Northland_A 4,000-Mile Journey Along America's Forgotten Border

by Porter Fox

  Time is money on a ship, and Ian said the boat would be ready to sail again at midnight. I tried to think of things to do for the next sixteen hours. I hadn’t seen anyone in the hallway or mess hall. I’d eaten five meals by myself at that point. The Equinox was starting to feel like a ghost ship.

  Ian pointed to one of the wheelsmen, Stephen, who was standing on the deck, and said that everyone who wasn’t on duty had shore leave until 10:00 p.m. “You can probably share his cab if you get over there in time,” he said.

  It took me about ninety seconds to grab my jacket and wallet and speed-walk among deckhands, mooring lines, and cargo hold covers to the gangway. (No running on the deck.) Stephen did not look happy to see me. His eyes were bloodshot. He didn’t answer when I said hello. He muttered something about crappy cell phone service and gazed at the work lot. One of Stephen’s shipmates said that Stephen often told stories on watch that turned unexpectedly gruesome. He started to tell me one while we waited, then the taxi arrived and he jogged down the gangway to meet it.

  We loaded in and Stephen asked to be dropped off near Dofasco’s gate. Another town car with tinted windows waited for him in a dirt turnout. He grabbed his backpack and jumped out without a word. I continued to Hamilton. The crew described the city as hell on Earth, and so far it fit the description. Something happened when the cab turned onto North James Street, though. We passed a café and a smoothie shop, then a string of art galleries. The cab let me out, and I found a half dozen other galleries, three coffee shops, five restaurants, and two boutique saloons within six blocks. It was a bizarre and unexpected scene. A newspaper article in the window of a gallery explained the renaissance. At some point in the early 2000s, high rents in Toronto, an hour away, had pushed artists west into Hamilton’s Jamesville district. A 2006 article in the Globe and Mail entitled “Go West, Young Artist!” had galvanized the migration, and by 2015, North James Street looked like a neighborhood in my hometown of Brooklyn.

  I browsed hand-cut wood prints and giant oil paintings at the Hamilton Artists gallery and bought an “Art Is the New Steel” T-shirt at a print and media arts center. I ate lunch on a sunny restaurant patio with fifteen other patrons, who talked about business and art while sipping lattes and microbrews, then got an espresso to go.

  Hamilton is the kind of town where you can call the mayor an hour in advance, meet with him, and ask him what the hell is going on there. Mayor Fred Eisenberger was waiting for me fifteen minutes after I phoned his press secretary. He wore a blue button-down and slacks. He was born in Amsterdam—blue eyes, silver hair—and had moved to Hamilton with his family when he was eight. He was in the second year of his second term as mayor, he said from behind a desk stacked with paperwork. One of his campaign promises: clean up the water. “That is an overriding concern,” he said. “We’ve spent hundreds of millions of dollars remediating the aftereffects of industry.”

  One percent of Great Lakes water arrives as precipitation and eventually exits through a river. The other 99 percent sits right where it is, meaning that pollutants become more concentrated over time. City waste, industrial discharge, agricultural runoff, landfill leaching, and contaminated precipitation are the primary sources. Pesticides, fertilizers, flame retardants, plasticizers, and synthetic fragrances are among the most common chemicals found in the lakes. Recent research shows high levels of pharmaceutical compounds as well. Antibacterials promote resistant bacteria in the lakes. Antidepressants, steroid hormones, and caffeine have been detected in residential wells in lakeside towns. Invasive species are a major issue as well. More than 150 have been introduced to the Great Lakes in the last two hundred years—many via oceangoing freighters that release contaminated water from ballast tanks—and are decimating fragile ecosystems there.

  The northland is America’s water tower, making water quality—and availability—there a national, not regional, issue. Ninety-five percent of America’s surface freshwater sits in the Great Lakes basin. Climate change has already melted spring snowpacks in the north by 20 percent or more. Subsequent lack of spring and summer runoff has lowered water levels in many of the country’s largest rivers, most of which originate in the north—the Columbia, Missouri, Mississippi, and Ohio.

