Sault Ste. Marie, St. Joseph's Island and Sudbury

I started out east early in the morning. Since I had skipped dinner, I treated myself to a filling breakfast of bacon, eggs, toast and home fries at Barsanti's Small Frye, 23 Trunk Road. The home fries were excellent. (Author: I must have liked it a lot to record the address. But it seems from a search in 2013 that it's remembered in nostalgia as there are auctions for postcards of it.)

A billboard exhorted Americans, Join us against acid rain. Acid rain is a burning issue for Canadians and a source of acrimony between the two countries. There is little doubt now that the oxides of sulphur and nitrogen come from the exhaust towers of the midwest and blow northeastwards to descend on the forests of Ontario and Quebec. The soils there have insufficient capacity to neutralize the acid and the pH of the soil drops. Lakes become acidic and aquatic life dies.

I didn't have to travel far, only 300 km to the next hostel at Sudbury, so I took a side trip to St. Joseph's Island. This island is located between the mainland and Lake Huron and has a national historic park, Fort St. Joseph. After the American revolution, the British needed a base to maintain links with Indian tribes loyal to the British. So Fort St. Joseph was built. In those days there was no Transcanadian highway, of course, and the line of supply was long and tedious, wending through Ontario canals and Lake Huron. The St. Lawrence River was obviously unusable because of the Americans on the other side. So Fort St. Joseph had the distinction of being the most distant outpost of the Canadian colonies. Life was harsh. Today, the ruins are very peaceful. There is an excellent Parks Canada display about the history of the fort. It was 2 pm before I finally left St. Joseph's Island. I wondered if I would make it to the hostel by 5 pm.

The idea of living out in the Canadian country is always tinged with romanticism. When one mentions the Canadian wilderness, images come to mind of settlers holding out against the elements in the deep of winter, huddled around a log fire, kept from starvation by a well-provisioned pantry. I used to have such visions whenever I looked at a map of western Ontario with its sparse network of roads. These ideas came back to me as I considered how far I was from major cities. But this was not the reality. Although serious settlement is restricted to a thin strip around the main road and around country roads, the connection to civilization is firm. Dozens of trucks must traverse this Transcanadian highway every day, bringing supplies and mail, and social amenities were probably adequate, though far from what a urban dweller has come to expect. I presume that if one cared to wander away from this thin lifeline on any of those side roads branching out from the Transcanadian one would find the afore imagined wilderness.

A sign proclaimed This is Indian land. Obviously a protest from the natives, tired of the broken promises of white men. I saw cyclists now and then. Some looked like they were outfitted for a cross-continent trip. A side road was named Seldom Seen Road. Maybe it disappears in winter?

I thought I had wasted too much time at St. Joseph's Island, but I had plenty of time. At Sudbury I visited Big Nickel, a demonstration mine. They took us down the elevator for a tour of the galleries and explained how the ore is blasted out and then hauled out on rail cars. It was fascinating how the charges have to placed in the rock in a specified pattern and the charges have to be set off with precise timing. I didn't know before that the fertilizer ammonium nitrate is a perfectly good explosive. I must remember that next time I plan a revolution. No nickel was ever extracted from Big Nickel, it was just a demonstration mine. There was a project in the mine that grew vegetables under artificial light. A gigantic Canadian nickel stands outside the mine. Tourists take pictures next to it.

The landscape around Sudbury consists of bare, dark rock in many places. It looks like the mines are partly responsible for stripping the soil. Then again, Sudbury is located on the Canadian Shield, a mineral rich area and the soil was probably thin to begin with.

The Sudbury hostel had moved and I had to get directions from a friendly clerk at the railway station to find the new location. It turned out to be a boarding house with permanent residents, in addition to travellers like me. While I was making dinner, K, a Japanese hosteller walked in. He arrived on motorbike, all the way from Japan, via Asia and Europe. He had been travelling for a year already. He crossed into Canada at Niagara Falls and hoped to arrive in Alaska in a couple of weeks, before the summer ran out. Then he would head down the west coast of the US. Then home to Japan, I asked? No, he'll go to South America or Africa, if the money lasts. I admired this guy. He used to work as a programmer for a big corporation but found the logical thinking required beyond him, so he set out on his travels.

