Road trips and fairy tales

Sunset on Lake Michigan by Andrea Burns ~Enlarge

One of the goals I set for WATERLIFE was that it show the extraordinary beauty of the Great Lakes as well as all that undermines them. As many other writers have pointed out, one of the incredible things about the lakes in the 21st century is the peculiar blindness of our relationship to them. Most of the 35 million or so who live on the lakes have no idea that our fate, and that of the lakes, are intertwined.

Sure, the lake may be hard to ignore if you live in Sault St Marie or Collingwood or Bay City. But if you live in Toronto or Cleveland or even Chicago, with its much-celebrated waterfront, you could go months without ever laying steady eyes on that vast tract of blue and you might never, in your whole life, swim in it or boat on it. You probably don't even know that you drink it and pee into it; most people cannot begin to imagine what's inside their plumbing or inside their skin. And the mass-mediated consumer culture, in which you cheerfully wallow, is devoted to preserving that innocence.

As we were preparing to shoot WATERLIFE, I sat in on the presentation of the results of a poll, commissioned by a number of environmental groups, on people's attitudes toward the Great Lakes. The presenting consultant told the small assembly of environmentalists that people had a hard time relating to the lakes and to the idea that they might be "threatened". Rather, the average urbanite saw the lakes as threatening, huge, unknowable beasts. Their job - the environmentalists, that is - was to craft and sell a story to the public in which the lakes were rebranded as "a damsel in distress". As opposed to the dragon about to eat her. I'll never forget the skeptical expressions flashing around the table that day. These were serious people dealing with crucial issues and the task this hipster was assigning seemed, at best, daffy. But, in a certain, limited, way, he was right. The lakes are sort of like an animal and we do empathize with animals we can relate to. That's why people castigate the north Atlantic sealers but admire the north Pacific crabbers; neither species is endangered, but one is much cuter than the other.

However, the metaphor is ultimately lame, because the lakes are much more than any animal. They are, properly, an environment. But that does not quite hit the mark either. In ON THE BRINK, Dave Dempsey quotes a group of scientists who point out the distinction in people's minds between an environment - which seems like something outside of ourselves - and an ecosystem - which is a home. The Great Lakes are the font of a hydrosphere that courses around and through every living thing in their basin. This hydrosphere is our home and much, much more: it is us.

It and we and the things that each does to the other are inextricably interwoven and endlessly multi-faceted: we are beautiful and terrible, visiting upon one another joy and misery in proportions that oscillate like the waves. To connect people to the reality of the Great Lakes, WATERLIFE had to show these many faces and, more challenging, had to show their perpetual co-existence by cycling constantly between the light and the dark. But the time-based linearity of a movie - and the audience's expectation of it - dictates movement in a given direction and mitigates against ambiguity. That's the interesting challenge of documentaries: they are movies about real life, which is full of ambiguity.

Searching for a structural conceit that could fill this bill, I kept remembering a story from childhood: PADDLE TO THE SEA, Holling Clancy Holling's classic fable of an aboriginal boy who carves a canoe, complete with tiny paddler, and sets it loose on Lake Nippissing, north of Lake Superior, to travel through the Great Lakes to the Atlantic. The story was later made into a film by famed director Bill Mason (a legendary lover of the Great Lakes) and remains one of the most popular films ever created at the National Film Board of Canada. I saw it in primary school and it always stayed with me, probably because of the breathtaking sweep of the adventure.

As I planned WATERLIFE, I realized that this basic conceit - of a watery "road trip" through the lakes - was the best model I could use. We, too, would start on the north shore of Superior and follow the water to the sea. The approach, first of all, would give us a narrative line to follow which would weave together all the diverse realities that the film had to depict. It would be a "story", but one that would give us the freedom to look at the lakes in all of their moods, across all of their scales, from above and below; it would allow us to show the wonder of the lakes and the horrors besetting them and, most crucially, to show them - or, rather, the water itself - moving constantly back and forth across a polarized continuum. When the film was finished, and we were writing marketing lines, we hit on one which revealed the meaning of the continuum: "Do you know where your water's been?" It was another way of saying: ‘Do you know what you are?'

As I was thinking about how to make the "road trip" conceit work, I considered directly adapting PADDLE TO THE SEA - complete with wooden voyager. The idea was really tempting because the constant figure carrying us through the lakes would so easily sew everything together. But this was not to be a kid's movie. It was to be a serious (if, hopefully, entertaining) documentary for all ages. Attractive as it was, I didn't want to be distracted by the gimmick. So we set out, in the winter of 2007, to simply follow the water from Superior's haunted north shore to the Atlantic. At the time, I had no way of knowing that the gods of documentary were watching, listening... and smiling. My wish had been heard and was to be granted in a way that I couldn't foresee and, certainly, would never have dared to invent.

Tomorrow: "Helpers, hindrances and magic."