  In 2014, 90 percent of the US West was in a state of drought. The Ogallala Aquifer, which waters much of the West, will be 70 percent depleted by 2050. Water shortages in cities like Phoenix, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlanta, New York City, and even Waukesha, just ten miles from Lake Michigan, have inspired plans to tap the Great Lakes, alarming Canadian authorities. Water wars are nothing new in North America. The 1960s North American Water and Power Alliance proposed using nuclear explosions to divert several major rivers into a five-hundred-mile reservoir along the Rocky Mountain Trench. The plan for the Canadian Great Recycling and Northern Development Canal was to dam James Bay and turn it into a massive freshwater reserve. A similar plan in the USSR dried up the Aral Sea, and one that is being built in China will pump the equivalent of three Colorado Rivers from the Yangtze to arid northern cities.

  Already, a million miles of water pipelines and aqueducts crisscross the US and Canada. The eight states that regulate Great Lakes water in the US recently loosened rules that control where it can go—allowing more counties to pull water from the lakes. With demand for freshwater in the US expected to grow 50 percent by 2050, former Canadian ambassador to the US, Gary Doer said, water wars in the future will make battles over cross-border oil pipelines like the Keystone XL “look silly.”

  FOUR HUNDRED YEARS AFTER Champlain canoed the lakes, fresh fruit and vegetables are still hard to find on freighters. I walked from Eisenberger’s office to the Hamilton indoor farmer’s market—the oldest in the country, founded in 1837—and grabbed a dozen apples and pears for my cabin and a few quarts of strawberries for Mike. Then I called a cab and headed back to the steel mill.

  Neighborhoods grew progressively darker and poorer, the closer we got to the waterfront. An orange glow hung over the mill five miles away. Giant warehouses and empty lots lined the street. I didn’t see a single person or another car. Inside Gate 15, flames flickered above Dofasco’s smokestacks, and earth movers roared as they pushed piles of iron. The foundry runs twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

  Inside the boat, nothing had changed. The forced-air system whirred. The fluorescent lights made everything bright and sterile. A single crewman sat in the mess hall, staring at a plate of spaghetti. Stephen was in the wheelhouse and said that half the crew was still in town. While we were gone, one of the clamshell loaders had punched a hole in the Equinox’s hull. The ship has a double hull, so it wasn’t sinking. “Until it gets fixed,” he said, “we aren’t going anywhere.”

  EUROPEAN SCHOONERS, SLOOPS, AND BRIGS hauled most of the freight on the lakes in the eighteenth century. Around the start of the Seven Years’ War between Britain and France in 1754, more maneuverable fore-and-aft rigged ships arrived. Hull shapes were designed to carry as much cargo as possible in shallow and variable waters. Early ships were fat with vertical topsides. Flat bottoms allowed vessels to skirt over shoals. A centerboard was added at the turn of the century to improve sailing efficiency. “Canallers” were the workhorses of the mid-1800s and were the model for modern freighters. By 1860, 750 of the 1,300 ships sailing the lakes were canallers.

  Most of the steamers in the Great Lakes in the 1850s burned wood. It took an average of 150 cords in four-foot lengths to cross the lakes. One cord cost $1.50. Boats made about thirty trips a season, consuming nearly five thousand cords. Lake Superior had still not been sounded then, and there were no charts. Captains sailed with a compass, a sextant, and a barometer. Lookouts at designated stations warned of coming storms. Sailors Encampment near Nevis Island was a popular stop to heave to and wait for favorable weather.

  Steam engines eventually made sails obsolete, and iron ships replaced wooden ones. Boats spoke to each other using “whistle talk,” which included everything fro
m what was on a pilot’s mind to where he was headed. Each vessel had a distinct whistle—some shrill, some deep. Sailors cut down the masts of old canallers, cleared the decks, turned them into “hookers,” and towed them. By 1889, whaleback tows and bulkers, with their flat bottoms and rounded tops, were running the lakes.

  After World War II, a few steel ocean freighters sailed up the Saint Lawrence, and the age of the modern laker began. Dimensions were standardized. Boats were built to almost the exact size of the locks. Variations of lakers include longboats, oreboats, straight-deck bulk carriers, and self unloaders. Because the new Soo Locks are larger than any others—1,200 feet long and 110 feet wide—a handful of thousand-foot lakers operate exclusively on the Upper Lakes.

