The mountains are beautiful, the prairies are flat, the East is storied. Whatever. Consult anybody for these places - what about the great lakes region? This area has always troubled me, in the same way Everest troubled Hillary and the Antarctic troubled Shackleton. Is it possible for a man to circumnavigate the great lakes using only his air conditioned vehicle? I flirted with the idea but decided it would be too risky, I would be found months later, entombed in my truck, buried under McDonald’s wrappers and cassette tapes. So instead, I drive past them, feeling small and spiteful, wishing they would give up their secrets.
In order to get from western Canada to eastern Canada you must be wary that there is a no man’s land between these two regions that stretches somewhere around 2000 kilometers. If this region were to be made into a nation it would be the sixth largest in the world*. Historians, geographers, and the like would disagree with me, they would say that it is, in fact, eastern Canada. Don’t listen to them, it’s theoretical nonsense. Once you’re east of Winnipeg you are in a void, if the Greeks had seen this region they would have had to re-invent the underworld. Until you arrive in Ottawa you are in the mystery meat of the North American sandwich.
The route I choose through this land based bermuda triangle involves a detour through The States, we hang a right at Winnipeg and after a long wait at the border we are let in to the land of cheap gas and caffeinated Mountain Dew. The American prairie interstate highway, decorated by vehicles of the suspiciously rich, gives way to thick mats of stunted trees and eventually lakes so big they have tides**, ocean freighters, and commercial fisheries.
The towns along the Great Lakes really are beautiful, they look like places that all of us should have grown up in. These smaller towns are anchored to bigger resource communities like, Duluth, Thunder Bay, and Sault Ste. Marie. These cities are characterized by factories and shipyards so massive they dwarf the sizable communities around them. They look as though they need all of North America present in order to make them run. Arriving at these places is humbling, it is humbling in a different sense than it is to be a Canadian going to Toronto for the first time, or an American going to New York. It is humbling because of these huge factories, restless beasts that never sleep. They chew up resources and spit them out into the lakes. There are people in these places that are actually still making things. They make things in buildings that were slapped together in that dated brick design that dominated the 50s and 60s. The architecture creeps in to other parts of the town as well, as if the weedy roots of the factories have spread under the earth and popped up in the form of utilitarian apartment blocks and Zellers department stores.
There is a sort of beauty in this, in the same way in there was a beauty in what civilizations like the Maya did. Their achievements are rooted in their communities being the pinnacle of what is possible for humans to make, the degree to which they manipulated their surroundings is unsurpassed. City skylines are impressive, but what happens within the confines of these snap-together tall buildings? If, in the distant future, I was excavating the site of a 20th century city, I would hope to come upon a place like Duluth rather than say, Tokyo, or Los Angeles. I would want to see where people had worked with their hands. I would want to see where people made stuff, not where people moved numbers around on a screen. This is why I am in awe of this region. There are still people, deep in the belly of those beasts, ensuring that the legacy of the human being is one that, despite being somewhat irresponsible, was also one that could get things done.
*This is speculative.
** Similar to a bathtub I'm told, not like those fancy lunar ones....on second thought, this too is speculative.