I’ve often been accused of (and sometimes happily pled guilty to) being a Great Lakes bioregional chauvinist. But you still can take my word for it that the north shore of Lake Erie is one of the best chunks of creation, and one of the most pleasant parts of the “sweetwater seas.” And this is especially when you get out in the more remote stretches of road and beach – far from Fort Erie/Buffalo on one end and Windsor/Detroit on the other.

Note the precedence of the Canadian place names in the above. That’s only fair, since all of Erie’s N shore is within Canada, and also because I think that country as well as the Province of Ontario have generally done better by the lake than has the US, which peppered the S shore with more industry and fewer public parks than the lakeshore deserves. Of course, the US side is dominated by an industrial history long as your brawny arm: steel, autos, chemicals, alloys, you name it, in metro areas from Buffalo to Erie, Pa., to Cleveland and Sandusky and Toledo. By contrast, the Ontario shore is a string of small port communities, including Port Colborne at the S end on the Welland Canal, Nanticoke (home to that humongous coal-fired power plant that’s now pumping ozone our way during the heat wave), and Leamington (tomato capital of Canada, and just about the southernmost point of that eminently boreal nation).

Try Long Point Provincial Park when you get the time; it also could be justly be called Long Beach: a truly impressive stretch of bright sand littered with just enough driftwood to be decorative, and something resembling real surf when the wind’s up, as it generally is. The day we were there was refreshingly chilly at waterside; I spent an hour snoozing under some weather-stunted trees that provided just enough shade to keep me from getting cooked under the strong sun. I was a wimp about getting all the way into the cold water – what happened to shallow Lake Erie’s reputation for warming up quickly? Must have been one of those wave-driven temperature inversions.

The region’s got history and social issues, too: my obsessions, in other words, the stuff that always keeps me from having an unalloyed good time. But anyway: legendary liberal Keynesian economist John Kenneth Galbraith grew up in Iona Center, an Essex County hamlet just a stone’s throw from our route. And today, the excesses of globalized capitalism that JKG warned of (and that his son Jamie, of the U of Texas, warns of even more strongly and radically today) have brought many no-doubt-underpaid Latin American workers to the greenhouses that now provide Canada with cheap tomatoes and flowers, etc. Turns out Leamington, a lot closer to post-industrial Detroit that Iona Center ON in more ways than one, has Canada’s highest density of Latinos; we saw many obviously low-income workers getting around the rural roads and village streets by bike. We should have connected more directly with them in a gesture of solidarity, I suppose. But we were perhaps too fixated on heading west for the start of the Social Forum. Such are the contradictions…

July 1, Canada Day – the beginning of the crossborder holiday madness, what with July 4 in the offing stateside. Liz and I and our friends in Waterloo ON are headed for Niagara Falls this morning for a picnic and a farewell as the two of us bike somewhere over the Rainbow Bridge toward the Land of Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace. But it will be good to get home again after two weeks on the road.

My mind is still back in Detroit. Somehow I got more out of the Tent City experience there of solidarity amidst the urban decay-slash-renaissance. Official Detroit is American capitalism writ small – and the smallness is moral as well as geographical. The city has been left to Smith’s invisible hand pretty much, though I’m persuaded after my Michigan visit that, just as Joe Stiglitz says, the hand isn’t invisible, it’s not there at all. The “surplus populations” of the US are being left to rot, and you can see real live human evidence of this every morning, afternoon and night along Woodward and other downtown Detroit arterials.

Case in point: We were having breakfast in a greasy spoon one morning when a woman came by, obviously mentally ill, and took off practically all her clothes, uttered some curses to persons unseen, dressed herself again and went about picking up litter along the sidewalk. When a crew from the restaurant pushed a loaded coffee cart out the front door, probably heading to some catering gig, the woman approached them. In a short drama we watched from inside the place, a drama that obviously has gone through many rehearsals, the guy pushing the cart drove the woman away by spritzing her on the face with what I hope was only water. In a civilized country, women in such distress get real social services that keep them from being “refreshed” in such a manner. Maybe our nation will someday be civilized. But the way things are going, don’t hold your breath (or do hold your breath as you get spritzed politically).

In my next post – after I can mentally break away from the contradictions and conundrums of Detroit – I’ll jump to our biking experience in Southwestern Ontario, specifically the route from Sarnia to Stratford and beyond.

