Category Archives: Travel

A Fundamental Misunderstanding

2024 Trip to Eastern Canada, civilization, Indigenous People After Contact, Indigenous Religion and Philosophy

 

When Europeans arrived in what they called, wrongly, “The New World,” they quickly encountered the people who already lived here. In fact, they had lived here for thousands of years and had done rather well at that.

The  indigenous people were shocked at how these newcomers from Europe were not as healthy as the people who lived here. The Europeans were shorter than the North Americans and much less healthy lives.  Added to that, the Indigenous People were shocked at the great inequality between the different newcomers. There were classes of people that did extremely  poorly while the elite lived extravagantly well.  The Indigenous people did not understand this. They thought this meant the newcomers were not really civilized. I think they were right.

The Indigenous People realized the newcomers had some good ideas. They had amazing technologies.  Guns, big ships, and horses to name a few. But the Europeans also had a lot to learn from the inhabitants.  They were not able to survive here without help from the native North Americans. At first, they learned quickly and well. In time the Europeans forgot how they needed help.

The indigenous people of North America knew how to live well in North America. Even though the continent had incredibly variable environments and circumstances, from freezing northern terrains, to lush forests, great plains, amazing deserts, and everything in between, the inhabitants new how to thrive. Not just survive. But thrive!

Barbara Huck in her wonderful book, Exploring the Fur Trade Routes of North America, which I have been reading on this trip described it this way:

“Europeans adopted a number of North American technologies such as snowshoes…toboggans, birchbark canoes, and pemmican, but largely misunderstood the continent’s cultures.”

 

And that misunderstanding has made all the difference. It has wreaked havoc. It has destroyed lives, including the lives of many young and vulnerable children. But, in my view at least, it is not too late to do better. We can do better. We must do better.

Indigenous People are talking a lot about land-based education. I like that idea. The land can teach us a lot. But only if we listen and learn. We must pay attention.

Islets in the Stream

2024 Trip to Eastern Canada

 

Ernest Hemingway loved Islands in the Stream. So do I.  He wrote a book with that name, but it was a modest little book. He actually did not want to publish it and it was published after he died.

But I also love islets in the stream. Those are the little islands in lakes and rivers of the Canadian shield.

Just past Kenora and highway 71 that runs south towards Sioux Narrows we saw our first of many little islet. Many lakes have them including of course n Lake of the Woods and Lake Superior.  This one was on Dixie Lake. This is quintessential North Woods scenery that we are frankly fortunate to see. It is a real blessing. Such scenes of small rocky islands exude the Canadian Shield like sacred breath, providing the myst to our souls. Sadly, some of the best little islets escaped the reach of my camera. It is often difficult to stop beside the road with its narrow shoulders. I vow to return to those I missed.  Next time I pledge. Sadly, the next time I usually miss them. But I am grateful for those whose images I could capture with my camera.

This was a fine little islet, though a bit on the scraggly side. I didn’t mind that. After all, less is more. I really was not able coax it to yield a great photo. The  light was too dull this afternoon.  Or perhaps more likely, I was too dull or in too much of a hurry. But, as I frequently say, ‘You gotta dance with the girl you brung.’

Later I realized I should have walked east rather than west from the rest area. There was a much better islet there, but sadly, as I saw as I was speeding past it, I felt it was time to move on. Next time. This is an emotion I felt often on the trip. Should I stop and go back and grab a photo or persist in moving on. I consider myself a meanderer so should always be able to stop. Sometimes it is best to continue. But sometimes it is best to go back for a second look. Meandering is always good. The only way to travel.

I love islets. To me they speak the modest language of Canada. They seem to arise from the depths of the lake and I never get enough of them.

