a snagged bracelet, gin and wildflowers / la Gaspésie May-June 2023

A month by the sea. 

The light, the water, the sky move constantly. The very first tiny wildflowers were opening. White treacleberry. Purple wood violets. Fiddleheads unfurled, becoming fiddles. Heaps of moose poop. The clothesline-that-needs-oil keen of the blue jays. The white-throated sparrows orchestrating a companionable round of song from high in the spruce trees. A fox leisurely crossing the neighbour’s yard in afternoon sunlight that turned her bushy tail a pale, post-winter gold. The enormous crows. 

There wasn’t as much snowmelt rushing down the hills and the banks to the shore as there usually is. Most years I can’t walk along the beach because the rivulets are too wide and deep for me to cross. 

One day when we were walking we saw a fat log up ahead on the beach. Then the head moved and I thought of a dog wrapped in a thick blanket. A few more steps. Too large for a dog. Too fat for a blanket. We wondered if the seal was hurt and had washed ashore, but she looked inquisitive and alert—even friendly. We kept a respectful distance. Ten minutes later, when we turned and looked back, she’d swum back into the surf.

It is always big news when a new cantine/canteen opens. Frîtes, poutines, hotdogs, guédilles (like a lobster roll but on a hotdog bun and can be made with shrimp or crab and I don’t know what else, I’ve never been tempted), club sandwiches, etc. This new cantine is on the main drag (which is also the only drag) in Mont St Pierre. The cook has hefty tattooed arms, an equally generous application of eye makeup, makes excellent fast food as the crowded parking lot will attest, remembers her regulars and the variations they like. No pickle for you! I gave you extra onion! Except it was the lunch rush and she’d snagged her bracelet on the catch of the screen window she’d opened to set out an order. Maudit! Tabernak! She couldn’t free herself and wouldn’t let anyone help. Her assistant paced in the tiny kitchen but didn’t dare go close. Customers backed up as well as they could in the narrow space, but also not wanting to lose their spot in line. The mayor’s wife, who sat on one of the window stools eating a poutine, got up and said, Let me. You cannot tell the mayor’s wife to mind her own fucking business.

R overheard forestry workers say that in the interior of the peninsula it was 38C. The trees were dry and with so many forest fires elsewhere in the province, people were anxious. We were lucky because the next day it rained--heavily. In some places in the Gaspé, 100 mm came down and there was flooding. 

We attended a community hotdog and pétanque event in Rivière-à-Claude, a village that in 2016 had the debatable honour of housing the oldest population in the province of Quebec with a median age of 59. 

https://plus.lapresse.ca/screens/84f67d8b-7033-461c-bdfd-b3a95899b4ec%7CbGTfI4tXCERH.html

The article is called, "The end of an epoque", but in the meantime a group of young people ‘from away’ realized that the broad valley behind the village had a microclimate suited for farming. Bravo! I love these people. Here’s a picture from the farm last summer. 

In the hills there are mountain bike trails and places to camp.  Solar-powered yurts and cabins. 

AND: there are children. Even the oldies in the village who grumble about the tie-dyed clothes and long hair are delighted to hear children laughing and running about. 

Then, with the pandemic, the abandoned houses along the coast that had sat empty for years were bought and are now inhabited. I’m waiting for the next census report.

I spoke with a young man—ie young enough to be my grandchild—whose father bought the old church which they are turning into a gin distillery. I was interested in seeing the inside of the building before everything was dismantled and he offered to show me. He explained the layout they were planning as per government guidelines. Here for storage, here for production, here for receiving clients, and here in the balcony would be la salle de dégustation—the tasting room—with a view onto the sea and the cemetery. 

The confessional and the pews were still in place. The altar had been pushed aside. On an inside cupboard door was a handwritten list for whoever once upon a time prepared the altar for mass. “Placer le ciboire s’il y a des hosties à consacrer. Vérifier lampion…"

We talked about juniper berries and sourcing local legends for names for the different flavours of gin that he planned. I had just spent the week hearing male moose bellow from the forest that they were hot for a female. I said, How about L’Orignal Bandé? Moose with an Erection. He looked startled. I explained. 

Either that was too local for him or he didn't expect a woman of my age to say that. Hm, he said. Maybe.  

