Oh Canada!

Lake Ontario has been receiving water from Erie for a very long time, probably since the time when those Great Lake basins were carved out by glaciers in earth’s ice ago. Gordon’s Lightfoot’s legendary song about the building of the Canadian railway explains the flow of cold water. . .“Lake Huron rolls, Superior sings in the ruins of her ice water mansion. Old Michigan steams like a young man’s dreams; the islands and bays are for sportsmen. Farther below, Lake Ontario takes in what Lake Erie can send her.” Farther above, eastward, the St. Lawrence River takes in what the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of St. Lawrence can send to the city of Montreal. Gordon Lightfoot explains the building of the Great Canadian Railway, in mid-1800’s, beginning on the east end:“Up the St. Lawrence all the way to Gasp’e, swinging our hammers and drawing our pay, bringing the good to a young growing land, into the seaports and into the strand.” The St. Lawrence River terminates near Montreal. Here’s where my story begins. In 1968, I attended an international convention of Key Clubs International, a service organization of high school young men. The convention was hosted at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal. I was fascinated by Canada. In the summer of 1971, when I was selling dictionaries door-to-door in southern Ohio, our LSU sales crew took a Saturday break to drive up to Columbus and catch a move. In the movie, “The Strawberry Statement”, the sound track included a song, “Helpless”. It’s funny how the mind captures memories in a random way. One of my most vivid memories was a scene picturing a night sky, with the sound track presenting Neil Young’s high tenor voice: “There is a town in north Ontario; all my changes were there. . . big birds flying across the sky, throwing shadows on our eyes, leaving us helpless, helpless. . . At that time, “helpless” is a word that could be applied to our collective efforts to dodge the draft and not have to go fight in Vietnam. Recently, I learned that the “helpless” may have applied to Neil Young’s bout with polio when he was a child. At the end of 1971, I traveled to Colorado and worked in a restaurant near Lake Eldora.A musical trio was providing entertainment. Their songstress, Casey, sang Joni Mitchell’s song, “River.” “It’s coming on Christmas; they’re cuttin’ down trees, puttin’ up reindeer and singing songs of joy and peace. Oh, I wish I had a river. . . I could skate away on.” Later, it must have been the summer of ’72 . . . someone handed Joni Mitchell’s “Blue” album to me. It included that song about the River; also on the album was the song “Carey”, which was neither here nor there, but kind of interesting to me who had been fascinated by the idea of skating on frozen river and also Joni’s affair with some fellow whose name was the same as mine. But that’s neither here nor there. What I’m seeing now is that there was something special about Canadian song writers. . . Gordon, Neil, Joni. But hey! What about Leonard Cohen? Another vivid memory from those college days. . . I had watched a documentary movie about Richard Nixon. Walking out of the theater, a friend of mine, Maureen, told me: “don’t do anything rash!” Well, ok. A few minutes latter, she said something about Leonard Cohen. Now Maureen was from New York City, and she knew a lot about people up north. I remember she said that Leonard Cohen is “down!” . . . like, he’ll bring you down, not like all the fluff that was coming out of Haight Ashbury at that time. Meanwhile back at the homestead in 2026, remembering all these Canadians who had such an impact on my life, even before I had made my two record albums many years later. . . Joni’s song, A Case of You includes this line: “On the back of a cartoon coaster, in a blue TV screen light, I drew a map of Canada. Oh Canada! with your face sketched on it twice.”

One You Tube video that I saw today identified Leonard as the man she had been referring to in the song. But we’ll never know for sure.

Now Leonard is gone. Goodbye, Leonard. I hope you made it to heaven so that you could say, “even though it all went wrong, I stand before the Lord of song with nothing on my tongue but “Hallelujah!” As for those Canadian songwriters, I greatly appreciate them. And I found all the Canadians that I ever met to be very good people. . . which is why it makes no sense to me that the oval office occupant wants to steal Lake Ontario away from Mark Carney and the peaceful Canadians. King of Soul