More Manhole Covers

Posted on November 16, 2023 by admin

Almost warm today, except in the house, where I maintain temps at a skinflinty 68° F. in the colder months. It wasn’t warm enough outside to raise the inside temps, and it was so windy I decided not to built the possible last back-yard fire of the year. Maybe tomorrow.

One thing leads to another online, and from Hello Kitty I eventually made my way to the Atlas Obscura article on Japanese manhole covers.

“In Japan, many manhole covers are works of urban art — elaborate, curious, distinctive, even colorful,” AO notes. “They have become a tourist destination unto themselves, and attract a legion of dedicated manhole enthusiasts who travel the country to visit some of the thousands of unique designs.”

This seems to be a thing that has happened in the about 30 years since I lived there, so I’d never heard of it. At least, the article puts the origin of the covers as a local initiative in 1985, and it probably took a while to become a mass phenomenon.

“Typically, ‘local manholes’ or ‘design manholes’ feature elements special to a particular location: a town emblem, landmark, event, or official bird or flower,” the article says. “While there is some logic to the placement of the covers… [some] appear to have been placed without rhyme or reason.”

The last image in the article, depicting Osaka Castle, would hew to its place even without the kanji for Fukushima Ward, Osaka – it has the miotsukushi.

That’s something to look for, should I make it back to Japan. In the meantime, I sometimes look down at manhole covers in other places. Such as in Ireland and Spain, and in San Antonio more recently. Here’s one weathered by many decades, probably.

At least the lettering is barely visible. A much newer cover reminds us to protect the downstream fish.

East Jordan Iron Works are headquartered in Michigan, and the company these days is known by the less specific moniker, EJ Group. No substance to that name, if you asked me.

Simple, but with a certain style.

Not a manhole cover, but sharing a similar shape, and displaying an intricate design, at Lake Plaza in Elmendorf Lake Park in San Antonio.

Best visibility would be with a drone, looks like, but the edge-on view isn’t bad.

Centennial Park and the Vanderbilt Ramble

Posted on November 8, 2023 by admin

On Saturday the sun came up in Nashville and we weren’t there to greet it, having stuffed ourselves with hot chicken and beer the night before, and then engaged in conversation until fairly late. On the other other hand, we were there to see the sun set later that day from the roof deck.

Between those moments, we did a lot of walking. First we set out from our well-located short-term apartment along side streets past the site of our residence in the early ’80s, which was also the place we built an isolation tank for ourselves, then to Centennial Park, the crown jewel among Nashville parks.

On Saturday morning we merely crossed the park, where one of our number had been arrested for drinking beer in public 40-plus years ago, exiting it at the end (or beginning) of the short Elliston Place. We noted the buildings and businesses gone from that street – such as Rotier’s and its barbecue chicken without peer – and additions, none of any particular character.

The Elliston Place Soda Shop still serves tasty meat-and-threes, wonderful breakfasts, and incredible milkshakes, though in a larger location next door to its original site, where it reopened in 2021. The look is about right, a larger space but still a close homage to the original. The real test was the food, and the place passed with flying colors.

Then came the Vanderbilt Ramble: along sidewalks and across greens, past dorms and classrooms and other buildings, many tied to specific sets of memories: McGill Hall, Sarratt Student Center, the Main Library, Furman Hall, and 21st Avenue to the former Peabody Campus, where we noted that Oxford House had vanished, replaced by a parking garage still under construction; East Hall is still that and West Hall that; but Confederate Memorial Hall is merely Memorial Hall and the Social-Religious Building is named for some chancellor or other. Former Social-Religious has ten pillars out front, which to this day I believe stand for the Ten Commandments. On its expansive front steps, every day once upon a time, a blind student practiced his bagpipes. He wasn’t bad.

Further wanderings took us through Hillsboro Village, a storefront shopping district that existed 40+ years ago, though most of the shops are different these days. Returning to campus, we passed through the blocks of fraternity and sorority houses, once marked by regular streets, which are now pedestrian walkways. We had little to do with them in our student days, though one of us pledged ATO, which didn’t take. I noted the spot where I had a short springtime conversation with a tipsy future vodka billionaire. Indeed, besides going to the same junior high and high school as I did, he spent one year at VU.