There is a long story about an old house that I won't tell here. 

We spotted our first forget-me-nots. The beach peas started blooming. The buttercups. 

The wind changed direction and we got Mordor sunsets.

Back in Montreal now. 

ps I apologize for the change in spacing and size of font, but Blogger has become increasingly not-user-friendly.

snow melt and sunsets galore / gaspésie May 2022

I'll warn you right now. When the sun starts to go down over water, I grab my camera and dash outside, even if only onto the porch with the road between me and the sea. (R groans.) Whether the sky is clear, whether there are clouds--even when it's completely overcast and you don't think there's a slice where colour will get through--there is almost always a sunset of note. 

I was stunned the first time we came to the Gaspé in the winter and I was waiting for the magic over ice, and the sun set HOURS EARLIER BEHIND THE HILLS. It's by coming to the coast where land and sea meet that I've learned more about the way the Earth tilts than any lesson taught in school. I'm a hands-on learner. 

There was extraordinary snowfall in the hills this past winter and when the spring sun melts the snow, water tumbles down down down to the sea. It gushes streams, it carves the sand, it turns our yard into a sodden mat. I sit outside and hear gurgling and chuckling. We lost power for about 12 hours because the snow melt caused a rock slide. We went for a walk and found the path washed out. 

There were so many streams--getting broader and deeper every day--that I didn't do my usual rock-clambering walk along the shore because I couldn't get across them. I walked by the road, and so saw a car parked at the cemetery where there are usually only gravestones. A man was slicing squares of grass with edge of his shovel, putting the chopped pieces aside in a neat mound, making a coffin-shaped rectangle. I assumed he was a cemetery employee, but no, he told me, there is no staff. Family dig each others' graves. He was digging his aunt's grave. He'd already buried six aunts and had two more to go. Next, he said, it's my turn. He laughed. He was very cheerful. 

I do not want my body buried, but I find it fitting that a loved one, whoever that may be, should dig the grave if there is going to be a grave. I asked what happened if there is no family. He said a volunteer would do it. He dug quickly--the experience of six aunts already? he didn't mention his parents--and on my return an hour later, although his car was still there, I didn't see him. Until I noticed the shovelfuls of soil flying out of the hole. He was digging a proper grave.  

I've noticed before--in other cities, in other countries--that the dead always get prime real estate. In Montreal, the large Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish cemeteries are on the mountain. In this small village, the dead have a view on the wide horizon of sea. 

I also had a conversation of sorts with a man whose French I only half understood because he didn't quite form his consonants. They were like shadows around his vowels. In English the way he spoke would have sounded like... 'I on no ut yoooouuu 'ink' for 'I don't know what you think'. We were talking about the environment, by which I thought he meant climate change. He said you had to pay attention to the environment because if not, the environment would come back to haunt you, and what you had to do then was going to be worse than doing the right thing now. It took a while before I realized he meant the Ministry of the Environment and government rules and fines.

 

Where was R? He'd driven farther northeast, almost to the tip of the peninsula, to work on another old house for a few days. A back addition which we knew was collapsing had collapsed even more and the municipality had asked for it to be fixed or demolished. I haven't visited the house for a couple of years but this is what it looked like then. 

R knocked down the walls and took apart the tin roof. It wasn't easy. The construction was solid. The joints were dovetailed, the nails six inches long.  Each nail in the tin roof had been individually caulked. 28 rows of 10 nails = 280 nails. He counted in the way one counts when a task seems like it might last forever unless you define it. 

The house still contained a lot of the previous owner's abandoned furniture. R carried a lot out to the side of the road for Big Garbage Day. Jour de la collecte des objets volumineux. A washing machine, a double porcelain sink, 1960s style lamps and armchairs. I should say that on Big Garbage Day, it's understood that people driving by will stop and see if there's anything they might like to take--and they do. The sink was soon gone. One fellow began talking to R and asked if he could look through whatever was still in the house. He liked a medicine cabinet. R told him it was his. 

R kept a box of handsome brass drawer handles, spools of 100% wool for weaving, an Omega sewing machine which I'm having cleaned and repaired, an alabaster bust he found wrapped in canvas and tied in twine and wondered if there might be a dead person inside. 