Inukshuk

2024 Trip to Eastern Canada, Affinity, art, Indigenous Religion and Philosophy

 

At Dixie Lake, not far past Kenora I stopped the car at a rest stop and strolled in the south side of the highway about a ¼ km along the highway shoulder. I noticed a proudly installed Inukshuk on the north side of the highway at the top of a granite wall created by blasting the top part to of the Canadian Shield.  For generations young boys and other miscreants have been painting information no one is interested in, onto the rocks beside the road. Things like their initials and the initials of their current girlfriends. They used to mar the countryside. Lately, government employees diligently try to paint over these markings as soon as possible. And they do a pretty good job.  Frankly, I consider the messages a desecration. Rarely do we see the graffiti anymore.

 

Building an Inukshut is an entirely other matter. I appreciate everyone of them I see. These I think honour the history of Canada and the places in which they are found. They are respectful. They don’t mar the countryside like painted initials.

But I like them for another reason. A more philosophical reason.

The word “inukshuk” means “in the likeness of a human.” For generations, Inuit have been creating these impressive stone markers on the immense Arctic and sub-Arctic landscapes of Canada to show others where they have been and sometimes to let others know where emergency food can be found. Inukshuks really serve more than one function. They are used to guide fellow travellers sort of like a modern GPS is used. Some warn strangers of dangers. Some help assisting hunters and other to mark sacred places.

Sometimes they show how the people are part of the land and the land is part of the people. Even rocks. After all, as Carl Sagan said, “we are all stardust.”

Humans were created out of the dust of ancient stars. Whenever I think of life that way I am in awe. Imagine that each one of us is created by dust sent into the atmosphere by the big bang billions of years ago.

Inukshuts are really just piles of rocks. Nothing more. But they are places where people show reverence to nature.   They show us how we are all connected. I consider them holy messages. The opposite of desecrations. They are spiritual manifestations created by artists to suggest those connections that are the essence of religion.

A hodgepodge

2024 Trip to Eastern Canada, Indigenous--Reconciliation

This is a badly burned hotel that has been abandoned it would seem along side the Trans-Canada Highway in northern Ontario.  I must admit, sometimes I think of Canada this way. Not always, thank goodness., but too often. Is this what Canada is like?  I will come back to this photo later.

I love travelling, and an essential part of travel, for me, is learning. I want to learn new things about new places from new people. Or, learn more about places I already know to some extent.

One of the things I wanted to learn about was Canada.  I lived in Canada my entire life except for the last 10 years where we lived in Arizona for 3 months and Canada 9 months each . Give or take.

I thought I knew Canada. But did I really know it?  Of course, not. I had a lot to learn. One of the things I have been trying to learn more about for at least a decade and even more, is the relationship between indigenous people and the descendants of the European settlers as well as an amazing array of immigrants and their descendants who came to live in Canada a country that was already clearly occupied. They have all made for an incredibly interesting place here in Canada. Not a melting pot. Rather, a hodgepodge.

What is a hodgepodge? According to Vocablulary.com

“A hodgepodge is a random assortment of things. A dorm room might be furnished with a hodgepodge of milk crates, antique mirrors, and a poster of a kitten hanging on a branch with one paw. Hodgepodge is a funny-sounding word for a somewhat funny occurrence — a grouping of things or people that don’t fit together.”

 

They don’t fit together. Yet they do. Somehow, inexplicably, they do. They make it work.  The phrase is partly French and partly English.  Pretty appropriate to Canada. We have been trying to put the French and English together for hundreds of years. Lately, we have come to realize there is another very important group of people we neglected for too long. These of course are the indigenous people who were here all along. Yet painfully, awkwardly, and wrongly forgotten or neglected. Again, according to Vocablulary.com,

“In the case of hodgepodge and hotchpotch, the rhyme is not an accident. These words came to English from early French in the form hochepot. The spelling was changed to make the second half of the word rhyme with the first. In French hochepot was a stew of many foods cooked together in a pot.”

 

I love stews. Through ingredients into a pot heat them up and enjoy. Great in theory. But does it work? We must admit it has not worked very well in the past. But we can do better. I think we want to do better. First, we must be willing to learn and willing to change. We must in humility admit our mistakes of the past and honestly try to do better. That is what reconciliation is all about.

