Keeping Things Whole Read Online Free

or plaque commemorates our wettest hour. With all that booze, all that money, my great-grandparents were the local norm, not the criminal fringe. Strap a single bottle to your belly or thighs, walk aboard the ferry, and you’d make enough to eat out for a week. That tempted
everyone
, and yet nothing around here celebrates the decade-plus of our twenty-six-ounce handshake. Mine wasn’t the only great-grandmother to cross the ferry with bottles under her skirts. We’ve got the slippery touch in our genes.
    After the official Windsor-Detroit Tunnel opened in 1930, Windsorites couldn’t read or hear the phrase without smiling. Ten years earlier—when tunnelling was done with a shovel, greed and courage, not an international agreement—police chiefs, priests, and sanctimonious politicians had nicknamed the whole area
The Windsor-Detroit Funnel
. Click back to that map. When we’re not the crotch of the nation or its only stiff prick, we’re a funnel. Booze from all across our country pouring into theirs at one narrow and populated spot. Glug, glug, glug. Women’s voluminous skirts, false-bottomed salesmen’s cases, cars on the winter ice, even a submarine cable car—whatever could move the hooch did move the hooch.
    Many didn’t bother to hide so far from the law, at least not on this side. During Prohibition (or, as my team call it, Prohibition I), it was legal for Canadians to export booze provided the gargle was legal in the destination country. America, no, but Cuba, Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, sure. And the guv enjoyed its cut, $30 million a year by 1930 (roughly $400 million today). When a single man rowed up to Windsor’s government docks to buy a case and a permit, both customs officer and rower would agree Cuba, not America, was the destination. Right: a single man was going to row three thousand kilometres to Cuba in a small wooden boat. That he returned later the same afternoon for another delivery was never a problem so long as the feds got their coin. The officers weren’t stupid; they were paid, legitimately. And with all their trade, new officers were hired. Promotions. Overtime. Same’s now true for the completely failed marijuana prohibition.
    You sleep with an elephant, you get on top or you die. Up front we looked needy to America, always noticing them more than they noticed us. But round back we were pouring it down their throats and grabbing cash by the fistful. We got the most powerful country in the history of the planet drunk for more than a decade, and you’d never know it from walking our city today. In a country of subsidized literature and museums funded by three levels of government, nothing commemorates our bottleneck handshake. Where’s our smuggler’s symphony? Our ode to the Windsor skirt of many pockets? Detroit’s waterfront has a huge sculpture of boxer Joe Louis’s fist. Where’s our bronze bottle? We’ve got nothing unless you count the Right Honourable Prime Minister Paul Martin Junior’s childhood home, the cash drop of former whisky baron Harry Low. The floor tiles and roof slates of a future prime minister’s childhood home were originally bought with smuggling money. Kate hit the books at the Paul Martin Law Library not five hundred metres from a river carrying Paul Martin boats that dodged Canadian taxes, yet I was a criminal for moving a plant.
    The Detroit River, our umbilical cord of industry. Hanging over it all is the bridge, shuddering with its constant load of trucks. Most nights at least one letter of the glowing red
Ambassador Bridge
sign is extinguished. When the entrance to the nation’s hooker capital finally spells out the truth,
ass dor Bridge
, drinks are on me.
    When I cross I still prefer the bridge to the tunnel. Despite the trucks and the danger of the bridge, nearly a billion dollars a day in trade tempting every nutter with a bin of fertilizer and a cellphone, I like the