Heading South To Go North

I have been through many mountains across North America, including the grand Rockies of Colorado, the Sierra Nevadas of California, even the great mountains around Mexico City which tower above tropical landscapes in glorious displays of snow throughout the year.  Try as I might, however, I find myself still more so in awe of the subtle majesty of the Appalachians.  I think this is because the forests of all these mountains are what holds the true attraction for me, and the Appalachians are amazing southern continuations of the grand Boreal forests of northern North America.  Boreal species can be found as far south as West Virginia, where the right combination of altitude and cold, boggy conditions let a forest survive as it would have during the last ice age in the same place.  At the same time, multitudes of species extending from the Atlantic, Southern, and Midwestern worlds converge in what is one of the most under-appreciated ecologically diverse areas on the continent.  Maybe I just like rooting for the underdog!

Pictured below is a scene off of NY 165 just south of Roseboom, NY.

Only a couple of hours out of New York City one can experience scenery that looks like what one could encounter hundreds of miles to the north in Quebec and Ontario.  There are some "southern" trees and shrubs even in the photo, of course, along with rhododendrons and azaleas among the pines on the mountain slopes or cottonwoods and willows lining a stream, things that one would not find in the northern Boreal world.  Then again, one would not be so close to some of the largest cities in the world, either.  One of the catchiest slogans of the Upper Peninsula tourism billboards along I-75 in Michigan is "Up North: Closer Than You Think".  In the case of the Appalachians, up north can even be to the south!  While most residents of the east coast pride themselves on the marks of civilization they have all around them, they should also know that they still have a little bit of the wilderness that not only the second born American colonists and immigrants had in their backyard, but that has been here for tens of thousands of years.

Parks In The News: Three New National Monuments.

http://www.npca.org/news/media-center/press-releases/2013/national-parks-group-applauds-7.html

The United States now has 401 national park units!  President Obama designated them protected sites of national interest today.  Two of the sites help us to discover more of the heritage of Black people in the country, centered especially on the Civil War era.  The other gives Delaware something to finally put on the map.

A Border Between Friends: Different Priorities.

In the last post on our current topic of discerning a political-cultural divide between Canada and the United States we visited some primal history regarding the development of a modern notion of liberty in our nations. We opened and returned to a concept of liberty that the political forces of the late eighteenth century were familiar with, one that was intimately bound to the power tied to capitalism (or more specifically, capital).  We also ended on a note of something far more simple and familiar for most of us: the desire to live a life unmolested by those who would seek to impose either economic or religious views on people.

Many of the first Colonists or Habitants were probably primarily after a better existence away from all the conflicts over in Europe.  As colonial Canada and the United States grew in size and economic import, however, men of political ambition followed the early colonists and freedom seekers and tried to create little dominions of their own across the sea.  Likewise, any who came over to read the Bible in peace and quiet found some religious reformers and revolutionaries take the same boat and try to start little religious battles that were clearly making life difficult enough over in Britain and even France.

In the end, the religious and economic revolution was forced out of France by a Louis XVI obsessed with eliminating the resistance of Le Fronde; the country was made forcibly Roman Catholic with conservative and slightly Jansenistic agendas.  In Britain Catholicism was instead ousted, and any particular Protestant factionalism shelved in the face of pursuing economic power for the nation and thus for the individuals of the nation (which was clearly tired of religious-inspired civil war).  The battle cry of Liberty thus was suppressed in France for some time, and embraced in Britain, until in the last half of the eighteenth century, when parlors in France became occupied with nothing other than the talk of freedom.  Likewise, talk of Liberty was popular in Britain even after the outbreak of violence in France during the Revolution, but the talk became far more pressing over in the colonies where new waves of taxation were awakening some very old debates.  Liberty for the reason of economic or personal freedom was starting to become an international affair.

So what was it like for everyone, including and especially the ordinary people?

