Blue Highways: Greenport, New York

Unfolding the Map

Getting gas in Greenport with William Least Heat-Moon lets us reflect over the words of the gas station attendant about what belongs where.  Does Long Island belong to Connecticut, New York, or should it just be its own state.  I'll discuss what attaches us to place, and if it really means anything.  To attach yourself to Greenport, check out the map.  At right is the Eastern bluebird, the state bird of New York.  The image is from Wikimedia Commons.

Book Quote

"Don't call me a New Yorker.  This is Long Island....

"Manhattan's a hundred miles from here.  We're closer to Boston than the city.  Long Island hangs under Connecticut.  Look at the houses here, the old ones.  They're New England-style because the people that built them came from Connecticut.  Towns out here look like Connecticut.  I don't give a damn if the city's turned half the island into a suburb - we should rightfully be Connecticut Yankees.  Or we should be the seventh New England state.  This island's bigger than Rhode Island any way you measure it..."

Blue Highways: Part 9, Chapter 7

Greenport, New York. Photo by americasroof and hosted at Wikimedia Commons. Click on photo to go to host page.

Greenport, New York

With whom and with what place does one identify?  For many of us it is easy.  Our ties to home, to family and friends, make our identities pretty strong and ones that stay with us throughout life, despite where we live.  You can take some boys and girls out of _____ (fill in your place name here) but you can't take the _____ out of those boys or girls. 

I grew up in such a place.  Everybody I know who lived or currently lives in my home town thinks its a little slice of God's heaven on earth.  It is a small town, situated on the coast of Northern California, north of San Francisco and just south of the intriguingly named Lost Coast.  It's rugged and beautiful.  People have continued to live there despite economic slowdowns and loss of industry.

Of course, we all thought that the north coast of California was the best place to be.  If you couldn't live in my home town, at least you wanted to be somewhere in the north coast region.  The Bay Area was nice but too crowded, so you wanted to stay away from there.  But if you couldn't live near the coast, being in Northern California was good enough because it is beautiful and not too crowded.  The Bay Area was crowded, it is true, but it was certainly preferable to Southern California, which was way too crowded and busy and all that traffic.

But hey, California, even with southern California, was preferable to anywhere else in the country.  Where else could you find such coastline, such mountains, such wonderful farmland, such variety, such entertainment?  So don't mess with California, it is the best place on earth!  And even if you couldn't live in California, then at least if you lived somewhere in the west you were doing better than if you had to live in the harsh Midwest, the steamy South or the uptight and overpopulated East Coast.  But you had to feel lucky that you were born and lived in the United States of America, the best nation on earth.

And so on...

I could go backwards to, down to the very street and acreage on which I grew up.  The point is, our thought processes about places resemble concentric circles.  I have put a graphic below...

If you think of the middle, small circle as the point of origin, such as your neighborhood or your town, then it is a small part of a bigger area, such as your region in the state.  We belong to many different localities and identify with many different places.  That's why I could proudly be a Fort Bragger, but also a Northern Californian, a Californian, a westerner and an American.

I think the next big concentric circle that is in the process of becoming part of our identity is regional, or perhaps continental.  Europe took that big leap starting in the 1950s, but while many people who live there consider themselves European, most of them identify more with their country of origin.  There has yet to be forged a consistent and strong pan-European identity.  However, you see baby steps toward this regional identification in places like Asia and even in the Western Hemisphere.  The identification is loose because the integration is occurring economically, not politically.

In the end, borders are just made up markers on a map.  As the Long Islander who identifies with Connecticut and New England more than New York in the quote above demonstrates, borders don't often truly delineate who belongs where.  This is especially true in countries where borders were haphazardly drawn, such as in the Middle East, or where borders were defined by acts of aggression or the taking of territory through war.  Much of the Southwestern United States fits this description.  I've been told that the US-Mexico border in Texas is just a place where guard stations are erected.  The real border is a fuzzy zone stretching from San Antonio to somewhere inside Mexico.  Southern California is as much Mexican as it is American.  Except for a different systems of government, and excepting Quebec, much of Canada looks like the northern U.S. states it borders, and its people have remarkably similar appearances and values.

