Part Three (A)
Part One recounted getting from Seattle to North
Carolina; Part Two recounted the week at the beach and a bit of background about
my family; Part Three tells the tale of getting from North Carolina to Seattle -
except that this is only Part Three A, which tells the tale of getting from
North Caroline to Thunder Bay, Ontario.
Nota Bene: There's a newer and larger "Across Wyoming" movie now on the multimedia page <http://homepage.mac.com/credmond/multimedia.html>, also accessible directly via <http://homepage.mac.com/credmond/AcrossWyoming.html>.
Nota Bene: There's a newer and larger "Across Wyoming" movie now on the multimedia page <http://homepage.mac.com/credmond/multimedia.html>, also accessible directly via <http://homepage.mac.com/credmond/AcrossWyoming.html>.
Before diving into the details of the trip back
west I have two corrections to make, brought to my attention by no less than
three cousins. First, and most importantly, my cousin - John Thomas Culbreth -
died when he was just a few weeks shy of his 28th birthday, not at 19 as I had
thought. That's great news because it means that he lived about twice as long
as I had presumed and no doubt experienced many of life's great joys which come
after one's teenage years. The even sadder news, though, is that I missed out
for even longer on knowing the youngest member of the clan. On the other hand,
one of my cousins pointed out that his eldest son - now a joyful and
rambunctious school-age young boy and the namesake of all the John Thomas', has
inside him the spirit of the JT's and will carry on the name and tradition. I
know this to be true because young JT has so many of the characteristics which
made my grandfather John Thomas such a great role model for me. And, this
newest JT I've known and will continue to know for as long as I'm
around.
The other correction is the religious affiliation of my mom's parents - my granddad was a Baptist and my grandmom was a Methodist and the church which has been around for all these generations and hosts the family graveyard is the Wesleyan United Methodist Church. All this proves to me is how far I've moved from concern and consciousness of the aspect of religion and church to me and my life in the preceding decades. It doesn't lesson the importance of church or religion to others (even from my perspective) but it does point out a blindness I've acquired once my own views on the present, the afterlife and the "creator" were settled many, many moons ago. I'll be more conscious of these affiliations of others in the future.
Now, how did we wind up back in Seattle after having spent a week along the southeast Carolina coast? Adam and I had previously thought we'd take one of our more fun routes and meander around the Great Lakes and then back down into the Black Hills and up through Glacier National Park yet one more time. After saying our "goodbyes" to all the family and climbing into "trusty steed" (a name I endowed on my second Volvo after it had transported most of us for over 100,000 miles without incident and a name the current and fourth Volvo has certainly earned), Leif, Adam and I made our way back to DC taking Interstate 95. It was a Sunday and by the time we expected to arrive in DC the freeway traffic should have been relatively light and it was. I parked on Aker Place, the location of Leif's Capitol Hill rented group townhouse and unpacked the things which went there and packed the things which needed to be in Seattle and we set out for a walk about the neighborhood.
We dined at an alresco restaurant right off Massachusetts Avenue and enjoyed a really, really pleasant Washington late Sunday afternoon. All three of us retired to Leif's place and dinged around till time to get some sleep since Adam and I were setting out literally at the crack of dawn on Monday to head for a different destination than the one we had planned. Adam and I discussed the trip back and he suggested that we cross the Canadian Rockies since I've been extolling the grandness and unbelievable nature of them for quite some time and based on his experience in Glacier decided that he'd like to see the Canadian Rockies. So, our new trip was still to go around the Great Lakes but to stay in Canada and head more northward than I've ever driven previously, though I had taken essentially the route we intended to follow on a previous Canadian Via Rail TransCanada excursion.
Monday at the crack of dawn we all get up, finish loading the car with whatever was left, mostly dirty clothes, and say goodbye to Leif and headed for the area's northwest mega-freeway, I-270 - "the Tech Corridor," as it's called locally but which no one ever actually uses. We make really good time since we're essentially counter-commuting and head straight for the Pennsylvania State Turnpike interchange at Breezewood and stop for breakfast before traveling on. Breezewood, for anyone who has never been there, is a town filled with over 1,000 motel rooms and is an entity which has the sole purpose of serving the traveler using the Pennsylvania Turnpike. A truly American phenomenon <http://www.bedfordcounty.net/breezewood/>.
We head west towards Pittsburgh, enjoying the rolling hills, the tunnels through the Alleghenies, the greenery of late summer and the nearly perfect blue-sky, white-puffy-sky conditions. We zip past Pittsburgh and on into Ohio, paying our Pennsylvania dues and getting another ticket for the Ohio Turnpike section of what has become a major Industrial Belt highway. We zip on through northeast Ohio, past the outer stretches of Cleveland's expansive Lake Erie-area suburbs and on into northwestern Ohio, past Sandusky, Huron and Port Clinton - ports on Erie in the way-western reaches of that lake and an area where the hills and dales of the Alleghenies finally give way to the plains of the Midwest. The weather remains perfect and just past the Indiana border turn northward onto US Highway 127 which runs directly north up through Michigan's central "hand" towards Mackinaw City and the Mackinac Straits Bridge with the Upper Peninsula. We did stop at the Ohio border and pay our turnpike dues and deposit at least one payment on the Indiana turnpike before heading north. We had intended on getting as far into Michigan as the day would allow and then stopping short of Mackinaw City so we could take some time and linger about that area again.
The Mackinac Straits are where Lake Michigan and Lake Huron mix waters and is one of the Great Lakes' most outstanding areas for both scenery, things-to-do, and history. We had stopped to get gas and food in the lower reaches of Michigan's industrial belt and had asked one of the local ladies to recommend a nice Central Michigan town for us to spend the night. She had recommended the college town Mt. Pleasant and by the time late afternoon arrived we were on the outskirts of this truly pleasant and welcoming burg. We checked into one of the local motels (we seem to divide our stays between Best Western, Day's Inn and TraveLodge). Afterwards Adam said he wanted to tour the campus - Central Michigan University - so we did what we've come to be pretty good at and that was circumnavigate the town, find the college (or other point of interest, depending on the town) and then cruised the several main streets looking for a place to eat.
