Bizarro World was a planet conceived of by DC comics in the 1960s  — it was a cube-shaped planet known as Htrae, or Earth, backwards, and everything there was an opposite, or in some way slanted version of what happened here on our blue marble patrolled by Superman.

I don’t mean any insult when I say that Canada has always struck me as Bizarro World – it feels so familiar, but everything is a few ticks different. Canada and the United States share so much in the way of ingredients – influenced by the British, the French, similar tribes of Native Americans, similar geology, topography, flora and fauna…I suppose this is why some people call it the 51^st state.

But it’s not, of course, and just as can make a number of different dishes from the same set of ingredients, our differences are significant. Cross into Canada, and you immediately notice the trivial changes: the bills have become coins, the coins are called “loonies” and everything is in metric.

The border is more than mere cartography.

The writer Clark Blaise was born in Fargo, North Dakota in 1940, to Canadian parents. He grew up shuttling back and forth across the border, and wrote about that time in an essay called “Memories of Unhousement”, which I just read in The Pushcart Book of Essays.

Blaise tackles what was the primary cultural divide in Canada historically — between the French speakers and the English speakers,  a subject that was particularly inflamed during the Trudeau administration.

“In Toronto, I have heard the familiar retort “Speak White!”.  I’ve seen my (one time) fellow Torontonians demand of young Québec tourists chattering away on the immaculate Toronto subway to please remember where they are; that so much jabbering in French is giving everyone a headache…On Prince Edward Island, in a tourist home modelled on Anne of Green Gables, the landlady, in showing us our rooms and remarking on my Québec license plates (but not on my French name) confided in me, “the white man built this country! What are the French trying to do?”

The great thing about visiting Bizarro World is that it lets your see own world with more clarity. I mean, doesn’t it seem strange, from a modern U.S. perspective, that someone would be considered “non-White” by virtue of language?

It does indeed, because  race is an entirely imaginary and flexible concept. (At various times in US history, many people who would solidly be considered “white” today — Italians, Greeks,  for instance — were considered non-white.)  “Race, as a meaningful criteria within the biological sciences, has long been recognized to be fiction,” writes Henry Louis Gates, Jr. “When we speak of “the white race” or “the black race,” “the Jewish race” or the “Aryan race,” we speak in biological misnomers, and more generally, in metaphors.”

We humans do tend to put great stock in these entirely imaginary differences, with quite real and often sickening consequences. And we, here in the United States, are now in the midst of a defining race by virtue of mother tongue — only we’re talking about people who speak Spanish and who hail from below that other border, to our South.

Yellowhead to Yellowstone a song about change, loss, what to keep and what to let go, and handling all that, told in the voice of a wolf who is relocated from western Canada to Montana. It is the title track of Ian Tyson’s most recent album and opens the door to a group of songs about personal confrontations with change, and reflections of the changing landscapes and ways of life in the Rocky Mountain west.

That’s a landscape and a way of day to day living Tyson knows well. “Music and horses, they’ve been my two loves all my life,” he said.

For the last three decades, Ian Tyson has lived on the eastern slope of the Canadian Rockies, in Alberta. It’s ranch country, mountain and prairie, and although it is changing, still a place where those who live there both wrest their livings out of the land and know they have to work with land and weather to survive. “It’s just a mosaic of western values and emblems, ” Tyson said.

He should know. He has been a force in re inventing the image of the west and rewriting the history of cowboy music. It began when he was invited to come to the Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada, in the early 1980s. “Back then, that was really the beginning of a whole renaissance of the cowboy movement, from silversmithing to saddle making, to poetry, to music,” he said.

“When I went down there, those people just said hey, there’s this Canadian guy, he’s a cowboy, he sings good and we’re gonna go hear him. They didn’t know anything about Four Strong Winds, they didn’t know anything about Ian and Sylvia, they just knew this guy’s a cowboy and he sings good. Which was fantastic. And I slowly came to the realization that I could change this music.”

Tyson was the man to do that. In addition to being a working cowboy and knowing and loving the way life goes in the mountain west, he had, through the folk revival of the 1960s and early 1970s, been half of the duo Ian & Sylvia, one of the top acts of the era. The combination of Ian’s strong tenor and Sylvia’s edgy alto gave them a distinctive sound. They each had a fine ear for song, as well, creating arrangements of traditional music such as Jesus Met the Woman at the Well and V’La L’Bon Vent which foreshadowed both country rock and Americana. They recorded songs by then little known musicians Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and Gordon Lightfoot. They each wrote songs, too: Ian’s Four Strong Winds and Sylvia’s You Were On My Mind are but two which remain enduring classics which have been recorded by artists around the world.