Will people one day identify with each other on a planetary basis?  I've been watching the old Star Trek series lately, and the idea of a Federation, in which humans identify with each other and the Earth as their common home, seems very far away.  I suppose it's a historical process, evolving just as our awareness of what constitutes our "neighborhood" evolves also.  At one time most people couldn't imagine what lay beyond their sight.  Now, we can imagine, so much so that I see writing about our neighborhood in our galaxy.  As our ideas and goals get bigger, so does the sense of what and where we belong.  And I think that's all for the good.

Musical Interlude

Here's a wonderful song by a group named Pangea, consisting of the US band Flying Machines, and musicians Cheng Lin from China, Kailash Kher from India, Khaled from Algeria/France and King Sunny Ade from Nigeria.  The song is called Citizens of the World.  Enjoy this global music supergroup!

If you want to know more about Greenport

New York Times: Greenport, New York
New York Travel Magazine: Greenport
Village of Greenport
Wikipedia: Greenport

Next up: Riverhead, New York

Blue Highways: Queenston-Lewiston Bridge, New York

Unfolding the Map

We're ending our brief foreign excursion with William Least Heat-Moon and about to enter into the state of New York.  I've been thinking a bit lately about why and how I entered this world in the United States, instead of someplace else.  In this post, we'll ponder a variation of the question "why am I here?"  If you wonder not only why, but also where, consult the map.

Book Quote

"....By the time I reached U.S. Customs, the rain had stopped and, as I crossed the bridge over the Niagara River north of the falls, with quite unbelievable timing, the Canadian sun turned the eastern cliffs orange."

Blue Highways: Part 8, Chapter 1

The Queenston-Lewiston Bridge crossing the Niagara River between Canada and the United States. Photo at HighestBridges.com. Click on photo to go to host site.

Queenston-Lewiston Bridge, New York

The other day I had a thought run through my head.  This particular thought has happened before, but I was surprised by it again because I haven't given any serious consideration of it for a while.  It's kind of a chip off of the block the usual philosophical question "Why am I here?"  My question is "Why am I a U.S. citizen?"

One can only really examine this question truly when one steps outside of the U.S.  The more foreign the culture, the more perspective it gives upon one's place within their own.  Luckily, I've been able to travel and gain a little perspective.  I don't think LHM really was able to examine his U.S.-ness or his citizenship from a brief travel through lower Ontario and a cross over the Queenston-Lewiston Bridge, but it gives me the opportunity to do so in this post.

I think it's important that all Americans consider why they were born an American citizen.  I feel this is critical especially now as we very noisily and politically debate what the true meaning of citizenship is.  After 9/11, very many people and politicians concluded that the outside world was a dangerous place.  Many advocated for the U.S. to retreat inward and disengage.  Others, particularly prominent politicians at the time, put in place a policy of unilateralism and preemption.  The U.S. would strike, unprovoked if need be, wherever it felt it must to ensure its security and its own interests.  In the process, we not only alienated many other countries, peoples and cultures, but internally we began to classify those who were us, and those who were not.

Yet, a vast majority of the American people have not stepped foot outside the borders of the U.S.  According to CNN, only 30% of the U.S. public has a passport.  They have never gotten that experience of seeing what it's like to be a "citizen of the world."  They have never had to confront that, in the absence of a happy accident, they might have been born in Africa, or North Korea.  They might have lived in squalor in a Calcutta slum, or been kidnapped and thrown out of an airplane over the ocean in an Argentine "disappearance."  They might have had to contend with hunger and poverty, sickness and disease, war, violence, famine, despotic governments and everything that a majority of the world's population has had to deal with.

So, why am I U.S. citizen?

I've been dabbling, a mere amateur really, into some classical philosophy.  I'm not sure that philosophy can answer my question, but I will try, though I'm not a philosopher and am probably completely off-base.  It is possible, in a Platonic sense, that we can accept the idea of the United States as a form of something deeper and more fundamental to our existence.  Therefore, I can accept the idea that I am a U.S. citizen, but that is only how I can understand a much more abstract concept - by making it part of the real world.

In an Aristotelian sense, the idea of being a U.S. citizen is associated in my mind with goodness and virtue through my political socialization.  Since I was young the importance of my citizenship has been reinforced.  Therefore, I strive to be a good citizen in the cause of attaining a most virtuous status of citizenship.

Virtue has long been associated in American history with hard work.  But here the American ideal strays from some of the classical philosophies such as Cynicism which reject the ideas of wealth, fame, power and possessions.  In fact, sometimes the U.S. has been associated with hedonism in the pursuit of gratification and pleasure.

