I have been fascinated with the movement around tourist towns. I live in one myself - a ski/college town in the Rocky mountains. It's a wonderful place to live. The ethic of adult play, the importance of being warm and friendly towards travelers, and the ethic of helping the young work together to produce a marvelous zeitgeist for the community.

How did the tourist town movement get started? It seems to have been the "act locally, think globally crowd" who were artists and craftspeople that decided to move to small rural communities and begin to remake them. These towns often have all the wonderful amenities of the big cities - performing arts, ethnic restaurants, and other stuff, along with the warmth and friendliness of a town, where you can walk down the street and often run into people you know.

The metaphor that comes to mind is seeing a child being born. The rural areas of north america have been an excellent uterus. People in rural communities have very high social and ethical standards. They have an ethic of friendliness, of opennness, and of smiling at your neighbors (including children) who you pass by on the street.

So, I muse to myself, "where can we start an even bigger and more glorious social happening?" Well, it seems to me that Canada would be an even more magnificent uterus, so to speak, for a baby of a new kind of community.

I remember a song from the 1980s which always has brought tears to my eyes. The Dream Academy's "Life in a Northern Town" - the message in that song seems to be a call out to folks south of the border to come north and help out revitalize the communities of the far north.