In the thirteen colonies, Liberty meant not having your property infringed upon, especially in the form of taxation or the quartering of soldiers meant to enforce said taxation.  Liberty also meant being able to freely exploit the land, especially the opportunities awaiting beyond the Appalachians which Westminster was otherwise eager to reserve to the First Born of the continent.  Liberty meant being able to defend one's land against encroachment from any hostile party, First Born, British, or even someone from another colony.

In Canada, Liberty meant being able to speak French, remain Catholic if so desired, and preserve a culture while also enjoying the benefits of English law and British developments in representative democracy which had all but been suppressed in France.  After the Loyalists arrived, it meant holding on to hearth and home, just as it did back in the colonies, but not under threat from Britain and King George... under threat instead from intolerant Yankees.  When free land was offered to Americans interested in resettlement, passions became a little less hostile, but the American invading forces in 1812 were seen as no less hostile by such transplanted Americans who actually enjoyed the stability and, yep, lack of government offered by the ruling British.  Here we start to see the beginning of what the negative definition of Canadian identity: being North American and not American.  When the American threat died down, the Loyalists turned their attention to the French-Canadians, who stared back at them from across the Ottawa River, sometimes even from across the street, as my Franco-Ontarien ancestors did.

The English and French wanted protection from each other, in something of a cultural personality battle, even as some loud-mouth, but minority, factions do to this day.  Liberty started to mean "I have rights as a province".  What rights were focused on, exactly?  Language.  Religion.  Education.  Business was, and in my opinion still is, secondary to the debates of cultural freedom.  This is probably why Canada, while decidedly a capitalist nation, has shown only minor aversion to socialistic intervention by the government, in great contrast to the United States where the opposite has been a point of much political drama in the past decade.

In the United States, of course, the states also wanted protection from one another, but this was largely out of economic issues, most notably the issue of slavery.  While cultural debates have always raged on in American political warfare, notably in the realm of civil rights, the power of the Federal government to mess with what the states are allowed to say goes in regards to property has always been the leading force behind helping to define Liberty.  Why?  The United States had long shared a broad common culture, even as immigrants would later pour into the country and regional cultural identity differences were apparent even before the Revolution.  And what of those immigrants?

Canada has had just as many, in proportion of course, as the United States.  The end of the nineteenth century saw all sorts of nationalities pour into both countries, usually for the general reason of seeking a better life and escaping political garbage back in the mother country.  Both countries proved exceptionally capable to absorbing the entire world into a melting pot, but this is the key point of departure:

In Canada, the differences were not considered crucial in deciding how to make someone a Canadian.

In the United States, the differences were considered crucial in deciding how to make someone an American.

Stop for a moment, before drawing conclusions about both countries, however.  Take a look at something very simple in both places, the concept of official language.  Canada has two.  The United States does not even have one, at least not one ever officially declared.  Canada features petty fights over both tongues.  The United States features a general acceptance that English is the way to go and gets into absolutely huge and dramatic patriotic stand-offs over the matter despite, you know, not having declared English the official language.  Citizens have to take an English test, but an interpreter and a lot of assistance in the process are provided for the newly minted American.  In Canada, this is less the case, and you need to do English or French (unless you happen to be in the far north and want to do Cree or something).  Confused at the irony yet?

And what about the general concept of a melting pot?  In the United States, there is little strange about a Black family sitting down for a spaghetti dinner and not having it mentioned that they are eating Italian food, or everyone in town going nuts on St. Patrick's Day despite being in no way Irish whatsoever.  In Canada, half the town might still be throwing an Orangeman's parade!  Go to Wegman's supermarket in Buffalo and find a huge variety of groceries celebrating every known culture on earth with a Christmas display featuring everything from Mexican goodies to Polish-American toasting wafers.  Go to Loblaws over in Niagara Falls, Ontario and notice prominent displays of traditional British cuisine and a Christmas display featuring those annoying Victorian Christmas crackers that my Mom insists are necessities.  Head over to Quebec and find a different world entirely.  Head out into the prairie provinces and find Ukrainian and Icelandic stuff.  First Born influences are also everywhere.  Multi-culturalism is assured, but the individual influences are very obvious.