Most of us, however, probably take a less gratuitous approach.  In an Epicurean sense, we would allow ourselves only moderate pleasures and we would wish for a freedom from fear.  In this sense, the promise of the U.S. is very important because our political system was created to give us freedoms from what the Founders believe was the biggest potential source of fear, the national government.  Classical liberalism advocates individual freedoms as the most important goal for us.   Indeed, we could take this farther into a Stoic view of citizenship, where the best life in the U.S. is one of reason, virtue and in line with the harmony inherent in the universal order.  Thus, being a good citizen would consist of the exercise of restraint, self-control, logic, reason and wisdom.

I could take these exercises even farther, but they don't bring me any closer to knowing why I am here in this country, and as I wrote earlier, I'm just an amateur at this.

What I keep coming back to is a sense of the meaninglessness of borders that we have demarcated.  If I were to look at the globe from space, I would not see large lines that would indicate where one country ends and the other begins.  What I would see is land masses with people on them.  Any barriers outside geological or natural ones are completely arbitrary.  There would be nothing separating me from Canadians or Mexicans.

Of course, there are borders, and they are reinforced by our acceptance of them.  And our acceptance of those borders leads us to believe that as Americans, we are different than Canadians and Mexicans.  We separate and classify but really, that's absurd.  Recounting looking back on Earth from the moon, astronaut Frank Borman writes:

The view of the Earth from the Moon fascinated me—a small disk, 240,000 miles away. It was hard to think that that little thing held so many problems, so many frustrations. Raging nationalistic interests, famines, wars, pestilence don't show from that distance.

Life Magazine, January 17th, 1969

So why am I a U.S. citizen?  I was born in the U.S., and I attach meaning to it.  But I have been outside the U.S. and have been able to see and hear how others perceive us, and many times in a very unflattering light.  That has affected my view, as made me less U.S.-centric and has made me want to use the luck of being a U.S. citizen to promote good in the world.  I could not help but feel how privileged I've been in the presence of the poor of Bangladesh, prostitutes trying to survive in Thailand, the oppressed of Central America striving to gain political and social equality and that I owed it to myself and them to have a wider view of what my citizenship means and how I can use my influence to push my country toward actions that better the world.  The freedoms that I have allow me to think about such problems and potential solutions, where, as a citizen of someplace else, I might just be trying to survive.

So, I am a U.S. citizen because a random roll of the dice put me here.  But, I am also a U.S. citizen because from here, I can affect tremendous good if I so choose.  And I so choose.

Musical Interlude

Wow, I just discovered this song.  I like it!  The song was written by the American band Flying Machines and includes four other world musicians: Kailash Kher from India, King Sunny Ade from Nigeria, Cheng Lin from China, and Khaled from Algeria.

If you want to know more about the Queenston-Lewiston Bridge

Niagara Falls Bridge Commission
Wikipedia: Queenston-Lewiston Bridge

Next up: Lewiston, New York

Blue Highways: Sarnia, Ontario

Unfolding the Map

Oh Canada, once we get over the border with William Least Heat-Moon (LHM), will you show us your secrets?  Well, not really.  LHM is just taking a shortcut to New York.  But, in our brief, and first ever on Littourati, sojourn into another country I'll reflect a little on how easy it used to be to get into Canada as a US citizen, and how difficult it's gotten since 9/11.  A driver's license just doesn't go as far as it used to.  Immigrate over to the map if you want to see where Sarnia, Ontario is located.

Book Quote

"I crossed the St. Clair River into Sarnia, Ontario, and stopped at Canadian customs to assure officials I carried none of this or that, had enough money for my stay, was unarmed, had no live animals, and would be in the country only a few hours."

Blue Highways: Part 8, Chapter 1

Downtown Sarnia, Ontario in winter. Photo by Rob at Rob's Arena Tour website. Click on photo to go to host page.

Sarnia, Ontario

It used to be so easy to cross into Canada.  Then 9/11 changed it all.

