Agawa Canyon

The Agawa Canyon Tour Train during its 90-minute layover in the Ontario gorge.

The report on my trip last week to Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, and the Agawa Canyon Tour Train is now online at my train travel blog.

The gist: It's a great ride, but probably not for the Disneyland-and-Wisconsin Dells crowd.

In bed with the enemy

Years ago I had a good friend and colleague, one quite a bit higher up the editorial ladder from my modest rung, who refused to attend social events involving politicians or public servants of any kind. As we went out the door to hoist one with a local alderman or cop, he'd shake his head and hang back.

"You don't socialize with the people you cover," he'd say when pressed.

Some of us thought he was being needlessly priggish, perhaps just covering for an innate shyness, an inability to relate to others outside the office. It's important, we journos told ourselves, to know our subjects fully, and to do so we need to experience their company in friendly and relaxed surroundings. We need to see them when they let their hair down.

On the other hand, every time I read about Washington journalists hanging out after hours with Capitol Hill pols and federal government functionaries, even to throwing huge parties for them, I've wondered about that wisdom. How honest and objective can a journalist be if he's drinking buddies with the people he's writing about? Can he throw a chum under the bus for the sake of truth and enlightenment if it should come to that?

Over the last few days, as revelation after revelation has burst in London of News Corporation writers and editors partying with Scotland Yard honchos and members of Parliament (even at their country houses) during the years in which a titanic phone hacking scandal struggled to emerge from a massive cover-up, I kept thinking of my old colleague.

Maybe he wasn't so shy and stiff-necked, after all. Maybe he was smarter than the rest of us. Surely he was prescient.

Off to the Agawa Canyon

Courtesy of the Algoma Central Ry. Click on the map for larger version.

In a few days I'm driving the 5 1/2 hours across the Upper Peninsula from Ontonagon to the Soo to ride a train -- the Agawa Canyon Tour Train of the Algoma Central Railway.

The train runs 114 winding miles northward from Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., through the thickly forested Canadian Shield to Agawa Canyon, said to be one of the most spectacular rubbernecking sites in Ontario. It's an all-day trip, leaving at 8 a.m. and returning about 6 p.m. The train stops at the waterfall-bedecked canyon for 1 1/2 hours so that passengers can debark to hike and lollygag, then heads back to the Soo.

I'm making the trip wearing my field reporter's cap for Trainweb.org, and will be an on-board guest of Canadian National Railways, owner of the Algoma Central.

Past reviews of the journey on TripAdvisor.com have been all over the map. Some people hated it, some loved it, and many were indifferent. The two 2011 reviews so far posted on TripAdvisor, however, are four- and five-star, leading me to think that the winter refurbishment of the train has been a success. Many of the coaches have been replaced by rebuilt cars from the recently defunct Rio Grande Ski Train, which once carried skiers from Denver to Winter Park.

One of the new attractions of the train is a GPS-driven on-board narration (in five languages) of the tour that tells you exactly what you're seeing as you see it. Out of curiosity I asked the CN marketing people if they provided a printed script of the narration for the deaf and hearing-impaired -- and they do. They emailed me a link to the script for printing out, and I'll be carrying it on the train.

Full report to come.

Draggin' dictation

When I saw David Pogue's breathless encomium to Dragon Dictation for the iPad 2 in his New York Times column, I said to myself, "Henry, you've got to try this one. It's free. And it might even work."

I have "deaf speech" that was once described as sounding like "rusty bathtub pipes." My production is breathy, my enunciation muddy. I'm understandable in a quiet room if my interlocutor pays close attention. In the presence of background noise or human impatience, I might as well be shouting down a bottomless hole.

I once took speech therapy until the returns began to diminish. At the age of almost 71 there isn't much point in subjecting myself to that kind of hard work anymore. After all, I'm not about to address the British Empire on the eve of World War II.

Still I hope for a breakthrough. Perhaps the easy-to-use Dragon Dictation app, which translates spoken words to text, might be a useful engine for sharpening my speech--if it could reproduce what I say with any accuracy. Perhaps a bit of practice would increase that accuracy, however incrementally.

So I downloaded it to my iPad 2 and gave it a try.

Here is what I said:

"In this grave hour, perhaps the most fateful in our history, I send to every household of my peoples, both at home and overseas, this message, spoken with the same depth of feeling for each one of you as if I were able to cross your threshold and speak to you myself."

