#14 in a series of adventurous reports -- The Yooper Report

#14 in a series of adventurous reports

The Yooper Report

Brought to you from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula – a land unique unto itself, where a food line with five people in it on Saturday night at the Houghton Seafood Fest brought this comment from the young man in front of us: “Wow, this is the longest line I’ve ever seen in my life!” But it wasn’t just this comment, it was also the accent, eh? Easy to fall in love with those drawn out vowels, especially since we never knew which words exactly would come out so lyrically. It was always a surprise and it always caused us to smile. And then, when the M.C. introduced the evening’s entertainment, the Flat Broke Blues Band, he said, “They’ve come to play tonight all the way from Marquette,” about 70 miles away, but the biggest city on the U.P. with a population of about 24,000. And we had to smile again.

Actually, even though we were at the gateway to the U.P.s Keweenaw Peninsula, which juts far out from the southern shore of Lake Superior like a dorsal fin, this community festival felt so comfortable, we could have been at Memorial Park in Albany. The scenery was different, but we felt welcome and included. There seemed to be thousands of young people, so we’re guessing they must have come from miles around to Houghton’s waterfront park along the Portage River. Houghton is on the south side of the river, Hancock on the north. Houghton appears to be a little more prosperous because it is home to Michigan Technical University, a college that was founded in the late 1800s to train engineers for Michigan’s exploding mining industry.

But I’m getting ahead of myself – I wanted to explain what a Yooper is, if you haven’t figured it out already: A Yooper is a resident of the U.P. That is what the people who live up here call themselves. We met a few, and can say with conviction that the report on Yoopers is good. In fact, the U.P. (more specifically the Keweenaw Peninsula) is about the only place we’ve been so far that we could seriously say we might like to live someday. Then we remember that as much as 300 inches of snow can fall here in one year. But Yoopers told us that that is changing, and they are getting less snow every year, and of course, they remind us, it doesn’t all fall at once! We even bought ourselves a local bumper sticker that is popular here: “Say yah to da U.P., eh!” If you have no idea where in the world I’m talking about, consider getting out a map or your atlas or just google it.

Copper was the wealth of the Keweenaw. The Chippewa (Ojibwa) Indians mined veins of copper that were at or near the surface and used it to make tools and jewelry. But when the white men discovered it in 1840, there was a copper rush akin to California’s Gold Rush. Many ton rocks of copper ore were hauled away while miners dug both around the surface and down into tunnels all around the rivers and streams. Individual prospectors had a hard time of it, and it wasn’t until New England investors set up mining companies that large-scale removal began. Turns out Michigan copper is a very large contributor to old wealth in New England!

Our S.F. friend Bob Pizzi’s grandfather came to the Keweenaw from Italy in the late 1800s along with many other Italians, Irish, Germans, and Scandinavians looking for work in the mines. Bob’s father was born on the peninsula and moved to Detroit, which is where Bob was born (and also Paul and I), but Bob has spent time up here just about every year of his life. He told us where to go and also introduced us (via telephone) to his friends Scott and Joyce, who took us out to lunch and shared their worlds of art and political activism with us, which helped us feel even more connected.

Since mining and lumber were the main economic activities in the U.P., towns sprang up all over the place in the 1800s, making it an interesting combination of both wild and settled at the same time. In addition to copper in the Keweenaw, there have been and still are rich deposits of iron ore in the central U.P. This is the iron that supplied the north with bullets for the civil war and also has supplied the raw material for steel required by Detroit’s auto industry over the last hundred years.

Early on, some of the mining companies made an effort to take care of their workers by building housing and schools, but when the easy-to-get copper was gone, so were the companies. Once Arizona copper was discovered, the U.P.was left behind. (You may remember that we visited the Queen Copper Mine in Bisbee, AZ.) Now, many of the mining sites and mining artifacts in this area are being joined together into a National Historic Park, and it just so happened that my sister Bobbie’s friend Abby is in charge of that project. With a little luck we found her at work and she graciously gave us a personal tour of the new Park’s historic research building and artifact storage in the town of Calumet.