Walt Whitman famously wrote of “Blue Ontario’s shore” and just as famously never saw that lake outside of his endlessly colorful imagination – but by the goddess, he should have been biking with us along true-blue Erie’s shore. I’ve never seen the second smallest (in surface area) of the Great Lakes in better hue. It’s a testament to the success of the clean-water laws and programs that were inspired by Lake Erie’s moribund condition forty years ago (some say it was actually dead, except for algae, etc.) and sideshows like the combustion of one of the lake’s most infamous tributaries, the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland.

It’s not just the blue water, though, that makes for beauty. The shoreline between Fort Erie and Point Pelee is verdant, slightly rolling (unlike the back country here, which is quite flat), and festooned with new wineries, apparently prosperous small farms, and patches of hardwoods. hardwoods, including deep-rooted old oaks, were taken down by microbursts and tornadoes recently; the towns around Leamington are still dealing with cleanup, and it’s remarkable how selective the wild winds were: you’ll see a few acres of trees devastated, and acreage nearby almost untouched – hardly a twig torn off.

There are far too many lakeside cottages cluttering up the fringes of beach, but still enough openings to preserve the viewscape, that sometimes underappreciated part of the public domain. Speaking of views, Ontario and regional municipalities here have been installing wind farms at a rapid pace. Parts of the region reminded me on northern Germany, with white-shafted and _bladed windmills dominating the skyline. They look a lot better here than they do, say, in the hilly Southern Tier (NYS) town of Cohocton, where they seem like vertical insults on the ridgelines, and banks of intrusive red warning lights at night. (You might have guessed my support for wind development is qualified.)

One thing’s beyond debate: the Ontario windmills should presage the long-awaited shutdown of coal-fired electric plants like the one at Nanticoke, a major source of ground-level ozone, etc., that plagues a wide swath of points east, including Toronto, Buffalo, Rochester, and the rural areas between. I seem to recall that Toronto now gets more than 100 ozone alert days per year, thanks not just to Nanticoke, but to other obsolete, poisonous coal plants like Huntley in Tonawanda and the Dunkirk plant on Erie’s south shore. So the US is doing its part, too!

Nanticoke is also ugly as sin. What a contrast it makes with so many other features of the north shore.

Next post: I’ll finally get to the US Social Forum and its biking connections – not to mention the eminently bikeable city of Detroit and its eco-transportation potential.

-Jack

(Cross posted at sewgreen These tips may be obvious for experienced bike commuters, which probably describes many Rocbike readers, but I thought I’d share for any newbies reading!)

I was so busy sweating and churning (aka pedaling) that I neglected to report daily or even weekly on our BikeIt group’s westward progress. But here it is in a bunch of nutshells.
If you haven’t ridden the canal trail from Rochester to Lockport, do it asap. 70 miles of absolute flat – not even a lock to break up the elevation – but great for cruising, unless you hit a big headwind. (Way out west they call the wind Mariah; in Western New York, we call it lots of other names, unless it’s at our back.) The group had a couple flats, but generally it was an easy go. I bypassed the beautiful, historic Lockport high locks, but after 70 miles I was ready to get to pt. B as fast as possible. We took Bear Ridge Rd. down to Tonawanda Ck. Rd. N., where I checked out my Uncle Ed and Aunt Eleanor’s old place (childhood memories aplenty) and told Liz a bit of family lore as we rode. Then came the Buffalo Riverwalk, starting in the city of Tonawanda – about 12 miles along the great Niagara River (some call it a strait, but never mind) to the Queen City. The next day we crossed the Peace Bridge with minimal bureaucratic delay, then found the lakeside trail that leads west from Fort Erie – natural bliss again, though I have to emphasize my love for Buffalo and its bikeability.
More later…

