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After the long haul flight from Melbourne, Australia to Halifax, Nova Scotia at the northeastern point of North America, heading down to Durham, North Carolina would seem to be dead easy. There are no direct flights, but an itinerary through Washington DC was the next best thing. We were going to need a car in Durham, however, and the only way to get one there was for me to drive down.
At one point we contemplated a rendezvous in our nation’s capital. I would leave a couple of days before she did. We would catch up with friends in DC over dinner and sail on down to North Carolina together. That was before our caretaker told us he was going to be in Acapulco, Mexico so he wouldn’t be there to close up the house.
When Richard is around to take care of things, we can walk away from the old place, but his absence changed things completely. In January a big storm can knock down the power poles and in no time the pipes will freeze. To hedge our bets, I would have to drain the plumbing, something I haven’t done in a long time.
It is some 1400 miles (2250 kms) from Grand Pre, Nova Scotia to Durham, North Carolina heading down through the mess of New York/New Jersey. I wanted to avoid that, so we figured out an alternate route through the hills of Pennsylvania that added mileage but cut out some of the stress.
You can eliminate some of that distance by taking a ferry across the Bay of Fundy. I decided to shoot for the very last sailing of the year. At noon on the 31st, when my wife and daughter were heading into Halifax for an evening of celebration, I poured antifreeze into toilets and drained a hot water tank. I had just enough time to drive to Digby and catch the 4:30 sailing of The Princess of Acadia. It would not be much of a New Year’s Eve, but it would put me in St John, New Brunswick before bedtime.
I had made only one serious “Down Under” driving blunder since returning to North America. I pulled out of our laneway on automatic pilot, heading out onto Highway One in the wrong lane. The driver coming my way looked up in alarm, breathing a sigh of relief as I made a quick correction. I would have to remember NOT to do that on the long drive down south. Americans are quite fussy about their cars and they carry guns.
In the end, the journey down the eastern seaboard was uneventful. I did manage to get stuck in the sloping parking lot of the motel in St. John. Fortunately, the Vietnamese owner was well equipped to get hapless drivers back on the highway. I followed a snowplow for miles in northern Maine,
then a sand truck when the plow pulled off. Blizzard conditions and sparse traffic made me a little nervous without snow tires or a cell phone.
By the time I reached Marlboro, Massachusetts I was in the road groove. The lady at the front desk said there was a decent Italian restaurant at the local mall. She neglected to tell me that the mall was huge. I had to enlist the aid of a mall cop to locate the car. He was smug on his Segway, zipping around like the Prince of Wheels. I had made his day by looking lost and asking for help.
American road food has to be among the worst in the world, but the hospitality improved as I headed south. My wife’s route route planning and the GPS managed to keep me on track through New Brunswick and all seven states. It was chilly when I finally arrived, but I left the real wintry weather up north. There was a new pantry to stock and a new, old house to turn into a nest, a new triumvirate of cities to explore.
I’m in the heart of tobacco land, the home of Bull Durham. It’s a whole new ball game.
I have taken a leave of absence from life in Melbourne, Australia and from the blog. It seems like a good time to return to the writing, even though I won’t be back “down under” for half a year. It hardly seems worth changing the title to Up and Over to point my readers toward North America. As I said in a previous post, my wife is on sabbatical for a semester and we are currently in Durham, North Carolina, a state that is definitely south of the Mason-Dixon line.
Our transition here was a brief visit with my son and his family in Portland, Oregon, and a two week holiday at the old place in Nova Scotia. Grand Pre is a lovely place to spend Christmas as long as the weather doesn’t get too Canadian. Our two hundred year-old house does not have central heating and a howling North wind whips right in.
We were greeted by a cold snap that had us quite concerned for friends from Washington DC who planned to spend Christmas with us, but it warmed up to more seasonal temps by the time they arrived. Right after they left it got very cold again. Nova Scotia has always seemed gentler with tourists than long-term residents that way.
I have spent a number of years in hot countries, and the celebration of Christmas in such places always seemed odd. In Hong Kong, I never got used to the neon-lit, red cloaked Buddhas driving Asian looking reindeer on skyscrapers high overhead. The European traditions of Christmas seem singularly inappropriate when the weather is 40 degrees centigrade and everyone is heading for the beach or the barbecue.
In Canada, men dream of snow blowers at this time of year. A Muskoka man named Kai Gundt got fed up with his wimpy commercial snow blower and decided to build one with a V-8 engine. His home-built job cleared his driveway in five minutes, throwing snow over a five story building. The latest model has heated handlebars and a cup holder. “I know it goes against the green initiative. But it really works. It takes the snow and blows it right back where it came from.”
Fortunately, we have a good stock of dry firewood and fireplaces that were built when people knew how to do it properly. We laid in groceries and got a lovely tree that just fit into the parlour. Our daughter did a beautiful job bringing it to life. On Christmas Eve we went to the local church (which is about the same vintage as our house) and sat in straight back pews for the music and the sermon. It was wonderful to come home and snuggle up under the down comforter.
Today, the weather here in Durham went up to springtime temperatures. People are out running around in T shirts. Christmas was only three weeks ago, but our connection with the seasons has been tenuous of late; it seems like it could have been a century ago. This is what our village looked like then.
Well, the election has finally been announced. Prime Minister Howard drew the first blood by announcing a massive tax cut. Sound familiar? Current government policies are so reflective of the Bush administration that listening to political cant here is almost like being in the U.S. On the other hand, I see reflections of my other country, too — Canada.
This is a resource based economy. It is doing very well, thank you. As Tim Colebatch of “The Age” pointed out in a recent editorial, it is all because of China. These are boom times for economies the world over. Australia is doing particularly well because of China’s demand for iron ore and coal. China is building a city of a million inhabitants every month. The woods of Tasmania are being raped so the Japanese can make more paper.
Canada is booming because its extensive deposits of minerals and the extraction of oil sands out in Alberta. They will make holes in the landscape visible from the moon. All to fuel the automobiles of its voracious next door neighbor as well new ones being built in China.
Both countries are living in the short term, ignoring their future citizens in favor of voters who live right now. Their political salesmen (bolstered by economists) seem to believe that economies can thrive with or without an environment. That intelligent people can actually buy into this notion utterly baffles me.
There are alarming projections for global warming in Australia. In just sixty years it could be five degrees hotter and 40 to 80 per cent drier than it is now. The Great Barrier Reef will be dead. A desalinization plant is in the works for Melbourne and the pundits on talk radio are testing the waters on nuclear power plants.
Like Canadians, Australians still earn most of their money hewing wood, drawing water, and attracting tourists. It is starting to dawn on people that even tourism may be in jeopardy here. Some tourists are starting to think twice about dumping carbon into the atmosphere simply to satisfy their curiosity.
The most obvious options for escaping the resource rut seem to have been deliberately neglected. “Crystalline silicon on glass” was an Australian invention, but Australia (the land of inexhaustible sunshine) lacked the determination and political will to commercialize its invention. In 2004, CSG Solar purchased the rights. The company is thriving in Germany, leaving Australia where it seems to want to be, in the backwater of the environmental marketplace.
It is time for a change. Countries such as this one can no longer afford to use up what is left of the planet’s resources to make ends meet, doing nothing to stop the acceleration of global warming. We can’t make the same costly mistakes, over and over until our only home rolls over one last time and says, “I give.”
The world can’t afford it.