The end of the road on the Keweenaw is the town of Copper Harbor. It is a small place with a beautiful protected harbor along Lake Superior, a town that Paul thinks may be just about the right size – population 800. We had several long conversations with local inhabitants, and it turned out the woman who ran the fish market used to live in Albany and her kids graduated from Albany High! She grew up on the Keweenaw, left, and has now returned, as she said many, many do. We’re starting a list for our retirement community up there – just let us know if you might be interested in joining.

We sampled some of the U.P.’s other highlights as well: the Porcupine Mountains, Tahquamenon Falls, Whitefish Bay, and Sault Ste. Marie. These are all beautiful places where we hiked; saw birds, including eagles, loons, and cedar waxwing (Paul’s favorite); and marveled at Lake Superior in the sun, in the rain, in the wind, and at sunset. In fact, on the windiest day of all, which also happened to be quite clear, we drove most of the way up Brockway Mountain to a spot where we could look out 180 degrees onto the vastness of this incredible lake, and we could see the curve of the earth!

We had a date, however, to meet my brother Jack in Vermont around the 4^th of July to go sailing on Lake Champlain in his new boat. So we left the U.P. and headed across Ontario, along the northern shore of Lake Huron. We considered ourselves to be in the far north, but soon realized that from the Canadian perspective, we were in the far south. We are still working on this adjustment to our thinking as we cross the province of Quebec and head east to the Maritime Provinces.

#15 in a series of adventurous reports -- Hey, Let’s Spend Canada Day in Ottawa!

#15 in a series of adventurous reports

Hey, Let’s Spend Canada Day in Ottawa!

We positively sped across Ontario, from Sault Ste. Marie to Ottawa, across the north shore of Lake Huron, which means we drove about 200 to 250 miles per day. We realized when we got to Ottawa that we were about to spend July 1, Canada Day (equivalent to July 4 in the U.S.), in the country’s capital. Canada Day 2007 in Ottawa was celebrating both the 140^th year of Canada’s constitution and the 150^th anniversary of Ottawa being chosen as the capital of Canada by the Queen of England. Apparently there was a lot of rivalry between Toronto and Montreal for this honor, and the capital had been located in each of those cities for different periods of time. So to avoid hurt feelings and put an end to the rivalry, the Queen chose Ottawa.

The city of Ottawa is situated in a lovely spot on the Ottawa River. Parliament is located in a grand old sandstone building on a hill overlooking the river, and there are lots of parks and museums. Lucky for us, the museums were free on Canada Day, so we joined thousands upon thousands of Canadians wandering from park to park, enjoying free music, and from museum to museum, enjoying art and history, while waiting for the most spectacular fireworks show we have ever seen.

We ran into a couple of people who had come from Labrador for the celebration. They drove for 32 hours to get there, and 16 of those hours were on dirt roads. And we thought we had a come a long way from California!

Crossing Ontario, we learned a couple of things about how to be real Canadians: Number One – eat French Fries. We’re not talking about McDonald’s either. We’re talking about freshly cut fries sold from a little roadside shack set up expressly for the purpose. The proprietor cuts the potatoes right there in front of you and fries ‘em up. You can put ketchup on them and/or you can put vinegar on them. Poutine was also on the menu. In our ignorance, we asked what it was and were told by the customer in line in front of us: “French fries, covered with lots of melted cheese and gravy – a real heart stopper.” We declined the poutine but shared an order of fries on a park bench at the confluence of the Ottawa and Mattawa rivers in the little town of Mattawa – a beautiful spot on the edge of the mountains and forests of Algonquin Provincial Park.

An aside: The truth is, Paul and I both love river confluences, and we do everything in our power to go to them and spend some time there. The most exciting river confluence we’ve been to was in Montana in the summer of 2005, on our way to visiting Chris during his internship as a backcountry ranger at Yellowstone National Park. We just happened upon the town of Three Forks, Montana, and realized that the three forks referred to the Madison, the Gallatin, and the Jefferson rivers, which come together to form the infamous Missouri River. We spent several hours hiking in the heat of the next day, on an unmarked trail through grasses and marshes, to find the EXACT SPOT where Lewis and Clark, with the help of Sacajawea, their Native American woman guide, had to decide which fork to take to reach the Pacific Ocean. That was a beautiful day.

