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: London and Brantford, Ontario

Unfolding the Map

Lost in Ontario sounds like it could be a movie.  But, it was William Least Heat-Moon's (LHM) experience when he took his shortcut through Ontario to New York.  Getting lost can be fun, if you are open to the experience.  For most of us, though, it is a pain.  For men, it can even be painful and the cure, asking directions, can be like surgery.  To see where we are lost, locate us on the map.

Book Quote

"....The showers kept at it, the traffic ran heavy.  I got lost in London, and again in Brantford; finally I was just driving, seeing nothing, waiting to get off the road."

Blue Highways: Part 8, Chapter 1

Downtown London, Ontario. Photo by xcommun and posted at Wikimedia Commons. Click on photo to go to host page.

London and Brantford, Ontario

I think that I've written about getting lost before, but I'm going to revisit it in this post.  I think that when I wrote of it previously, I referred to the act of getting lost as a fine thing.  My logic was that as Americans, we tend to hurry from place to place and don't allow ourselves to, as my mom constantly reminds me, stop and smell the roses.

But getting lost isn't positive and fun if one is in a hurry or is feeling tired.  So you can sympathize a little with LHM when he says that he gets lost in both London and Brantford.  He wants to get out of the rain, he wants to get back into the US, and he wants to stop driving.  The way through Canada is longer than he thought. 

Men are often stereotyped as being unable or unwilling to ask directions.  We are seen as the ones that hold the maps, memorize them, and then promptly take wrong turns so that by the time that our wives or girlfriends or any othe female passenger has to be called in for assistance, the situation is completely hopeless.  Not only do we get in these scrapes, but we are often seen as stubborn to boot - we will happily lead our crews to the gates of Hell before we admit that we are wrong.

There is some truth to this.  I love maps, and read them all the time, and get pretty upset if my wife dares to suggest that I am wrong.  And I have been wrong.  It still sets my teeth on edge when I am, and there are times when I watch my wife read a map, turning it this way and that when I know, KNOW, the way to go.  But that is simply pride and hubris.  As Roseanne Barr once famously suggested about men and maps, "....Men can read maps better than women. 'Cause only the male mind could conceive of one inch equalling a hundred miles."

My theory is that men tend to appropriate directions and maps because they are socialized to do so.  After all, the things that men do involve making a series of logical steps from point A to point B.  We do this in many of the activities in which we participate in our daily lives.  Something needs to be fixed?  Simple, just follow certain steps and it will work.  Problem need to be solved?  Again, very simple.  Just do this, that and one last thing, and problem gone.  Need to get to a place?  No problem.  Just follow the lines.

However, sometimes the information flow comes too fast.  We might be flying down the freeway and have a moment where our attentions go elsewhere.  That causes us to miss the exit that we needed.  We had everything planned out from point A to point B - heck, we don't even need the map any more so we didn't bother to bring it.  This is where the cascade of failures begins.  We get off at an exit two or maybe three exits down the road.  However, instead of turning back on the freeway, we figure we'll be able to cut some time off by simply going over to the next road and doubling back.  We're pretty sure that's what the map indicated.  However, that road circles around into another entirely different direction, and ends up at a crossroads with signs pointing to two towns whose names we never even heard of. 

By now, our pride is involved.  We've probably been arguing with our wife or girlfriend, who has been suggesting the most logical choice of going back to the freeway and back to the next exit all along.  Going back is out of the question in our male mind because it would be a monumental failure and tantamount to a dereliction of duty.  So, taking our best guess, we head toward one of the towns, only to realize that it was farther than we thought and we are hopelessly lost.  At that point, usually we resort to sending our female companion into a gas station to ask for directions.  We sit in the car, embarrassed, because we can imagine the station attendant looking at her with pity, and glancing at us with a slight expression of disgust at how that man could have so failed in this important masculine duty.

Of course, I am generalizing a lot here.  There are plenty of women who do their own navigation and hate having to ask directions.  There are plenty of men who do not get locked up in this comedy of errors.  My wife, for instance, doesn't like asking for directions and I am usually the one who will get out and talk to the gas station attendant.  But, the stereotypes ring true to me because I see that tendency in myself.  I love maps, I love to read them and I love to use them in that logical point A to point B way.

One of the reasons I love writing the Littourati blog is that my logical, rational, straight ahead point A to point B brain gets its satisfaction out of the pure fun of mapping these trips that authors have taken.  My creative, not so logical or rational brain, gets its fun by allowing itself to take these points on the map and connect them to whatever is inside me and putting it down for me, and ultimately whoever comes to the Littourati page, to see.  It's a great way for me to meld these two sides of my mind and, if the side benefit is that I will avoid cascading direction failure because either I allow myself to just be lost for a while and explore what's out there or I at least allow myself to admit my failure, ask directions and move on, then so be it.

Getting lost CAN be fun.  But if you're going someplace where your choices are bounded by time and necessity, you don't want to be lost, you just want to be there.  As our GPS navigation devices get better and better, chances are less that people will get lost.  In some ways, particularly for our efficiency and or time-effectiveness, that's great news.  In other ways, and particularly in the case of those chance amazing discoveries we might make because of being lost, that's a shame.  But have no fear.  We'll always have places to go, and most of the time, we'll get there whether we get lost or not.

Musical Interlude

I typed in The Google a query about songs referencing being lost, and this song, Destination Unknown by the appropriately named Missing Persons, came up.  I liked Missing Persons back in the day, and had forgotten about this song.  It fits, and I'll share it.

If you want to know more about London and Brantford

Brantford Expositor (newspaper)
City of Brantford
City of London
Discover Brantford
Fanshawe College
London Community News (newspaper)
London Free Press (newspaper)
The Londoner (newspaper)
Scene (London newspaper)
Tourism London
University of Western Ontario
Wikipedia: Brantford
Wikipedia: London

Next up:  Queenston-Lewiston Bridge, 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