This is not to say that you can't find tons of different cultural treasures in Canada, especially in places like Toronto (one of the best places to get a curry outside of India is either in London or Toronto) its just that... well the differences will be highlighted, even as they are diluted in the States.  In Canada, cultural differences are viewed as the purpose behind Liberty, and are given anointed protection even as they cause tension here and there.

We certainly have a different emphasis on democracy, to say the least.  But this is not where the differences end.  Again, we return to perspective.  The history of democratic struggle in the United States has always been one of assertive action, sometimes to the point of raw aggression.  In Canada, political freedoms have gradually evolved, with social action being taken defensively.  Political freedoms in Canada have come about  in a parallel history of development with the United States, sometimes even in reaction or as an alternative.  Again, the Canadian mentality is about the democratic experiment looking at the broader portrait of historical awareness, even perhaps into the fishbowl that is British, American, and French democratic evolution.  The American mentality is about the front line of the struggle, an experiment always in a state of flux and even survival.

This is, of course, all opinion and the viewpoint of this French-Irish-Canadian-American looking at his two nations with the perspective of an expatriate looking at both host and home nation from a standpoint straddling the border.  I remain a Canadian citizen because of perspective, even as I continue to live in the United States because of intense fascination.  If ever the two nations were united...

And what of that?  Could they be?  Definitely, and yet not without some pain and difficulty.  We already share a lot in common.  At the same time, we also hold on to a history of "get off my lawn":

The Isaac Brock monument on the site of the Battle of Queenston Heights, overlooking New York across the Niagara Gorge.  This is probably the most poignant reminder that a border still exists between two otherwise peaceful friends.

Yet we also have a history of being allies and building the way to having the longest undefended border in the world.  Signs leading up to border access points on both sides of the line declare not that a checkpoint is coming up, but that there will soon be a bridge to the other country.

Not too far from that monument are multiple bridges manned by immigration officials more concerned with how much duty-free alcohol you have in your car than with how you intend to spend your time in their country.  Above, pointed at the New York side, is the Rainbow Bridge, along with the American Falls of Niagara Falls.  

When you cross over, you will probably see a McDonald's on both sides, you drive on the same side of the road, and you just feel like you are on the other side of a river... and yet it always feels a little bit different, units of distance measurement aside.

Good News For Syrup: Growing With Plants Spreads The News

After a few ridiculous winters of days as much as thirty degrees above normal giving even New Englanders and Ontarians a chance to bask in the January sun, our delayed winter of 2013 has given our lovely Sugar Maple (Acer Saccharum) trees a chance to once again shine and bring for their wonderful sap, and more importantly, sugar derived from said sap.  A wonderful blog I follow, Growing With Plants, has devoted their latest post to this wonderful affair of sticky tree blood:

http://www.growingwithplants.com/2013/03/vermont-maple-sugarmakers-rejoice.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2FKxxH+%28Growing+with+Plants%29

Now, to be fair, this is only mere Vermont maple syrup, which is nothing compared to Ontario or even Quebec maple syrup.  I will not even try to comment on people in Illinois or Indiana claiming they can do it...

Just kidding.  Or am I?

Anyway, thanks to Growing With Plants, probably one of the most entertaining and informative gardening blogs out there, for spreading the maple gospel.

Why We Are Not One Country: Historical and Ideological Ancient History.

What is liberty?

Is liberty being allowed to do what you want, to believe what you want free of all coercion?  Is liberty being able to take small pleasures in life, is it about making your own way in life without someone else telling you what to do?

For English speakers in the early and mid eighteenth century, liberty was perhaps all of these things, but above all else it was about being able to own property and not having someone else take it away from you or do anything to it without your consent.  Freedom of religion was also important, to be sure, but it was a sideshow to what truly mattered: power.  That's right, I just linked the two concepts, and the property owners of the time certainly did in mentality if not in direct word.  Perhaps this is a dangerous concept to be illustrating in such words considering as how I am defining the differences between Canadian and American mentalities, as per our last post over two weeks ago:

Defining A Border: Why Are We Not One Country?

