north of superior

I'm sitting at my campfire, overlooking the Little Pic River and Lake Superior. A freight train is chugging along a rock cut overhead. It's beautiful here.

This is a trip I need to make every couple of years. A pilgrimage.

Seventy something years ago my grandfather got a job here, logging along the Little Pic.

There aren't a lot of jobs up here anymore. Yesterday I bought the local paper at a variety store in Marathon. The clerk was a guy in his mid fifties. Until a couple of years ago he worked at the Marathon paper mill.

A good gig. Sixty thousand a year before overtime. The mill is closed now. When I was up here 25 years ago the place was booming. Construction workers from the big gold mines on the other side of Marathon lived in the park I'm camping at.

At the tourist info center just before Marathon I learned that Barick Gold is still pulling 4-500 thousand ounces of gold out of the ground here every year. But the construction boom is long past and Barick can do this with just a few hundred workers.

Another train goes by. There are probably campers who would find this distracting. I find them beautiful. Even more, they remind me of what we used to be able to achieve in this country.

Imagine, a railway from coast to coast!

Canada was able to do this 130 years ago. We could never do it today.

That's progress.

The front page story in the local paper is all about Barick Gold giving the local medical center a contribution of $100,000. Just like that - no strings attached.

One hundred grand.

Oh, maybe they'll have to call it the Munk Medical Center.

Peter Munk survived the shame of bankruptcy and reinvented himself as the founder of Barick Gold. The 500,000 ounces they get out of their Marathon mine translates into something around three quarters of a billion dollars a year.

This gift to the Marathon Medical Centre is emblematic of the Canadian spirit; great Canadians don't just take and take and take, they also give back.

So Peter Munk reinvented himself as a gold miner.

Buddy at the variety store reinvented himself as a variety store clerk, and my grandfather, after being drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1939, reinvented himself as a logger.

Another train.

Imagine, a railway from coast to coast! If we tried that today it would never happen.

Today it takes twenty years of planning for 10 kilometers of subway. Train tracks across the country?

I figure at least a hundred years for the feasibility studies. Then the environmental impact studies.

Imagine all the sensitive wetlands a trans-Canada railway has to cross!

At least a couple of hundred years for that.

Then the aboriginal land claims...

In Nippigon, a couple of hours drive west, I ask the clerk in the liquor store where  locals go to work.

Fort McMurray she says. She's not trying to be funny.

Nippigon is hurting. All the towns along the north of Superior are hurting.

The jobs are gone. Except the few hundred still digging gold out of the ground for Peter Munk.

It seems a lifetime ago, but I remember Mulroney campaigning on his "job jobs jobs NAFTA jobs jobs jobs NAFTA" platform in 84.

Sounded fishy to me.

You mean our stupid brown brothers south of the Rio Grande only want the shit jobs?

We're gonna keep all the good ones?

Oh yes, not only keep all the good ones; there'll be more more more!

Well, people voted for that.

That's democracy, I guess.

Another train.

Mulroney probably gets a bad rap.

The mere mention of his name conjures up images of cash-stuffed envelopes being furtively passed from hand to hand in sleazy hotel rooms.

In the first place, and let's do Mulroney justice here, they weren't sleazy hotel rooms - they were the poshest of posh.

Secondly, I think we forget the leadership role that Brian Mulroney played in the boycott of apartheid South Africa.

Those were turbulent times.

Nelson Mandela had been jailed as a terrorist for many years, and although that was before the Palestinians gave terrorism a bad name, it still took courage for a world leader to stand up for him.

Brian Mulroney took that stand.

Apartheid South Africa had one main export - the Krugerrand. The Krugerrand was the gold coin of choice for people around the world who needed to hoard gold.

I don't know why people need to squirrel away gold - I'm sure there are lots of legitimate reasons. When Brian Mulroney took his stand against apartheid, the Krugerrand had but one competitor - the Canadian maple leaf gold coin.

Here's another train.

When I first heard these trains many years ago I couldn't figure out why the brakes were squealing at the same time as the engines were pulling. Then I realized that the back half of the train was still going downhill while half a mile ahead the engines were already pulling uphill. They are a marvel, these trains.

So Buddy at the variety store thinks the mill jobs might come back. Apparently some politicians together with some wheeler-dealer types have a plan afloat that will use the mill to make bio-fuel to use in Ontario's coal fired electricity generating plants.

I wish him well.

So NAFTA came in.

The jobs on the north shore of Superior are gone.

The factories in the south are gone to Mexico.

Brian Mulroney left politics and became a director of Barick Gold.

Peter Munk has the biggest gold company in the word.

Nelson Mendela got out of jail and became President of South Africa. He's celebrating his 93 birthday today. All's well that ends well.

Except for Buddy at the variety store, maybe, but we'll see.

So my grandfather gets drafted, goes to war, and gets captured in the first week. My other grandfather gets sent to the eastern front and freezes to death in a snowdrift.

Fate.

Here on the north shore the German POWs considered themselves the luckiest Germans in the world.

Every morning a guard would take twenty prisoners out for a nature hike. You can see pictures of the guards and prisoners at the information center at Neys Provincial Park.

The prisoners had a handball club, orchestra, boxing team, wrestling team... escape attempts were rare indeed.

You can see it in the pictures...

Fate.

These men, some guards, some prisoners, were all in this together. If not for fate, they'd have been somewhere in Europe trying to kill each other.

I hear another train.

I don't think we could build a railway across Canada today.