Here I am a at usual destination on a Spula-style bike-trip: a bar. Yes, sipping a pint of local pale ale lubricates the blogging process better than teflon oil does a drivetrain. The bar, as luck would have it, is around the corner from the BiketIt tent city, and folks here are very positive about the Social Forum, and attitude not universally reflected in the local media (the ironically-named Detroit Free Press recently published an extended insult by some local columnist, who referred to, among other things, the aromatic quality of Social Forum participants – and he wasn’t talking about Chanel No. 5. But the low-income neighbors here off Woodward, the main arterial, are more welcoming; I’ve had several good conversations at the fence with folks who are trying to weather the economic storms that have hit southern Michigan especially hard. Today is check-in day the Forum itself – I realize now I don’t have the right armband to get back into Tent City tonight – so I gotta rush down to the extravagantly capacious Cobo Center and get my credentials. The tent city is definitely a work in progress: showers going in (solar, of course), more tents going up on plots reclaimed by mulch infill. Quite a project – and even the Detroit MSM are taking notice! More later, Rocbikers… The Forum officially kicks off in an hour or so, and I’ve still gotta find a shower and a clean shirt.
-Jack, from Motor City

That’s the updated version of the old Erie Canal song text: today most of the traffic is bikers, walkers, etc. on the towpath. And among the bikers yesterday was our stalwart BikeIt crew, headed to Buffalo via Lockport (and soon on to Detroit). It was great getting to know this energetic crew from Ithaca, Binghamton, and other Upstate locales – though as usual, I’ve been slow in learning everybody’s name. There are old folks like me, a couple of pre-teens, and a large group in between, and different levels of experience on a bike, to match. We did get strung our along the 90-mile route we chose (I mean strung out geographically, not emotionally), but the ride, under the capable facilitatorship of Claire Stoscheck, kept together pretty well. Luckily, the infamous west wind, which of ten makes the westernportion of the canal trail a challenge if you’re going in the “wrong” direction, was gentle yesterday, though the sun was strong. I was hoping to see much wildlife, but not a single water snake or migrating snapping turtle crosse my path. Nary a heron – but lots on Canada geese – and two chipmunks. Maybe other riders had more good fortune in this department. We had pleasant stops, too, for snacks and conversations with support vehicle drivers. Just flat tires – one of them mine. I stopped in Tonawanda at Dick’s bike shop (not to be confused with megastore of similar name) and got a replacement tire before the next flat could arrive. Lesson to all- make sure your wheels and tires are in mint condition before you leave on a 400-miler. Well, more later… We’re working with the Massachusetts Ave. Project in the city of Buffalo today (check them out online), then off to the Peace Bridge and beyond tomorrow. Here I can take the opportunity, too, to thank my brother Richard, who lives very strategically near the bridge entrance – great to be cloase to family members (emotionally as well as geographically)!

BEYOND THE MOTOR CITY
A Documentary Film about the past and future of transportation.
June 28, 2010 @ 7:00 pm Free Screening

Presented by the Rochester Regional Community Design Center
and Empire State Future.

The Dryden Theater at the George Eastman House
900 East Avenue, Rochester, NY 14607

Dear RocBike and friends: I’ve been away from the site for so long, you must think I was uploaded to a UFO. Well, that’s close; I’ve had some health issues to contend with, but those are now under control pretty much. More to the point, I’ve got an announcement: Liz and I and hopefully thousands of others are biking to Detroit next week in prep for the US Social Forum to be held there the following week. Liz and I will be joining a group that’s starting in Ithaca and eventually will be among the proud residents of a massive Bike Tent City in the erstwhile Motor City – and hopefully will be plugged into many an interesting event. I plan to concentrate on – cue the drums, please – bike transportation. Anyway, I’ll also be blogging (and posting to rocbike) as we make our way to Buffalo and across the Ontario Panhandle to Windsor and Detroit and (somehow) back. Hope the posts will be edifying, etc., etc. See y’all online very soon. And check out BikeIt.org as well as the USSF site for details – or maybe you’ve already done so (as I said, I’ve been UFO’ing more than surfing the last months). Take care!
-Jack

Rather than bicycling as many miles as my age, like I did two years ago, I celebrated with a trip to the Albright Knox Museum and surrounding neighborhood in Buffalo, NY, where I saw the above church sign.

I got this beautiful piece of pottery made by my friend and wonderful artist Vicki Hartman. You should go to her website where you can see a better picture than my dark image.

And the great bumper sticker from my partner, which really says it all. You can buy one yourself at Talking Leaves Books, or online at stickergiant.com.

p.s. When in Buffalo, I always like to stop by Campus WheelWorks bike shop. They had some really great-looking cruisers from Felt which I lusted after from afar.