The arboretum that is the Vanderbilt campus, including Peabody, was near peak coloration, a blaze of leaves in places. Many trees are enormous and stood well before anyone on campus today was born. The day was warm and campus alive with people, though never crowded anywhere. Students went about their weekend business, and paid no attention to the oldsters wandering by, with their collective recollections trailing behind them.

On Sunday afternoon, we spent more time in Centennial Park, legacy of a long-ago expo.

The temporary art building, a replica of the Parthenon, was rebuilt in the 1920s to be more permanent, and it abides. So does Athena inside.

She wears the world’s largest sandals, probably.

Though Steve and Rich had never seen her, Athena isn’t exactly new, having been completed by sculptor Alan LeQuire in 1990. I’ve visited a few times in the years since.

Much more recent (2016) is the Tennessee Women’s Suffrage Monument, also done by Alan LeQuire. None of us had seen it.

We visited a few other spots in the park, but forget to visit the new Taylor Swift Bench. Oops.

OLLU & Elmendorf Lake Park

Posted on November 1, 2023 by admin

Despite the cold, we had about 40 kids show up yesterday to collect sweets, maybe half again as many as the busiest Halloweens of the past, though I don’t count every year. We ran through an entire box of full-sized candy bars plus some other smaller confections. Almost all of the kids came before dark, which has been the case for many years now. Another example of widespread nervous parenting that’s pretty much entrenched, I figure. When I was that age, we went out after dark in our Invisible Pedestrian costumes and we liked it.

Most of the costumes this year were buried under coats, but I have to say the best of ’23 was a tallish kid in no coat and a white-and-red full-body chicken outfit, complete with a comb as prominent as Foghorn Leghorn’s. The costume might well have been warm enough for him to go without a coat. The color scheme reminded me of Chick-fil-A right away.

I’m just old enough to remember sometimes receiving baked goods and fruit on Halloween; those vanished by about 1970, victim of the lurid nonsense stories about razor blades in apples, poisoned cakes and chocolate Ex-Lax being given to kids. We found the thought of that last one pretty funny, actually.

This morning we woke to about an inch of snow destined to melt later in the day. A small preview of winter.

The cold is an unpleasant contrast to South Texas last week, where it was hot for October. (Temps have fallen there since then, I heard.) Just after noon on Saturday, I headed over to the campus of Our Lady of the Lake University, OLLU. I’d heard of the school for a long time, but my knowledge of it never rose above the level of hazy.

Main Building, the sign says. A name refreshing in its simplicity. The building’s a little more intricate.

Mere steps away is Sacred Heart Chapel.

The school recently marked the chapel’s centennial. At your feet at the entrance, a date.

“The English Gothic chapel was the vision of Mother Florence Walter, Superior General of the Congregation of Divine Providence from 1886-1925,” says the university web site. “In 1895, she looked down from Prospect Hill at a swath of wilderness and declared, ‘One day we will have a chapel here. And its spires will be seen throughout the city of San Antonio.’ ”

That must have a good day for the superior general. Funding the chapel took 11 years, but eventually the Sisters, who had founded the school in 1895, were able to hire a renowned architect, Leo Dielman, to design the chapel. A prolific architect of sacred space – more than 100 churches to his credit – Dielmann had his funeral in 1969 at Sacred Heart Chapel.

When I went in, a funeral was going on. I gazed in for only a moment from the very back of the nave. Looked like this, except for the sacrament pictured.

OLLU borders Elmendorf Lake Park, with walking trails ringing a small manmade lake, created by the damming of Apache Creek. I took a walk. When the sun periodically came out from behind the clouds, it felt like it was about 90 F. It was a sweaty walk. Needed that hat I’d left in Illinois.

Thick foliage luxuriates on the lakeshore.

Almost no one else was around on what, compared with South Texas temps only a few weeks and months earlier, was merely a warm day. A Saturday at that. The place gave out no sense of being avoided out of fear for one’s person; just ignored. A few recreational fishermen stood on the shore, angling. One was in a small boat. That was all.

