Book review: One great lake, two very different countries

Having lived and worked in both the US of A and Canada, I am sometimes asked to explain the differences between the countries, if any there be. Canada and the Excited States are quite different, but identifying and explaining the dissimilarities requires more time and space than I have ever cared to devote to so doing.

I was therefore gratified to stumble upon a highly recommendable book by two Americans -- Ken Sobol and Julie Macfie Sobol -- who migrated to Canada, and in the early 1990s undertook a series of trips through neighbouring parts of the two countries, perhaps to be sure they'd made the right decision. Their entertaining account of their wanderings, Looking for Lake Erie (Penguin 1996) is highly recommendable.

Ken Sobol and Julie Macfie were raised in the Cleveland and Detroit areas, respectively. They met at Oberlin College, married, moved to New York and in 1974 to Toronto. It would be nice to say that Ken and Julie had a lifelong love affair with Lake Erie, but it's not so. They began their travels around the lake in the course of researching magazine pieces. In the prologue we are told:

We...began to be intrigued by the lives of the people who lived along the lake. We wanted to know more about the millions of people who live along Erie's shores, some of whom worry about daily survival in dilapidated, drug-devastated slums while others drift through the American Dream in tidy suburbs, studiously oblivious to anyone else's problems, and still others rise at dawn to work their farms and pursue a daily routine not all that different from that of the first pioneers to settle in Ontario.

Where had they come from (and why and when), what place in the ongoing social history of the lakeshore did they occupy, what kind of communities had they developed? Had common patterns evolved from ne side of the lake to the other? How alike and how different are the two cultures that share the shoreline?

The Sobols' book is thus more sociology than geography. More social history than travelogue, Looking for Lake Erie paints a picture not just of an empty landscape, but of the nature and attitudes of the different peoples who inhabit the Canadian and American shores.

For Americans, Looking for Lake Erie will make depressing reading. The grim descriptions of Buffalo, Cleveland and Toledo beg the question of why American cities are the way they are. (That's the authors' question, not mine.) Why the dilapidation? Why the racial division? Why the depression? The writers do not attempt to give definitive answers, only suggestions presented in a down-to-earth and entertaining style which owes much to Bill Bryson and Dervla Murphy. (The debt is acknowledged in the authors' note.)

Canadians cannot look across the lake smugly. The Sobols point out the similarities (beyond the names) in Fort Erie ON and Erie PA, the former being described as "hanging on by a thread". That was nearly two decades ago. It would be interesting to revisit places like Leamington ON and Ashtabula OH today, to see if things have changed... for better or worse.

Looking for Lake Erie is chock-full of amusing, acute and sometimes profound observations of Americans, Canadians, and their settlements along the shores of the great lake. Even if you have no intention of going anywhere near that part of the continent the two countries share, the Sobols' book is not to be missed.