Star Date 2010.0722 -
A tale of two ships, perhaps.
The first ship is the Manitou, tall ship, reconstructed on the plans of a 1800's trade schooner, but outfitted for tourist passengers as cargo, instead of, say, wood or coal. Beautiful sails, some square, some triangular, all polished wood and real, single-tree masts. 114 feet, 21 beam, block and tackle, rope and muscle and cotton-tar sealed decking.
The captain, Dave, loves her, and so does the crew, it shows in every part of the tall ship, polished to gleaming shine. In the morning, every morning, they squeegee every part of it to clear the dew and prevent spots from the moisture drying. The Manitou is a floating sculpture, a museum you can sail on.
And we did, around Traverse Bay, singing sea shanties and learning how to use the head (step on the pedal, pump the stick shift three times then release).
We slept on this ship, also a bed & breakfast inn, on narrow, hard bunks, down in shining wood belowdecks. It was difficult and sweaty and hard and confining and uncomfortable and magnificent. Outside, the splash of leaping fish and the shine from stars over the mast.
The crew of the Manitou keep alive a dream of adventure and wood and sail and a time where wonder, and work, mattered.
The second ship is the Bideawee, a tour ferry taking the curious or the bored to see the great Soo Locks of Sault St. Marie, where more ships pass than in the Canal of Panama. Here, amidst vessels vast and small, we rode the edge between two nations.
On one side of the ship, a shining city of seventy thousand, modern and magnificent, and Green too, powered by wind farm and hydroelectric, the Sault St. Marie of Canada. Here, the enormous steel works manufactures both metal and jobs from the raw materials brought in from Michigan and Virginia, and the people enjoy one of the highest standards of living, and a civilized life with medical care and retirement and hope.
The other side of the Bideawee is the alternate universe Sault St. Marie of the United States. Here, nothing is made, nothing is built, the old steel industry having been outsourced, because they could. The buildings are small, and old, and few, and everything is run down. The only industry is tourism, because that is all that is left. The corporations simply left, because the unions demanded a living wage, and there was nothing to stop them, and no socialized functions to subsidize the difference between the greed of the Owners, and the need to survive of the Owned.
Betwixt the two nations, I imagined myself on the border of North and South Korea, and my heart sank as the ship turned back to the impoverished dictatorship.
My dreams remain, I think, on the Manitou, sailing into that fiction where we had a future.
Jenny Plenty
