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I smell sweat.

“Sorry,” Colin said. “That’s a bodily function I can’t control. It’s hot; we’re hiking; I sweat.”

Not your sweat. It’s sweat that permeated the rocks, gravel, and soil of this place more than a hundred years ago. And it’s not just the sweat of exertion, of labour. It’s a sweat tinged with fear and sweltering hardship. The sweat of willing slaves.

Willing slaves? Colin reverted to thought-talk, because his voice echoed inside Othello Tunnel #2 and would be overheard by others taking in the astounding wonder of chief engineer Andrew McCulloch’s impossible achievement. 

Not Andrew McCulloch’s achievement. Hermes corrected. You are deluded by a hierarchical, capitalistic, Eurocentric brand of tunnel vision. It’s the achievement of the men—many of them migrant labourers—who blasted, dug, and hauled away the granite of these cliffs, opening a linear grade for the Kettle Valley Railway above the roiling Coquihalla River.

“Okay! Okay! I get it.” Colin objected out loud. “But my mea culpa isn’t going to make any difference to the non-existent ghosts of the long-since dead. And this place is like a North American cathedral. It’s a testament to the vision, determination, and grit of the men who tunnelled and bridged their way through some of the most rugged terrain imaginable… and the man who imagined, designed, and coordinated the undertaking.”

A couple ahead of them twisted round to see who it was shouting. Colin cringed, looked guilty, and shrugged apologetically.

On unceded territory, let’s remember. Hermes lectured. And risking lives. Do you know men were lowered in wicker baskets by ropes down these sheer, 300-metre-high rock faces so they could bore blast holes, stuff them with dynamite, then be hauled back up before the lit charges exploded? So I think it’s fair to ask, ‘What god calls your cathedral home?’

The pyramids, Notre Dame, Taj Mahal, Apollo 11, they were all human achievements, and—metaphorically speaking—all required expenditures of blood, sweat, and tears.

Hmmm? Hermes scoffed. I suppose it’s not unreasonable to ask, ‘Whose blood was spilled, sweat excreted, and tears shed in the accomplishment. And who benefited from the enterprise?

You know, Colin sighed. I tilt farther left than the Leaning Tower of Pizza. I hate the right-wing swing our political pendulum has taken. But one of the reasons things have gone so far down those reactionary, oft times fascist rails, is the 21st century banishment of anything that celebrates the accomplishments of the ‘colonials’—the descendants of the Victorian ‘settlers’ who emigrated from Europe, mostly Britain. Your average North American guy is tired of being told day-after-day that he doesn’t belong in the land where he was born, that he’s responsible for all its flaws and inequities, how guilty he and his children should feel as pillagers and usurpers… That he has no right to be proud, and no culture to be proud of.

Awww! My heart goes out to them…

They’re angry! Colin cut Hermes off. A large segment of North American society is pissed off. And guess what fuels political activism and radicalism more than anything else?

Colin waited; Hermes, too.

I’ll give you some hints: It’s not idealism, the notion that we can do good by our fellow citizens and create a utopia here on earth; it’s not logical thinking, the practical approach to problem solving that would lead to a sane, somewhat egalitarian, sustainable world; it’s anger—the visceral feeling that I’m being denied something I deserve and others are being given rights and privileges that override my own.

The MAGA crowd has harnessed that rage, poured gasoline on it, fanned it. They’re incinerating social progress that has been decades in the making and undermining foundational democratic institutions. What they’re creating is America Inc. and Canada Corp.—governments that are operated as if they were businesses.

So, what’s wrong with that?

You’re playing the devil’s advocate, surely?

Hermes trotted on as if he hadn’t heard the challenge.

One of the fundamental principles of a corporation is to ignore, or refuse to account for in any way, what are called ‘externalities’. You know what that means, don’t you?

Teach me, Master.

Externalities are anything that doesn’t contribute to profitability. So America Inc. will do everything it can to increase the profits of its supportive constituents—big businesses—and avoid anything that increases taxes or restricts the ability of its partners to conduct their operations and fund the political parties that shield them. Poverty and homelessness? Externalities. Affordable health care? An externality. Restrictions on carbon-emitting products? Someone else’s problem, and a serious potential constraint on profit taking… Get it?

They walked on, subdued, exhausted by their conversation. And confused. What should I celebrate? Colin pondered, as they crossed a trestle bridge between two of the Othello tunnels. He peered into the Coquihalla gorge, at the impetuous surge of the river toward its ocean; scaled its sheer rock walls in his imagination, looking up, up, beyond the crown of forest into the darkening sky, its blue dome concealed now by a billowing cumulus of storm clouds.

Wondrous! he enthused.

Then he looked ahead, through the bored holes of the Kettle Valley Railway. And behind. The tunnels defied nature with their precise linear arrangement—like the undeviating track of a godly dentist’s drill that had created cavities in the granite teeth of a gigantic jaw. “I’m an insect!” Colin hollered into the corridor, an alignment true as a rifle’s barrel. “I’m smaller than an insect. I’m a mite, a cell, a molecule…”

Hermes looked back, alarmed. Shut up! he commanded. You’re a lunatic off his meds!

“It’s your fault, Hermes!” Colin laughed.

Ears drooping, nose to the ground, Hermes scuttled along, pretending not to know the madman on the other end of his leash.

“You’ve triggered this epiphany!”

I’ll deny ever having met you when asked by the nuthouse shrinks.

“But it’s a stunning revelation, my friend,” Colin hurried forward and stooped in front of Hermes, holding his best friend’s head clamped in his hands, eyes locked on. “We’ve been talking as if humanity is somehow separate from nature.

“All this…” he craned and rolled his eyes, as if taking in the stupendous grandeur of a Sistine Chapel… “All this is as much a part of nature as a pristine, old-growth forest.”

I’ll plead with them not to unbuckle your straitjacket!

“There’s no such thing as an ‘invasive species’. We’re all invasive species. Dogs, earthworms, wolves, caterpillars, frogs, morning glory, the black plague, and—prominent in the mix—homo sapiens and its subspecies: the greedy, power-mongering, manipulative bastards—and bitches—who run America Inc. and Canada Corp.”

You call that an ‘epiphany’? Hermes balked.

“Yes! Yes, I do! Don’t you see, we’re intelligent enough to invent the microchip, the lunar module, self-serve check out counters, nuclear weapons, mass marketing, and mobile phones; too stupid to realize that, like every species that’s ever inhabited a niche on planet earth, we are going to over-graze our environment and consume ourselves into a catastrophic collapse.

“If we could only embrace that wisdom, I could celebrate places like this as glorious achievements. I could say we had actually reached a new orbit in the cycles of evolution.”

Ta-dah! Hermes mocked.

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