors. Marked by that infamous wall, birds can see the border, but ignore it, sometimes contemptuously perching on it to survey their domain.

Across an ocean from that frontier is a muddy line nobody can see. The UK-Ireland border meanders erratically across fields and farms, bisecting villages, pubs and homes. If that border had a personality, it would be a muddled old man, unsure where he has been, or where he is going next. The US-Mexico border, on the other hand, is young, decisive, purposeful. Both borders, however, are seething with anger and old vendettas, cradling hope and despair alike.

Not long ago, I returned to the Irish border, after fifty years living away. When I grew up there, in Blackrock, a seaside village adjacent to the town of Dundalk, you could see the border, but most people ignored it. We were all smugglers, stuffing groceries under the back seat, wearing five layers of clothes, twisting our way home in the darkening evening on “unapproved” roads, between rough hedgerows and ivy-clad trees. We could cross the border in our imaginations too: while the rest of the country watched dull interviews with clerics and politicians on low-budget RTÉ, we had access to BBC and ITV. It gave us a window to the outside world: Swinging London, Carnaby Street—and, more darkly, the “Troubles” to the north.

But otherwise, it seemed the most humdrum existence, a damp seaside town in a country of drab villages, walled in by the strict doctrine of the Catholic Church and the false certainties of Irish nationalism. Across the virtual wall, in the North, was the mirror image: “Free” Presbyterians as unfree as we were, strange bowler-hatted men who thundered and drummed ancient triumphs over the Pope’s forces and the heathens—that was us—to the south.

A half century abroad changes your perspective. Aside from the occasional fleeting visit, I had stayed away; now, as I revisited Blackrock, I was astonished by its beauty.

I had forgotten all this, or never noticed it. Looking north, the Cooley Hills ease into the chilly Irish Sea like a tentative swimmer; eastward, the hard, rippled sand of Dundalk Bay extends forever, as if you could walk across to Wales; the jagged rocks that give the village its name trap eels, urchins, and small fish. In memory it was dull grey, but it greeted me in full colour. My dismal village was now one of the most sought-after addresses in the country, its main street lined by trendy cafes and the expensive cars of tech bros.

Six years earlier, half a world away, on a beautiful June evening, I was making my way home from Victoria, where I was a Professor and Director of MBA Programs at the University of Victoria’s Gustavson School of Business. My commute, from Victoria to Vancouver, is glorious, the ferry weaving a meandering path between pine-topped islands in the gentle Strait of Georgia, interrupted every now and then by breaching Orcas.

Taking my seat, I opened my phone to learn that the UK had voted for Brexit. It was shocking news, but only later did its implications become clear to me.

As part of the United Kingdom, Northern Ireland would leave the European Union while the Republic stayed in—and that meant there had to be some form of border once again. In the early 2000s, the border had been dismantled following the Good Friday Agreement that put an end, more or less, to the Troubles. Now, the threat that it might be reimposed brought fears that the violence would reignite.

I began to realize how little I knew about the place I came from. I had proudly followed the headlines, about Ireland’s transformation from a repressed, impoverished island to a socially progressive economic powerhouse, but these reports dealt with the Republic as a whole, not the border region. How could the violence come back? Didn’t the Good Friday Agreement solve everything? Didn’t the country’s new secularity smooth over its old intolerance? Didn’t economic progress mean more jobs, and less tension?

I watched the bitter debate in the UK in the wake of the vote—admittedly, taking some delight in the paroxysms following what I considered a foolish, jingoistic decision. Teresa May’s government twisted in the wind, and fell. Boris Johnson promised to Get Brexit Done, and did, before his government fell too. At the centre of all this chaos was the UK government’s tense negotiations with the EU over the border. It was plain that the UK’s Brexit-toting zealots had little understanding of the Irish border or the people who lived there.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, I dug into the history of the border, a history I had largely ignored at school. I began to talk, via Zoom, with borderers. It became clear to me that not only was the memory of violence still raw, but that the border region had largely been forgotten by both British and Irish governments, entering into their respective national consciousness only when a conflict arose.

In the decades since I left Ireland, I had lived in the UK and Canada, and travelled widely in Asia and Europe. I had worked as a marketing and advertising executive—a “Mad Man”—in London, eventually changing countries and careers to become a professor in Toronto. I had served as Board Chair and volunteer with the NGO Academics Without Borders, traveling to Nepal in the wake of that country’s civil war, and leading some of its African programs. Though I wouldn’t have admitted it at the time, I was led more by instinct than by any preconceived plan—but my direction was away from the hard certainties of business and economics, towards the fuzzy, less clear, but infinitely more interesting, world of people and creativity.

The label I adopted for this shift was Human-Centred Design, a way of approaching business and social problems based on a rich understanding of daily life. To design—anything: a building, a car, a service—is to question why things are as they are, to explore stories that reveal insight about lived experience, to dwell in the mystery of problems that defy easy solutions. Design methods bring a measure of clarity to so-called “wicked” problems: complex, ambiguous problems in which symptoms, causes and outcomes are intertwined. Dealing with such problems demands a great deal of empathy, openness, and comfort with ambiguity.

It was this “lived experience” aspect of the border, its impact on the lives of borderers, that now captured my attention. I resolved to travel to Ireland as soon as I could, and learn what life was really like in the place I—like many others—had ignored for decades. In spite of my rigorous academic background, I saw this as a personal and emotional journey.

When I finally went, in Fall 2022, I found a people rarely seen, still trapped between fiercely-held ideologies, subject to the whims of others who barely acknowledged their existence. As an educator, I was shocked to find that little progress had been made in integrating education across the Protestant and Catholic communities; as a designer, I was struck by the way signs, symbols and objects expressed and reinforced bigotry; as a business professor, by how little about the border could be explained in economic terms—and as a human being, I was deeply moved by the stories of victims, and the trauma they continue to endure.

There is no Irish border now for birds to see. You can travel back and forth from Northern Ireland to the Republic, without realizing you have left and re-entered the European Union. You pay in euros and get change in sterling; road signs in English switch to bilingual Irish-English. In other respects, Ireland and the UK are indistinguishable.

But people see things birds don’t. In my travels on the border, I met characters who, together, paint a vibrant picture of this in-between region. Pat sees the past: a self-described packrat, he runs a makeshift museum of the Troubles, lovingly storing objects that trace the history of the conflict and his own involvement in it. Michael, traumatized by his father’s murder by the IRA fifty years ago, reflects on a life destroyed, and sees the killing’s effect on his own children. Nigel, a police officer who lives in fear of an attack on his home and family, sees more hate around him than ever. Cormac, a university student, wants to put the Troubles firmly in the past, seeing his future in a united Ireland.

All along the frontier, borderers see infinite tears and unbounded joy; they see selfless love, and bitter hatred; they see limbs and lives lost; they see the past and all it holds; they see hope, for a peaceful, prosperous future—but under the surface of this hope lies fear. The Magical Line is an ode to a place apart, a liminal zone where forgotten people are haunted by a past that threatens to become their future, and where hope and despair are bedfellows.