Another, more hard-surface part of the park includes benches. Parc Güell sorts of benches, but without the crowds.

No human crowds, that is. Birds were another matter. An astonishing number of birds occupied a handful of the trees in the park, ca-ca-ca-ca-ing with a resounding volume, especially on a small island I saw later is called Bird Island. Thinking on it, their Hitchcockian vibe might keep some people away. A lot of people.

Birds looking something like herons with completely black plumage. I couldn’t place them, but my bird knowledge is pretty meager. Crows? They look leaner of build than crows. But what do I really know about crows?

I do know enough not to walk under them. A few of the bird-occupied trees were along the path of my walk, so I took minor detours to avoid any direct bombardment. I passed through the park without being the target of any droppings.

I thought of a Red Skelton TV sketch featuring his characters, seagulls Gertrude and Heathcliff (I had to look the names up, but not that fact that he did those characters). One of the birds noted that the beach below was very crowded. The other responded, “There’s no sport in that.” Odd what sticks with you after more than 50 years.

Ruby City

Posted on October 30, 2023 by admin

I didn’t take many pictures in Austin this time around. But after dinner one night, Tom had to answer a call, and I had a few moments to document a minor example of Austin neon. It’s a good town for neon.

That was the restaurant entrance. The full name of the place is Wu Chow. Good chow, as it happens.

In San Antonio, I was much more attuned to image-making, at least on Saturday, when I was footloose and out to see new things. Such as Ruby City.

Ruby City is a new art museum west of downtown on the not-so-mighty San Pedro Creek. Which is wider at this point than much of the San Antonio River.

“The story of Ruby City — the landmark museum designed by world-renowned architect Sir David Adjaye… — begins with the lucid dream of a dying woman,” Texas Monthly reported just before the museum opened in 2019.

“In the spring of 2007, Linda Pace, at age 62 a legendary patron of contemporary art in San Antonio, understood that her breast cancer, diagnosed a few months earlier, was likely terminal. All the money in the world could not keep the woman born into both the Pearl beer and Pace Foods families alive long enough to see through her final project, a permanent home for her art collection.”

Ideas for the building design came to her in a dream, the magazine reported, and – having skill in drawing and materials ready at her bedside – she drew sketches and provided them to the architect. About a decade after her death, the building was realized. How much the final structure hewed to the dream-images is impossible to know, at least for those of us standing at the base of the concrete walls years later.

I arrived just as the museum opened at 10 in the morning. I’d been encouraged to make an online “appointment” before coming, so I did. Would crowding be an issue at this free museum? Well, no. During my first few minutes there, I was the only visitor. Everyone else worked there, and there weren’t that many of them. It was a little weird being in a gallery in which the employee’s (or volunteer’s) only job is to watch you, except pretend they aren’t really watching you.

Never mind, the entrance asks one and all to “be amazing.” I made a self-portrait.

Be amazing. That’s a tall order. Better to be “interesting” or maybe “remarkable” on a really good day. Much of the artwork inside is at least interesting. A few pieces I’d say were even remarkable, but nothing amazed me much. Maybe I’m jaded.

Actually, this rectangle o’ river rubbish was mildly amazing.

“Riverbank” (2006), by Luz Maria Sanchez of Mexico City. Made from clothing, bags, bottles etc. found in the Rio Grande. Behind it is “Mobile Home II” (2006) by Mona Hatoum, a Lebanese artist living in London. Its items are connected to laundry lines slowly pulled back and forth by small electric motors.

This one I found remarkable. “Ultimate Joy” (2001) by American artist Jim Hodges. A light bulb artist, at least for this work.

“View of Gorge” (1999) by Anne Chu, an American artist (d. 2016).

Outside is a sculpture garden with three pieces – one of which seemed to be removed for now. No matter, one of the remaining ones is an impressive pile: “5000 lbs. of Sonny’s Airplane Parts, Linda’s Place, and 550 lbs. of Tire-Wire” (1997) by Nancy Rubins.

