Northland: A 4,000-Mile Journey Along America's Forgotten Border by Porter Fox

Book Review - Five Stars
Northland: A 4,000-Mile Journey Along America's Forgotten Border by Porter Fox
My wife and I have over the years traversed this border route by car, canoe, bike, boat,freighter and train. Reading the book was a glorious trip down memory lane.We loved it!
The story definitely picked up momentum as it progressed  with never a dull moment.

Excerpts:
The Bay of Fundy has the largest tides on the planet, rising and falling up to fifty vertical feet twice a day. Storms in the North Atlantic are among the most violent in the world, and the average water temperature around Lubec is forty-five degrees.

I was so used to driving and flying that the shape of the continent had become distorted. You get on a plane or a highway in New York and get off in Minneapolis. Or Chicago. Or Los Angeles. Most people don’t travel anymore. They arrive.
Unless you’re riding the slow boat. Then you see every mile.

Superior and Michigan are the most dangerous because they are the longest, giving storms enough fetch to create two-story waves. Fronts flowing west to east in the fall are particularly rough. The lakes sit in a lowland between the Rocky Mountains and the Appalachians. Cold, dry air flows down from the north and meets warm, moist air coming up from the south. Add prevailing westerlies rolling off the Rockies and you get a vortex of constant and dangerously unstable weather. Winds can blow forty to fifty miles an hour and whip up waves twenty-five feet tall.

The Great Northern, the Northern Pacific, and the Montana State Board of Agriculture, as well as anyone with a stake in western real estate, got on board. The Dry Farming Congress pulled huge crowds throughout the West, and even larger grants for “scientific research.” Promoters, scientists, and US Geological Survey officials added another lucrative theory: “Rain follows the plow.” The concept: steam engines, plowing, and human activity induced precipitation. The Santa Fe railroad advertised its own rain line, a fictitious meridian that progressed west at eighteen miles a year, just in front of new construction. Hill proselytized on irrigation, summer fallowing, strip farming, and the virtues of homesteading from the caboose of his train as he rolled through north land settlements like Saint Cloud, Fargo, Grand Forks, Billings, Helena, Portland, and Seattle. He awarded prizes to the most productive farms in the region and set up display cases of golden north land-grown wheat. He hired an agricultural expert to manage forty-five experimental farms along the line, and figure out a way to make something sprout. His sermons caught on, and the north land grew behind him, earning Hill a new nickname: the Empire Builder.