The next day, Ahmed decided to leave his country forever. He escaped to neighbouring Togo. But after hiding out for a few weeks, Ahmed realized that if he ever wanted to love again, he’d have to flee Africa entirely. From Togo, Ahmed flew across the Atlantic to Ecuador. He considered seeking asylum there, but couldn’t speak Spanish, and so wouldn’t be able to work. He resolved to push north and make a refugee claim in America. From Ecuador, he crossed into Colombia, where at the bus station in Cali, he was robbed of all of his belongings, including his passport. He had, though, kept a photocopy of his birth certificate and some cash in his sock, which the thieves overlooked. He entered Panama with other migrants: the plan was to cross the Panama Canal at night to avoid border patrols. They set out on two boats with only small outboard motors: there were seventeen migrants on Ahmed’s boat, and thirty-four in the one behind. The boat behind Ahmed’s capsized. As far as he knows, everyone drowned. “God loves me,” Ahmed thought to himself.

For three days and nights, they walked through the Panamanian jungle. One of his fellow migrants was bitten by a spider and became paralyzed. There was nothing they could do to help, so they left him there. At the edge of the jungle, they were picked up by the authorities. After being processed, they were bussed to Panama City and released. From there, the group went to Costa Rica. They paid coyotes $20 to take them on horseback through the mountains into Nicaragua, then took a bus to the capital, Managua. It was raining, so Ahmed slept at the station. After an eighteen-hour bus ride through Honduras to the Guatemalan border, he slept at another bus station, then got on another bus, this one headed to Tapachula, Mexico. When he got there, he was arrested and detained for five days. The authorities released him and told him he had thirty days to make his way into the United States.

For the first time in his journey, Ahmed felt relief. The worst of his eight-month odyssey was behind him, and a new life in America was within his grasp. He spent $120, nearly the last of his cash, on a three-day bus ride to the border town of Matamoros. From there, he walked half an hour through cartel country to the border station at Brownsville, Texas. After introducing himself to the guards, he said that he was seeking asylum. They searched him, put him in full-body shackles, and eventually transferred him to York County Prison in Pennsylvania, a penitentiary that also houses detained migrants. There he languished for months, preparing his claim.

Through the summer and fall of 2016, Ahmed watched images of Donald Trump’s campaign on the prison televisions. In order for his asylum claim to be processed, Ahmed would need to present the judge with documentation that proved Ahmed was who he said he was. But thanks to the robbery in Colombia, the only ID he had left was the photocopy of his birth certificate. Ahmed wasn’t allowed to call home from the prison to arrange for replacements, and he had no money left to hire a lawyer. When he requested legal aid, he was told staff were too busy to help. So when he appeared in immigration court, he had no official documentation and no representation. Although the judge acknowledged that Ahmed had a credible fear of persecution in his home country, he ordered that Ahmed be deported back to Ghana.

In the meantime, he was released from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody and given six months to gather the documentation necessary for his return to Ghana. A friend living in Minneapolis, whom Ahmed had met in prison, suggested that he do what thousands of others were now doing: flee from the US into Canada. Ahmed learned, however, that he couldn’t simply turn up at a Canadian border post and claim safe haven—if he did that, he would be turned away without a hearing and sent back to America for deportation. He needed to smuggle himself into the country.

Ahmed made his way to Minneapolis, where he planned the final leg of his journey to the small border town of Emerson, Manitoba—the closest crossing point, according to the maps he consulted online. His friend gave him $300, which paid for a bus ticket to Grand Forks, North Dakota, about an hour and a half south of the border. After his bus arrived at the depot, he called to let his friend know he’d arrived and was about to set out.

That’s when another man, Adams, walked up to Ahmed and told him that he’d overheard him speaking on the phone in the same Ghanaian dialect that was his own mother tongue. Adams had fled Ghana after a dispute with his uncle over some family lands. The uncle had threatened to kill Adams, and used his influence with Ghanaian authorities to make him a wanted man. Adams had flown to Brazil and then, like Ahmed, made a trip up the continent. He was detained in an ICE prison for fifteen months before ultimately having his asylum claim denied.

Ahmed was amazed to hear someone else speaking the Hausa dialect, and told Adams that he was heading to the Canadian border. “What a coincidence,” Adams said. He was doing the same. As it came up on eleven o’clock at night, the weather started getting colder. Ahmed was wearing only a long-sleeved sweater—no jacket, no gloves, no hat. Adams was similarly dressed, but at least had a hat. They decided to hire one of the taxis queued at the depot. Adams turned to Ahmed and said, “If something happens, maybe one of us will survive.”

Between the two of them, they put together the $500 the driver wanted. Eventually, the driver let them out in a field and pointed them toward lights on the horizon. After they’d walked for almost eight hours through cornfields, Ahmed stopped in a frozen field of mud, lay down among the sheared stalks, and said he could go no further. He was cold and so tired he could barely talk; his mouth was impossibly dry, and they had no water. Adams would not let him quit. He forced him up, and they kept going, trudging toward the lights through the wind and the dark. And then around eight in the morning, they passed a little stone obelisk with “United States” written on one side and “Canada” written on the other, and they scaled an earthen levee. As the sun came up, they walked to the Maple Leaf Motel.

Emerson is named after a man who hated to travel. “Our first journeys,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, “discover to us the indifference of places.” In the 1870s, two wanderlusting Americans, William N. Fairbanks and Thomas Carney, established a town on land once home to a Hudson’s Bay Company fort, bordered on the west by the Red River, and on the south by the forty-ninth parallel. When it came time to christen the place, Fairbanks suggested they honour his favourite writer and homebody.

For a while, their community flourished. Its economy was tied to traffic. A customs house had been built near the old fort and served the cross-border trade. Most important, Emerson was set to have its own railway, called the Emerson & North West Rail Road. As investment in the E & NWRR soared, Emerson’s prospects seemed boundless. Many thought it would outpace even Winnipeg as the railway hub of the Northwest. People from all over flowed into the town. In 1880 alone, Emerson’s five lumberyards sold 10 million feet of wood. In the summer, you could play cricket or baseball for the local teams; in the winter, there was hockey or curling. By the early 1880s, Emerson boasted a roller-skating rink, a brewery, a horse track, bowling lanes, brothels, two brickyards, six painting companies, seven contractors, eight bars, and eleven real estate agents. The well-heeled could enjoy the town’s luxury accommodations and haute cuisine. There was even an opera house, which hosted vaudeville acts and orchestras. Soon after, it was officially a city.

But in the fall of 1881, the Canadian Pacific Railway announced that it would run a line south from Winnipeg, sixteen miles west of Emerson. The CPR then approached Ottawa and asked it to revoke the provincial charter for the Emerson railroad. The citizens of Emerson panicked and sent the mayor to meet with the prime minister and CPR’s general manager. Together, they struck a deal: the CPR would connect its line to the city, so long as Emerson built a suitable bridge across the Red River.

But the man who had named the city was furious with the compromise. Fairbanks was a major investor in the Emerson Railway, whose value had now been gutted by the CPR’s move. He refused to acknowledge the city’s expropriation of his property, and prevented bridge tradesmen from reaching the work site. When track construction finally reached the city limits, the bridge was still unfinished. Deciding that Emerson had reneged on its end of the bargain, the CPR dismantled the track and put it to use on the main line moving toward the Pacific—an act that led to the city’s isolation, decline, and fall.