visiting with an old friend
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
I don't have many friends in Canada any more, and yet this year I've visited the homes of two friends I met nearly twenty years ago.
This time it was Jimmy Caputo, my room-mate in early 1993. We carried on like it had been three months since we last saw each other instead of the um ten-twelve years that we agreed was likely. Jim's a fellow with a ready laugh and an inquisitive nature. The degree to which he hadn't changed over the years was as amazing as it had been when I'd caught up with 1994-era Richard in the Spring. Same fellow, just a bit greyer.
Jim lives in Sault Saint Marie, one of Ontario's three northern cities of any size. "The Soo", as it's known (despite "Sault" being pronounced "so" in the original French) is an industrial town that has the ambition of becoming the capital of North American green energy production. It's already got a substantial solar panel farm and has been producing low-impact (no dams!) hydro-electric power for decades. I glimpsed a wind turbine as well but it wasn't turning.
We'd driven to the Soo from Killarney to take the Agawa Canyon train tour, which is very highly rated. The Agawa canyon is one of the country's great ice-carved vistas, and we've been looking forward to it for weeks. The highway between Killarney, where we'd started our day, and the Soo is the famous 17 - famous for songs like "Trees and rocks, rocks and trees; if you've driven 17 you've seen plenty of these". It's an interesting enough bit of the country, but the eastern half truly is all rocks and trees and once you've seen 10 kilometers you've seen all 150. The central and western ends are a mixture of rather marginal-looking (what do I know, though) agricultural land and pleasant river/cottage scenes. I mentioned the many signs we'd noticed cautioning about horse-and-buggies, and Jim said that in the past five years the Mennonites had been arriving in growing numbers.
It's funny to hear: my mother's mother's mother's family were Mennonites (my grandmother switched churches from the Mennonite to another because the other had more interesting boys - cheeky girl!), and my mother's father was born in Bruce Mines - one of the towns on the 17. His mother spent some of her child-hood in the Soo according to my mum. In those days there were no Mennonites to be found in that territory, of course, but it's fun to watch the lines mix geographically and temporally. And when we stopped in Bruce Mines to switch driving duties, I noticed a Bavarian restaurant - bringing my father's German ancestry into the mix in that far-flung town. It's sort of a family ancestry mash-up.