Almost as exciting as the Ottawa and Mattawa river confluence was camping that night on the shore of Lake Nipissing. At the time it was a thrill because we were so close to the water and a dazzling sunset on this beautiful lake. But now, after Paul has read a book my brother Jack loaned him about Samuel De Champlain and his explorations, we know that we camped on the same shore that Champlain explored while looking for that magical passage to the West, about one hundred years before Lewis and Clark!

Arriving in Ottawa, we learned our second lesson in how to be real Canadians: wave a Canadian flag. We were given two little paper Canadian flags early in the day on July 1. We carried them with us all day, and carry them with us still in the cab of the truck as we make our way through Atlantic Canada.

On July 2, we left Ottawa for Montreal, where we spent three days, including the 4^th of July. There were no fireworks here, but we arrived in the midst of Montreal’s International Jazz Festival. Confession: we had hotel reservations. We stayed a few blocks walk from McGill University and the Place des Artes, the central site of the jazz festival’s free outdoor music. That night’s free concert just happened to be the biggest draw of the week: Seun Kuti and Egypt’ 80 from South Africa. There must have been between 50,000 and 100,000 people attending this event, all packed into a square in the middle of the city (not a park). The music was intense and electrified the crowd.

But for Paul and me, this was our second night in just a couple of days spent with about a hundred thousand people we didn’t know. We began to realize that although we had been in Canada for a little over a week, we had barely had a conversation with anyone but ourselves, and we had so many questions we wanted to ask somebody. At the same time, we were exhausted and ready for a little quiet time.

So, the next day, in the rain, we wandered down to Old Montreal and the Old Port. We stood alone on the dock looking at the St. Lawrence River, when we were approached by an older man, who looked somewhat bedraggled and had funny spots of color on his face and his hair and his clothes. He asked us, in labored English, if we were tourists and where we were from. When we said California, his eyes lit up. His first language was French, but he was determined to speak with us in English. He started telling us some of the history of Montreal and the French-Canadian culture. We spent the next 4-1/2 hours together, walking the city streets and the tunnels of the underground city. He showed us all of his favorite buildings, old and new, inside and out, and taught us about the architecture, art, and history of the city. In addition, he did his best to answer our many questions. Turned out Gerard is an artist himself, in his retirement, and those were spots of paint coloring his body and his clothes.

He loves his city; he loves the Quebecois culture of Quebec Province; and he loves all of the many creative contributions to the world made by the French settlers of Canada, many of which he told us about. For him, the beauty of Quebecois culture is the marriage of the French joie de vivre with the down-home, salt-of-the-earth friendliness of North America – a combination that can’t be beat. We tend to agree.

Gerard had an impact on Paul’s and my experience of Montreal. He may have been a little over the top in his enthusiasm, but he gave us a different point of view. And he taught us our third lesson in how to be real Canadians: Parlez Francais! He was quite clear that he thought it was no big deal to expect the rest of Canada to speak French, basically out of respect for heritage and respect for all of the contributions made to Canadian culture and economics, both historically and in the present day, by French-speaking Canadians.

Actually, I was amazed at how much French came back to me while in Montreal and later Quebec City and the province. I studied both French and Latin for four years in high school and was pretty good at reading and translating the written word – but speaking and listening, not so good. Over the two weeks we were in Quebec Province, I was told quite a few times what a good accent I had! Even more impressive than my accent, however, was the ease with which so many people we talked to switched between speaking French and English at the drop of a hat. This truly bilingual experience fed both of our desires to speak another language, be it French or Spanish.

I knew that my ancestors on my mother’s side (both her mother and her father) had come from France a long time ago and that they had come to Canada and then eventually moved down to Detroit. And I knew that my family had books about this ancestral heritage on both sides. I had seen the books and even tried to read them in the past, but the places and names were so elusive and so far away, not places I had ever heard of or been to, or thought I ever would go to. When we got to my brother Jack’s house in Vermont a few days later, he pulled out one of the books, and I was able to put together the stories and lineage and get a much clearer picture of where this part of my family came from and what they were doing in the New World back in the 1600s. So not only did we get lessons in how to be Canadian – I got some lessons in my own French-Canadian heritage.

On to Quebec City . . . coming soon.