We settled on a truly period-piece restaurant which has been delivering hamburgers and fries to Mt. Pleasant and Central Michigan U students since the early 1950's and which had every proof of its having been there for the past fifty years. The staff was pleasant, the outside, inside and customers were a great diversion to inspect, look over and dwell upon while we ate and the food was - well - classic American 'burger and fries.
The more I travel through Michigan, especially the northern reaches of the "hand" and the Upper Peninsula, the more I appreciate that state's unique position of being nearly surrounded by waters from the Great Lakes. Ohio and Pennsylvania have Lake Erie and New York has Lake Ontario. Ontario Province has Ontario, Erie, Huron and Superior. Michigan has Michigan, Huron and Superior. Of all five Great Lakes, Michigan, Huron and Superior are the absolutely most stunning of the lot and the ones with the most islands, the most peninsulas and bays and inlets and - deepest and most flavored of the history of the region. Michigan itself is a truly late-modern industrialized "nation." They have one of the most complex freeway systems of any of the Eastern states, matched perhaps by Illinois but not many others. They have the old "rust-belt" cities, many of which are coming back to life in a new-found incarnation as sub-assembly plants for a variety of electronics and more modern machinery. It's also one of the most incredible farming states in the land. The "thumb" region - Traverse City and the other towns on the Lake Michigan side - produce some of the country's finest fruits and berries. Along with Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Western New York, it also produces a raft of dairy products. It's also one of those states where if you own a car you also own a boat and a boat trailer and usually a Winnebago or other camper.
Like the native tribes before them, the modern settled Michigander also engages in a host of hunting seasons - the state has abundant wildlife and fish and has a well-financed Natural Resources and Environment department. They are also a state I respect, much like South Dakota, for their "out of the ordinary" road ethic. In Michigan there are highway signs everywhere which intone "Injure or Kill a Highway Worker and it's $7,000 fine and Twenty Years." They are dead serious about protecting their state highway employees and contractors. As a consequence, despite the fact that Michigan, like West Virginia and Montana, has an almost outrageously-high legal speed on most of its highways, EVERYONE slows down to the posted limit in construction zones. A law with teeth is a real law and people just don't ignore it like they do in most states.
The geology and topography of central and northern Michigan and the Upper Peninsula are marked by and the result of the many glaciations which have occurred in the area (and which basically created the Great Lakes) and it's a beautiful state with rolling hills, rivers everywhere, deep pockets of forest and preserve and a fantastic coastline. Michigan residents have the highest proportion of boat ownership per capita of any state and there's a reason - one is never more than about an hour from the water and we're not talking about a one-acre lake either.
We arise early on Tuesday heading for Mackinaw City, where we expect to spend at least half a day doing nothing but playing tourist. Reason being is that our next stop - Sault St. Marie, Ontario, is only about four hours away. Adam and I both have a really fond attraction to Sault St. Marie, Ontario. It's on old town right on the St. Mary's River, which connects Superior with Huron, and it's got great urban amenities coupled with the unbelievably friendly and open Canadian nature. We get to Mackinaw City in no time and find a place to park and get out and stroll about but then decide on a kick - we've never been to what Conde Nast Traveler calls one of the "top ten resort islands in the world" - Mackinac Island. The straits area were initially inhabited by the Huron, Chippewa (Ojibwa) and Ottawa tribes. The area was fortified first by the French, later, after the fall of New France, by the British and still later during the war of 1812 by the Americans - who both lost and regained the island and surrounding mainlands. In 1895 the United States abandoned its fortifications and ceded the 1100 acres of the island to the citizens and state of Michigan on the condition that it remain a parklike environment in perpetuity. In 1910 the state instituted a policy of "no automobiles" on the island. Since then transportation has been by horse and carriage or horse and trailer or by bicycle even though there is a not-unreasonable network of paved roadways and driveways and dockside quays. For a great set of pages on the island see <http://www.mackinac.com/>.
Getting to the island is clearly one of the economic realities of modern Michigan. There are three separate ferry companies, each of which operate a fleet of from four to twelve high-speed boats which depart, typically, every fifteen or thirty minutes 18 hours a day from either the Upper Peninsula port city of St. Ignace or the lower peninsula city of Mackinaw City. We decided on Sheplers Ferry Line but could as easily have taken Arnold LInes or Star Line. Each one competes on some "advantage" their boat has over the other fleet. Round trip fare is roughly $15 for any of the lines and takes about fifteen minutes from dock to dock. While in transit passengers are treated to the piercingly-blue waters of Lake Huron and the Mackinac Straits Bridge - the longest suspension bridge (at 8,614 feet length for the suspended portion) in both Americas and the third longest suspension bridge in the world. The towers are 764 feet tall with 210 of those feet under water to the bedrock beneath the straits. According to state highway department information, the center span can sway 35 feet right or left of center and its designed this way. From the center, one literally can see an eternity of water in nearly all directions. Driving across it is one of those great experiences for those who like heights and one of those things to severely avoid for those who do not like heights. At ground level it is just one beautiful bridge - more so because of the flatness of the land on the surrounding mainland sides - though the St. Ignace northern terminus is built into bluffs about a hundred feet up.
