You've landed on Mars and are negotiating the rugged terrain and electrically charged dust storms in your allpurpose, sustained-environment SUV.

It's time to radio in for directions.

"How do I get to the Helias Basin?"

"Keep going straight to the Olympus Mons volcano and hang a right. You can't miss it. It's right across from the Tim Hortons."

An impossible scenario, you say? Hey, you never know.

Tim Hortons has transcended being a mere restaurant chain. It's a phenomenon and a national addiction. There are 2,733 outlets coast-to-coast that reinforce our cultural sovereignty north of the 49th parallel.

There are twice as many Tim Hortons in Canada as there are McDonalds. Orangeville has four and soon will have a fifth. Even Hepworth, a village of 340 souls on the Bruce Peninsula, has a Tim Hortons.

When you consider how labour-intensive these franchises are, and their brisk trade of out-of-towners, it's not a stretch to say the most prevalent base industry of the entire municipality is a Tim Hortons.

The fisherman in Newfoundland, the Pequiste in Montreal waving his fleur-de-lys, and the rig worker on the Alberta oil fields find a common bond through a double-double and a Boston Cream.

Krispy Kreme, the Yankee doughnut behemoth, invaded Canada five or six years ago. They came armed with an arsenal of goodies saturated with enough sugar to guarantee the prosperity of insulin manufacturers for centuries.

It was 1812 all over again. Every urban strip mall, shopping centre food court and suburban arterial was the 21st-century incarnation of Queenston Heights. The American interlopers charged north, but couldn't penetrate Hortons' brown monolith, eventually retreating to a few shelves in the odd gas bar and convenience store.

Starbucks, meanwhile, has established a toehold in Canada and holds down second place in the Canadian coffee market with seven per cent. Is Tim Hortons sweating over that? I doubt it. It's got 62 per cent of that market.

Tim Hortons now has 345 outlets in the U.S. and even has one in Kandahar, Afghanistan.

The great Canadian contributions to the world: insulin, the snowmobile, the air ambulance, the Robertson screwdriver and the Timbit.

Have you ever been to a Tim's in the morning? What a dumb question. Of course, you have.

The line-up is akin to a hospital emergency room, overflowing with unfortunate souls who just had their hands chopped off in a lawnmower accident. Once they get that cup, however, the vital appendage is magically reattached and operating at 100 per cent efficiency.

The Orangeville Citizen offices are no exception. Rose Elsdon, the lovely salesperson that does the daily doughnut run, need do nothing but purr "Tim" over the intercom. In an instant, we're stampeding to her desk like a herd of ravenous mustangs on crack.

Why this fixation with Tim Hortons? The coffee's good and the food is tasty, but neither is going to get five stars in the Michelin guide.

Is it the name? Perhaps. Yet, when I did an impromptu, thoroughly unscientific survey after a new franchise opened at College and Yonge in Toronto, only seven of the 25 respondents knew who Tim Horton was.

In fact, one guy insisted that Tim Hortons was named for "that elephant in the Dr. Seuss books."

(The ignorant can be forgiven, though, when you consider that Tim Horton played for a Maple Leaf team that actually won a Stanley Cup ... which means he played a long, long time ago.)

The rumours have circulated among those who are convinced that every success story must have a covert, sinister element to it.

Tim's coffee was laced with nicotine, they said. When that allegation proved to be false, the story was that an inordinate amount of MSG was used in the flavouring process, like it is in Chinese food.

I guess the allegation there is that one would fill himself with Tim Hortons and then be hungry for it an hour later.

Then again, the answer may be as simple as this: Regardless of what turmoil we, as individual Canadians, are going through on any given day; whatever situation of immense pressure we are enduring; whatever time of day it is, or wherever we are ... we will always have time for Tim Hortons.