Let's Have a Talk: The War of 1812.

I was doing some reading last night on Canadian history and came across a chapter on the War of 1812.  When I finished the chapter, the thought crossed my mind that the 200th anniversary is well on its way, and that in the United States, it will largely get ignored in lieu of the commemorations being held everywhere regarding the American Civil War.  Thinking further back, I remembered how in history classes in high school, 1812 was often ignored outright, if not given a very minor mention.  This is unfortunate, as it is one of the three conflicts I consider to be instrumental in shaping the political and cultural landscape of North America as it exists today.  For Canadians, the War of 1812 was in many ways the birth of our nation.  For Americans, it opened up your path towards Manifest Destiny, confirmed to the World what had been achieved in the earlier revolution, and served as both the finale and opening act of the generation of the founding fathers and their children, respectively.

Even more impressively, for the first time in history, a nation won a war by means of conference rather than superiority of arms.  True, the British had the business over in Europe to deal with at the time, but they were by no means distracted enough to not be able to give adequate attention to what was going on over in our world.  Quite frankly, there was some pretty amazing diplomatic force present at that Treaty of Ghent.  Despite enormous losses on the frontier, which included the capture of Detroit and Chicago (then Ft. Dearborn), and the near outright destruction of Buffalo, the United States managed to keep the border at the Great Lakes and the Saint Lawrence River.  Despite the mess that British regulars made of Washington and Baltimore, the United States kept its sovereignty intact.  While it was true that Baltimore was successfully defended, and American forces did secure a number of other victories, they were by no means significant enough to justify a return to ante bellum status of borders and rights.  Instead, the United States won a diplomatic victory the likes of which has never been trumped.  This bolstered the national confidence and gave credence to a spirit of expansionism that until then had been kept somewhat in check by the warnings of George Washington to be satisfied with independence and not become involved with international matters.    The renewed energy would result in the construction of the Erie Canal, the start of extensive settlement in the Midwest and Lakes, and the creation of a northern limit giving rise to looking towards defining a southern boundary.  This would prove to be the start of turbulent times for Native Americans and Mexicans, especially for the peoples of the Ohio Valley.

The outcome encouraged President Madison to make some interesting statements during his seventh annual State of the Union Address.  In effect, this war not only secured American independence, but that of the entire continent from foreign domination.  In an age where our economic sovereignty has come into question in the face of increasing dominance by nations such as China, we might be seeing this doctrine invoked a bit more in the future.  Ever since 1814, North America has been made into what it has become not because of world scale imperialism, but because Canada, the United States, and Mexico, have learned that cooperation and inter-dependence have truly shaped our part of the world into what it has become.   Do not get me wrong, I "believe" in humanity and the progression of the world.  At the same time, regional development counts for something.  That, I suppose, is a post for another time, a time in which I have become much more informed and can witness certain conditions first hand.

So about those neighbors then?  Well, for Canada and Canadians, who are quite well educated on the importance of this conflict, this was freedom and the start of the forging of a national identity.  While the concept of true sovereignty was a bit farther away, "Canada" looked like it was starting to have a chance beyond "land that the Yankees are going to take away maybe next year".   While the history books and popular jest like to insist that Redcoats did all the work, the truth of the matter was that the locals, be they native or transplanted, did a substantial amount of fighting.  For that matter, it was not the Redcoats that had their homes and fields burned to the ground.  Many battles had men and sometimes even women fighting for their homes that were perhaps no further than a mile or so away.  The Battle of Chateauguay, in fact, was fought almost entirely by Canadians born on North American soil.

In the coming year, I plan to visit and re-visit many of the key sites associated with the war, and will leave some posts about impressions (with photographs, of course) as I come to them.  In the meantime, check out your local bookstores for titles on the subject, which I have been noticing have been displayed even in the United States lately!

Pure Michigan.

OK, OK, I admit it.  Tuesday has rolled around and I have not thought of anything good to put in these pages. No, I have not given up on the blog, I just need to spend more time with it.

For now, enjoy a photo-journey through the Great Lakes State.  

Life at the Top, part one.