  Until the Welland Canal was built in Ontario, to circumvent Niagara Falls, there was no connection between the Upper Lakes and the ocean. Canadians built the first Welland in 1824. The canal opened in 1829 with forty locks that lifted boats 325 vertical feet from Lake Ontario to Lake Erie. Large ships needed to be lightened to make it through, and the Ontario Railway was built alongside the canal to carry extra freight. Over the years the canal was widened, deepened, and rerouted four times. The last rebuild was in 1932, and plans are under way to redo it again.

  The completion of the canal dropped freight charges dramatically and stimulated economies all around the lakes. The twenty-seven-mile link became so vital that several terrorist schemes targeted it. In 1916, a group of Germans tried to blow up the canal in what became known as the Von Papen Plot. Captain Franz von Papen helped organize a ring of German nationals from his headquarters in New York City, in an effort to stop troops and supplies flowing from North America to the Allies. Dynamite and blueprints for the canal were secured, but the Secret Service foiled the plot after an agent picked up a briefcase full of incriminating documents on New York City’s Sixth Avenue El train. Von Papen and the other conspirators were expelled from the US. A grand jury indicted the group, though it had already returned to Germany. Charges were dropped in 1932 when von Papen was appointed chancellor of Germany. (He would later become one of Hitler’s greatest supporters and vice chancellor under the Führer.)

  THE EQUINOX HAD ALREADY passed through the first two locks in the Welland Canal by the time I woke up. It was eight in the morning, and the familiar hum of the engine rattled the mirrors and furniture in the cabin. An Algoma welding team had arrived in the middle of the night and fixed the hole in the hull. Captain Ross made up time after they finally pushed off and was back on schedule by the time he reached the mouth of the Welland.

  It would take eight hours and eight locks for the Equinox to climb the hill from Lake Ontario to Lake Erie. Captain Ross said I could get off at Lock 3 and return to the ship at Lock 8 if I wanted. One minute late at Lock 8, and I’d be heading home on a bus. I gathered my gear and walked to the deck. The assistant cook, a young woman named Cleo, was getting her seaman’s license certified in Saint Catherines and showed me where to wait. When the boat pulled into Lock 3, we climbed a ladder up the lock wall and walked across a bridge spanning the lock doors. Two cabs waited for us on the other side behind a chain-link fence.

  The Niagara Escarpment didn’t look like much from the cab. The land lifted so gradually that I hardly noticed the incline. Hardwood trees and green lawns bordered the canal. Farther inland was farmland, and a few small roads. The canal itself was so skinny that, from land, the Equinox looked like a mini mall sliding through the neighborhood.

  My driver left me at the Table Rock Welcome Centre near the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. The border runs through the middle of the Niagara River but not the middle of the falls. The waterfall you see on postcards, Horseshoe Falls, is on the Canadian side. The much smaller American Falls is on the US side. As the limestone riverbed erodes and shifts, the border shifts with it. Erosion has moved the falls seven miles upstream over the last 12,500 years. The current rate of erosion is about a foot a year, meaning that 50,000 years from now the falls will connect to Lake Erie and be replaced by a series of rapids.

  A string of midrange hotels, casinos, restaurants, and attractions along the Canadian shoreline is working its way upriver as well. A few blocks north of the welcome center, the sprawling Fallsview Casino Resort stands alongside the Skylon Tower—whose “Yellow Bug” elevators rise 775 feet to a revolving restaurant. I walked northwest up Clifton Hill, past the Guinness World Records Museum, Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, the Upside Down House, Brick City (Legoland), Movieland Wax Museum of the Stars, and the Haunted House. A study in the 1990s found that a surge of new construction on the Canadian shore had changed wind patterns over the falls and significantly increased mist from the waterfall there—good news for poncho salesmen on the viewing platform.

  Niagara Falls has been a place of business since Étienne Brûlé stumbled across it. Frontiersmen kept an eye out for falling water. Stream-powered gristmills and sawmills were often the first step in settling an area. The first sawmill on the Niagara River was erected in 1725. In 1805, Augustus and Peter Porter bought the entire American Falls from New York State and used cascading water to power their tannery.