A final comment on the building itself. Maybe not the color I’d have chosen, though it’s an interesting one. Why aren’t more concrete structures one color or another? Is it too expensive compared with plain dirty white? Imagine how many ugly concrete structures would be a little less ugly with a dash of color.

The National Cambodian Heritage Museum and Killing Fields Memorial

Posted on October 15, 2023 by admin

It’s mid-October and in Chicago at least, that means Open House Chicago, which we’ve attended most years over the last decade. We’ve visited churches, synagogues, temples, office space, libraries, factories, theaters, museums and more as part of the event. Open House is a worldwide phenomenon.

Rain fell heavily Friday night, and was forecast to last into Saturday morning – which it did, also obscuring whatever partial eclipse was above the clouds. The weather didn’t stop us from going out, though it did slow us down some, since driving in the city is like driving through glue even in the best conditions. To make things easier, I decided to head into the neighborhoods east from O’Hare – relatively accessible from our suburb – and on to Lakeview near Lake Michigan, as familiar as a neighborhood can be in Chicago, since we used to live there.

Our first stop was west of Lakeview, however, in the much less familiar Lincoln Square. It was still rainy and quite windy when we arrived at the National Cambodian Heritage Museum and Killing Fields Memorial, which I hadn’t known about till I saw it on the Open House List.

The weather discouraged outside photos, but I did manage to capture the mural on the side of the museum building, which faces west on Lawrence Ave.

“Cambodian Color” (2017) by Brandin Hurley and Shayne Renee Taylor.

A detail near the museum entrance, and out of the rain.

It’s a small museum, only a few rooms, but enough to provide some testimony and images about the Cambodian genocide – the evacuation of Phnom Penh, forced collectivization, blunt-instrument murders to save ammunition, Tuol Sleng and other death prisons, the Khmer Rouge turning on itself when an agrarian utopia mysteriously didn’t appear — the whole horrorshow of ideology gone barking mad. A somber place to visit, but that should be an element in one’s wanderings.

One of the docents, a young woman I took to be an American of Cambodian ancestry, asked me if I knew anything about the period. Unfortunately, I do. Not unfortunate that I know, but that there was anything to know. I remember reading reports of mass murders in “Democratic Kampuchea” while the Khmer Rouge was still in power and of course after its overthrow, when much more detail came out. I told her simply yes, that I’d heard of it.

The memorial is in the back room of the museum.

Not really visible unless you look very closely is Khmer script up and down the glass panels. A lot of it, in other words. Names.

“Designed within an environment for quiet contemplation utilizing glass, stone, water, and light effects, the memorial includes the individual names of thousands of relatives lost by Cambodians all over the United States,” the museum web site says.

Downtown Dallas Sculpture, 2013

Posted on September 17, 2023 by admin

Wee rain in the wee hours, which makes waking up to go to the bathroom a pleasure, at least once you settle back into bed. The light rain continued after daybreak, and made a pleasant backdrop for staying in bed to read. I expect the grass to respond by re-greening and unkempt-ing.

Ten years ago this month I was in Texas, including downtown Dallas. I visited the Nasher Sculpture Center then, which has the best sculpture real estate developer Raymond Nasher (d. 2007) could buy, and lots of it. Such as a bug-eyed Picasso (“Tête de femme,” 1931).

“La Nuit” (ca. 1902-09) by Aristide Maillol.

And something a little newer, “Quantum Cloud XX (tornado)” (2000) by Sir Antony Gromley.

The Nasher isn’t the only place in downtown Dallas to spot sculpture. Not far away is “Colts in Motion” (1980) by Anna Debska.

As well as “Bear Mountain Red-A Texas Landscape” (1982) by Alice Maynadier Bateman.

It’s a whopper that has outlasted its original corporate patron. A nearby sign says the work was carved on site from a 12.5-ton block quarried near Fredericksburg, Texas, for the building, then known as the Diamond Shamrock Tower (717 North Harwood St.). The company had moved to Dallas from Cleveland not long before – companies moving to Texas isn’t a new thing – but was eventually swallowed by Valero Energy, which is based in San Antonio.