How can we do that? I wanted to think about that and how we got into this hodgepodge in the first place. As Chief Justice Murray Sinclair, the Chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada often said, “You can’t understand where you are unless you understand how you got there.”

I wanted to consider that on this journey through the eastern part of Canada. How did we get into this hodgepodge? Is there a way out?

 

The Not So Glorious Winnipeg River

2024 Trip to Eastern Canada

 

 

For this trip we did something highly unusual. We woke and packed the car in a reasonable amount of time. I remember one year we were embarking on a trip to Arizona it took us so long to get going, it appeared that we might not get past St. Pierre Manitoba. That day we had a late lunch at Mitchell Manitoba about 6 miles from Steinbach. Not a great start. This year was much better. Far from perfect, but much better.

Our packing this year was suspiciously efficient. Christiane and I are not famous for being efficient. Something must be wrong. This time both of my two bags and Christiane’s 2 bags were not full!  Moreover, the car was not full either. Have we missed some urgent items?  Are they large ones? Any other explanation seems highly unlikely. Even the bulky walker we packed for Chris does not eat up all available space.

As we drove down the Trans-Canada highway we marvelled at the Canadian scenery.  The beauty of Canada is stunning. Some friends have actually said to us that there is nothing to see between here (Steinbach) and the east coast.  This is also insane. It is not Canada that is boring. People who think that are boring. They are boring.

We saw rocks and trees and lakes in endless combinations of beauty are that are never repeated and are boring only to the boring.

The golden phragmites beside the Trans-Canada highway in some places were a gorgeous unique white gold. The leaves of trees were just starting to turn colour. That is what we were hoping for. We expect to be about 6 weeks on this trip, going right through the leaf season and we want to soak it all in.

One thing I found frustrating about this trip and I noticed it within about 2 hours of the trip.  That was that it is very difficult along the Trans-Canada Highway to stop and take photographs.  I had purchased a new camera recently, since I had accidentally smashed it earlier in the year in Arizona. I wanted to take a lot of photographs.  I was still learning how to use the camera. But there is very little room to stop and take photographs on the highway. It is basically illegal in most places. More importantly, Chris gets easily annoyed with me and my frequent stops. So I did my best not to make too many stops along the way.

 

As a result I have no photographs of the historic Winnipeg River.

 

I had taken a book along as sort of a guidebook. An unusual guidebook. It was Exploring the Fur Trade Routes of North America, by Barbara Huck and had many interesting illustrations and photographs. Some of the photographs were taken by my friend, and great photographer,  Dennis Fast. The cover of the book invited us to “Discover the Highways that Opened a Continent.”  That is what I wanted to do.

 

At Kenora we crossed the historic Winnipeg River. Huck’s book had some interesting information on this river I had crossed many times:

 

Dropping from Lake of the Woods in the Canadian Shield into Lake Winnipeg at the edge of the Manitoba Lowlands, the voyageurs knew was a wild, beautiful waterway that traversed Earth’s most ancient mountains.  Eric Morse, historian and discriminating canoeist, called it “unquestionably the grandest and most beautiful river the Montreal Northmen saw on their whole journey from Lake Superior to Lake Athabasca.

 

This meant this was a fantastic river to cross in the first couple of hours of our journey.  What a great start. We were ready for adventures.

 

The book went on though in its description of this grand and beautiful river as she called it:

 

“Over its 225 kilometres length it drops 100 metres and was once a river of spectacular falls and rapids. Today, though tamed by eight dams along its length, parts of the waterway still invite even challenge, paddlers.”

 

What a pity. I love waterfalls and photographed many of them on this trip, but not the Winnipeg River. There were none to see from the highway. All gone in the dubious name of progress.  I have photographed the river on other occasions in many places, but not on this trip.

This also sums up our trip. The best of times the worst of times. We saw the good, the bad, and the ugly of Canada. We saw places of splendid beauty. We saw places of desolation.  we saw Canada rising and we saw Canada in sad decline.