Once we docked at Mackinak Island, the Shepler's staff cautioned us to be careful as we emerged from the dockside quay and onto Main Street because of the number of people - "it's very crowded on Main Street," the guide said. Adam and I looked at each other and thought "how crowded could an island main street in the way northern reaches of Michigan be at this time?" Well, we found out. It was pretty much like any downtown Manhattan street at lunchtime or any shopping mall the day before Christmas. Unbelievable!! But, with three ferry companies delivering and returning passengers from two mainland locations every fifteen minutes I guess it made sense. Anyway, this was clearly one of the resort towns of America and the town itself is a gorgeous blend of the many architectural periods which America has experienced. It was also quite clear that early on in the island's history the monied population of the Industrial Age had decided this was the perfect place for a summer home. There are a number of really pleasant (and costly) inns and hotels along the parallel main streets which front the southwest Huron coastline of the island and there is one fantastic resort inn on the bluffs overlooking both lakes (Huron and Michigan) and a brand new resort inn with cottages and meeting spaces facing the eastern, all-Huron, side. The State of Michigan also operates, a la Jamestown, a working recreation of the fort and its denizens and their lives and trades. Oh, nothing is cheap here on the island but one does have a fantastic choice of places to eat, clothes and art to buy and houses and historic forts and embattlements to engage in. The island has a circumferential paved bike and hike trail which puts one right in the marshes of the shoreline and even that trail was crowded in spots with cycles, walkers and dogs and kids galore.
We walked all around and did about a third of the circumferential trail. The southwestern area of the island has two lighthouses which guard the actual Straits of Mackinac for the still-intense shipping which occurs on the Great Lakes. One is actually on a stand-off rock in the straits and is reachable only by boat. We ate lunch on one of the side streets between the two main streets and had an outstanding lunch, also alfresco. The island has enough permanent residents to have a K-12 school as well as all the rest of the requirements for a small community. There were two really amusing components of our visit to Mackinac Island. The first was the realization that everything is delivered or everyone gets about using either a horse-drawn device or on a bicycle. I was amused to see a UPS delivery person in the usual brown and gold uniform, stepping off the front seat of a two-trailer horse-drawn carriage with the driver in different livery working twin draught horses. Both carts, each about 12-feet long with two axles each and linked by an old-fashioned link-arm and chain, were completely full of boxes, including one set of boxes which must have been the CPU, monitor and speakers for a Dell system. The other amusing event was this one seagull which was in the middle of the main roadway area on Main Street and just squawking and squawking and squawking. He walked around in a small circle and would look up at the people inches or feet away from him and continue with his squawking. He'd look down, open his bill wide and squawk at the ground and then continue with a rapidly-delivered set of squawks and then look at some person or distant landmark and do the same thing again. Adam and I stood about four feet away on the sidewalk and watched this gull for about five minutes and he was unrelenting in his tirade. I've never seen a seagull in the throes of having a hissy fit before and it was both an amusing and perplexing occurrence. I'm not sure whether some other gull had done something to him or whether he had lost the love of his life or whether he was just a tad deranged. The one thing, though, he did not have one single concern about who saw or heard him.
About four in the afternoon we decided it was time to take the ferry back to Mackinaw City and continue onward toward Sault St. Marie and so grabbed the next ferry - pretty much like one takes the next MetroKC bus here in Seattle or the Metro subway in DC - just wait for the next one which came along in about three minutes from when we entered the line. We got back to the mainland and then took the bridge across to the Upper Peninsula and had a glorious drive across the Upper Peninsula to yet another great bridge - the international bridge across the St. Mary's River to enter Canada. That bridge is a very old-styled and very narrow steel framed and steel roadway bridge which gives one a pretty good view of both the U.S. and Canadian Sault St. Marie's. The world's largest single pulp and paper-making plant is on the Canadian side and from the top of the bridge one can see what looks like a half-mile's worth of structure. It's quite impressive, more so because it meets all Canadian and world (UN and UNESCO) emissions standards for a plant which is located in a world heritage area. The two towns have been there since the French began their explorations of the Canadian woods and there's a long and storied history of the French explorers, trappers and Catholic missionaries. The French were much more adroit with the local native tribes than the English or Spanish were and the French and locals generally had a very good and profitable-to-each-other relationship.
One of the neatest things about all the Great Lakes trips I've taken in the past few years is that I've finally filled in some of the history of the New World which I was denied living in the United States. Our history, it seems, favors the Spanish and English world view to the detriment and absence of the French world view (world view at the time of the explorations - in the 15th century and several centuries following). As a result we've been educated with this - clearly-to-me-now - very skewed and Colonial English world view. It's wrong folks. Re-read your entire high school history courses except include the French along with the English and Spanish and Portuguese. There are clearly better ways to explore the planet and the one we seem to have been following - the English/Spanish world view - is not one which has had much long term success, I'm afraid. Anyway, suffice to say that the geology and history of the Great Lakes was never a part of my high school education and I'm thrilled to now be able to fill in lots of blank spaces with a different view of history.
We check into what has turned out to be our favorite hotel in Sault St. Marie, right on the town's main street and right within a two-block walk of the riverwalk which follows the St. Mary's River. We also check the local cinema listings since the town's mall is also right across the street and feel that it's time for a movie. We saw "Open Water." This is an interesting movie, not so much for the action, since the action is all inside the heads of the individuals who are basically stranded in open water, but for the exploration of what's inside their heads and the emotions and resolution of fate they have to deal with as individuals and as a couple. The movie has - to me - a plot twist which is relatively unexplored in cinema: if you were certain that you were going to die, would you await the actual moment of death (in this case inevitable because of the open water and what was in it) and accept that as your fate or would you decide your fate and take your own life? Not that long a thread for a movie but really well presented and portrayed in this flick. A movie to ponder rather than a movie to amuse or entertain.
We had dinner at a coffee shop in the mall which consisted of cookies and crystalized ginger which we purchased at a Canadian bulk foods store in the mall. The store identified by manufacturer what their products were so that when we bought chocolate chunk cookies we knew which Canadian brand of cookie they would actually taste like. I've got a question. And I've been around enough of the United States and Canada for enough years now to pose this question. Why are the Canadians so much more honest in their business practices than the Americans are? Or, conversely, why are American companies so consistently trying to cheat their customers and why as customers are we so willing to accept that practice? It makes no sense. Canadian companies make money too and also have stockholders. Is dishonesty being ingrained into Americans from birth? And if so, why are we allowing this to happen? It's NOT a good thing.
