The Foreigners Invading Canada

 They say you used to be able to ski through the canals. I wasn’t alive then, granted. So I’ve never actually seen it. But all the old people say so. Things were different before they starting dredging. In 1842, in a country just a few years awayfrom declaring itself Canada, colonist David McCall received a Crown Patent for a small island in the middle of the St. Clair river, just a stone’s throw from the Michigan border. After arriving on North America’s shoresa few hundred years before, his people had spread unwanted across the back of the continent, upending any native groups rooted in their way. 

At times they spread deliberately, at timesby accident, but no matter how they got there, their influence soon spanned coast to coast. McCall happened to be one of the ones that was spread deliberately. What was once a fertile deer hunting groundfor the local indigenous tribes would now be a farmstead for an ambitious British implant. A European seed in American soil. Through him, land would be made prosperous. Native plants would make way for foreign cash crops. Forest would be carved to field. He was a true 19th century man, and he earned his living from the earth. But like any true 19th century man, he lived at the dawn of a new era. 

Unlike his ancestors, when David McCall clearedthat forest for his farm, he planted a garden of the world. He planted crops that his people had only just discovered. Corn and beans. Pumpkins.Tomatoes and tobacco. Mesoamerican wonders transplanted into his adopted Northern home. He worked his land with horses. Horses that had died out in the Americas tens of thousands of years before he arrived. He’d brought European imports, just like him. Pepper from Indonesia adorned his meat andthere was a Florida orange in his Christmas stocking. Like so many colonists around the globe, adjusting to their own small islands in the middle of what must have felt far from anywhere, farmer McCall was an early cog in a now unquestionably connected world. And as his generation came to a close, the island that he’d farmed so loyally was dragged into a new age. 

A new crop of people bloomed. In the 1890’s, it was turned into a resort,catering to wealthy Americans experiencing an early industrial boom. Foreigners invaded these shores with fistsfull of cash, looking for a weekend of fishing, horse rides, and picnics on the beach. They built twin luxury hotels and McCall’sfarmhouse was dragged into the forest to be turned into a dormitory for service workers and spillover guests. Cottages were soon built to handle the boom. Demand overtook supply and native interestsgave way to the stronger roots of foreign capital. The island became a symbol of a newly Gilded age. 

It wasn’t a community. It was a business investment. A prospering piece of dirt. The first world war, collapse of prohibition, and death of the steamship all spelled an end to that prosperity. By the 1920’s, in an effort to reverse theirfortunes, the owners hatched a plot. Since waterfront land was more valuable, the easiest way to make more money was simply to create more waterfront. Deep canals were dug through a swamp in the centre of the island with trails criss-crossing back and forth. Maximum shoreline, maximum profit. But theory and practice are two different things. Before a single plot on this new Venice of the St. 

Clair could be developed, the great depression hit. With mounting debts and no new cottages, the island was sold off to the highest bidder. Quite literally. At one point in the 1930’s, the entire northwest corner of the island was dug up and sold as gravel to the Americans. A local bit of dirt, shipped away to bulk up some foreign shore. The remaining land was sold to the cottagerswho'd somehow managed to survive the depression. They laid the foundations for what is the Stag Island community today. 

The hotel era had ended, and the cottage era had begun. Forty years passed. By the time America began dredging the river to allow for tankers, McCall’s farmhouse had already stood for over a century. In it would soon live a new farmer, alongwith his wife and five young children. Roger Hadfield, my grandfather. A second generation immigrant, already adapted to the new landscape. He didn’t need to a clear a forest to build his home. Because he was not the first farmer to live between these walls. He no longer represented the will of a foreignimplant, because he was born here. Local. 

My grandfather’s arrival would coincidewith a new chapter in this island’s history. The post-dredge years. In 1960, a few months after my father was born, the United States decided to open the St. Clair to international shipping, allowing the region easier access to the Great Lakes and the Atlantic Ocean beyond. Heaping tons of mud were dug from the bottomof the river and dumped on Stag Island’s south end. Within two years, the island would have grownby nearly a quarter of its size. 

From the base of the canals now stretched out a lifeless expanse of silt, quickly eroding its way back downstream. Soon, a regular stream of ships would be passing by the cottages, the rapidly globalized era paraded before their very doorstep. Boats hailed from Greece and Norway, Cyprus and France. Cargo from every corner of the globe. The ships became such an important part of life that before long, it was hard to remember a time before them. Tomatoes were no longer exotic. 