Thinking about a Trip

2024 Trip to Eastern Canada

 

I always consider such little islets in the Canadian shield to be the essence of Canada. I am not sure why.

 

After the trip was over, I thought Charles Dickens summed it up well in the first sentence of his book A Tale of Two Cities:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of credulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going the other way…”

 

That really summed up this crazy trip. This wonderful trip. I had been thinking about it for a long time. I should have thought about longer.

The idea for the trip arose when I retired from the practice of law. That process took a while.

I was slow to jump into retirement. 2013 I  reached the age of 65 years and decided to retire.  I gave formal notice to my partners in the firm, about 6 months before my 65th birthday as I needed the time to finish my files and the partners needed to figure out what to do with all my clients.

I thought it would be easy. It wasn’t. /When I returned from a 2 week holiday and returned to the file just to complete my file turnover, the firm offered me a position I had never considered—counsel to the firm. I had no idea what that meant. Neither did they. The idea was that I would stay in the firm, not retire and work mainly with helping other younger lawyers in the firm. To some degree I could work as much or as little as I wanted.

Frankly, it was a pretty good gig. I could work as much or as little (more or less) as I wanted. We agreed the firm could fire me at any time and I could quit without notice at any time.  Yet I was still working. After nearly 10 years of this I decided it was time to quite entirely. That is what I did at the beginning of 2023. I retired completely. I did not renew my license to practice law and was done with law. I had finished what I considered a great career, but it was time to turn to new adventures.

Now, in 2024, I had the time to do the things I always enjoyed doing.  Travelling was one of them. In the first year, 2023 Chris and I continued what we had been doing for about 9 years, namely spending 3 months in Arizona and a lot of time at our cottage at the lake.

This year we wanted to do something different. We decided to travel by car across the country! What a magnificent dream! What a dumb idea! Before we left my brother-in-law said we were too old for such a trip. He was probably right.

 

Starting out in Steinbach, approximately in the middle of the country, makes this tricky.  We decided to break up the trip into legs. First, we would travel to the east coast and back again. Really the distance of the country, in 6 weeks. We did not want to travel all the time. We rented rooms or homes  each for about a week, in 3 places in Nova Scotia—our favorite province.

Then, sadly,  my cousin Ernie Neufeld who had lived in the Ottawa area for most of his adult life, died suddenly. He was the cousin I had always been closest to. But we had grown apart on account of the vast distances between our residences. I wanted to go to his celebration of life in his last home town, Brockville, Ontario. It was right on the way. So it was a no-brainer, but it meant adding nearly a week to the trip. No problem, we thought. So we struck out on the road—a grand adventure. From the middle of the country to the east coast and back.  The second leg to be made from the centre of Canada to the far west coast back, would be done after Christmas. So, we hoped.

It turned out the plan was mad.  We returned home utterly exhausted.  We were forced to reconsider our plans. At least in part.

 

Once Upon a Time Time

New Attitude to Nature, Travel

 

Moriarty reminded us in his YouTube lecture that all time is “once upon a time” time. Once we get into that time, we must let go of the common-sense world, the practical time. We must let go of Aristotle’s world of “A is A” and of non-contradictions. Then we can have a ginger bread house. These stories grow from the once upon a time time. He says “when we enter once upon a time time we are nearer the creative centre of the universe.’ According to the Aborigines of Australia we begin then walking in the creative dream time that is in the beginning.  Bruce Chatwin, a man who made a religion of traveling, in a wonderful book Songlines  talked about his time in Australia wandering with the aborigines. Bruce Chatwin said in his book Songlines, “yet, in the East, they still preserve the once universal concept: that wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe.”  I would put it this way, travel, particularly meandering travel,  helps us to understand that we are one with the universe. And that is magical time.