The next morning we set out for the northern route across Lake Superior - a region of primordial rock scoured by millennia of glaciers and populated now with birch forests and inukshuks <http://www.inukshukman.com/thelegend.html>. Other than the stretch of central Idaho where the Sawtooth range reside and where there are NO paved roads going through that range, the northern shore of Lake Superior is simply the most accessible stretch of true, virtually uninhabited wilderness left in the populated reaches of the U.S. and Canada. A ride through the region - which is an all day event if one is going from Sault St. Marie to Thunder Bay (both STILL in Ontario, which, believe it or not isn't as large as Quebec!!) - is a ride through pristine forest populated by very few other travelers and even fewer towns. Really big towns have from 800 to 2,000 population. Most of them are associated with either a road going even further north or the village town center of one of the many reservations in the area, or one of the several mining operations which dot the landscape every hundred miles or so. Once again, we were lucky and the weather was perfect for appreciating the glaciated hills and mountains which border Superior.
From a turn in the road a great sea of deep blue emerges. In the distance are islands which look like peninsulas or even whole other continents. Earth has some really large fresh-water lakes and North America has more than its share of them. Superior is huge, Great Bear and Great Slave are two of the North American lakes I've still to see and which have been on my list of places to get to ever since a high school auditorium presentation by wilderness experts first exposed me to these great northern waters. Superior has over 31,000 square miles of water surface; Great Slave has nearly 10,000 square miles of water surface; Great Bear has over 11,000 square miles of liquid surface. The state of Vermont only has an area of 9,250 square miles. Superior is so vast and so deep that it creates its own weather. Clouds form along the shoreline; clouds hover over the islands; wind-waves on the lake can get as high as dozens of feet. The French, when they arrived at Superior along the Ottawa River, named it "le lac superior," or the lake above Huron, which had been previously known. The Chippewa name for the waters is "kitchi-gummi," which translates into either "great water" or "great lake." Understatements, all!
The most prominent expression of civilization along the northern shore isn't the few towns and reservation town centers which infrequently appear, but rather the occasional huge, Wyoming-class, mining operations which - though cleverly concealed and reasonably environmentally-conscious - evidence themselves by the miles separating the operations' various entry-point roads and shaft buildings. Because this section of North America, the Canadian Shield, is so primordial, there are incredible riches which lie beneath the scoured rock surface. A mineral map of the world shows many continents with great riches and North America is certainly in the first league. Among North American countries, Canada is in the first rank. Clearly part of the wealth engine which drives Ontario is its vast mineral deposits, many of which are on First Nation lands and which benefit the modern descendants of those tribes.
The northern shore road, TransCanada Highway 1, is as much a mountain road as it is a lakeshore road. The upheavals which created these lands eons ago have not been scoured completely flat by the glaciation and some of the coastline ridges are hundreds to a few thousand feet in elevation and, though many are now forested and appear Appalachian-like in their age, many others appear as rough and hard-edged as the Rockies. This is one of those places on the planet where one can literally get burned out or inured to the almost endless and changing beauty of the landscape. One has to be very aware of this and fight against it because the 700 or so miles of northern Superior lakeshore and lake-mountain highway presents an unending vision of surreal beauty - the trees, the landforms, the water, the clouds and the interplay of all these elements. As fine as our computer-generated landscapes have become in movies such as the Lucas Star Wars II series or the Lord of the Rings trilogy, there's nothing quite so fine as a real landscape and there's no end of different, stunning, landscapes in those 700 miles of Lake Superior.
As one approaches Thunder Bay the landforms begin to change again - this time it's the more obvious intrusions of human settlement. Thunder Bay is the westernmost city of commerce and manufacture in Ontario Province and was forged out of the two competing towns of Fort William (an older British fortified settlement) and Port Arthur (an older railroad settlement) in 1970. As a consequence, Thunder Bay is an oddity - a relatively large (for its area in the region) city with two distinctive and distinctively different "downtowns" and a rich collection of neighborhoods as well as a revived waterfront area which now connects the two together. Though not nearly as old as Sault St. Marie, the eastern gateway to the northern Lake Superior region, Thunder Bay, the western gateway to Superior's north shore, is as fascinating and rich in its own history. The precursor towns were actually dependent on the Industrial Revolution for their growth pangs - they had to await the shipping and mining and lumbering which accompanied the Industrial Revolution before there was a reason to have a populated town rather than just a settlement in this section of the Great Lakes. Now, Thunder Bay is an important shipping center and, along with Duluth, Minnesota, provides the home port fleet for much of the grain and mineral shipping which wends its way through the locks at Sault St. Marie and eastward to the Fleuve St. Laurent / St. Lawrence River and the Atlantic Ocean.
Thunder Bay is also notable for an entirely humanitarian reason. On a bluff overlooking both Thunder Bay and Lake Superior on the eastern edge of the area is a memorial to Terrance Stanley Fox, who in 1980 set out from Newfoundland to run across Canada to raise the consciousness of Canadians about cancer and hope and to help raise money for research into prosthetics and treatment. The memorial marks the spot where his journey of courage came to an abrupt end. He was 18 at the time he lost his right leg to the disease and had been fitted with a prosthesis which enabled him to continue to run - he was a marathon runner of some considerable ability. He was 22 when he left Newfoundland in April, 1980, running west on his left, real, leg and his continuously-modified right, prosthetic, leg. By the time he reached mile 3,339, marked by the memorial - running 26 miles a day - he succumbed to the disease and had to be hospitalized in June of 1980. He died on June 28, 1981, but not before galvanizing his fellow Canadians and immortalizing himself as a great athlete and humanitarian. His run had raised over $25 million which was used directly for cancer and prosthetic research. The statue of him on that bluff never fails to inspire me nor does it ever fail to cause a great lump in my throat. In Montreal, at the Science Museum and Discovery Center in the old waterfront district, there are the various models of prosthestic legs which Terry had been adapted to and tried and gave his feedback on how improvements could be made. It's in the medical section of the museum and is a profound display for someone like me who has seen that and the memorial overlooking Thunder Bay.