Along North Avenue, Chicago (Murals &c.)

Posted on August 30, 2023 by admin

My stroll along North Avenue on Saturday gave me an opportunity to look more closely at murals I’d seen before, but only from the vantage of a moving bus window, which isn’t optimal. Murals have always been around – one I looked at is over 50 years old – but I can’t help feeling that now is pretty much a golden age of murals, at least as far as North American cities are concerned: commercial, polemic, vernacular, idiosyncratic, ghost, ars gratia artis and uncategorizable.

To start: not actually on North Avenue, but steps away, a new-looking advert on a wall under the Damen El station.

An eatery about as Chicago as can be, but I wonder. What are the odds the restaurant will outlast the mural? It’s a tough game, doubly so considering how many other joints in the city offer dogs and burgers. Chicago’s a city of dogs and burgers, you could say.

Equally new, equally commercial, on the opposite wall (a detail).

Not a painted mural, but built-in concrete relief mural and adjacent art on North Ave., making a wholly nondescript brick building into something notable.

“Life-Tree” or “Arbol de Vida” (1989), according to writing on the wall. No random reference, that.

The building traded for $2.9 million in 2017, according to the now defunct DNAinfo Chicago, closed in a fit of anti-union pique (and whose workers later formed the nonprofit Block Club Chicago, which is still around).

The work was created “by artists John Pitman Weber and Catherine Cajandig,” the DNAinfo Chicago archive says. “They were helped by nine community-based youth artists, who contributed other works along the same wall.”

As pretty much all Chicago streets do, North Avenue also features works by those who don’t sign them, unless I’m missing their code (and I probably am). Such as this entire graffiti’d wooden fence.

Encouraging one and all to – bake?

There’s something vaguely unsettling about this rendition of a famous cartoon rodent. The more I look at it — an unholy melding of Mickey and Goofy?

A graffito, see the bottom, that encourages warm interpersonal relations.

As this mural seems to do as well.

Not a mural or graffiti, but advertising posters tell a story as well, such as the rise of Korean chicken in North America (and corn dogs, too).

And the persistence of tobacco, in spite of everything arrayed against its use.

I don’t think I’ll take up premium cigars, or any cigars, but I have to like an outfit whose web site quotes in large script: “If a man says he is not afraid of dying, he is either lying, or he is a Gurkha,” which is attributed to Indian Army Chief of Staff Field Marshal Sam Manekshaw (d. 2008).

Soon I came to North Avenue’s most intriguing mural, and certainly the most polemic of the ones I saw. One not to be appreciated from a bus, whose title I had to look up later: “La Crucifixion de Don Pedro” (1971). It’s a little hard to get an unobstructed view, unless you’re up close.

Left.

Center.

Right.

“ ‘La Crucifixion de Don Pedro’ was painted in 1971 by three community artists: Mario Galan, Jose Bermudez, Hector Rosario, and was commissioned by the Puerto Rican Arts Association,” notes Clio. “It is the oldest Puerto Rican mural in the city. The mural shows Don Pedro Albizu Campos being crucified between Lolita Lebron and Rafael Miranda. Campos was the Vice President [sic] of the Puerto Rican nationalist party, which fought for Puerto Rican Independence. Lebron and Miranda were also members of that party.”

The backdrop is a Puerto Rican revolutionary flag raised against the Spanish in the 19th century.

My sources don’t say who’s depicted as the figure stabbing Campos, paralleling the soldier stabbing Christ, but my guess would be Luis Muñoz Marín, first elected governor of Puerto Rico and generally considered the architect of the Estado Libre Asociado status of the island that the nationalists so bitterly opposed. Enough to organize violent uprisings in the 1950s, which landed Campos in prison most of the rest of his life. In the case of Lebron and Miranda, they wounded a number of Congressman by opening fire in the U.S. Capitol in the pre-metal detector days of 1954, which earned them about a quarter century each of hard time in the federal prison system.

Another polemic on North Avenue.

Not polemic.

Unless you count the comment about ICE that Homer wouldn’t be able to see, even if he weren’t sloshed.