  In 1891, the International Niagara Commission opened a competition for a commercial generator system that could transmit energy twenty miles to Buffalo, New York. The “Current Wars” were under way in scientific circles then—with Nikola Tesla backing alternating current (AC) and Thomas Edison promoting direct current (DC). Tesla had briefly worked for Edison at Edison Machine Works, but the two soon parted ways. Edison was stuck on the idea of electrifying America with DC, although DC did not transmit well over long distances. Tesla was convinced that his AC motors could do it better, and he was racing the clock to invent one that could transmit power at industrial voltages.

  Competition entries were split among AC, DC, and “compressed air,” the latter incorporating pistons and water columns that could run machinery and steam engines. Judges did not find a solution among the entries and asked George Westinghouse, who bought Tesla’s patents, and General Electric, which had recently merged with Edison Electric, to submit bids. General Electric proposed a DC system to use locally and an AC system to transmit to Buffalo. Westinghouse put its faith in Tesla and designed a plan around his new polyphase AC motor. The commission went with Westinghouse, helping to decide the Current Wars, and on November 16, 1896, Niagara Falls power lit up the streets of Buffalo.

  Plans to dam the entire falls for power generation almost became a reality. Local opposition shut the project down. Frederic Church of the Hudson River school of painters, who painted many of New York’s waterfalls, advocated for ending development on the Niagara River. Landscape architect Frederick Olmsted surveyed the falls and recommended that the state buy back the land, which it eventually did. The Niagara Reservation became New York’s first state park. Water diversions for hydropower today decrease the flow over the falls so significantly that the US and Canada limit power generation during the day, when most tourists visit.

  I WAS RUNNING OUT of time to make it to Lock 8 and headed to the other end of the canal. Port Colborne sits at the head of the Welland, on Lake Erie. When the canal was complete, concrete plants, nickel refineries, and all of the ancillary businesses that followed the shipping industry across the northland quickly sprang up. As in Hamilton, most of the industry in Port Colborne has dried up, and the town was becoming a chic weekender destination—with gift shops, cafés, and the incredible three-generation Minor Fisheries cafeteria, where your breaded and fried perch comes in daily from the local fishing fleet.

  Once I boarded the Equinox again at Lock 8, I wouldn’t get off until we had crossed Lakes Erie, Huron, and Superior. I took my time looking at shops and cafés along West Street. Sunset comes slowly on Lake Erie. Land on the far side of the lake was a shadowy thumbnail with a few towers and smokestacks poking through. The clouds were soft streaks overhead, weather moving in from the west. An optical illusion takes place on the lakes: when hot air settles over a cool
layer, it can bend light. Blinking cell phone towers and skyscrapers a hundred miles away shoot up through the night sky as if they are a short boat ride away.

  I found the Alphabet Bookshop close to the lock and spoke with the owner, Richard Shuh. The store is housed in an old, brick Victorian home. The sign out front advertised paperbacks, hardcovers, first editions, and small antiques. Books were stacked on the porch, in the hallway, and all around Richard, who sat in an office chair in the foyer. A photo of Allen Ginsberg and another of Charles Bukowski were thumbtacked to the wall. I asked whether Richard had known them, and he said he’d met them a few times, in Buffalo and Toronto, back when he sold books there.

  Richard had worked on lakers before that. He loaded sacks of grain onto freighters until he hurt his back. The money was good. The work was bad for his body. He did well with his bookstore until 9/11. Half of his business was American, he said. “It’s all gone since 9/11. They make you have a passport now. Most Americans don’t have one. I guess it’s a hundred dollars to get one?” Business had fallen off by 90 percent in the last six years. His best sellers were Victorian-era prints that people hung on the wall. “I guess they have time to read that,” he said.

  Richard used to live in Thunder Bay. His wife is from there. In the summer they would rent a VW because the clearance was high enough to drive on logging roads. They drove deep into the northland, to a lake in the woods too small to be marked on a map, too big to walk around in a day. They set up camp there and fished, drank, cooked, and disappeared from civilization for a couple of weeks.

  “North of that,” he said, “you can put your canoe on a train to James Bay and get an Indian to take you to an island there that is untouched.”