The Gaspe Peninsula, Quebec September 15-17, 1978

From Quebec City I carried on along the north side of the St. Laurence, on a narrow, winding road, following the curves of the river.  A road made for driving slow, allowing plenty of time to appreciate the new landscapes that appeared around each bend.  We wound our way through fields and hills, forests just starting to show their fall colours – reds and yellows sprinkled amongst the deep fir greens.  Past pretty little towns, with tidy white houses, gussied up with brightly coloured trim – fire-engine red, kelly green, sunflower yellow, ultramarine blue. Deck chairs out front, painted to match, and set in tidy little flower gardens.  So bright and cheerful.  Once in a while a more traditionally painted house – white with jet-black trim – very prim and quaint in comparison to its more flamboyant neighbours. Did they all start out this way until someone bucked the trend, took a chance, and dared to make the move from black to... red! 

I think about being an owner of one of these little gems, and the fun, each year, of deciding what colour I’ll choose for the trim.  Like a woman deciding what dress to wear, and then what colour purse and shoes to match.  What mood shall I strike, what message convey?  Is this a red year or a blue year?  Or do the owners keep to one colour – “I’ve painted ‘em green all my life, and my father before me.  Green’s good enough for me.”  

 

      Landscape near San Simeon, on the north side of the St. Lawrence River

 

Toward the end of the day we caught the ferry from San Simeon to Riviere-de-Loup, and the starting point for our drive along the full coastline of the Gaspe Peninsula, or ‘Gaspesie’.

 

San Simeon - Riviere-du-Loup ferry

 

 

And spent the night at a campground just out of Riviere-du-Loup.  As it happened, this was a bit of a meeting place – lots of travellers from various parts of Canada – and the US.  An older couple from Long Island, N.Y. invited me to share a glass of sherry with them.  They’ve done a lot of international traveling, but not, they make clear as ‘tourists’.  They refer to themselves as ‘travelers’ who prefer to stay in one place for a while and get to know the people, the place, the culture – and the cuisine!  They find long-term rentals – a private house or apartment, somewhere where they can cook.  And learn as much of the language as they can.  They usually go for the winter months, and choose places with warmer climates – like Mexico, Southeast Asia, India.  This winter they’ve decided they’re going to drive instead of flying.  So tomorrow they’ll start heading south and see how far they get.  I admire their openness to adventure, their willingness to not have a plan, to not know exactly where they may go or where they’ll end up.  

 

A little later I met up with a couple of gals my own age, and – over over several glasses of wine – shared more traveling tales.  They’ve both just quit their professional jobs in ‘the city’ (Montreal), with the intent of slowing down, and allowing their lives to unfold.  For them it’s about staying open to whatever opportunities present.  They’re heading for Newfoundland for the winter, where they hope to find just enough work to keep them comfortable until spring, when they plan to continue their journey – wherever it takes them.  I went to bed, three sheets to the wind, and dreamed of traveling to far-off places, places I’d never been.

 

The next morning I set out early, getting to Rimouski before mid-day.  Rimouski is just one long commercial-industrial strip right along the river's shores – lined with cheap motels, nondescript stores, gas-stations, lumber-yards, stock-yards, hot-dog stands, billboard signs, more gas stations.  Signs everywhere: "centres d'achats," "libre service" gas stations, "casse croute", “artisanat”.  I wonder what knick-knacks they might sell there, but not enough that I’m willing to stop and look.

 

Once out of Rimouski the drive becomes much more pastoral. I see evidence of those long skinny strips of farmers’ lands along the river that I learned about in school.  How the plots were made narrow so that each farmer would get a little stretch of river to irrigate his crops.

The mighty St. Lawrence now is a deep, deep blue – the sun is shining brightly, highlighting the colours of the houses and churches along the way, so they stand out like beacons against the yellow of the fields, the deep blue of the sky, the inky blue-black of the river.  Such an orgy of colour!  And I realize, a little wistfully, that if it weren't so cold – and clear – the colours wouldn’t be so bright, so startingly beautiful.  I feel lucky to be here now.

 

And in the same moment it dawns on me that the deep blue ‘river’ I am seeing is – almost – the ocean.  Technically it is still the St. Laurence River, but the northern shore is too distant to be seen, and there are wild white caps that remind me how close I am to the great Atlantic Ocean. 

We have climbed a rocky cliff to a transmission line tower to get a better view of the coast.  It’s no longer a gently rolling farm landscape with a black rock beach.  Now it’s a heavily forested landscape, reminiscent of BC (including the evidence of ongoing logging operations) with a grey pebble beach interspersed with larger, more jagged rocks.  It’s wilder, freer and more lonely.

Perce 1+2

 

As I drive along I gaze at the striated faces of the rocks that line the road.  In the colours and textures of their striped facades is revealed their history – the forces of nature that thrust them up, pushed them down, blew, washed and rolled over them.  The communities of animals and people that lived upon them, their structures and bones now compressing, along with the soil, sand and rock, into the thin bands we see.  How long ago – what age and what people – does that thin stripe represent?  What story does it tell? 

 

I think back to my drive through the Rockies, and my sense of them as living, thoughtful, sentient beings. What if these mountains shook us off their shoulders – the roads here are so narrow it wouldn’t take much.  And if they did, how far down would we fall?  I am mindful of the fact that these great sloping rocks don't level off and become flat when they reach the river.  In fact, no one knows where the 'bottom' of the St. Lawrence River is.  Perhaps it is miles deep, an endless chasm into the centre of the earth.

 

Round the next bend the road is under construction – the seaward side is being bolstered, a new retaining wall to keep the mountainside firm below the road. Humans, the 'dominant’ species here on earth – at least at this point in time – spend enormous amounts of time, energy and resources on altering landscapes to better meet their needs – and wants.  We chip-chip away, dig and dredge, move earth from one place to another, blow things up, and generally try to tame and dominate our little patches of the planet. But our efforts are so paltry and vain. We hardly scratch a surface, a part of a surface really, and even then our greatest works, from civilizations to massive structures, have not stood the test of time.  All have been ‘lost’, and covered over by water, earth and new civilizations and monuments.  

 

We are destined to become yet another thin line on şome distant set of 'mountains' that we will never know. How will our end come? Will it be plague, pestilence, flood or fire?  The only thing we know for sure is: our end will come. 

 

I think of animals, gaining control over their space, marking it out, building nests, altering their environments.  Even trees and plants send out roots, holding the piece of ground on which they stand together, and drawing life from it all. All animate, and even inanimate, things are part of the process of change, erosion, regeneration.  Will they too perish, or will some of them survive, or even thrive, when our ‘civilization’ ceases to be, when humans cease to dominate this pale blue dot.

 

I come to the point of Gaspe – Cap Gaspe – and look out at the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and beyond to the great Atlantic Ocean.  And then I round the corner, as it were, now driving on a sunny afternoon, on the south side of the peninsula.  Like all tourists on this route, I stop to take a photo of the famous rock at Perce – the rock with the curious eye-hole and odd gap at its far end.  

Note: for more information on Perce, go to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percé_Rock

 

 

It has been a full few days. 

A long drive through an iconic piece of Canada – the Gaspe.

It is a full moon tonight.  

A harvest moon. 

The stars come out, one by one, as they do every night,

Since time out of mind.

The sea roars, the wind whispers. 

I am grounded in, and reassured by these powerful, unchanging things.