BikeIt.org

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…

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