A hero is someone who does something impossible, against all odds, not for personal gain or glory but because he or she is bound by a higher calling or ethic or moral and succeeds in spite of the odds. Terry Fox is a hero <http://www.thunderbay.ca/index.cfm?fuse=html&pg=1426>.
We stayed in Thunder Bay and schlepped around the town, a town Adam and I've become quite familiar with and fond of. Oh, and we stopped once again at the Terry Fox memorial so I could reflect once again on how great human beings can be and how much of a difference one person really can and does make.
Part Three will continue again with the segment from Thunder Bay through the Canadian Rockies and on to Seattle. I'll stop here because this is already a tome and there's more observations and adventure to report on.
Chas
The other correction is the religious affiliation of my mom's parents - my granddad was a Baptist and my grandmom was a Methodist and the church which has been around for all these generations and hosts the family graveyard is the Wesleyan United Methodist Church. All this proves to me is how far I've moved from concern and consciousness of the aspect of religion and church to me and my life in the preceding decades. It doesn't lesson the importance of church or religion to others (even from my perspective) but it does point out a blindness I've acquired once my own views on the present, the afterlife and the "creator" were settled many, many moons ago. I'll be more conscious of these affiliations of others in the future.
Now, how did we wind up back in Seattle after having spent a week along the southeast Carolina coast? Adam and I had previously thought we'd take one of our more fun routes and meander around the Great Lakes and then back down into the Black Hills and up through Glacier National Park yet one more time. After saying our "goodbyes" to all the family and climbing into "trusty steed" (a name I endowed on my second Volvo after it had transported most of us for over 100,000 miles without incident and a name the current and fourth Volvo has certainly earned), Leif, Adam and I made our way back to DC taking Interstate 95. It was a Sunday and by the time we expected to arrive in DC the freeway traffic should have been relatively light and it was. I parked on Aker Place, the location of Leif's Capitol Hill rented group townhouse and unpacked the things which went there and packed the things which needed to be in Seattle and we set out for a walk about the neighborhood.
We dined at an alresco restaurant right off Massachusetts Avenue and enjoyed a really, really pleasant Washington late Sunday afternoon. All three of us retired to Leif's place and dinged around till time to get some sleep since Adam and I were setting out literally at the crack of dawn on Monday to head for a different destination than the one we had planned. Adam and I discussed the trip back and he suggested that we cross the Canadian Rockies since I've been extolling the grandness and unbelievable nature of them for quite some time and based on his experience in Glacier decided that he'd like to see the Canadian Rockies. So, our new trip was still to go around the Great Lakes but to stay in Canada and head more northward than I've ever driven previously, though I had taken essentially the route we intended to follow on a previous Canadian Via Rail TransCanada excursion.
Monday at the crack of dawn we all get up, finish loading the car with whatever was left, mostly dirty clothes, and say goodbye to Leif and headed for the area's northwest mega-freeway, I-270 - "the Tech Corridor," as it's called locally but which no one ever actually uses. We make really good time since we're essentially counter-commuting and head straight for the Pennsylvania State Turnpike interchange at Breezewood and stop for breakfast before traveling on. Breezewood, for anyone who has never been there, is a town filled with over 1,000 motel rooms and is an entity which has the sole purpose of serving the traveler using the Pennsylvania Turnpike. A truly American phenomenon <http://www.bedfordcounty.net/breezewood/>.
We head west towards Pittsburgh, enjoying the rolling hills, the tunnels through the Alleghenies, the greenery of late summer and the nearly perfect blue-sky, white-puffy-sky conditions. We zip past Pittsburgh and on into Ohio, paying our Pennsylvania dues and getting another ticket for the Ohio Turnpike section of what has become a major Industrial Belt highway. We zip on through northeast Ohio, past the outer stretches of Cleveland's expansive Lake Erie-area suburbs and on into northwestern Ohio, past Sandusky, Huron and Port Clinton - ports on Erie in the way-western reaches of that lake and an area where the hills and dales of the Alleghenies finally give way to the plains of the Midwest. The weather remains perfect and just past the Indiana border turn northward onto US Highway 127 which runs directly north up through Michigan's central "hand" towards Mackinaw City and the Mackinac Straits Bridge with the Upper Peninsula. We did stop at the Ohio border and pay our turnpike dues and deposit at least one payment on the Indiana turnpike before heading north. We had intended on getting as far into Michigan as the day would allow and then stopping short of Mackinaw City so we could take some time and linger about that area again.
The Mackinac Straits are where Lake Michigan and Lake Huron mix waters and is one of the Great Lakes' most outstanding areas for both scenery, things-to-do, and history. We had stopped to get gas and food in the lower reaches of Michigan's industrial belt and had asked one of the local ladies to recommend a nice Central Michigan town for us to spend the night. She had recommended the college town Mt. Pleasant and by the time late afternoon arrived we were on the outskirts of this truly pleasant and welcoming burg. We checked into one of the local motels (we seem to divide our stays between Best Western, Day's Inn and TraveLodge). Afterwards Adam said he wanted to tour the campus - Central Michigan University - so we did what we've come to be pretty good at and that was circumnavigate the town, find the college (or other point of interest, depending on the town) and then cruised the several main streets looking for a place to eat.
We settled on a truly period-piece restaurant which has been delivering hamburgers and fries to Mt. Pleasant and Central Michigan U students since the early 1950's and which had every proof of its having been there for the past fifty years. The staff was pleasant, the outside, inside and customers were a great diversion to inspect, look over and dwell upon while we ate and the food was - well - classic American 'burger and fries.