Marathon to Sault Ste. Marie by Way of Wawa

Posted on August 21, 2023 by admin

I was pumping gas not long ago, and spotted what I took to be shiny penny on the pavement near the pump. A closer look told me it wasn’t a U.S. cent, but I didn’t ID it until I’d picked it up and eyed it when I got back in the car. Ten won, it turned out to be.

It’s the smallest currently circulating South Korean coin, both physically and in value. In theory, 10 won is worth 0.75 U.S. cents. A whopping seven and a half mills. The structure depicted is the Dabotap pagoda, a southeast-coast relic of the ancient kingdom of Silla, which lorded over most of the peninsula more than 1,000 years ago.

Back-and-forth between Korea and the U.S., and more specifically northwest suburban Chicago, is no unusual thing in our time, but still I was mildly surprised to find it — like I felt finding a New Zealand 20-cent piece. Made my day.

On the morning of August 3, I left Marathon, but not before a look at the one-room Marathon Museum, and a talk with a lanky young man who said he’d been hired just three weeks earlier to run the place, his first job out of college. He had grown up in the area, gone away for school, and only now was beginning to appreciate the history of the place, he said, as he read more and more.

Pretty refreshing, finding someone that young with an interest in history. That is an old man thing to say, of course, but anyway I was glad to hear a bit about the town, such as its origin as a prospective wood pulp mill whose development accelerated in the early 1940s when Canadian raw material extraction was deemed important to the Allied war effort. A postwar boom made Marathon into a genuine town; a wood pulp mill town that prospered until the crushing blow of the mill closing in 2009.

A public tank in Marathon.

Here’s a story of early Marathon: POW logging camps were built in the area after Canada entered the war in 1939, and on April 18, 1941, 28 German prisoners made a break for it, and many more attempted it, in a tunneling scheme worthy of The Great Escape or rather the real incident of the 1944 escape from Stalag Luft III. The goal of the prisoners at Camp X, Angler was to cross into the still-neutral United States. None made it. This article, which is serious need of an editor, nevertheless tells the tale of the long-abandoned camp not far off the modern road.

“Travellers on the Trans-Canada highway would not notice the dirt track leading south from the highway some four kilometres west of Marathon, Ontario,” the site says. “There is no sign to indicate where it leads, and no historical marker to record what happened along that track.”

This part of the Trans-Canada has more visible abandoned sites. Making a go of a business must be tough up there.

White River, Ontario has a claim on the origin of Winne-the-Pooh.

All well and good, but why do we see the Disney iteration and not one based on the illustrations by E. H. Shepard? Do you think Winnie wore a jacket at the London Zoo? No, she did not.

Wawa has more than its steel goose statue. There’s a pleasant lakeside path, for example.

On the relatively small Wawa Lake, not Superior. Just an everyday relic of the last ice age.

St. Mary Margaret Cemetery in the town (closed 1954) includes the remains of old-time Wawa-area miners. Most unmarked.

I sought out lunch at Philly Wawa Hoagie. A few days earlier, I’d heard the owner interviewed on a CBC radio show. Why not, I figured. I ordered the shawarma poutine.

How Canadian is that, eh? It was good and I barely needed to eat dinner.

Wawa features a bit more public art than the goose. Including figures all labeled “Gitchee Goomee” just on the other side of the visitor center from the goose.

A few miles out of Wawa, down a dirt road, is Magpie Scenic High Falls.

Not that high, unless you’re about to tumble over the edge. It’s the overflow spill weir of the Harris Hydroelectric Generating Station, which has a capacity of 13MW. Signs at the sight are emphatic about not climbing the thing, since spillway volume is notoriously fickle. (I’m paraphrasing.)

Nice falls, but the glory was getting there and back.

My goal for the day was Sault. Ste. Marie, Canadian side, so I pressed on. More abandoned Ontario.

A plaque about the road itself.

From the plaque, it was only an easy walk to Chippewa Falls, so I went.

