July 28, 2001 and thereafter

 Future Shoes 
"O Canada"

by Michael Finley

Seeking an inexpensive vacation this summer, Rachel and our son Jon and I sought a place that would provide family relaxation without draining the family wallet. We went to Canada.

Almost immediately we noticed differences. Bilingual signs, of course. You could not know something was compulsory without also noticing it was obligatoire. Not that very much was either. We took our poodle with us, and he was neither quarantined nor even checked for vaccinations. While we saw a few signs in Winnipeg schoolyards requesting that dogs be leashed, we did not see another anywhere in the province. People did not seem to mind that we had brought this big odd animal into their country.

But there was something else. There were virtually no billboards along the rural highways. No cloverleafs on the freeways. And no fast food anywhere in the province outside Winnipeg. No Burger King, no Dairy Queen, no Subways. In the absence of that visual noise, that clamoring sameness, we felt calm overtake us.

If you saw a sign for a business, chances were it was a small sign on the business's property, not out along the highway like a whore. Furthermore, there was an innocence to the advertising. It was like businesses didn’t do focus groups, so they just said what seemed appropriate. These declarations tended to be direct but respectful and a little wordy. "Satisfy all your kerosene needs here. We certainly do appreciate your patronage!" (Actual sign at a gas station in Hnausa.) No one from marketing was testing these statements.

I saw one ad that was completely incomprehensible, alongside Highway 75 near the border. It had the head of a grinning pig with the words "Make mine a Vomi-Lite!" I have since learned it was an ad for a barley-based hogfeed made by Seed-Ex of nearby Letellier. Vomi-Lite is a brand of high-vomitoxin barley.

We drove northeast to the shores of Lake Winnipeg, which we did not know even existed much less that it is "the seventh longest lake in the world." It is like a long wet pencil, that can look placid as pudding one moment and choppy and wind-tossed the next. Which is why you practically never see a boat on it. This struck us Minnesotans, anxious as we all are down here to drop anchor in any body of water with a greater circumference than a flush toilet, as very weird.

We were so dumb, we had trouble calculating pounds into kilos, miles into kilometers, our gallons into their gallons, our dollars into their play money. Thank goodness we used the same kind of clocks.

Then there were the people. Minnesotans make a big thing out of how "nice" they are, nice meaning repressed. We can’t bring ourselves to speak the truth, so we stifle our feelings under a feather-pillow of euphemisms. But Manitobans seemed genuinely nice to us. The butcher in Gimli cut us slivers of the local pastrami and watched with interest as we sampled it. Then he stepped from behind the counter to tell us about his travels to Saint Paul, and the fierce but healthy rivalry between our minor league team and theirs, the Winnipeg Goldeyes. I had never heard of them.

We ran into two youths, perhaps 18, arms around one another, proclaiming what good mates they were. The handsomer of the two kept shoring his smaller friend up, informing us he'd won $10,000 in a darts tournament. Could he maybe advance a small amount to some Yanks down on their luck? we asked. He shook his head sheepishly. The dart money was gone, only the glory remained.

I tried to be pleasant and kind, but I was sometimes uncomfortable in these encounters. The people were so sweet, and I was afraid I would say something atrocious and American that would cause the luminous smiles to fade. I did not want my dark mental reality to occlude their sunshine.

We were only there a week, long enough to visit the Icelandic village of Hecla a third of the way up the endless lake. And long enough to spend a day in Winnipeg, learning about the heroic Louis Rial, leader of the Mètis, the mixed-race people of the Canadian plains who sought to live independently of the mercantilist government of the Hudson Bay Company. Native Manitobans wanted to ally, if necessary, with Minnesota, with whom they traded naturally. But the company came down violently on Riel and the Mètis in 1885, hanged him and dispersed them across the territory -- securing Manitoba for English Canada. We saw his black coffin, broken in half when the Cathedrale de Saint Boniface, where he was interred, burned to the ground in 1968.

It was a reminder that beneath the blandness of Manitoban life runs a river of blood and betrayal. Not so different from Minnesota that way.

A Canadian friend told me that he has a special affection for us "Americans" (Canadians consider themselves Americans, too, so be careful with that term). He said there is something violently childlike about us. We want many things, and we go after them, invading, pillaging, bombing, handing out Hershey bars and refilling our tanks. He saw us pretty much as baboons, pawing the earth and flinging grass at the world to get our way. For all our storm and fury, he said he has great affection and admiration for us, because we can't camouflage our feelings, and because our passion is often remarkably creative.

Freedom is our birthright. But like Esau, we squander it on trivia. We are willing to be controlled if we can just retain our freedom to buy.

Whereas, there is something about Manitoba, its infinite distances and interminable cold, that seems to inhibit the flaring up of hubris, that keeps people and the communities they live in human-size. The cleanness and the friendliness are almost shamingly beautiful. The lousy economy helps, too.

And as we crossed the border and reentered the zone we call home, our windshield wipers phasing the roadside come-ons for gasoline, lodging, and eats between splashes of rain, we regarded our northerly friends in the rear-view mirror, and with a blast on our car horn bid them adieu.

 

  Copyright (c) 2001 by Michael Finley

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