The more I travel through Michigan, especially the northern reaches of the "hand" and the Upper Peninsula, the more I appreciate that state's unique position of being nearly surrounded by waters from the Great Lakes. Ohio and Pennsylvania have Lake Erie and New York has Lake Ontario. Ontario Province has Ontario, Erie, Huron and Superior. Michigan has Michigan, Huron and Superior. Of all five Great Lakes, Michigan, Huron and Superior are the absolutely most stunning of the lot and the ones with the most islands, the most peninsulas and bays and inlets and - deepest and most flavored of the history of the region. Michigan itself is a truly late-modern industrialized "nation." They have one of the most complex freeway systems of any of the Eastern states, matched perhaps by Illinois but not many others. They have the old "rust-belt" cities, many of which are coming back to life in a new-found incarnation as sub-assembly plants for a variety of electronics and more modern machinery. It's also one of the most incredible farming states in the land. The "thumb" region - Traverse City and the other towns on the Lake Michigan side - produce some of the country's finest fruits and berries. Along with Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Western New York, it also produces a raft of dairy products. It's also one of those states where if you own a car you also own a boat and a boat trailer and usually a Winnebago or other camper.
Like the native tribes before them, the modern settled Michigander also engages in a host of hunting seasons - the state has abundant wildlife and fish and has a well-financed Natural Resources and Environment department. They are also a state I respect, much like South Dakota, for their "out of the ordinary" road ethic. In Michigan there are highway signs everywhere which intone "Injure or Kill a Highway Worker and it's $7,000 fine and Twenty Years." They are dead serious about protecting their state highway employees and contractors. As a consequence, despite the fact that Michigan, like West Virginia and Montana, has an almost outrageously-high legal speed on most of its highways, EVERYONE slows down to the posted limit in construction zones. A law with teeth is a real law and people just don't ignore it like they do in most states.
The geology and topography of central and northern Michigan and the Upper Peninsula are marked by and the result of the many glaciations which have occurred in the area (and which basically created the Great Lakes) and it's a beautiful state with rolling hills, rivers everywhere, deep pockets of forest and preserve and a fantastic coastline. Michigan residents have the highest proportion of boat ownership per capita of any state and there's a reason - one is never more than about an hour from the water and we're not talking about a one-acre lake either.
We arise early on Tuesday heading for Mackinaw City, where we expect to spend at least half a day doing nothing but playing tourist. Reason being is that our next stop - Sault St. Marie, Ontario, is only about four hours away. Adam and I both have a really fond attraction to Sault St. Marie, Ontario. It's on old town right on the St. Mary's River, which connects Superior with Huron, and it's got great urban amenities coupled with the unbelievably friendly and open Canadian nature. We get to Mackinaw City in no time and find a place to park and get out and stroll about but then decide on a kick - we've never been to what Conde Nast Traveler calls one of the "top ten resort islands in the world" - Mackinac Island. The straits area were initially inhabited by the Huron, Chippewa (Ojibwa) and Ottawa tribes. The area was fortified first by the French, later, after the fall of New France, by the British and still later during the war of 1812 by the Americans - who both lost and regained the island and surrounding mainlands. In 1895 the United States abandoned its fortifications and ceded the 1100 acres of the island to the citizens and state of Michigan on the condition that it remain a parklike environment in perpetuity. In 1910 the state instituted a policy of "no automobiles" on the island. Since then transportation has been by horse and carriage or horse and trailer or by bicycle even though there is a not-unreasonable network of paved roadways and driveways and dockside quays. For a great set of pages on the island see <http://www.mackinac.com/>.
Getting to the island is clearly one of the economic realities of modern Michigan. There are three separate ferry companies, each of which operate a fleet of from four to twelve high-speed boats which depart, typically, every fifteen or thirty minutes 18 hours a day from either the Upper Peninsula port city of St. Ignace or the lower peninsula city of Mackinaw City. We decided on Sheplers Ferry Line but could as easily have taken Arnold LInes or Star Line. Each one competes on some "advantage" their boat has over the other fleet. Round trip fare is roughly $15 for any of the lines and takes about fifteen minutes from dock to dock. While in transit passengers are treated to the piercingly-blue waters of Lake Huron and the Mackinac Straits Bridge - the longest suspension bridge (at 8,614 feet length for the suspended portion) in both Americas and the third longest suspension bridge in the world. The towers are 764 feet tall with 210 of those feet under water to the bedrock beneath the straits. According to state highway department information, the center span can sway 35 feet right or left of center and its designed this way. From the center, one literally can see an eternity of water in nearly all directions. Driving across it is one of those great experiences for those who like heights and one of those things to severely avoid for those who do not like heights. At ground level it is just one beautiful bridge - more so because of the flatness of the land on the surrounding mainland sides - though the St. Ignace northern terminus is built into bluffs about a hundred feet up.
Once we docked at Mackinak Island, the Shepler's staff cautioned us to be careful as we emerged from the dockside quay and onto Main Street because of the number of people - "it's very crowded on Main Street," the guide said. Adam and I looked at each other and thought "how crowded could an island main street in the way northern reaches of Michigan be at this time?" Well, we found out. It was pretty much like any downtown Manhattan street at lunchtime or any shopping mall the day before Christmas. Unbelievable!! But, with three ferry companies delivering and returning passengers from two mainland locations every fifteen minutes I guess it made sense. Anyway, this was clearly one of the resort towns of America and the town itself is a gorgeous blend of the many architectural periods which America has experienced. It was also quite clear that early on in the island's history the monied population of the Industrial Age had decided this was the perfect place for a summer home. There are a number of really pleasant (and costly) inns and hotels along the parallel main streets which front the southwest Huron coastline of the island and there is one fantastic resort inn on the bluffs overlooking both lakes (Huron and Michigan) and a brand new resort inn with cottages and meeting spaces facing the eastern, all-Huron, side. The State of Michigan also operates, a la Jamestown, a working recreation of the fort and its denizens and their lives and trades. Oh, nothing is cheap here on the island but one does have a fantastic choice of places to eat, clothes and art to buy and houses and historic forts and embattlements to engage in. The island has a circumferential paved bike and hike trail which puts one right in the marshes of the shoreline and even that trail was crowded in spots with cycles, walkers and dogs and kids galore.