Closer to Sault Ste. Marie, near the entrance of Pancake Bay Provincial Park, is a small complex of tourist shops on the Trans-Canada. I took a good look around, and confirmed that stores in this part of Canada offer a woefully small number of postcards. Too bad, there’s a lot of scenic raw material for postcards in this part of Canada.

The Wawa Goose

Posted on August 20, 2023 by admin

Whatever else you can say about the township of Wawa, Ontario, the goose comes first. I can’t call Wawa famous, but to the extent the town is known in the wider world, the goose puts it on the map.

The current goose is only a few years old, the second steel-bodied bird to stand on the site, which originally sported a chicken-wire and plaster goose erected in 1960 that lasted only a few winters. The statue calls attention to Wawa, which was its sole original purpose, since the brand-new Trans-Canada highway had bypassed its main street.

It works. You only need to pull off the Trans-Canada to see it, and then you stand a chance of going further into town (pop. 2,700). Though I spent a couple of hours in Wawa, and saw and did other things, the goose persuaded me to stop about mid-day on August 3. Well, maybe. With a name like Wawa, I might have stopped anyway. But the experience wouldn’t have been nearly the same.

Wawa has taken to its goose wholeheartedly. Follow the road into town and you’ll see other, more volant unofficial geese.

Look a little closer, and there are even more geese. It’s geese all the way down. This can be found on the wall outside of the township’s offices. Based on the township seal, looks like.

A small goose at a small historic cemetery in Wawa.

Pretty much any fact about the Wawa Goose is a fun fact, but I’m only going to cite a few from the Northern Ontario Travel (NOT) web site and other sources. The most fun of the fun facts, in my opinion.

• The goose is 28 feet tall, 22 feet long, and has a wingspan of 20 feet, according to NOT. [What, no metric measurements?]

• One Dick Vanderclift, Dutch immigrant and ornamental wrought iron specialist from Sault Ste. Marie, created the second goose. I assume the third one hews pretty close to his original design.

• One Al Turcott, owner of a Wawa dry goods and clothing store – back when that could make you a prominent local citizen – ponied up for most of the money to build the original.

• “The Canada Goose is not an official symbol of Canada,” NOT says. “Only the beaver and the maple tree have this cultural status.”

[What committee decides – no, I’m not going down that rabbit hole.]

• “Stompin’ Tom Connors sang the song ‘Little Wawa’ about a goose that stayed behind when her lover Gander Goo got shot down with an arrow!” NOT exclaims. “Bet you didn’t know that one!”

I sure didn’t know that one. Stompin’ Tom Connors (d. 2013) only now has come to my attention. Quite a thing in Canada, he was. This isn’t “Little Wawa,” but it is Stompin’ Tom.

Wait, Conan O’Brien is Canadian? No. No reason he couldn’t be, but he’s from Massachusetts. He clearly knew what his Canadian audience wanted.

Thunder Bay to Marathon, Ontario

Posted on August 16, 2023 by admin

On the first day of August, I made the acquaintance of Terry Fox. In bronze, anyway, and perhaps in spirit, since he’d been dead for over 42 years. Died very young; he’d be 65 now, had cancer not taken him away. A contemporary.

Apparently every Canadian knows who he was. Ignorant as I am, I didn’t, but I learned some remarkable things about him after seeing his memorial, which is just off the Trans-Canada Highway not far east of Thunder Bay.

It was a foggy morning in northwest Ontario. The memorial features Fox as a runner, which he was. But not just any runner.

He had only one leg, the other amputated to prevent the spread of osteogenic sarcoma, bone cancer, from his knee.

“In the fall of 1979, 21-year-old Terry Fox began his quest to run across Canada,” the CBC says. “He had lost most of his right leg to cancer two years before.

“[He] hatched a plan to raise money for cancer research by running across Canada. His goal: $1 for every Canadian. Fox’s plan was to start in St. John’s, Newfoundland on April 12, 1980 and to finish on the west coast of Vancouver Island on September 10. With more than 3,000 miles (5,000 km) of running under his belt, he was ready.”

So he ran almost every day early that year, gathering attention as he went. By the time he got to Toronto, the nation was watching. But he didn’t make it all the way to the West Coast.