The first time I went into Canada, I was fifteen and had never been outside of the state of California.  My family decided to take a real family trip, a type of trip that we were to never repeat.  Somehow, my parents had found a cheap cruise for us out of Vancouver, British Columbia.  It was cheap because the ship was a Soviet cruise ship with a big hammer and sickle on the smokestack.  The Soviets were trying to make inroads into U.S. and Canadian tourism, so we headed up to Vancouver, an overnight drive from my hometown, to board for what I think might have been their maiden voyage.  Unfortunately for us the timing was bad.  The Soviets invaded Afghanistan, the US took economic countermeasures and, in the middle of our cruise up to Alaska, shut off most US ports and scenic attractions to us.  Our cruise mostly became one of going in and out of Canadian fjords.

What little I remember of our border crossing at the time was a friendly Canadian border guard asking what we were going to be doing in Canada.  I remember my father handing over his and my mother's identification in the form of their drivers' licenses.  Because us kids were all younger than sixteen, we didn't have I.D.'s and so I guess my parents had to vouch for us.

I remember just how cool it felt to be in Canada.  It was my first foreign country and even though today I see how similar the two countries are, through my fifteen-year-old eyes everyone and everything had this strange foreign hue to it.  The money was different, the shops had different names for the most part.  People spoke with a slightly different accent.  The names in the countryside were a little English and charming.  I met a couple of kids on the ship who were from a place called Surrey, which I learned was east of Vancouver, and it sounded so exotic to me.

I was a few years older the next time I went into Canada, and it was for the same reason that LHM went into Canada though in reverse.  I had made a trip out to the East Coast and happened to be in western New York.  I also had a person from Detroit with me.  Rather than going the long way around Lake Erie, we decided to cross over into Canada at Niagara Falls and make for Detroit.  Again, all it took was a driver's license.

I learned that air travel was different when my girlfriend and a friend went to Vancouver by air and while changing planes she learned that she would need a passport to get into Canada once she landed.  She didn't have hers with her and flew to Vancouver full of dread that they'd send her back.  After telling her that ordinarily she'd need a passport, Canadian authorities let her in and she got to enjoy her trip.  Ahhh...the days before Al Qaida ruined it for all of us...

Now, in this time of heightened border security, it seems that we have to bring our passports almost everywhere we go to prove that we are who we say we are and that we have a right to be where we are.  However, this border security is selective.  While goods and services are able to cross many borders without any problems, people cannot.  For example, after the U.S., Canada and Mexico signed and ratified the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), barriers to trade and services were lowered and eliminated between those countries.  Goods traveled freely back and forth between those countries.  But barriers were kept up to inhibit the flow of people.  Even if NAFTA created jobs, most people from Mexico who might want those newly created and lucrative jobs in the US were discouraged from getting them.

Then 9/11 happened, and security went way up.  The US is now in the process of building a border fence to keep poor Mexicans from coming across the borders in search of better work.  The last time I went to Canada, I crossed at the same border crossing where LHM will recross back into New York.  I had to show a passport.  The Canadian border guards were less friendly than I remembered, and more efficient and businesslike.  When I came back through the border at Niagara Falls, bored US border guards barely said a word.  When I walked across for a look at the Falls from the Canadian side, I found to my amusement, and a little shame, that it was free to walk into Canada but 50 cents to walk back into the US.  I watched people fumbling, trying to find 50 cents to get their kids and themselves into the US, and I could only shrug as I realized that even the border had become a money-making opportunity - reducing our deficit 50 cents at a time.  Welcome to the US, now pay up.

Perhaps we had a wakeup call as to how the world really is dangerous when the terrorists slammed jets into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.  But what I really hate about Al Qaida, and our response to it, is that I almost feel like the U.S. has become the loner barricaded in the house, constantly suspicious of everyone and everything.  And I hate that our response has created a similar response in our friendly neighbor, the neighbor with whom we share the longest unmilitarized border in the world.  I miss the good old days when a license and a smile were all I needed to be thrilled that I could cross into a country so like my own, and yet different enough to feel a little exotic and thrilling.

Musical Interlude

Immigration Man, by Graham Nash and David Crosby and released in 1972, stems from Graham Nash's unfortunate experience with a U.S. Immigration official as he was coming back into the US.  It's a great song.

Here's a wonderful live version by Crosby and Nash in 2010:

Or if you prefer the 1972 studio album version:

If you want to know more about Sarnia

City of Sarnia
Sarnia Bayfest
Sarnia Observer (newspaper)
Sarnia Ontario Heritage Blog (nothing published since 2010, but good information)
Tourism Sarnia-Lambton
Wikipedia: Sarnia

Next up: London and Brantford, Ontario