« p. 128-139: The Running Road
The Gateway to the Prairie
p. 139-146
On the third morning, you wake up on the northern coast of Lake Superior, the Mediterranean of the Midwest.
The atmosphere carries a hint of dust from the steppes, and time goes back an hour, from Eastern to Central Time.
Port Arthur comes into sight -- the Pulse of Canada -- and it’s fun to look out the car windows and see the strangeness of Port Arthur. The giant elevators and grain storehouses stand at the foot of giant gray pipes, fourteen or fifteen of them set up next to each other like the ammunition clip of a god. A gray bridge hovers high in the air in-between them, and the tubes still tower over it. It is an utter fortress.
From the station platform you can see the largest grain elevator in the world, the property of Canadian Northern, sixteen pipes sitting next to each other. When they’re full, they hold seven million bushels of wheat, the bread of the world waiting to be ground.
Processing the wheat is easy to explain. Wagons run in from all areas of the prairie to the mouth of the elevator. This mouth immediately sucks up the insides of nine to twelve wagons. The wheat runs through various channels into a room, where a system of automated shovels separate the wheat from the chaff. Dust, chaff and garbage will be automatically sifted from the wheat, which is weighed, taken up by backhoes and shuttled into the large, gray towers. And there the wheat waits patiently for the world to cry out for bread.
These elevators are like skyscrapers. They remind me of the generators in the powerhouse at Niagara Falls. They collect the living strength of the earth, fulfilling the hope of the millions of people streaming into this land.
The fruit of this power, the fulfillment of this hope, will be carried out through businesses, middlemen, the free market and all the speculators in the large sieve-like skyscrapers of Chicago and New York. The automated shovels bottle up the power of ten thousand offices, winding themselves around it and holding it. The world, in the meantime, screams for hunger a little more hoarsely.
In Winnipeg, I stayed in the train station all day. There is nothing else in the entire world that could have interested me more than the train station in Winnipeg. It is full to overflowing and tugs at the human heart.
People come here from all parts of the world, seeking and waiting for land. On a large chalkboard in the waiting room, the arrival of every train is recorded, as well as the arrival of every ship on the Atlantic Ocean, whose human cargo will be emptied out into the rooms of the train station, cargo that the large prairie has been impatiently waiting for since the creation of the world.
The Teutonic, Jonian and the Cassandra have arrived in Montreal and Quebec yesterday and the day before yesterday. The trains and their passengers arrive a quarter before eleven. The trains of the Heimats-Sucher, the homeseekers, arrive an hour later. Every ten minutes, trains of the colonists arrive and unload their insides. Hard, serious, composed men. Astonished, overly quiet women. And the children, sleeping or crying. I walk in-between the platforms and the giant waiting rooms, looking up at the clock and learning about the trains: this one brings people from the Cassandra, this one comes from St. Paul, here come the thirteen thousand harvesters which Manitoba needs, these are the homeseekers -- I am deeply moved by these thousands of people, even though they have nothing to do with me.
I feel my own petty and implausible wanderlust as the homeseekers pass me by.
Six small children in pajamas sit on a pile of bedding, wearing bright red caps on their snow white heads. They sit in the middle of a fortress of boxes, suitcases, household utensils, baby buggies and giant baskets filled with laundry. The parents are running to immigration offices, ticket offices, to the consul. How could they drag all these little things along? The little ones sit in their fortress. The family property guards them, and they guard the family property. Without any shyness, simply out of curiosity, they look at all the people who walk around their fortress, none of them speaking their language.
A young Slovakian peasant’s wife sits on a bench opposite one of the national offices. She has tied a yellow kerchief around her head and cradles in her arms a sleeping infant, who is bound in a bright, red cloth. She wears a brass wedding ring on her finger. The young English woman over there on a bench is not wearing a wedding ring on her finger. She also has a baby on her lap, and she dresses prettily, in a white sweater, brown dress and one of those fashionable plumed hats, like every middle-class woman in the world. They wait for their husbands, the Slovakians for the Slovakians, the English for the English. The Slovakian puts all her worldly goods in a bundle sitting next to her, while the English woman on the bench has a proper suitcase made of leather standing next to her on the ground.
Not far from them, a large, tan yokel with flaxen hair and an embroidered shirt begins to play the Kamarinskaja on his accordion. A few other rednecks dance as they sit on their bags, not even bothering to stand up as they wildly flail their legs to the Kamarinskaja. A crowd gathers around the Russians, laughing and talking together in all the languages of the world.
Because of all the noise, the Slovakian child wakes up with a godawful wailing. The young mother turns red and looks around for her husband. Then, as if she doesn’t know what else to do, she unbuttons her jacket and pulls the child to her breast. The young Englishwoman is having the same problem. Both children are screaming the same song in the same language. But the Englishwoman blushes violently as she unbuttons her sweater and stuffs her kid’s mouth just like the Slovakian did to hers. The two mothers smile kindly over their bare breasts. Both are still a little red in the face. They’re almost showing off, with their shirts pulled completely away from their breasts. They’re not really blushing out of shame, but pride. --
The government offices, information kiosks and guest houses of the American immigration bureau are directly next to the train station, so that anyone arriving sees them right away, even if he doesn’t want to.
You can recognize the state employees immediately by their hats. They are friendly men who inspire confidence, speak every language known to man, wait for the arrivals and guide them into the rooms, the offices and the free guest houses. The arrivals produce their papers, submit their requests and rest their tired limbs for the night on clean beds -- and early in the morning, they go out into the country that will belong to them from this morning on!
I really cannot imagine anything as inviting, encouraging, hopeful or agreeable as the immigration offices in Winnipeg. After a journey over stone and water and burnt forest, the people’s eyes go bored and slightly mad, but once they step into these illuminated, decorated rooms, their eyes become light and cheerful.
There’s a confidence and strength in these eyes that at home had only been half-open. The poorest of them lived by begging and panhandling. They were pushed around and ridiculed whenever they wanted to work for bread in the old country. But here they are expected, welcome, important, useful. Finally they become creatures of God.
A man who arrives here is welcomed kindly and given the utmost value of the land, land which bursts with fruitfulness and is nurtured by the people.
The state employees, who speak his home language, ask him what he did in the old country and what he wants to do in the new. A map, broken apart into tiny segments, is spread out between the immigrant and the employee. The employee takes his pencil and marks a corner of the map, which prompts the arrival of a red piece of paper he must pick up in another room and stick in his pocket. In one hour, he has achieved the dream which for years in the old country had been chewed up and spit out. He has gotten land and bread for himself and his wife and his children. Now all he has to do is work.
If I wanted, I could stand in the line with the others, take my pass out of my pocket and tomorrow I’d be sitting on my 160 acres. I’d be a made man, instead of a proletariat who makes his uncertain living writing books.
Any suspicious types are pushed to the side to be examined -- but the trustworthy walk with massive steps out the door!