“As Fox headed towards Georgian Bay, his health changed. He would wake up tired, sometimes asking for time alone in the van just to cry… On August 31, before running into Thunder Bay, Fox said he felt as if he’d caught a cold. The next day, he started to cough more and felt pains in his chest and neck but he kept running because people were out cheering him on. Eighteen miles out of the city, he stopped. Fox went to a hospital, and after examination, doctors told him that the cancer had invaded his lungs… He had run 3,339 miles (5,376 km).

“Terry Fox died, with his family beside him, on June 28, 1981… Terry Fox Runs are held yearly in 60 countries now and more than $360 million have been raised for cancer research.”

My goal that day was much easier: drive to the town of Marathon, Ontario, from Thunder Bay, about 300 km as things are measured locally. I actually like having road distances measured in kilometers on lightly traveled Canadian roads, since they seem to go by quickly. For example, 50 km to go? Ah, that’s only 30 miles. The conversion is easy to do in your head – half + 10%.

Though I have to stress that kilometers should have no place in measuring U.S. roads. Miles to go before I sleep; You can hear the whistle blow 100 miles; I’d walk a mile for a Camel. There’s no poetry to the metric system.

(The conversion of U.S. to Canadian dollars is pretty easy these days too: 75%, or half + 25%. That way a $20 meal magically costs only $15.)

East from the Terry Fox memorial is Ouimet Canyon Provincial Park, which I visited as an alternative to Sleeping Giant Provincial Park, which is highly visible from Thunder Bay but which looks like an all-day sort of place. I preferred to spend the day on the road, stopping where the mood struck.

Ouimet Canyon is striking. A easy walk of 15 minutes or so takes you to the canyon’s edge. Foggy that morning but worth the stop.

There was another place to stop in the park: a pleasant river view seen from a bench not far from the road, but tucked away behind some greenery, so that the road seemed far away. There was virtually no traffic anyway. I sat a while and watched the world go by not very fast. Or at all. I had to listen carefully to realize just how quiet the place is.

Also, the fog had started to burn off. Temps were very pleasant, whether Celsius or Fahrenheit.

The Trans-Canada is King’s Highway 11 and 17 at this stretch. Highway 11 eventually splits off and goes way around to Toronto, including Yonge Street, while highway 17 hews closer to Lake Superior, and is the longest highway in the province. It is the one I eventually drove all the way to Sault Ste. Marie.

Much of the roadside is uncultivated flora. I took this to be fireweed, which meant I was far enough north to see it. I saw it in a lot of places in this part of Ontario.

But sometimes fauna, of the non-wild sort.

I found lunch in Nipigon, pop. less than 1,500. I could have had my laptop repaired, if it had needed work, or bought worms and leeches, if I were in the mood to go fishing. I never am.

Nice church. The Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary Roman Catholic Church. Closed, of course.

Nipigon has an observation platform just off the highway, free and open to all, and completed only in 2018.

Naturally I climbed to the top for the vista. I need to do that kind of thing while I still can.

The Trans-Canada crossing the Nipigon River. Elegant, but with a troubled recent history.

The bridge was also completed in 2018. Or rather, it was reopened that year.

“[The reopening] comes nearly three years after the bridge, described as the first cable-stayed bridge in Ontario, failed in January 2016, just weeks after it opened,” notes the CBC. Oops. Apparently no one died as a result, so there’s that.

“Engineering reports found that a combination of design and installation deficiencies caused the failure, which effectively severed the Trans-Canada Highway. Improperly tightened bolts on one part of the bridge snapped, causing the decking to lift about 60 centimetres.”

Further to the east: Rainbow Falls Provincial Park. Another short walk to a nice vista. Another thing to like about this part of Canada.

All together, it was a leisurely drive, but even so I arrived in Marathon, pop. 3,270 or so, before dark – long summer days are a boon up north – and took in a few local cultural sights.

Just the exterior of the curling club. Wok With Chow, on the other hand, provided me dinner that evening, inside and at a table. Good enough chow, and demonstrating just how deeply ingrained Chinese food is in North America.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Public Art