The truth of the matter, though, is that world politics are defined by power struggles as much if not more so than by ideological crusades; a world of military forces, cults of personality, etc. means that even the noblest of goals is going to continue to be fought over for some time.  While the human race has taken great strides toward progress by diplomacy and moral force, the fact remains that not all of us are interested in such paths.  The story of how the modern world and our two nations came about illustrate this all too well.  This story is a long one that takes us back to the plagues of the fourteenth century, when the New World was not much more than Nordic legend, at least over in Europe.

By the time the illnesses had run their course, many countries in Europe lost over half their population.  Farms started going untended, market places started breaking down, feudalism looked to be a memory.  Lords were in desperate need of workers to keep their estates running, the labor side of which was finding that they could make demands for a better life if the management wanted to keep things running.  Heirs, even lowly commoners, found themselves in possession of multiple lots and belongings as entire generations would leave only one or two males left in large families.  Some of them turned to trades and business, others to controlling the land as their former noble superiors had done for thousands of years of human history, but all of them found that they now had power unlike anything that had been imagined before.  In Britain, the House of Commons slowly grew in importance.

By the seventeenth century, that house, along with its upper counterpart of Lords, was able to turn the course of history by overthrowing a king.  While that particular revolution soon became overwhelmed by religious zeal, its main issue was never truly forgotten: power did not ultimately rest in the hands of one individual who was claiming sovereignty based on some assumption that human power rested in religious excuse (namely the divine right of kings).  The main issue, of course, was taxation.  You know, money, personal freedom to properly use money and individual economic value.  Some people would take this to the extreme in the next century and try to rid the world of anything other than the currency of economics, relegating religion and morals to the realm of either usefulness or menace.  A very classic line to sum all this up comes from one such "enlightenment" thinker who wrote much in the way of history (particularly focused on Rome), Edward Gibbons:

“The policy of the emperors and the senate, as far as it concerned religion, was happily seconded by the reflections of the enlightened, and by the habits of the superstitious, part of their subjects. The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful. And thus toleration produced not only mutual indulgence, but even religious concord.”

At the same time there were people still interested in the concept of freedom itself.  Some still clamored for religious freedom, as many do today even in North America.  Some wanted to be able to just keep a small home with ground to grow things in.  Some just wanted to be able to move about freely and not be tied down to any settlement.  Some just wanted to be left alone.  As wars over the power to control these things heated up not only in the British Isles but also in France, these sorts found themselves heading across the ocean to the vast unexplored wilderness of North America.  In 1607, Englishmen came to make this sort of thing happen in Virginia, and a year later Frenchmen did the same in Quebec.  The early years were extremely difficult, especially in the brutal northern climate that the French encountered, and settlement remained largely defensive and frontier-like for some time.  Furthermore, except for the landing in 1620 that would start up the world of New England, these ventures were also meant to be commercial experiments.  Virginia had tobacco potential, and Quebec had fur.  The foundations of two nations were little else than trading posts to begin with:

Part of reconstructed and surviving Jamestown.  Like Quebec and Tadoussac, little of the primal origins of Jamestown remains intact, owing both to development and historic disasters.  The place is definitely worth a visit, as with any historic site, because one gets to experience, with all the senses, the conditions and landscape that the people of history did.  Compared to England and France, wilderness North America was a rough affair for European ideas of comfort.

But before much time had passed, and people were making lives for themselves so far away from problems back home, people started arriving looking for something other than a piece of the game.  People started putting down foundations for homes and experiencing something that was just as appealing as a fight for freedom: a quiet life.  Many people who have come to call this continent home have done so not for reasons of power or belief, or both, but because they wanted something a little bit better than the possibility of having everything destroyed on an annual basis.  Come by tomorrow as we conclude this series and see how this quiet life developed just a little bit differently in the United States and Canada, to see what impact politics did have on everyday life.

Defining A Border: Why Are We Not One Country?

