Welcome to Ithaca
One of the most important things I have learned about the world from my years working as an ethnographer in the backwoods of Canada is that times and places don’t exist forever, even if they are home, spaces, and landscapes that people settle into, love, and identify with. Even homes are not always protected from the powerful social forces that can sometimes tear them down.
That happened to the pulp and paper mill in Pine Falls, Manitoba, where I did field research for years in the 1990s. I first went there to document the big worker buyout in 1994 and then lived in Pine Falls in the winter of 1998—the first non-mill worker to ever do so, locals told me.
My research was funded by another sociologist who needed data about people’s emotional attachment to the natural environment, like the river and the trees. However, I was more interested in the movie theater and Chinese Canadian restaurant built there in the 1920s to entice workers from Winnipeg to move there. There was also this rumor circulating in town that a Dairy Queen would be built and open at a highway intersection a few kilometers away by that summer. “That story has been going around since 1940, love,” a long-time resident informed me after expressing some concern that I was getting too excited about it.
Michael Simons and Paul Shoebridge carefully archived another lost resource-dependent Canadian homeplace named after pine trees—Pine Point in the Northwest Territories. Like me and Pine Falls, Manitoba, Michael and Paul weren’t from this place. They didn’t grow up there. But Michael had a personal connection with Pine Point, having visited it once when he was nine to attend an ice hockey tournament and then, as an adult when he tried to look the town up on a map and was shocked to learn it was no longer there. So he, along with Paul and a guy named Richard Cloutier, who grew up in Pine Point, created Welcome to Pine Point in 2011, which, for me, is the most beautiful interactive, digital novella ever written.
One of the things I like most about Homer’s The Odyssey is that most of the places on the maps that always precede the poem's text are no longer or were never actually there. So, in the seminar I am teaching on The Odyssey this semester, I have my students figure out how to get to one of the poem's settings or as close as they can get. Then I tell them about Hydra, the Greek Island where Leonard Cohen lived for seven years in the late 1960s, and how he arrived there broke, wanting to create things, and then left, still pretty broke but with a good idea about what he wanted to make.
In 1951, Cohen won a major academic prize for his poetry—the Chester MacNaghten Literary Award given out by McGill—and was poised to pursue a more academic literary career. However, he was getting tired of his life in Montreal. So, just six days after his 26th birthday, in September 1960, Cohen bought a house in Hydra for $1,500, using money he had inherited from his recently deceased grandmother.
Cohen wanted to live in Hydra partly because it reminded him of Homer’s The Odyssey. One of Cohen’s New York City friends, whom I became close with through my research on Jack Kerouac, told me that Leonard always said that Hydra seemed so mystical to him that it felt like living in one of Homer’s poems. So, for me, that is a pretty good endorsement to read The Odyssey and maybe turn it into a map and follow where it takes me. Below is the first song Cohen wrote while living in Hydra.