Where had he been to in Europe? He talked about Berlin, both East and West. He stopped for two months in Amsterdam early that year. I was in Amsterdam too, I exclaim. I pull out the American Discount Book Stores bookmark from my book. He laughs. He knows the store. He stayed at the youth hostel on Vondelpad and went each day to the Yamaha bike shop to work on his bike while awaiting a new engine from Japan. He also travelled to Belgium slowly, with a lame bike. Very cold, he says. Indeed, gray skies intensify the cold in one's bones.

How far is it to the next hostel, he wanted to know. I told him it was only 300 km to Sault Ste. Marie. But the next hostel, in Thunder Bay, was 800 km away. Too far for a day's journey. But the forecast predicted sunny weather the next day, a welcome change from the constant drizzle since the day before, so he might sleep in the open. He was caught in the day's rain too.

I asked K some questions about Japanese culture. How did they get their surnames, for instance? He said that long ago the Japanese didn't have family names. When the order went out for every family to get a surname, people adopted place names as identifiers. Matsushita, for example, means beneath the pine tree. Kinoshita and Suzuki are two of the most common family names in Japan.

I had wanted to see the slag pouring at the blast furnaces, said to be dramatic at night, but I decided to turn in early.

Michigan

I wanted to tour the Amway plant early so that I could have all day to get to Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. I had a big breakfast at the local diner and drove towards Ada.

Amway is the stereotypical American success story. Thirty years before, two Michiganers, Jay van Andel and Rich de Vos, started off selling their Liquid Organic Cleaner, purportedly based on coconut oil, from a old service station. Business boomed and they made other home cleaning products. In 1988 it was a corporation which employed most of the town of Ada. By Fortune 500 standards, Amway was small fry, with a turnover of less than a billion. But they acted very optimistic. My reason for wanting to see the factory was because my brother had been an Amway distributor. Before I came to the US, he told me to look for his and my sister-in-law's names on the list of direct distributors in Ada, Michigan. It feels strange to have one's name on some board of honour in some faraway land one may never visit. Amway works on the pyramid distribution scheme. Their marketing strategy harnesses the religious fervour of their distributors. I joked that my brother was my father's son, because my father used to preach the gospel, and my brother preached the Amway gospel.

I arrived in time for the 9:00 am tour. Apparently the first tour of the day is not very popular and I was the only person on it. My guide, Mr. Plastic, works in public relations. He goes out of his way to greet everybody we meet in the corridors, a superficial show of camaraderie. Politicians and salesmen have to develop this habit I suppose. I can't find my brother's and sister-in-law's names on the board. I guess they must have fallen short on the quotas. So much for fickle fame. At least my father thought he was working for a more permanent reward.

Mr. Plastic is relieved to have me off his hands when the tour is over. I wandered over to the display room to look at the displays. In a photograph of a production line a sign read Use your own brains, this machine has none.

Holland is 30 miles west of Grand Rapids on the shore of Lake Michigan. The area was settled by immigrants from the Low Countries in 1847. Zeeland is the next village. In May they have a tulip festival. The Amway founders may have come from here. I drove through the town but except for the name and the tourist trap Windmill Island, this could have been any other small Michigan town. This area marked the westward extent of my US drive. I headed north towards Canada. I thought the area around Muskegon might be more scenic but this was just another dump.

The Mackinac Bridge links the mitten shaped part of Michigan with the Upper Peninsula. When Michigan attained statehood, the Upper Peninsula was consolation for lands given away to Ohio in a boundary dispute in 1837. Now it is valuable because it is rich in minerals. The bridge is 5 miles long, including the ramps and was built between 1954 and 1958. As I crossed the channel, to my left was Lake Michigan and to my right was Lake Huron.

Sault Ste. Marie names both the US and the Canadian sides of the border crossing. I put in a full tank of petrol first. However expensive Michigan petrol was, I knew in Canada it would be between 1.5x to 2x that. Of course, it is the Americans who are spoiled and Canadian prices are closer to what the rest of the world pays. Many Canadian cars were lined up at the pumps. At the supermarket I noticed lots of shoppers. Are food prices too lower on the US side?

