More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Porter Fox
Read between
April 24 - April 25, 2020
At 5,525 miles, including Alaska, the northern border is the longest international boundary in the world. Without Alaska, the 3,987-mile line capping the Lower 48 is the third-longest.
The only known terrorists to cross overland into the US came from the north. Fifty-six billion dollars in smuggled drugs and ten thousand illegal aliens cross the US-Canada border every year. Two thousand agents watch the line. Nine times that number patrol the southern boundary. According to a 2010 Congressional Research Service report, US Customs and Border Protection maintains “operational control” over just sixty-nine miles of the northern border.
Ninety percent of Canadians live within a hundred miles of their southern border. Twelve percent of Americans live in the northland, and most of them in cities like Seattle, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, and Cleveland.
The Montagnais, Algonquin, and Huron paddled ashore to prepare.
From 1616 to 1619, disease killed 75–90 percent of coastal Indians living in the Northeast. About two million Indians lived east of the Mississippi when Champlain arrived on Saint Croix Island in 1604. By 1750, that number was 250,000.
This was the life that Champlain and most early explorers lived in the northland: cold, wet, slightly lost. They relied on Indians to survive, find their way, and export resources.
A mariner’s rule I learned growing up is that you have a 50 percent chance of swimming 50 yards in 50-degree water.
THE ASSASSINATION OF HENRI IV in 1610 shifted the balance of power in the northland.
THE ASSASSINATION OF HENRI IV in 1610 shifted the balance of power in the northland. Champlain’s longtime supporter was gone, and Henri’s wife, Marie de Médicis, had little interest in New France. Champlain spent years in Paris trying to appease investors and influence the royal court. He married the twelve-year-old daughter of a court secretary to gain access to Marie’s inner circle, and he lobbied noblemen to rally behind his creation. Back in Quebec, Champlain paddled the Ottawa River, Lake Nipissing, and the French River; crossed the rocky Canadian Shield; and saw the vast expanse of Lake Huron. He met Otaguottouemin, High Hair, Petite, Putun, and Madawaska Indians, among many others, and kept a promise to his Indian allies in 1615 by attacking a central Onondaga village in Iroquoia—near present-day Syracuse, New York.
Henry David Thoreau’s first naturalist essay was published after an expedition to nearby Mount Katahdin in 1848, six years before Walden was published.
The border pushed me close to land a few times, and I spotted a black-backed woodpecker and yellow-bellied flycatcher darting through the trees.
Champlain’s expeditions, Lewis and Clark, Thoreau, the emigrant trails, the hunting lodges of northern Maine—all blazed through the wilderness.
Thoreau passed within thirty miles of East Grand Lake on two of his three expeditions to Maine. He published his account of the trip in Sartain’s Union Magazine. The essays were eventually collected in a posthumously published book titled The Maine Woods, which revealed a lifelong fascination with the northland, conservation, and naturalism.
Two of Thoreau’s guides were Penobscot Indians—Joseph Attean and Joe Polis.
Two of Thoreau’s guides were Penobscot Indians—Joseph Attean and Joe Polis. The group traveled by canoe, in French bateaux, and on foot. They slept in blankets by a campfire. The 3.5-million-acre boreal spruce-fir forest between Moosehead Lake and the Canadian border was unmapped at the time. (Much of it still is.) Thoreau drank cedar beer and hemlock tea with homesteaders, ate moose lips, and learned to speak Abenaki. He documented the hard, spartan life of the frontiersman (“We breakfasted on tea, hard bread, and ducks”) and the beauty of backwoods rivers and lakes (“a suitably wild-looking sheet of water”).
The endless miles of evergreen changed Thoreau forever: “Thus a man shall lead his life away here on the edge of the wilderness, on Indian Millinocket stream, in a new world, far in the dark of a continent, and have a flute to play at evening here, while his strains echo to the stars, amid the howling of wolves; shall live, as it were, in the primitive age of the world, a primitive man.”
THE WAITING ROOM AT SAINT LAMBERT LOCK IN MONTRÉAL IS FURNISHED WITH TWO black, pleather couches, six office chairs, and a large wooden table pockmarked from what looks like an all-night knife game.
Since deep-draft navigation opened on the river in 1959, more than two and a half billion tons of cargo, worth about $375 billion, has traversed the Saint Lawrence Seaway.
The canal opened into Lac-Saint-Louis, then narrowed again at Île Perrot. We were three hundred miles due north of New York City, on the same latitude as Portland, Oregon. Elms and cottonwood bent in the breeze, casting shadowy fingers onto the water. White cedar and ash grew close to the river, where 350,000 cubic feet of water passed by every second. Moraines and drumlins left by glaciers shaped the riverbanks, creating miniature highlands shrouded in red oak and sugar maple. In between, peat bogs lay beneath a lace of fallen trees.
