View our ‘local’ world from much higher up
I want to pick up from where I left off last week: about the border that separates Ontario from places nearby.
This is a subject that comes up from time to time in arts, culture and heritage circles: Kitchener singersongwriter Richard Garvey, on his way to record an album, stopped at the border and denied entry. That is one example, although his destination, New Orleans, doesn’t qualify as a place nearby.
I’m thinking particularly of an initiative led by the Waterloo Regional Arts Council years ago to encourage and facilitate regional participation in show and sale events like the famous Ann Arbor Art Fair.
This was an experiment. We did some research, started making contacts in the Windsor-Detroit area, and put on some workshops. The plan was to organize a co-operative effort to handle transportation, customs and so forth.
There is all sorts of potential here. Direct contact between cultural institutions here and there appears to be minimal, especially between organizations in mid-sized cities, so it’s a wide open field.
As I drove through Michigan a couple of weeks ago I saw more evidence of how the barrier affects us.
We arrived in Traverse City just as they were about to open the 2017 edition of the National Cherry Festival, a tradition going back to the 1920s, and drove through miles and miles of cherry orchards ready for harvest. I don’t remember ever seeing Michigan cherries for sale in an Ontario grocery store.
The state also has a flourishing wine industry, comparable to what Ontario has established over the last few decades. The city of Grand Rapids boasts an emerging beer-making culture: There are more than 60 craft brewing operations. But again, I’ve never seen a bottle of Michigan wine or beer in these parts.
I’m not sure trade missions — regional, provincial or national — consider artistic and artisanal products. But that may not be the place to begin.
For me, what is attractive here is the possibility of a broader awareness here in southern Ontario of where we live, and our place in the world.
As I mentioned last week, I spent Canada Day 150 in Sault Ste. Marie. The guest of honour at the official ceremonies was hometown hero Roberta Bondar, Canada’s first female astronaut and the first neurologist in space.
She’s also an artist — a celebrated photographer who, having “seen Earth from the unique perspective of space,” celebrates “the beauty of our natural environment at an intimate level.”
It’s a visual image Bondar shared with her audience in her remarks that afternoon that sticks in my mind: She talked about how great the Great Lakes really are a globally significant phenomenon, unmistakable as landmarks on our planet when viewed from a space shuttle. She also pointed out how one can immediately place Sault Ste. Marie in such a view, strategically situated as it is at the junction between Lake Superior and Lake Huron.
An outline of the Great Lakes is a widely used symbol in Michigan. You see it on T-shirts, buttons, posters, mugs ... A common boast is that, wherever you may be in the state, you’re never more than six miles from a lake or more than 85 miles from a Great Lake.
Such symbols and such boasts are much less common here, but we’re part of that too. Ontario borders on all the Great Lakes except Lake Michigan; Michigan borders on all except Lake Ontario.
Even here in Waterloo Region, where the first inland European settlement took place, we’re part of that. The Grand flows into Lake Erie, and we’re in easy reach of two more of the Great Lakes. Our situation may not be as strategic as that of Sault Ste. Marie, but it should also be readily visible from a space shuttle.
It’s another way of deepening our sense of place, one that can complement and complicate the dominant view of southern Ontario as the heart and centre of Canada.