We walked all around and did about a third of the circumferential trail. The southwestern area of the island has two lighthouses which guard the actual Straits of Mackinac for the still-intense shipping which occurs on the Great Lakes. One is actually on a stand-off rock in the straits and is reachable only by boat. We ate lunch on one of the side streets between the two main streets and had an outstanding lunch, also alfresco. The island has enough permanent residents to have a K-12 school as well as all the rest of the requirements for a small community. There were two really amusing components of our visit to Mackinac Island. The first was the realization that everything is delivered or everyone gets about using either a horse-drawn device or on a bicycle. I was amused to see a UPS delivery person in the usual brown and gold uniform, stepping off the front seat of a two-trailer horse-drawn carriage with the driver in different livery working twin draught horses. Both carts, each about 12-feet long with two axles each and linked by an old-fashioned link-arm and chain, were completely full of boxes, including one set of boxes which must have been the CPU, monitor and speakers for a Dell system. The other amusing event was this one seagull which was in the middle of the main roadway area on Main Street and just squawking and squawking and squawking. He walked around in a small circle and would look up at the people inches or feet away from him and continue with his squawking. He'd look down, open his bill wide and squawk at the ground and then continue with a rapidly-delivered set of squawks and then look at some person or distant landmark and do the same thing again. Adam and I stood about four feet away on the sidewalk and watched this gull for about five minutes and he was unrelenting in his tirade. I've never seen a seagull in the throes of having a hissy fit before and it was both an amusing and perplexing occurrence. I'm not sure whether some other gull had done something to him or whether he had lost the love of his life or whether he was just a tad deranged. The one thing, though, he did not have one single concern about who saw or heard him.
About four in the afternoon we decided it was time to take the ferry back to Mackinaw City and continue onward toward Sault St. Marie and so grabbed the next ferry - pretty much like one takes the next MetroKC bus here in Seattle or the Metro subway in DC - just wait for the next one which came along in about three minutes from when we entered the line. We got back to the mainland and then took the bridge across to the Upper Peninsula and had a glorious drive across the Upper Peninsula to yet another great bridge - the international bridge across the St. Mary's River to enter Canada. That bridge is a very old-styled and very narrow steel framed and steel roadway bridge which gives one a pretty good view of both the U.S. and Canadian Sault St. Marie's. The world's largest single pulp and paper-making plant is on the Canadian side and from the top of the bridge one can see what looks like a half-mile's worth of structure. It's quite impressive, more so because it meets all Canadian and world (UN and UNESCO) emissions standards for a plant which is located in a world heritage area. The two towns have been there since the French began their explorations of the Canadian woods and there's a long and storied history of the French explorers, trappers and Catholic missionaries. The French were much more adroit with the local native tribes than the English or Spanish were and the French and locals generally had a very good and profitable-to-each-other relationship.
One of the neatest things about all the Great Lakes trips I've taken in the past few years is that I've finally filled in some of the history of the New World which I was denied living in the United States. Our history, it seems, favors the Spanish and English world view to the detriment and absence of the French world view (world view at the time of the explorations - in the 15th century and several centuries following). As a result we've been educated with this - clearly-to-me-now - very skewed and Colonial English world view. It's wrong folks. Re-read your entire high school history courses except include the French along with the English and Spanish and Portuguese. There are clearly better ways to explore the planet and the one we seem to have been following - the English/Spanish world view - is not one which has had much long term success, I'm afraid. Anyway, suffice to say that the geology and history of the Great Lakes was never a part of my high school education and I'm thrilled to now be able to fill in lots of blank spaces with a different view of history.
We check into what has turned out to be our favorite hotel in Sault St. Marie, right on the town's main street and right within a two-block walk of the riverwalk which follows the St. Mary's River. We also check the local cinema listings since the town's mall is also right across the street and feel that it's time for a movie. We saw "Open Water." This is an interesting movie, not so much for the action, since the action is all inside the heads of the individuals who are basically stranded in open water, but for the exploration of what's inside their heads and the emotions and resolution of fate they have to deal with as individuals and as a couple. The movie has - to me - a plot twist which is relatively unexplored in cinema: if you were certain that you were going to die, would you await the actual moment of death (in this case inevitable because of the open water and what was in it) and accept that as your fate or would you decide your fate and take your own life? Not that long a thread for a movie but really well presented and portrayed in this flick. A movie to ponder rather than a movie to amuse or entertain.
We had dinner at a coffee shop in the mall which consisted of cookies and crystalized ginger which we purchased at a Canadian bulk foods store in the mall. The store identified by manufacturer what their products were so that when we bought chocolate chunk cookies we knew which Canadian brand of cookie they would actually taste like. I've got a question. And I've been around enough of the United States and Canada for enough years now to pose this question. Why are the Canadians so much more honest in their business practices than the Americans are? Or, conversely, why are American companies so consistently trying to cheat their customers and why as customers are we so willing to accept that practice? It makes no sense. Canadian companies make money too and also have stockholders. Is dishonesty being ingrained into Americans from birth? And if so, why are we allowing this to happen? It's NOT a good thing.
The next morning we set out for the northern route across Lake Superior - a region of primordial rock scoured by millennia of glaciers and populated now with birch forests and inukshuks <http://www.inukshukman.com/thelegend.html>. Other than the stretch of central Idaho where the Sawtooth range reside and where there are NO paved roads going through that range, the northern shore of Lake Superior is simply the most accessible stretch of true, virtually uninhabited wilderness left in the populated reaches of the U.S. and Canada. A ride through the region - which is an all day event if one is going from Sault St. Marie to Thunder Bay (both STILL in Ontario, which, believe it or not isn't as large as Quebec!!) - is a ride through pristine forest populated by very few other travelers and even fewer towns. Really big towns have from 800 to 2,000 population. Most of them are associated with either a road going even further north or the village town center of one of the many reservations in the area, or one of the several mining operations which dot the landscape every hundred miles or so. Once again, we were lucky and the weather was perfect for appreciating the glaciated hills and mountains which border Superior.