The International bridge is much shorter than the Mackinac Bridge and only spans US and Canadian locks and a narrow strait between Lake Superior and Lake Huron. There are guided tours for the Soo locks, but I was not keen to sightsee shipping locks.

The customs officers on the Canadian side were very suspicious of a New York car this far away from NY. It seemed strange that I should choose to cross into Canada here and not at Niagara Falls or south of Montreal. They searched my belongings thoroughly, convinced they had a smuggler on their hands. They were disappointed to find nothing. The officer asked me why I was so nervous. How to explain to him that the aura of suspicion was enough to unnerve me?

I drove away from the customs office feeling that I was being watched. The tourist office was just opposite so I drove in. Actually I really did want some brochures and maps so it wasn't just for appearances. But they were closed this late in the afternoon, so I went in search of the hostel. I must have been the most law-abiding driver in Sault Ste. Marie that day. I dutifully stopped before making right turns, didn't try to beat any amber lights and all that. But after a while I realized how silly the whole thing was and had to laugh. I suppose it was inevitable, the search, knowing how the tiny minds of the custom officers worked. Why should I feel like a fugitive when I had broken no law?

The hostel was quite easy to find but finding a place to park required a couple of rounds on one way streets. A group of Germans were also staying at the hostel. They were on a cross-continent trip. They said they were waiting for some members to catch up. Perhaps they were cross-country cycling.

Westwards

Author's note: In August 1988 I attended a conference in Montreal, but took the opportunity to drive through the US and Canadian mid-west as well as tour a bit of northern Quebec. Unfortunately the very few slides I took have not survived the ravages of time well. Also the landscape was not as picturesque as the eastern seaboard of Canada which I had visited in 1986. So this blog will have far fewer pictures than others. However my impressions of the trip may be interesting. I have edited out, I hope, the purple prose and boring parts.

I had a long drive ahead of me. I had to be in Grand Rapids, Michigan by nightfall, for reasons that will become clear. The weather was ideal for travelling. It had been warm previous days but a cooling trend had set in. Buffalo and Erie went past quickly, as I made no stop for lunch. I cursed the poor Ohio roads as I drove past Cleveland. Cleveland was called a dump of a city and I saw why. The landscape revealed abandoned industrial buildings and depressed neighbourhoods. I noticed the absence of billboards for fast food places. It must be a poor American city whose citizens cannot afford fast food. Toledo, in contrast, looked prosperous with shopping malls, new housing developments and yuppie trappings.

When I entered the Ohio turnpike, the toll slip I was given said that using exits 8 through 17 was illegal. I puzzled over this. What sort of turnpike was this? Eventually I realized that I had entered via a westbound only toll gate and eastbound traffic had their own toll gates. Hence if you used exits 8 through 17 you had made an illegal U-turn, reversing your direction of travel. In Ohio and even more so in the flat plains obtaining land fill for making flyover ramps is a problem. A friend once had told me to look for artificial ponds nearby. The highway department usually strikes a deal with a farmer. We'll pay for your fill and make a pond for you.

I crossed into Michigan as dusk fell. Michigan is a corruption of the old Indian name Mishigamaa. Petrol prices were slightly higher than NY or OH but not excessive. In Michigan road construction signs were often accompanied by a frownie. Dinner was at Elias Big Boy, a chain restaurant whose signs I saw all over Michigan. The all-you-can-eat chicken buffet for $6.95 was a good deal. The lettuce tasted like cellulose, which was impressive for American vegetables, but the boiled potatoes and corn were quite good, as was the fried chicken. American cooking can be tasty when it sticks to simple, fresh food.

It had been a long drive and I stopped at a rest area for a short snooze when the drowsiness became overpowering. Better to lose some time than not arrive. At Grand Rapids, as I sat in my car outside the Red Roof Inn reading the maps, a woman dashed into the office. I found out later she had got the last single room so I had to pay a couple of dollars more for an extra bed I didn't need.