 

Once upon a time time is like Yeats’ “Song of the Wandering Angus” where he wanders into a hazel wood because there was a fire inside his head and he caught a little silver trout with a berry on a string and it became a glimmering girl with an apple blossom on her head and faded through the brightening air and, he said, “I will find her again as she plucks the silver apples of the moon and the golden apples of the sun. The hazel wood is part of your own mind. As Moriarty himself said, he wanted to become aboriginal, or as my granddaughter once put, “aboreligional.” She made up that term but our family has adopted it.

 

As Professor Moriarty said, “It may be that the fairy stories of the world bring us closer to reality than Newton’s law of gravity.” Once we understand those stories we will be able to walk beautifully on the earth. Like Chatwin did and like the aborigines did.That is what the good professor sought.

Myths and Realities about Immigrants

2024 Trip to Southwest USA, Immigrant Economics, Trump

 

Immigration issues are top and center in the current America election cycle. Talk to anyone here and they have opinions about immigration or the crisis at the border.

A Recent PBS poll showed immigration was the number one issue in the current political races for the US Senate, House of Representatives, and Presidency. This is particularly true in a border state like Arizona where we have been living. Everyone is willing to opine about immigration even people like me who know little about it. I have been trying to learn more while I have been here.

Many of the people I have talked to here in Arizona think refugees get all kinds of lavish benefits far beyond anything American citizens get. For example, I was told by a good friend here that they are entitled to a car!  My research indicates that is not true. Added to that, many Americans think refugee claimants are taking jobs away from Americans so they harm the poor in America.

Moreover,  many of Americans are convinced that the immigrants are responsible for a “crime wave’ in the country. Remember Trump called Immigrants rapists and murderers on the first day of his campaign in 2015! That continues to be Trump’s view and we must also remember that to many people—I call them Trumpsters—whatever Trump says on the issue is “gospel” truth whether there is any evidence to support them or not.  I choose that word advisedly because they treat him like a religious leader. Many of them nearly worship Trump. Trump himself has likened himself to God.

I want to consider some of these claims. I may make mistakes in this quest. If so, I urge my readers to correct me.

One of the economists I like to read is Paul Krugman who is Princeton professor of Economics as well as a New York Times columnist and winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2008. I confess he has a definite left-wing slant. I like him because he writes clearly on economics so a peasant like me can understand much of what he says.

First, he begins with the fairly obvious proposition that almost all modern nations will not tolerate open borders, and contrary to what Republicans in the US say, Democrats don’t advocate for open borders.

Very few people argue in favor of allowing anyone to choose to live in whatever country he or she wants to live. I have never met anyone who says that. As Krugman said, “The good news is that America doesn’t have open borders, and there is no significant faction in our politics saying we should. In fact, immigrating to the United States legally is fairly difficult.”

 Yet, Krugman admits that there is also bad news. That is that America has a very hard time enforcing its current rules.  The main problem though is that the authorities have inadequate resources to deal with the problem. Republicans in particular love to complain, and campaign on the “disaster at the border,” but they don’t want to pay the money to fix the problem however.

 

The most recent example of this reluctance was where the American House of Representatives rejected without even voting on it, the recent bill proposed by a group of non-partisans in the Senate. This group of non-partisans got the Democrats to agree to surprising compromises because they realized the American public was blaming them for the “disaster” at the southern border. That was why Trump instructed his sycophants in the House to reject the proposal which offered the toughest immigration laws in a generation! It also would provide sufficient funds to deal with the problem. At least more than has been allocated in the past. As Krugman said,

“The reason they don’t have those resources is that many Republicans in Congress, while fulminating about a border crisis, appear determined to deny the needed funding. Their position is rooted in extraordinary political cynicism, and they aren’t even trying to hide it: Donald Trump has intervened with Republicans to block any immigration deal because he believes that chaos at the border will help his election prospects.”

 

That is one of the problems, the Republicans want to rail against the catastrophe at the border but make no proposal to deal with it, reject advancing more money as the non-partisans agree. Instead, they want to rail against the problems because they know their supporters will jump to scapegoating the Democrats for everything that is wrong at the border.

I intend to examine in particular the economic realities at the border, which are very different from the economic myths.