Here is what Dragon Dictation said I said:

"Gran Mammo human Pidfile Net-Arping couldn't you think badly of voodoo mind him through okay Omega ring to message spoken with a PaymentInfo caring bridge women in favor and go to the print FoodGang. Close to you."

Your Majesty and Mr. Logue, you have nothing to worry about from the likes of me.

Happy Father's Day

As part of his annual Father's Day email to me, my second son offered the following. It is too good not to share with the rest of the world. (Dramatis personae: Conan and Annie, parents; Emmet, 5, and Alice, 2 1/2.)

As a special treat, I will provide a transcript of Saturday morning's breakfast table conversation:

Conan: Emmet, did you go to the pool yesterday? Please eat your waffles.

Emmet: When there's danger, you need a Space Ranger! Wheeeeeoooooo Wheeeeeooooo (siren sound).

Alice: Yeah, and you have a peanut butter hat. I went pee in the pool. Do you have a microphone hat?

Annie: Alice, we don't dunk our bacon in our milk. Would you like me to cut your bacon for you?

Emmet: . . . And then Jack bonked Quinn, and Quinn bonked Bobby, and I said, "Do you want to be arrested?"

Annie: Alice, don't. Please don't.

Conan: Wait--Alice, did you pee in the pool?

Alice: Yeah! On your mud hat. On the cement. Do you have a paper-airplane hat?

Annie: She peed on the pool deck in front of everyone. Mortifying.

Emmet: So I bonked Quinn and then he bonked Jack again. Donna's teeth are far apart. Dad, show me your teeth.

Alice: ... and I climbed up on the roof, and peed all over, and told the police officer, "You get them. I am a princess!" Where is your bucket?

Conan: My bucket?

Alice: For your bucket hat, you Foopie. You are a bucket hat. You Foopie. Foopie, foopie, foopie, foopie.

Emmet: Alice!

Annie: People were staring. Emily Maines came up and said the kid she was babysitting for did the same thing. The weird thing was, Alice had pooped in the potty like 10 minutes earlier. She needs to connect that you can pee and poop in the same go.

Emmet: Alice! Stop it! Why do you keep saying Foopie?

Alice: . . . Foopie, Foopie, Foopie, Foopie . . .

Conan: What time do we have to be in Downers Grove?

Annie: After naps. Although Alice never naps anymore. I don't know why I pretend that's an actual time of day.

Alice: You have banana soup, you Foopie. And mud soup!

Emmet: After Quinn got out of jail, he went right back up and bonked Jack again.

Alice: May I have some more bacon please?

And that, Conan assures me, is a typical breakfast-table conversation at their house.

An iPad 2 comes to my house

I have succumbed. Surrendered. Thrown in the towel. Gone over to the enemy.

Three weeks ago I bought myself an iPad 2.

A year ago I resisted mightily, choosing to buy a new netbook rather than the original iPad. To me the iPad was a toy, not a tool. Also, it's just an iPhone on steroids. And it was not so hot as an e-book reader, because you can't use it in the sun.

But realities and fealties change. In my travels I found myself humping a netbook, a Kindle, an iPod Touch and a cell phone everywhere. Most of those devices did their discrete jobs very well and still do. The netbook is fine for writing and editing, the Kindle for reading, the iPod Touch for playing -- but the cheap pay-as-you-go cell phone's keypad is lousy for old-man texting. (Being deaf, I don't do voice calls.)

Still, four separate tools to do four separate jobs are a lot to keep track of when you're traveling. Each doesn't weigh much, but added up they start to load down the baggage. Keeping track of them while getting the full-monty patdown at airport security is a nightmare unless you're traveling with a companion who can keep an eye out for light fingers.

And so when the iPad 2 came out earlier this year, I started to think that maybe a single device that can do all four tasks reasonably well might be what I needed.

So I took the $629 plunge on a 16-gigabyte Verizon G3 model from B&H Photo in New York. (No sales tax plus free shipping.) I don't listen to music and don't watch a lot of movies, so don't need the extra memory of the 32GB and 64GB versions.

The G3 cellular capability, I reasoned, would allow me to send and receive texts outside free wi-fi range just about anywhere in the country, even on the wild shore of Lake Superior in upper Michigan, and Verizon's minimum $20-per-month, no-contract plan for 1GB of data is affordable. Since I'm almost always around a free wi-fi node, 1GB probably will work just fine for texting (with the free TextNow app) and light Web surfing with Safari.