Most people don’t travel anymore. They arrive. Unless you’re riding the slow boat. Then you see every mile.
IF THE HISTORY OF THE PLANET took place in a day, humans would appear at 23:59:56, and the Great Lakes would take their current shape across the northland a fraction of a second before midnight.
IF THE HISTORY OF THE PLANET took place in a day, humans would appear at 23: 59: 56, and the Great Lakes would take their current shape across the northland a fraction of a second before midnight. The Great Lakes basin is set in the Canadian Shield, the geological core of North America. The shield floated on a sea of magma around the planet before ending up where it is today. At one point, it straddled the equator on the ancient continent of Laurentia. It was an ocean floor to several prehistoric seas; then it collided with South America and West Africa and created the Appalachian and Adirondack Mountains. Volcanic ash buried it, then glaciers scraped it clean. Geologists predict that in a hundred million years, it will merge with Asia and South America, creating another supercontinent they call Amasia.
The Laurentide Ice Sheet gouged the bottom of Lake Superior thirteen hundred feet deep during the last Ice Age. It cut Lake Michigan nine hundred feet down. When the ice retreated fourteen thousand years ago, the basins filled with freshwater. Lake Superior topped out first and spilled into Lakes Michigan and Huron. The Saint Lawrence River was still dammed with ice, so water flowed north through the North Bay Outlet and south down the Mississippi and Hudson Rivers. When the last of the ice melted, water flowed to Lakes Erie and Ontario, plunged over Niagara Falls, and drained through the Saint Lawrence to the Atlantic.
It takes a drop of water about four hundred years to travel from Lake Superior to the Saint Lawrence River, meaning that the water Champlain navigated is still meandering east today.
He had left a young Frenchman with the Algonquin and Huron tribes a year before to learn their language and explore the lakes. In return, he had hosted a Huron Indian named Savignon in France.
The Huron speak a form of Iroquoian. They were taller than the French and well built, wore beaver skin mantles, and greased their hair and faces.
Brûlé was likely treated with privilege in the camp. He killed caribou and deer alongside Algonquin and Huron hunters and spent most of his time learning to speak and write their languages. The Huron speak a form of Iroquoian. They were taller than the French and well built, wore beaver skin mantles, and greased their hair and faces. They came from Georgian Bay on Lake Huron and knew western waterways well. Brûlé was so content his first winter with the Huron that he asked Champlain at the rendezvous in 1611 if he could return for another year. Champlain agreed. He didn’t see his truchement again for years and considered him dead.
Champlain was stunned when he saw his truchement again in 1615.
Champlain was stunned when he saw his truchement again in 1615. They were both deep in Huron territory. Champlain was advancing his campaign against the Onondaga Iroquois and was in need of men. He dispatched Brûlé to locate the Susquehanna tribe and ask for their help. Brûlé found the tribe near Binghamton, New York, becoming the first European to explore Lake Ontario, Pennsylvania, and the Upper Chesapeake Bay along the way. He delivered the Susquehanna warriors two days after the battle was lost, though, and found Champlain wounded and on his way to Huron country to recuperate.
This time, his lust caught up with him. In June 1633, a Huron chief killed Brûlé over an argument about a woman and, as was custom, ate Brûlé’s heart.
They all traveled along a line that was slowly trampled through the forests, lakes, and wetlands of the northland, much of which would one day become America’s northern border.
They gambled and partied deep into the night and, sometimes, while waiting to get into a lock, they jumped overboard to cool off.
As for border security, he said, “There was before 9/11 and after.” The Equinox shadows the border most of the time, especially in lock systems and tight passages between lakes. Cameras watch the boats from shore. Paperwork and communication with authorities is constant. Ships have to notify agents on both sides of the boundary with an exact list of workers, passengers, and cargo. Border agents search boats occasionally, sometimes with underwater drones or radiation detectors to find drugs or bombs. Heightened security has been a hassle, but it doesn’t keep most captains up at night. What
...more
Heightened security has been a hassle, but it doesn’t keep most captains up at night. What worries them, and the entire Great Lakes shipping industry these days, is the health of the lakes themselves.
As for border security, he said, “There was before 9/11 and after.” The Equinox shadows the border most of the time, especially in lock systems and tight passages between lakes. Cameras watch the boats from shore. Paperwork and communication with authorities is constant. Ships have to notify agents on both sides of the boundary with an exact list of workers, passengers, and cargo. Border agents search boats occasionally, sometimes with underwater drones or radiation detectors to find drugs or bombs.