I was once involved in an interesting debate with an Irish professor of international relations.  This was at the University of London back in 2003, right after Iraq had been invaded by the American alliance, a time when the entire city was abuzz with discussions about the directions being taken in the war on terror, large-scale Muslim immigration to western Europe, and how the United States should now be viewed in the eyes of the rest of the world.  The talking always turned back to nationalism, and the professor and I had a historical sensitivity to the question; an Irishman teaching politics in the capital of the British Commonwealth/Empire was discussing what nationhood meant with a Canadian who had then been living in the United States for roughly a decade.

The crowds outside wanted to focus their anger for having Britain dragged into yet another battle in a conflict that was really getting ugly and being engaged on in a global scale.  They blamed the capitalistic giant across the sea, the United States of Imperialistic Christian Conservatism, and they burned her flag on Parliament square.  They were people of diverse nationalities and cultures, people that would just as soon raise a fist against each other but found common ground in their hatreds for a place they had never been to or had really come to understand.  Iranians, Cubans, Egyptians, Somalians, and so many others were burning a flag and even announcing that their national identity, in an adopted immigrant country no less, was about not being American.  The next day, we asked ourselves what we saw, and how it related to our sense of nationality.

For an Irishman, the answer was relatively simple.  Ireland has a different culture, pace of existence, religious foundation, and even landmass from the rest of Britain.  Her people speak in a different accent, if they even speak the same language that they do in the Sceptered Isle.  For a Canadian, the answer was a bit more complex.  We do share a common landmass with the United States, divided by an extremely straight artificial border for the most part.  Our indigenous peoples existed as the same nations on both sides of this line, except around Lake Ontario.  We both have the same fanatical love of hockey and baseball, we both (believe it or not) generally speak the same language in similar inflections and accents.  And yet...

We don't think alike.  Canadians by and large tolerate democracy with greater government oversight.  Americans generally deplore any level of government oversight, and certainly hate taxes, and yes, this goes for both the left and right, even if the execution does not end up being the same!  Canadians, now and in the past, are all about settlement.  Americans, now and in the past, like expanding all sorts of things, from the size of buildings and drinking cups to the settlement of frontiers both natural and man-made.  In Canada, one is more likely to hear a gun called a weapon.  In the United States, one is more likely to hear a gun being debated in the nomenclature of a tool.  In Canada, the struggle to define a national language has largely been settled in a divided country becoming a country of two national base cultures in recognition, even as the French portion grows smaller.  In the United States, the same struggle has long been quieted in the recognition of a single language (albeit one never actually given official status) both out of cultural pride and simplicity among a nation that would otherwise be a jumble of tongues, even as the Spanish minority grows larger.

Canadians were content to await the recognition of freedoms which had long been practically lived in if not codified.  Americans were unable to accept any alternative other than such a codification, even if the price was war and civil unrest.  Canadians would and do debate the nature of liberty.  Americans know liberty comes at a price, and that while debate can help realize what must be fought for, someone has to lead the charge.  Now this is not to say that Canadians have not crusaded for civil rights, no, quite the opposite!  This is not to say that Americans have never debated rather than come to a stand over issues, no, that is why this nation has such an immense legal tradition and a complex history of political theory.   As it was noted so many times in the nineteenth century, however, the United States of America is the great experiment in modern democracy, an experiment that Britain handed over to the colonies when she had to fight against a French powerhouse that was proclaiming herself to have the same role over in Europe (and we all know how that went for them in the first few decades).  Think of it this way:  The United States is like the fishbowl in which the world watches to see how civil liberty develops.  Canada has the front row seat, maybe even being the second fishbowl right next door.

I say this because in that talk with the professor I concluded that Canadian nationalism really started by us being... not American.  Oh yes, there is that distinct French flavor there, but even by the late 1700's the habitants of the St. Lawrence valley were not thinking in the same terms as the Parisians were, but were embracing a concept of parliamentary representation and coming to cherish things like religious liberty.  Educated men in Montreal were reading the same sort of things that Bostonians were, and the English-speaking leadership was getting nervous.  As it turns out, these educated people were historically-minded enough to know that they had it good under the ruling powers, and that together with the influx of Loyalists, were looking into the fishbowl while seeing where the water came from in the first place.  Canadians saw how the United States was developing, and they learned important lessons from her, and developed accordingly into a parallel but slightly different democracy.