When the couple came to a parting of the ways in the 1970s, Ian had returned to western Canada, and while keeping his hand in music by gigging around the region, focused on raising horses. Then came Elko.

“Here I was in my forties, “ he said, “and I realized that I could take the old Saturday afternoon Western movie music and leave that behind, and make a new music. Forge a new music out of my writing — and I did. It changed my life, basically, and gave me a whole new career.”

Tyson’s songs include character pieces about people who have shaped the west, clearly drawn descriptions of what it’s like to ride the range, to be out in the weather, to make a life in an often unforgiving land, stories of the beauty of that land, and stories of working out the joys and sorrows of love, framed in that life and those western landscapes. The album titles give an idea of the direction of the songs within them: Cowboyography, Eighteen Inches of Rain, Old Corrals and Sagebrush.

Yellowhead to Yellowstone is a bit darker than some of those. “You write about what you have,” Tyson said. Loss and change, connection and disconnection, regret and pondering what’s next make their way through ten songs, which end on a note of hope, in a song called Love Never Comes at All. “That’s a declaration of continuance, you know,” he said. “Love will continue.”

Now in his mid seventies, Tyson is pondering what’s next in his own path. “There are a lot of things I’d like to do before I tip over,” he said. “More songs, more cowboy stuff? It might be something else, a novel, a biography, maybe some short stories.” Later in the day of this conversation, he planned to go down to the small stone building on his ranch where he often works on his music. “I’ll play for a few hours,” he said, “just to keep the chops choppin.’”

The first time I visited the radically misnamed Open Air bookstore in Toronto, I was so overwhelmed with delight that I forgot all about it almost immediately.  That was two years ago, and on the occasions when it did pop into my mind, I couldn’t remember where I’d been when I’d encountered the store.  I was almost convinced that the whole thing had been a dream.

But when I returned Ontario last week, and found myself with some time to spare one morning, I had a glimmer that the bookstore had been in Toronto. I resolved to find it once again — if it in fact had a corporeal existence.

I couldn’t remember the store’s name, and my vague Google searches on the BlackBerry came up empty, so I walked around downtown rather aimlessly,  squinting back in my memory. I turned on Toronto Street, which at first seemed utterly unpromising, the sort of place where you’re likely to find little more than stockbroker’s offices and perhaps a sad cafe selling wilted sandwiches for takeaway… but then again,  it was starting to feel familiar.

At the end of the block, just in front of number 25, I spotted a rugged guy, in orange polyester-based wicking fabric and a backpack,  standing in front of a railing, and a staircase leading downward.   I’d found my quarry. I looked down into a window entirely stacked in with cardboard boxes, and saw a small wooden sign that said Open Air Books & Maps.

Just below sidewalk level, I pushed through a heavy metal door and entered into an absolute marvel — a chaos of jam-packed bookshelves, with books stacked front to ceiling in front of and next to those book shelves. Every single book is about travel, or nature, or the environment, and there are also maps. And globes!  Even thought it was a bright blue sky morning, there was almost no natural light in Open Air — the books blocked any sunbeams that could reach the near-subterranean space.

There is a rough order to the stacks — they’re divided by geography, but beyond that, there was no organization scheme that I could discern. In fact there really couldn’t be — if you want a book that is, say, two-thirds down a stack, you must try to delicately pry it out without sending the whole lot tumbling, and should you succeed, you’d have no practical way to get it back in its place again.

Book avalanches are a frequent occurrence, confirmed the young man behind the counter,  with the tolerant weariness of someone who answers the same question several times a day. Mr. Orange Wicking Fabric purchased some maps and asked whether they’d ever thought about expanding, a question that the clerk also answered in the affirmative with the same tone. “If it were up to me…” he said, letting his voice trail off.

Meanwhile I was again in a state of delighted overwhelm. Shall I read about Asia, the Adirondacks, the Adriatic? An anthology, a novel, an atlas? I wandered through slowly, considering all the possibilities, picking up (or rather, prying out) some books, and then returning them to their pile. Too many choices is supposed to make decision-making difficult — the theory is that multiple options create too many pluses and minuses to consider, which makes honing on a perfect choice a frustrating exercise in futility.