From a turn in the road a great sea of deep blue emerges. In the distance are islands which look like peninsulas or even whole other continents. Earth has some really large fresh-water lakes and North America has more than its share of them. Superior is huge, Great Bear and Great Slave are two of the North American lakes I've still to see and which have been on my list of places to get to ever since a high school auditorium presentation by wilderness experts first exposed me to these great northern waters. Superior has over 31,000 square miles of water surface; Great Slave has nearly 10,000 square miles of water surface; Great Bear has over 11,000 square miles of liquid surface. The state of Vermont only has an area of 9,250 square miles. Superior is so vast and so deep that it creates its own weather. Clouds form along the shoreline; clouds hover over the islands; wind-waves on the lake can get as high as dozens of feet. The French, when they arrived at Superior along the Ottawa River, named it "le lac superior," or the lake above Huron, which had been previously known. The Chippewa name for the waters is "kitchi-gummi," which translates into either "great water" or "great lake." Understatements, all!
The most prominent expression of civilization along the northern shore isn't the few towns and reservation town centers which infrequently appear, but rather the occasional huge, Wyoming-class, mining operations which - though cleverly concealed and reasonably environmentally-conscious - evidence themselves by the miles separating the operations' various entry-point roads and shaft buildings. Because this section of North America, the Canadian Shield, is so primordial, there are incredible riches which lie beneath the scoured rock surface. A mineral map of the world shows many continents with great riches and North America is certainly in the first league. Among North American countries, Canada is in the first rank. Clearly part of the wealth engine which drives Ontario is its vast mineral deposits, many of which are on First Nation lands and which benefit the modern descendants of those tribes.
The northern shore road, TransCanada Highway 1, is as much a mountain road as it is a lakeshore road. The upheavals which created these lands eons ago have not been scoured completely flat by the glaciation and some of the coastline ridges are hundreds to a few thousand feet in elevation and, though many are now forested and appear Appalachian-like in their age, many others appear as rough and hard-edged as the Rockies. This is one of those places on the planet where one can literally get burned out or inured to the almost endless and changing beauty of the landscape. One has to be very aware of this and fight against it because the 700 or so miles of northern Superior lakeshore and lake-mountain highway presents an unending vision of surreal beauty - the trees, the landforms, the water, the clouds and the interplay of all these elements. As fine as our computer-generated landscapes have become in movies such as the Lucas Star Wars II series or the Lord of the Rings trilogy, there's nothing quite so fine as a real landscape and there's no end of different, stunning, landscapes in those 700 miles of Lake Superior.
As one approaches Thunder Bay the landforms begin to change again - this time it's the more obvious intrusions of human settlement. Thunder Bay is the westernmost city of commerce and manufacture in Ontario Province and was forged out of the two competing towns of Fort William (an older British fortified settlement) and Port Arthur (an older railroad settlement) in 1970. As a consequence, Thunder Bay is an oddity - a relatively large (for its area in the region) city with two distinctive and distinctively different "downtowns" and a rich collection of neighborhoods as well as a revived waterfront area which now connects the two together. Though not nearly as old as Sault St. Marie, the eastern gateway to the northern Lake Superior region, Thunder Bay, the western gateway to Superior's north shore, is as fascinating and rich in its own history. The precursor towns were actually dependent on the Industrial Revolution for their growth pangs - they had to await the shipping and mining and lumbering which accompanied the Industrial Revolution before there was a reason to have a populated town rather than just a settlement in this section of the Great Lakes. Now, Thunder Bay is an important shipping center and, along with Duluth, Minnesota, provides the home port fleet for much of the grain and mineral shipping which wends its way through the locks at Sault St. Marie and eastward to the Fleuve St. Laurent / St. Lawrence River and the Atlantic Ocean.
Thunder Bay is also notable for an entirely humanitarian reason. On a bluff overlooking both Thunder Bay and Lake Superior on the eastern edge of the area is a memorial to Terrance Stanley Fox, who in 1980 set out from Newfoundland to run across Canada to raise the consciousness of Canadians about cancer and hope and to help raise money for research into prosthetics and treatment. The memorial marks the spot where his journey of courage came to an abrupt end. He was 18 at the time he lost his right leg to the disease and had been fitted with a prosthesis which enabled him to continue to run - he was a marathon runner of some considerable ability. He was 22 when he left Newfoundland in April, 1980, running west on his left, real, leg and his continuously-modified right, prosthetic, leg. By the time he reached mile 3,339, marked by the memorial - running 26 miles a day - he succumbed to the disease and had to be hospitalized in June of 1980. He died on June 28, 1981, but not before galvanizing his fellow Canadians and immortalizing himself as a great athlete and humanitarian. His run had raised over $25 million which was used directly for cancer and prosthetic research. The statue of him on that bluff never fails to inspire me nor does it ever fail to cause a great lump in my throat. In Montreal, at the Science Museum and Discovery Center in the old waterfront district, there are the various models of prosthestic legs which Terry had been adapted to and tried and gave his feedback on how improvements could be made. It's in the medical section of the museum and is a profound display for someone like me who has seen that and the memorial overlooking Thunder Bay.
A hero is someone who does something impossible, against all odds, not for personal gain or glory but because he or she is bound by a higher calling or ethic or moral and succeeds in spite of the odds. Terry Fox is a hero <http://www.thunderbay.ca/index.cfm?fuse=html&pg=1426>.
We stayed in Thunder Bay and schlepped around the town, a town Adam and I've become quite familiar with and fond of. Oh, and we stopped once again at the Terry Fox memorial so I could reflect once again on how great human beings can be and how much of a difference one person really can and does make.
Part Three will continue again with the segment from Thunder Bay through the Canadian Rockies and on to Seattle. I'll stop here because this is already a tome and there's more observations and adventure to report on.
Chas
Posted: Wed - September 15, 2004 at 03:43 PM
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Published On: Jul 04, 2005 05:41 PM
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Published On: Jul 04, 2005 05:41 PM