Heightened security has been a hassle, but it doesn’t keep most captains up at night. What worries them, and the entire Great Lakes shipping industry these days, is the health of the lakes themselves. A warmer climate across the northland has made water levels in the lakes fluctuate radically. Lack of ice in the winter increases evaporation rates, which rain can’t always make up for. The Great Lakes saw an unprecedented drop between 1998 and 2013, during which time regional conditions were wetter than average. (Fall gales can evaporate two inches of Great Lakes water per week.)
Freighters are designed to fill canals completely, often running just a few feet above the bottom. A one-inch drop in water levels means a Great Lakes freighter has to shave 270 tons of cargo from its hold so it doesn’t run aground.
The oldest known footprints on the planet were discovered in a Kingston, Ontario, sandstone quarry a hundred miles upstream. Scientists say they were made by foot-long insects called euthycarcinoids five hundred million years ago. They were among the first creatures to migrate from water to land. Before the discovery, the quarry owner used the fossils as lawn ornaments.
The lakes sit in a lowland between the Rocky Mountains and the Appalachians.
The Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum in Paradise, Michigan, estimates that six thousand ships and thirty thousand lives have been lost on the lakes.
The northland is America’s water tower, making water quality—and availability—there a national, not regional, issue. Ninety-five percent of America’s surface freshwater sits in the Great Lakes basin.
Holdovers from the Pleistocene still roamed North America then: mastodons, saber-toothed cats, five-hundred-pound beavers, speckled bears, and several species of prehistoric horses.
The Ojibwe are originally from the east and speak a form of Algonquin. Origin stories begin near the Atlantic Ocean, where a mystic seashell showed itself over the ocean. One day it sank and never rose again. The shell appeared again on the Saint Lawrence River, and the tribe followed it there and encamped for a while. It disappeared again and rose over Lake Ontario and, eventually, Point Island on Lake Superior—which is the geographic center of the Ojibwe nation today.
Archaeologists speculate that much of the rock art in the northland reflects winter meridian constellations. Theories about the Hegman art suggest that the three canoes refer to the “Winter Maker” constellation of Orion. The paddlers are moving along the Milky Way, which the Ojibwe call the Path of Souls.
The lodge itself was a northland relic. A bearskin hung from the varnished tongue-and-groove pine paneling. The coffee bar was also home to a VHF radio, 1980s Zenith television, RCA stereo, incoming mail basket, and a faded print of two loons swimming through morning mist.
houses in the northland look like they are crouched low to the ground, ready for a fight.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, demand for fur was insatiable. Hats were not accessories back then. They were essential garb, like wearing pants or a shirt today. Hat sales in England in 1688 reached 3.3 million, plus 1.6 million “caps”—or about one hat per person.
The average life span of a voyageur was thirty-two. The most common cause of death: strangulated hernia.
At night they sang and danced and warded off swarms of mosquitoes and blackflies with smudge fires, until Indians showed them how to make bug repellent from bear grease and skunk urine.
A man in Ireland found a time capsule that Paul and Will Steger had left at the North Pole, and the National Geographic Society threw a gala to celebrate the recovery. (The magazine had offered $10,000 to anyone who found it.) The time capsule was placed in a display case at the end of the ceremony.
Windigos walk south during harsh winters, eat people, and transform humans into cannibals.
That afternoon, we crossed the border into Canada and paddled for hours past granite promontories and tiny islets. The scenery sliding past was like a never-ending film: bluffs, white beaches, beaver dams, eagles, fireweed, hawkweed, bastard toadflax, and little-leaf pussytoes.
Another storm blew through at dawn with raindrops the size of nickels.
We overturned a canoe on a portage trail and ate lunch under it.
Paul got a cell phone signal at the top of a hill and suggested we order pizza to pick up in Ely. I gave him my order and, just like that, we slipped into the modern world.
The horizon was a shifting channel of light.
Minnesota is an anvil split in two:
Minnesota is an anvil split in two: half is in the Great Lakes region, the other half borders the dusty grasslands of the northern plains. Half is Laurentian mixed forest, half tallgrass prairie. Half was once Dakota country, the other half Wisconsin territory. The Mississippi River splits the state in two as well, starting in the north and cutting through Minneapolis to the southeastern border.
America’s farewell to the British Empire did not go as smoothly as history books depict. When negotiations began in 1782, George Washington’s troops were on the verge of revolt. A majority of leaders in Congress did not want a union—but rather the appearance of a union, followed by the creation of thirteen independent nation-states. The federal government was bankrupt following the war, and appeals to Spain and others for a loan were dismissed. In Paris, Franklin’s cohorts, John Jay and John Adams, ran out of money while traveling Europe in search of funding and alliances. Adams was the
...more