In fact, in this way, Open Air strikes me as a perfect analogy to the world we encounter as travelers — packed,  even overstuffed with the interesting and fascinating mixed in with the boring and the banal.

Now, I’m generally not trying to find perfect — either in a book, or a trip that I make, and so I don’t find decision-making that difficult, even when I’m spoiled for choices.  (Although I will confess that when I’m tired and cranky, I can find the world’s variety numbing.)  Without anguish, I made my purchase: The Oxford Book of Travel Stories. And then I left Open Air, glad to be out in actual open air — and also to have a reminder of how limitless our choices are, both on a travel bookshelf, and in the world.

Which, come to think of it, is like a very good dream indeed.

The moment I entered Schwartz’s deli, I felt like I was at home. It was cold outside, but warm and almost steamy inside this small restaurant which could barely contain its long counter with round swivel stools, well-worn wooden tables surrounded by crowds of people tucking into heaping piles of fragrant meat and freshly made french fries. While I waited to order, I sipped a dark cherry soda and looked up at the vintage, back-lit menu board mounted on the white tiled wall.

Which was when I reminded that I was not, in fact, on familiar ground. I had not taken a time machine back to the ubiquitous Jewish delis of my New York youth — I was in Montreal, at a Charctuerie Hebraique, on the Boulevard Saint-Laurent. My dark cherry soda was not Dr. Brown’s, it was Cott’s Cerise Noir.  I was not ordering a pastrami on rye, but a viande fumée (which is in any event not quite the same as pastrami), and my dill pickle would be called a cornichon.

Montreal has a reasonably large Jewish community, and the city saw roughly similar waves of Jewish migrants as did major cities in the United States. But culture is refined through the prism of place, and Jewish traditions, culinary and otherwise, naturally evolved into something different here. As I sampled my viande fumee (smoked meat) an odd, and not unpleasurable feeling settled over me – everything felt familiar — nope, I don’t like my Jewish meats extra-fatty – interspersed with jolts of difference – how did this meat get its amazing smokey flavor?

I’d felt this blend of familiar and exotic in my travels before – while touring synagogues in Kerala, India and in Barbados, for instance. I’d even started a file called “There are Jews Here?”  Now, both of these places are even more different from New York than Montreal is – but since Jewish food traditions apparently hadn’t filtered into the restaurant scene in India or Barbados, and because synagogue isn’t a big part of my life and food is, my Montreal experience struck me with greater force. It was something I could taste.

Since I’m not at all religious, why do I find evidence of Jewishness far from home so compelling? Why, also, do other writers? To name just one example, The Wall Street Journal, ran a story about Jamaica’s attempts to capitalize on its Jewish history. In Slate, Jack Shafer collects a number of stories of this sort, and calls the genre “Jewspotting”. (He also does a good job of laying out what these stories miss – and by extension, makes a case for why such stories are probably not worth writing.)

Here’s my theory. My family came to the United States from Europe at various times, my mother’s family after the Holocaust, my father’s fleeing Russian pogroms a couple of generations before.

From babushkas to Broadway — that’s the dominant narrative in modern American Jewish history. As a kid, I learned stories from biblical times and then a jump to the minor-key music playing in European shtetls and a cut to the doom-filled moments of the Holocaust, followed by immigration to the U.S. and the founding of Israel.

Although I will grant that I might have missed something since I spent most of my time in Hebrew School looking for places to hide to eat cookies, this is also the narrative that’s echoed in books and in movies.

I’d never heard much about what happened in earlier history, after the Spanish Inquisition – which would be a story about the Caribbean and Central and South America, and certainly hearing very little about Asia and Africa, full stop. And since I know that my maternal roots stretch back into Spain all those generations ago, coming across synagogues in seemingly out of the way places raises the possibility that my family history could have taken other turns, the path could have led to other shores.

I can imagine this quite vividly when I’m in a synagogue, or a deli, which happens to be in the vast Somewhere Else. For a moment, I can picture my family’s history transported to the the Caribbean, to India, or to Montreal. For a moment, I can imagine smoothly asking for viande fumée avec cornichon, s’il vous plait — in my mother tongue.