En Route

I left Marquette (Sand River, where I was staying outside Marquette) today. Drove westward toward Montreal, my final destination, and stayed in Blind River, a small town of 4,000 in Ontario. Crossing the border was no problem at all. I stopped in Sault St. Marie, on the U.S. side for lunch, and found a cute little café with great sandwiches and soup, and internet access – a jem when you’re on the road. Got great ice cream afterwards, and then headed for Canada, getting lost, and then unlost. From the Canadian border, Blind river was about 2 hours away. Let me tell you. This town is a small little economically depressed town with zero industry. And what made me especially anxious staying here was the B&B, which is someone’s home. So, here I am typing this in someone’s kid’s former room, B&Bized a touch. Some family friends, apparently, are staying in the other kids’ rooms.

This got me thinking more about the nature of a town’s evolution: fledgling, boom, steadying, and if businesses/industry dissipates, decline. That was this town’s fate, apparently. A saw mill existed here once, and now it is gone. A local whom I encountered on a walk I took – who was ‘grilling’ out on his porch and stopped me to talk, for which I was actually thankful – told me this. He called me ‘honey’ every other word, and said ‘eh’ a lot. It was cool. He invited me in for a beer or for a ‘shot of rye.’ I had to have him repeat this 2^nd thing, because I wasn’t sure I heard correctly. What is a shot of ‘rye’? I said no. (I would have liked to, for the mere experience of it, but out of pure self-preservation, and fear of safety, I said no. I have a feeling that everything would have been just fine, but still. This is the burden of being a woman. Were I a man, I definitely would have said yes.)

Anyway, this guy, John, told me that most people in this town are on welfare. He cleans houses for $10/hour. So, how do people exist? We create need – entertainment, health, way of life. We create a way of life that then leads to a need for a certain kind of health attention, for example. But more than this, I’m fascinated by the evolution of villages, towns, cities, now. It just seems to be the same; or, some succeed in perpetuating, and some fizzle out. But, ‘high culture,’ it seems, is nothing more than the perpetuation of a village with longevity.

I’m having a hard time grasping the idea that humans have only been around for so long, and that we’ve had a definitive, singular path of ‘evolution’; the European evolution of coming to a land, taking it from native Americans, clearing it, establishing businesses (i.e., mining it, taking resources from it), booming, persisting. It doesn’t seem more complicated than this, and it seems that sustenance on that path is finite.

I didn’t realize that human evolution was so quantifiable. That it is, scares me.

jem