« p. 101-104: The Hotel Athenäum, Chautauqua
Crossing Lake Ontario
p. 107-112
Lake Ontario is the smallest of the five lakes in the interior of North America. If you travel to its western corner, from Niagara to Toronto, this corner is broad enough, so that the shore disappears and the ship is surrounded by nothing but sky and water, with maybe a scrap of smoke in the distance.
I know I’m traveling over a lake, and I am well enough acquainted with the map of Canada to know that the border between Canada and the states is a straight line, as if someone used a ruler to mark down that part of the world. I’m getting that same feeling of astonishment that I felt when, upon counting the degrees of latitude, I realized I was nearer to the new world than to the old.
Canada is another new world all its own. It’s a shame that I hadn’t stayed in the states longer. It would have allowed me to feel the contrast more strongly. I remember hearing a child say to someone that he was going to the new world to begin a new life. Most people have old worlds and old lives to trade in! There was this idea: the new world. And then: the new life! An adult person begins a new life in a new world! It was something like a fairy tale, and the poor debtor slumping in the chair opposite his stern uncle was no less than a fairy tale prince.
Thanks to technology and competition and all the other blessings, what was once the new world has since become old, with some extremely natural parts -- but each degree north reveals another fairy tale land, something newly born into the world, almost unbelievable. In truth, no one knows exactly who lives in it. It is utterly enigmatic to me. I blink my eyes. I would like to see Toronto soon.
At a train station in New York, I came across a small, blue booklet entitled Five Thousand Facts about Canada. Now, as evening comes and the sky and water and smoke move through a hazy fog, I leaf through the book and try to hold up the map of Canada in the wind. In the evening light of this beautiful August day, the statistics and the map blend in with the fog. There are some lights here and there interrupting the fantasy, and then the horizon rises in the north -- like a tremendous, hair-thin tortoise shell, behind which a candle somewhere is burning.
This land Canada, in whose north the lines of the map uncertainly evaporate on the paper, has for decades been seen as a land of eternal winter, a playground for fur trappers, fur sellers, Indians and adventuring lowlifes crossing immense wastelands. Now I’m starting to realize what it really is -- Canaan!
Eight million people live in this English dominion, and there’s room enough in it for hundreds of millions. The railroads have opened up 250 million acres to agriculture. In a few years the railroads will open up even more land, but now there are only eight million acres under cultivation. For the past two years, Canada was the tenth highest wheat-producing country in the world. Now it’s the fifth.
Vast forests wait for the ax. Vast prairies, fertilized since primordial times by the rot of fauna and flora, wait for the plowshare to turn over the black earth. There is ore in the mountains. The streams and lakes are black with fish. Animals live in the mountains and have yet to see a single hunter. In the rolling hill country, stretching on for days, the cattle run free all four seasons of the year. And to the west, on the Pacific side, trees on the sloping hills bear fruit twice a year.
The Five Thousand Facts says this in somewhat of a biblical style, which I’ve tried to replicate, but for me there is still the sense of the word Canaan. I’m writing this from Vancouver, on the Pacific Ocean, ten weeks after traveling across Lake Ontario, and in ten weeks I have seen the country.
I traveled in both this country and the states. I was in the mountains, where the gold grows, and visited the wheat farms on the prairie. In Alberta, I ate with ranchers and stayed overnight with farmers in Saskatchewan. In the Rocky Mountains, I had adventures with hunters and mountain climbers, and in the valleys west of the mountains, settlers explained to me the hard times of the first year and the successes in the following years. In Ottawa, in their wonderful Parliament, and in Winnipeg, at their beautiful immigration hall, I was supplied with various numbers and dates which I dutifully recorded in my notebook. The numbers weren’t worth as much to me as watching the lights in the eyes of the people, people who in the Old World (and also in the “New”), were poor and desperate and kicked around. Then they came over, and today they speak cheerfully to me of Our Country!
And I’ll never forget the afternoon when the deepest mysteries of this country opened up to me, in southern Alberta on the ranch of the family McGregor. It’s by Bow Island in the middle of a wasteland. The will of the people created an oasis in the middle of a desolate, gray meadowland. In the middle of a mile-wide heath, they built a square piece of land, where they grow fruit trees, lumber, flowers, cacti and fifteen varieties of field crops. It’s an experimental farm, evidence of the worth of the soil.
I saw Canada in the summer, so I don’t know how it looks in winter. I’d imagine that the earth sleeps deep and long here, so it can be ready for the work that can feed a hundred million people. And out of that possible hundred, the eight million actually present receive the food and the fullness of its life. From here in Vancouver, I can think of no better name for the Canadian summertime than the one that comes out of the Old Testament.
As I’ve said, it has room and bread and hope for a hundred million people. There is help right now, free land for the hungry, the unemployed, the rejected, the factory slaves and all the brainwashed living in modern society. Just look at the people running around in the world, making mistake after mistake, with generation after generation suffering from mortal wounds, desperately turning their eyes from the future and laying down to die. There is a Promised Land for them, a land which will take them in when their troubles are too much for them.
But the world goes on its way. To the south, 92 million are hungry. How can you convince me then that some people just need to be poor, so that when they’ve reached the end of their ropes, they will finally be spurred to action? As far as I can tell, this excess of poverty has never created revolutionaries, only cynical beggars.
Canada belongs to England, which knows the situation, and there are a few over there who want to come over and develop it. A man can come over and have 160 acres from the government (1 acre = .4 hectares). Government officials will then be shipped out to see what he has done with the land: “I’ve developed this plot of land, take a look. There’s the hut where I live.” From the factories, the offices and the tenements, characters you couldn’t bear to look at in Europe’s large cities are now coming out to live with the earth below them and the sky above them! They could very well find a healthier, neater and more pleasurable life as a proletariat out here, transforming their lives through a small insurance policy and a government license. Without having to rely on any humiliating charity or the decisions of a committee, the poor can leave the nasty gutters of the city and arrive in the earth and its seasons. They’re allowed to name it for England and plant the beautiful Union Jack on their gables -- but no one forces them. I will soon tell you about the people I came across, who are allowed by England to remain out here by themselves.
Of all the statistics, I only remember one or two figures. A hundred million people don’t have to go hungry. The country is 112,000 square miles larger than the Union. Eighteen times as large as Germany.
I remember my trip over Lake Ontario well. The sun was going down, and the lights of Toronto shone to the north. On shore stood an upright line of lights. Somebody told me they were the towers of the parks of Scarboro Beach. It looked like a single line, a sentence of light with an exclamation point at the end. A couple of seagulls flew over our ship, and a minute later another bird from the south, a black, slender animal, a crane. It flew quickly over our ship, heading north to Toronto.
As it gradually flew towards the sketch of light on the horizon, I thought to myself: this bird comes right out of a fairy tale. And I also thought to myself that this is more beautiful than the most beautiful Once Upon a Time from Grimm. Because this fairy tale has yet to be.