Perhaps the most vivid way to see how this is the case would be a look at the unfolding of subsidiarity in both nations.  These days, Federalism can be an ugly word in both countries, and the desire to have a central government in service to local governments forged our two political systems, even as we both found ourselves really in need of unity in order to not be torn apart at conception.  The thirteen colonies had to "hang together, or surely all hand separately .  The diverse provinces of Canada had to make a stand as one body so as to not be swallowed whole by the Yankee to the south.   In both nations, no one wanted to give more power than they had to to the state or province next door.  In both nations, however, the emphasis on what was important to the states and the provinces rested on different foundations.

English liberty, after all, came first as a question of religion, only to be followed by a second question regarding individual property rights.

In Canada, the first question became the focus of what was truly important to the provinces, whereas in the United States, the second question ultimately took precedence.

Yes, I know we all come to the blog not to hear me rant but to see my pictures.  Here we have Wall Street, the modern heart of the "second question".  Interestingly enough, that is a TD Ameritrade building right there.  TD, of course, is Toronto Dominion.  Here again we see integration on economic and cultural levels, even as two different flags continue to fly on the northern part of our continent. 

This, of course, would be a very important part as to why we are not one country, a look at where our mentalities are truly focused.  We see that we define ourselves in part by not being something else.  Come by next post as we take a closer look at just how this happened, and what it means for us today.  

The Pennsylvania Wilds

Before I resume posting on the topic of Canada relating to the United States, I felt that I should post a picture or two I took on a recent trip across the length of Pennsylvania on I-80.

I-80 Westbound, mostly between Milton and Bellefonte, PA.

This was taken in an area known by the locals as the "Pennsylvania Wilds".  The wilds are exactly as their name seems to suggest, a bit undeveloped and rather "great outdoors" when compared to the rest of even the most mountainous parts of the state.  Whereas most valleys in Pennsylvania are extensively farmed and contain sizable cities and towns, the Wilds region remains largely as a settler or migrant would have found it, albeit with second-growth forests.  Part of the reason for this is because the land is a bit more rugged, even by Pennsylvania standards.  The parallel ridges that constitute much of the eastern half of the state converge here, and even where they are replaced by the Allegheny Plateau to the north, the land is a bit too vertical to accommodate the plow or city street.

The Appalachian indicator species that one encounters in eastern Pennsylvania are less prevalent here; I do not recall seeing as high a diversity among the pines as I did even dozens of miles back east.  Likewise, the rhododendrons seemed to be a bit stubbier and infrequent, but they were still there.  Botanically speaking, the northern extremes of the humid subtropical world closer to the Atlantic were being edged out in favor of the harsher climate of the continental interior, or perhaps even something a bit more northern than interior.  While I would hardly consider the area to be passably boreal, spruce bogs do continue to grow even south of here at the higher elevations where damp and cool conditions might persist in a soggy depression.  I know for a fact that I came across some Red Spruce (Picea Rubens), but the 70 mph missile I was driving was going just a bit too fast for a side shot off of I-80.  There were definitely a lot of Eastern Hemlock (Tsuga Canadensis), the ubiquitous Eastern White Pine (Pinus Strobus, which are just about everywhere in all three photos above), as well as some Tamaracks (Larix Laricina) in the soggier places.  Happiest of all finds, however, were the abundant Black Spruce (Picea Mariana) in those soggy spots, and indicator of actual boreal remnants if there ever was one.

This being winter, I did not have much of a chance to see any of the herbaceous plant life, and time constraints prevented me from listening for the local bird life, but this only serves to entice me to make a return trip.  The central Appalachians, even here in the heart of mountainous Pennsylvania, never really struck me as a place to see primeval Appalachia and wild eastern North America.  For one, they are a bit low around here, topping out over 2,000 feet only on the higher crests and peaks.  They always used to strike me as interesting marks of relief on the way between smoother Western New York and the coastal plains, but otherwise just some more mixed-hardwood forest punctuated by the odd tall pine.  After seeing them from the east-west axis, I have discovered them in a more intriguing light, perhaps as early settlers did.

