You can say, if you like, that the Washington Minuteman detachment is a valiant band of disciplined young patriots protecting America's porous northern borders against the threat of terrorists from British Columbia, where hundreds of Hamas, Hezbollah, and al-Qaeda operatives are busy making plans, even as I write this, to slip into the United States and slaughter innocent Americans.

If you prefer, you can condemn the Minutemen as a private army of right-wing vigilantes, white supremacists, and dangerous, heavily armed hatemongers whose presence along the border is a serious threat to public safety because all they really want is to inflict violence and suffering upon people of colour.

Those are the Pavlovian responses you are allowed, and you're welcome to them, but there is a small problem. There is Fox News, the Province newspaper, and the Indymedia tract archive, and then there is the real world, and in the rolling hills and woods of Whatcom County, down a quiet country road a few minutes from Exit 266 off the I-5, in a field, you will find two old guys in a little travel trailer with a leaky roof. One of the guys is positively silly about wildflowers. The other isn't even a white guy.

These are the Minutemen. Two pals in a trailer, drinking coffee, content with one another's company and the affections of three little dogs. They chat by walkie-talkie with about a dozen grandparents parked in cars and campers at a series of roadside spots along the border between Blaine and Sumas. They're volunteers. They're armed with binoculars. True enough, some of them persist in the charming and exotic American custom of lawfully possessing handguns.

But that's it.

"I don't even listen to Rush Limbaugh," Tom Williams told me during my visit to the trailer one recent rainy afternoon. Williams is the white-bearded, 64-year-old state leader of the Washington Minuteman detachment. He's a former U.S. Marine and a retired trauma counsellor. He lives in nearby Deming, in a nice little place on the Nooksack River. Hobbies: wildflowers, gold-panning.

It was flower-fancying that brought Williams to Arizona last spring, and that's where he met some Arizona Minutemen. They'd just started their controversial citizen-patrol operations there to protest the ongoing consequences of the Bush administration's underfunding of border security: more than a million people sneak into the United States across the Mexican border every year.

At first, Williams didn't know what to make of it all. President Bush was calling the Minutemen vigi?lantes, but the border guards' union was welcoming them. So after Williams satisfied himself that the Minutemen weren't just a bunch of gun nuts, he reckoned that "it would be fun to ride around the desert in a nice jeep," and one thing led to another.

The other guy in the trailer is Claude LeBas, the Washington Minuteman's "intel officer". The job requires a familiarity with the operation of walkie-talkies and cellphones and other such paramilitary know-how. LeBas is a Métis from St. Boniface, Manitoba. He's a barrel-chested guy with a ponytail, and, at 60, he's the youngest of Washington's Minutemen regulars.

How LeBas ended up with the Marines in Vietnam is a long story, but it led to a stateside career as a field officer with U.S. Customs and eventually a stroke and a triple-bypass heart operation. Hobbies: gold-panning with his pal "Skipper", which is what he calls Williams, and working on old cars and stuff.

Williams and LeBas make their rounds together, visiting the Minutemen in their lawn chairs along the border. It's not especially exciting work. The volunteers get lonely. They run out of coffee. They get nervous. The day before my visit a U.S. Border Patrol officer popped by a Minute?man post to say that five people were hiding in some bushes on the Canadian side, apparently intending to make a dash across the line, so the volunteers should keep their eyes peeled. But nothing came of it.

The Minutemen's month-long Washington-border vigil ends, suitably, on Halloween. Williams and LeBas don't pretend to know whether or not they made any difference in the way people think about border security. But it's been fun, they agreed.

In the meantime, if you want, you can believe people like KIRO 7 "investigative reporter" Chris Halsne, who claims that British Columbia is home to "hundreds of seasoned terrorists", and that there are 55 terrorist groups in the province, and al-Qaeda is selling drugs on the streets of Vancouver to fund the terrorist forays it intends to launch across the border.

Or you can believe all the bad things Vancouver's No One Is Illegal! crowd says about Washington's Minutemen. If you want, you can also agree with No One Is Illegal! when it says it's against the very existence of the Canada-U.S. border because the only reason it's there is to allow the white race to assert its illegitimate claim of entitlement to North America.

Be my guest. Wet your trousers. Set your hair on fire.

The Chronicles Web log can be found at transmontanus.blogspot.com/.