The journeys in this blog have thus far introduced the reader to a variety of topics from mountains to deserts to upstart beavers.  Much encouragement has been made on the part of your author to explore the world around you, and this has taken us from Virginia clear across to California thus far.  Much attention has been placed on mountains.  Why is that?  Well, mountains are nothing if not majestic, and they are a wonderful way to see a great diversity of landscapes all rolled into one.  Take the Los Angeles area, for instance.  You can move from grasslands and oak forest, through pines and spruces, over rocky fields and alpine meadows and finally end up in desert in the space of 10 miles.  Elevation can be much less pronounced, however, and have just as much influence with changes as subtle as only a few inches, as is the case at places like Big Thicket National Preserve and the Everglades.  At Big Thicket, a foot of elevation gain can move you from a cypress swamp into a palmetto forest en route to a pine barrens.  I hope to tour the area personally next year, and give us some great pictures in the process.

What happens when you really gain the elevation though?  What happens when you pass through pines, spruces, and then notice that not only is the air getting a bit frostier, breathing is getting a bit rougher and that sun just seems to beat down more than it ever did during that time you fell asleep on the beach and woke up red as a tomato and embracing a beached whale for some reason?  Well, depending on where you are, you might see a distinct lack of vegetation and life in general, at least at first glance.

For frame of reference, the pictures used here are going to be largely from the Front Range of the Rockies, and then in Rocky Mountain National Park.  That particular shot was taken off of Trail Ridge road which runs through the park and climbs as high as 12, 183 feet up into the wild blue skies.  The road is perfectly fine to drive on, at least from late May until early October, but the experience is not for the faint of heart.  Most people will have something happen to their bodies once they pass 8,000 feet, and much beyond 11,500 (which also happens to be the tree-line), things can get a bit bumpy.  The tree-line is my limit for normal functioning.  Above the line, I experienced a slightly light head and reduced reaction time, while my heart rate remained normal.  I saw other people on this delightful glacier (yes, you can walk on it) hopping and skipping about without problems, but then I have also been in the car about 2,000 feet lower on I-70 with a friend who nearly passed out from just sitting and breathing as normal.

This is a land of extremes, and seemingly very remote.  No one can really live this far up unless they are much closer to the tropics (La Paz, Bolivia is about 12,000 feet up and boasts streets lined with palm trees), and even the trees give way.  As you can see, those spruces are either dead or growing on the side of their trunks away from the cold and wind.  Most of them are barely 12 feet tall, and are true champions of their species.  Twenty feet further up, they shrink into mats of vegetation huddled low to the ground.  You can see those here.  Those are trees, believe it or not.  They are just very small, because the growing season is maybe a month or two months long.  And yes, that is an elk.  Heaven knows what it is grazing on.

Twenty feet further down are healthier fellows, but they are far less impressive considering as how they are literally protected by themselves.  The winds drop inside any forest, and the canopy, even as open as it is here, can keep snow from melting into June or shrubs from defoliating into November.  Still, this is a world more than two miles above the sea, and a cold one at that.  Even where the forest does pick up a bit more mass, things are hardly ideal for growing.

Now I don't know about you, but those are some pretty amazing trees to be doing that.  Sure, the gap in the snow is artificial, as the road is plowed.  Truth be told though, I stuck my hand in there, and my arm went all the way in before I felt anything resembling ground.  That spruce is mostly trunk!  I have no idea how it managed to grow the way it did, as up this far, things grow very slowly (decades for a foot of length).  This is what the top of our continent looks like, and not only here.  Remember how I advertised mountains as the land of diversity?  Well, this land of the tree-line and higher is called the "Hudsonian" life zone.  It is named after the southernmost tundra in the world, that which rings Hudson Bay.  Species here can be found there as well, and a trip up the mountain gives you the habitat equivalent of driving from Omaha to Churchill, Manitoba.  There, and here, even in the most undesirable of conditions, life grows as soon as the sun can hit it.

Mind you, there was still a pretty heavy snow pack.

These pictures were all taken in mid-June, by the way.  

There is more on the way.  This seemed like an interesting place to stop for now.