The culture had simply swallowed them whole. In the same farmhouse that saw David McCall marvel at the New World wonders of beans and watermelon, my father learned about pineapple and banana. On that same island where his ancestors plantedtheir seeds, he’d summer with his German wife. The cogs of that connected world spun with increased precision. But nothing is perfect, and sometimes practice just makes things worse. The longer that Canada left itself open to the world, the greater the likelihood that something coming back wasn't going to be asbeneficial as those apple trees and tomato plants.

 Eventually, be it by accident or design, one of the bellies of those ships would contain a stowaway that nobody asked for. Illegal, unwanted, and devastating to the local way of life. In 1949, a ship carrying one of those stowawayshit the shores of Lake St. Clair. They call it the common reed. Or at least, that’s what they called itin Europe where it came from. In Canada we call it by its Latin name, phragmite. Phrag, for short. I suppose that Latin sounds more intimidatingto those who are treating it as the enemy. As foreign.

 And to those most concerned about our native wildlife, it certainly is the enemy. Because it shouldn’t be here. Nobody planted it purposefully, and in our complacency it has grown wildly out of control. In just a generation it spread from Nova Scotia to Ontario. Almost as fast as the British. Just like those American tourists that had once floated onto its shores, the reeds found a home here powered by human action. The canals that were dug almost a hundredyears ago, untouched for generations, acted like incubators for the first few stalks. To the south, the newly created field of siltoffered a virgin staging ground for any plant hardy enough to take hold in the barren soil. 

By the time anyone was even looking out for it, it was far too late. And once it was here, it was here for good. Wedged between the international agreementsof the United States and Canada, on a major shipping line in a well-connected river, even if every last stalk was ripped from the earth, within a few seasons they would all come growing back. So why not kill them, you might ask. Certainly many have tried. They tried burning them, but the ash onlyfed the soil further. They trampled them, but the biomass only strengthened their roots. Each struggle to turn back the clock pushedthe hand further forward. 

The only way to truly kill the phrag is a chemical so poisonous it destroys everything in its wake. A scorched earth policy. Nothing left alive all the way down to the roots. But no government who cares for its people would ever allow them to poison themselves in such numbers. After all, how do you know the first thinggrowing back wouldn’t be those reeds? No, the phrag is here to stay. No matter how legitimate your reason for wanting it gone, it's not going anywhere. That’s just the realpolitik of the situation. This is the world that we live in. We’re connected now. 

And you can’t turn back time. So therefore, from my perspective, the onlyquestion that remains is how we make the most of it. My grandfather, who inhabits this island’s most ancient cottage, now over a hundred and fifty years standing, is a strong vocal advocatefor the reeds. He sees them for more than what they’ve taken away. Because he was here in the 1960’s when theirarrival stopped the erosion at the South End. He watched over a lifetime as native plantsgrew out of the soil left behind by fields of rotting phrag. How a lifeless patch of silt became a prosperous island park.

 He watched as the canals filled back in and as animals took up residence in the newly revitalized swamp. In the eyes of this historically British farmer,whose wealth came from a Mexican cash crop, the reed is simply doing what it’s supposed to do. And within a few generations, he reckons,it’ll be as Canadian as apple pie. Just as soon as we have a reason to see them that way. Yet some people will never stop hating the phrag for being here. I understand that. Man needs little prompting to go to war against change. But this is not a static world, and if we only focus on what’s being disrupted by what we’ve brought in, whether intentionally or not, we’ll miss the island for the reeds. Within the kitchens of these cottages Canadians eat mango from Costa Rica. 

They drink wine from Argentina, and wash dishes from Taiwan. Outside their window, an aging tanker flickers between the stalks. We all innately understand the trade. My family is now four generations deep on this island. It may seem short to some, but it's aboutas long as anybody's been here. The seeds put in the earth by that British planter almost a hundred and fifty years ago are not spouting up as unique Canadian fruits. Symbolic of the ever-changing landscape. And as time marches on, new seeds are arriving on these shores. From Jamaica, from China, and Hungary. Symbolic of the next generation of change.

 They are cogs in an endlessly spinning, increasingly connected world. A future worth planting. This is Rare Earth. Oh my God! We should do a reeds through of the script. Is that a good...? He's not laughing. No. Okay.