North of Superior

Hope is alive on the North Shore.

Just this past week an American outfit announced that they intend to open a chromium mine just north of the Marathon airport.

And this past week, some Indian multi-national announced that they were buying the Terrace Bay pulp mill which has been shuttered for nine months.

Hope!

Comes a little too late for Buddy at the Esso out on the highway in Marathon. He's the guy I met last year, clerking at the variety store. Laid off mill-worker. Fifty-five years old, made a decent wage his whole life since being hired on at the mill at age 18. Then the mill closed.

Clerking at the Esso.

The Esso is part of a gas station-restaurant-motel complex on the corner of the Penn road into Marathon and the Trans Canada Highway. It's changed hands.

It's in East Indian hands now. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but these folks come with extended families. They don't need 55 year old laid off mill-workers behind the till.

So he's gone, and that motel has become a Travelodge.

And I wish the new owners well.

Times change. Owners come and owners go.

The trip along the Trans Canada is a study in socio-economic change over the last half century. When I first traveled through here in the back of my family's station wagon in the '60's, there was a repair garage or a service station or a motel or a cottage court or a campground every twenty miles or so.

They all seemed to be doing well.

Almost all of them are gone now.

Even into the seventies new stuff was being put up.

There's a row of "new" stuff boarded up just south of Wawa.

Times changed.

Cars got more fuel efficient and more reliable. You can get from the Soo to Thunder Bay today in a day's drive on a tank of gas, and chances are really good you won't need any repairs along the way.

Or a night of lodging. Hundreds of Ma & Pa businesses have closed all along the North Shore in the last twenty years. Businesses that were the hopes and dreams of the families who started them up.

Air fare got cheaper and cheaper. Who needs to drive 36 hours just to get to Calgary from Toronto?

That Trans Canada Highway is just a ribbon of broken dreams now.

But there might be life in that Terrace Bay mill yet, and somebody wants to put a new mine in at Marathon, and Barrick is extending the life of their Hemlo mine, because Christ, who ever thought gold would go where it's gone?...

And anybody who has anything to do with those projects just might want to stay at the Travelodge for a few nights.

Hope lives!