Pennsylvania is a bit different from the other eastern states.  She is a large state and bears the same scale as the first tier of western states beyond the Missouri.  She was the only of the thirteen colonies to not have ocean front property, and compared to other western-reaching colonies like Virginia and the Carolinas or even New York, she did not have a lot of gentle relief.  The keystone state found a frontier at the doorstep of its capital, full of daunting ridges.  Much of her western portion was not settled until well into the nineteenth century, held back by easier terrain to the east and west.  Perhaps even more of an object of amazement and wonder than the mountains, however, would have been the forests that took on a much darker and northern appearance in contrast to the gentler woods of the eastern seaboard.  The early British and Irish colonists might have looked upon such woods as more akin to where the French were running around with the natives and going after beaver and big game.  The Germans and other immigrants who came generations later might have passed over the borderline boreal forests in favor of the lighter woods and savannas of Ohio and points westward.

I tend to imagine Daniel Boone escorting settlers toward the Ohio Valley, with everyone in the party absolutely enthralled and at the same time slightly scared of the immense forests around them, bound in by rather imposing ridges.  Today I-80 plows through a few road cuts but otherwise looks for natural gaps between the ridges as it charges westward, and the forest is a bit less dramatic to modern passersby more enamored of man-made wonders, but the Wilds and central Appalachians in general still tend to be a scenic and natural backdrop to the hustle and bustle of both the eastern cities and the rustbelt and agricultural breadbasket beyond the other side of the mountains.

Canada is Not America North

"The apartment a floor above the great loft party."

"America Jr."

"Some stupid place that puts tiny maple leaves over their corporate icons to remind themselves of how dependent they are on us while maintaining a superficial culture of superiority."

If you imagined these were all cute little snide remarks about how Canada relates to the United States, you would be dead on.  One does not need to watch South Park to know that the neighbor to the north has been maligned for years by some Americans, or at best taken as a joke.  Politicians in Washington have alternated between using Canada as a photo-op for international relations and bashing Canada as a terrorist school/socialist nightmare.  The sentiments of condescension toward the folks of the north is nothing new, nor entirely American; the British sometimes saw us as the consolation prize for their efforts in building a trans-Atlantic empire while the French sold us out entirely.  Thankfully, the majority of people who interact with Canada on more than a surface level find her an interesting part of the world, and most Buffalonians and Detroiters will admit that things are not exactly the same across the bridge.

That said, Canadians and Americans share much in common.  We have a shared history of both the first and second born of our continent, we share similar values in regards to an idealistic democracy, and we both tend to view the McDonald's down the street not as some bastion of American capitalistic domination over the world but just as the golden arches down the road that serves things that are not good for you.  We both strongly favor English as a means of communication, even as we have a great many people that speak French or Spanish as well.

But we are different.  The people who live on the left of the river below are not the same as the people who live on the right side.  Lewiston and Queenston might not be as different as Brownsville and Matamoros, but the lack of a linguistic gap and a large economic disparity is not all that goes into dividing neighbors.

Ontario on the left, New York on the right, looking north toward the mouth of the Niagara River on Lake Ontario from atop the Niagara Escarpment.  A boundary very much storied in war and separation   

As a Londoner once pointed out to me nearly a decade ago, at the height of tension during the war on terror, the differences of nationals lie not in cultural attachments, but in mentality.

I am breaking up this post into a series over the next week, mainly because it took a lot out of me to write, and because some very political messages might better be communicated and received when broken down a bit more.  What you will not see are diatribes about who did what to whom.  What you will see are ideas offered by a Canadian very much interested in and passionate about the United States and her history, one who has lived in the United States for quite some time now.

Hamilton: Gateway to the East?