The iPad 2's touch-screen "keyboard" is just fine for texting succinct messages to family as well as cab dispatchers while I'm on the road. It works well with the IP-Relay deaf telephone relay service, too, and I can jot short Facebook entries or comments without much trouble with the Friendly app.

That keyboard, however, is absolutely useless for writing, even with two excellent apps, iA Writer and Apple's Pages, at least with my arthritic fingers. For that I bought a compact and lightweight $66 Apple wireless keyboard, and that makes text entry quite usable although I wouldn't want to do heavy editing with the iPad. Much too clumsy.

Using the New York Times app (I'm a paying subscriber now) on the iPad is an absolute joy. So is the sophisticated app for New Yorker subscribers, as are the apps for free news from NPR, BBC News, CNN, the AP, Bloomberg and al-Jazeera. The free Intellicast weather app, with its colorful moving radar map, keeps me informed about malevolent thunderboomers. The game apps for solitaire (SolBox Free) and Scrabble keep me from getting bored.

And I've discovered the Netflix streaming video app, which for $8 a month allows me to watch unlimited movies and TV shows with subtitles on the iPad. Only about 30 per cent of Netflix' content is subtitled at present, but the provider promises to raise that figure to 80 per cent by the end of 2011.

I can download captioned movies from Apple's iTunes and watch them with Apple's own movie app, but downloading a single $4.99 film can take a couple of hours on a slow 801g wireless connection. One movie eats up about 3 or 4 gigs of memory on the iPad, and once you've started you have just 24 hours to watch it to the end. Streaming on Netflix is more efficient, and you can pick up where you left off at any time.

Gotta be careful with that, though. Yesterday the receptionist in the doctor's office was giving me dirty looks as I watched a Netflix foreign film -- until I realized the sound was turned up all the way. Quickly I muted the iPad, but not soon enough for her.

I haven't yet explored the iPad 2 for photography use, but can see that it may make a good "photo bank" for storing backup files from my camera during out-of-town trips. There are lots of apps, some of them free, for simple processing of photos.

As for e-books, I wouldn't say the Kindle and Apple iBooks apps make reading on the iPad 2 as restful as it is on the genuine Kindle, but indoors it comes close. So much so that the Lady Friend says she actually prefers the iPad to the Kindle for that task.

In fact, she's threatening to hog the iPad 2. To save our marriage I just might have to get her one for her birthday.

Hard times

That Michigan's Upper Peninsula is on its uppers is no news to the people who live there, both the hardy folks who struggle to survive and those fortunate enough (like the Lady Friend and me) to have made their pile elsewhere so they can spend their summers in these glorious woods on the shore of Lake Superior.

But now word is getting out. A crack Associated Press reporter named John Flesher came up from lower Michigan and looked around, and he filed a sobering report this morning that so far has appeared in 164 newspapers and television-station web sites, including the Daily Mail in London.

Ontonagon (Porcupine City in my mystery novels) is growing famous, even if the fame is the wrong kind: an international object lesson in the economic decline of rural America.

Still, there are opportunities up here. Living expenses are low, so low that many folks who live in urban Illinois and Minnesota are buying up properties for summer and retirement homes.

They have a love-hate relationship with the locals, some of whom call them, among other things, "FIBs." That's short for "Fucking Illinois Bastard," coined by a local waitress stiffed on the tip by a customer who drove off in a car with Land of Lincoln plates.

FIBs buy homes, many of which are foreclosures, that locals are too poor to afford even at absurdly low prices. Up here you can score a roomy, well-maintained three-bedroom home in town for $35,000 -- a home that might go for $350,000 in a Chicago suburb.

Still FIBs are not all bad. We bring in sorely needed money. We hire local tradesmen and spend our retirement checks in local supermarkets, some of which have expanded (especially their wine departments) to attract the summer crowd. Many of us fall deeply in love with the place and participate as much as we can in its cultural events, donating whatever we can to support local institutions.

True, some FIBs are truly arrogant bastards and attempt to lord it over the locals, but others try hard to win their hearts, knowing that will take time and effort. They volunteer their labor as well as their lucre -- and they ask for help in turn. If they're lucky, they get it.

You know you're on the way to acceptance when a neighbor brings over a clutch of eggs and a clump of chives for transplanting in your yard, when new friends quietly drop off (and stack) a spare cord or two of firewood after you've left for the winter, knowing you'll need it the coming chilly spring.

Today I'm going to wear my T-shirt that says "I Wasn't Born in the UP, But I Got Here as Soon as I Could."