I have posted much on my eternal dispute with others in this part of the world regarding what should properly be considered the Midwest.  In my grand vision of defending the uniqueness of the Great Lakes region, I even went so far as to clearly mark borders for the true Midwest on a map.  Truth be told, regional transitions are a bit more blended than simple lines placed upon a globe slice; some parts of farm-country western Pennsylvania could pass for the Midwest if someone just woke up there one day without knowing where they were, just as parts of nearby Ohio could fool someone in reverse.

For that matter, looks can be deceiving, and they are not everything.  Western New York, especially the more level portions of land near Lake Ontario between Rochester and Buffalo, can look positively Indianan. Southern Ontario, especially the bits west of London, well, is grand farm country set on one of the flattest landscapes in the world.  The stretch between Chatham and Windsor might make one think they are on some farmed over portion of the great tallgrass prairies of Illinois or Iowa.  Only an hour or so of travel in any of these places, however, will make one think twice about such a presumption.  Great escarpments and foothills are often in view, previews of the often overlooked dramatic settings of New York, Washington, and other eastern cities.  Hamilton, Ontario, offers one such preview for the adventurer from western lands heading east:

No matter which angle you approach her from, Hamilton is descended into or framed by the dramatic cliffs of the Niagara Escarpment.  She is sandwiched between Lake Ontario and these ancient cliffs, and her electric blush over the night skies is the first point of departure from and otherwise open and rural skies of southwestern Ontario.  Toronto can easily be seen even on miserable days from her shores, and like the grand cosmopolitan city, she bears a diversity that can lay claim to nearly every nationality on the planet.  She was founded as a haven for loyalists escaping the American Revolution (albeit not really a going concern until after 1812), people who longed for a place of domestic settlement rather than interior expansion.  Hamilton's heritage is very much one of colonial foundations rather than a place of portage or transit to some imagined happiness deeper into the wilderness.

This was to be a great British North American city, one of the many cities founded for English Canadians to begin settling back down and regaining some feeling of what had been lost when they had to leave behind New York, Boston, etc.  London, Kitchener, even Brantford can feel a bit more like a Toledo, Saginaw, or an Ashtabula, but Hamilton tastes, both culturally and geographically, far more like a Syracuse or Albany.  It is in Hamilton that one can start to feel like the interior has been left behind, even as steel mills and freighters on the harbor are tell-tale signs that this is still a city of the Great Lakes rather than the "true east".

Mineral Wonders: On Display in Sarnia

Much of the grandeur of the continent lies out of sight and usually out of mind beneath our feet.  For eastern North Americans, the local geology is often visible only in gravel pits or road cuts, and most people barely pay it any attention.  Rocks are rocks, after all, and just things that make up our foundation, no?

Yep, that would be an amethyst.  

Not exactly!

Seen above is a rather impressive giant amethyst cluster mined from the area around Thunder Bay, Ontario.  The Canadian Shield is among the most mineralized localities in the world, with the lake floor of Lake Superior supposedly holding untold riches in precious metals and gems of all sorts.  The Keweenaw peninsula which juts out into the lake from Michigan is one of the most mineralogically diverse places on the planet, to be sure.  The first born of North America knew it, and were mining for copper and other riches ever since the last ice sheets retreated northwards.

This cluster is on display at the welcome center for Ontario tourists just off the international bridge in Sarnia, Ontario.  In keeping with an appreciation for the geological beauty of Ontario, several large Canadian Shield masses of granite, basalt, gabbro, and gneiss veined with quartz, rhyolite, and other fun minerals, are situated in a lovely rock garden outside of the main entrance.

The outcrops of these wonderful rocks start popping up only two hours travel north of Toronto, or in the western Upper Peninsula of Michigan and the Adirondack mountains of New York for those travelers wanting a piece of the action but not willing to brave the Canadian frontier.  Here in Sarnia, as well as in other entrance points such as Niagara Falls, a little piece of our very ancient (a billion years plus) heritage is a little bit closer at hand.

American Voyages is back in action after a brief respite due to personal losses.