For now the house is boarded up tight again. 

When we arrived in the Gaspé, there was still a bank of snow beside the deck. For the two weeks that we were there, the snow shrunk and melted, and the buds of the trees began to unfurl. Driving 800 k to Montreal was a time-lapse trip into early spring, mid to late spring, and bingo! Summer full on in Montreal. 

 

snow wind tide / gaspésie march 2022

We spent a couple of weeks in the land where wind and snow rule. Except for when the ice starts to break up along the shore and the tide starts to swell again. 

The kitchen window was covered to the top with snow when we arrived and R dug it out, only to have to dig it out again two days later. 

We had wind gusting up to 75k/hr, we had one whole day of no wind to disturb the snow falling on the trees, we had magnificent sunsets. 

In the woods we snowshoed across moose tracks so deep that we couldn't see the bottom of their steps. How long their legs must be! 

I tripped on my snowshoe, fell forward with my pole jabbed up to my wrist in snow, and as I pushed to get up, the pole dug deeper. 

There were chickadees and crows and one robin feeding on a bush of winter-shrivelled berries. There were songbirds trilling about spring that was supposed to be coming if you looked at the light in the sky. There were a lot of last year's nests covered in snow. This one was so small that even heaped with snow it would have fit in my palm. 

We snowshoed a lot. 

Every day? 

Every day. In the woods when it was windy, along the shore when it wasn't too windy. 

place names / my version

Of the many places where I have set fiction, I am delighted to have my short story, "Our Ladies", which takes place in the Gaspé, published in the current issue of Prairie Fire. https://www.prairiefire.ca/current-issue

Ladies is a word that has fallen out of fashion--with good reason--but the title is a nod to the many places in Quebec called Notre Dame de [whatever]. Our Lady of… It is not a nod to the religion that named them, except in an ironic sense as I believe is made clear. 

The story is set in a village called Notre Dame des Quatres Douleurs. Our Lady of Four Sorrows. A fictional name for a string of houses in a landscape of hills and sea that I assure you exists. Place--physical, social, cultural--plays an intregal role in my writing. What is a character without place? Even if it's a place as small as a room or a country where the character does not feel she belongs. I am interested in the relationship--whether rootedness or tension--between character and place. It's fitting that this story appears in an issue exploring Roots & Routes.

When writing, I have sometimes used real place names, sometimes invented names. I don't have a rule about this. Even when I use a real place name, it's likely that I've manipulated the layout of the streets. Zadie Smith has a note in the Acknowledgements of her novel, Swing Time: "North London, in these pages, is a state of mind. Some streets may not appear as they do in Google Maps." Other writers of fiction have similar notes on the copyright page. For a writer, this makes sense. You use what you need for the narrative. A novel is not a photographic picture. 

However, I have discovered that some readers struggle with this. It has nothing to do with intelligence or level of education. A friend told me once that her father, who was a college professor, had grown up in Newark, New Jersey where Philip Roth had also grown up and set his fiction. Her father was angry that Roth had made up details about Newark. He didn't "get it right". In vain she tried to explain to him that Roth was writing fiction.

While I was writing the novel Five Roses, I debated using the name of the Montreal neighbourhood where I imagined it taking place. There are so many objectifiably recognizable markers. The Lachine canal with its history, the FIVE ROSES sign that marks Montreal's southern horizon, cycling by the St. Lawrence River, the dépanneur on my street corner, so many scenes that I documented, photographed, and used as source material. That was where my characters, albeit fictional, lived--in the Pointe aka the Point aka Pointe St-Charles aka Point St. Charles. 

When I began working on the novel, I had lived in the Pointe for 10 years. Long enough, I felt, to be able to describe it. Certainly as a newcomer. I never pretended to be someone with great-grandparents who dug the Lachine Canal.

Six years later Five Roses was published. I met with a generous response from readers who found that my portrayal of the Pointe was just and who appreciated the novel.

But there were also those who objected. They challenged my right to set a novel here. One belligerently asked why I hadn't told the "good, old stories"? The hardscrabble toughness of life when the factories closed and neighbours helped each other, the horse-drawn delivery carts, the family of the West End Gang driving up and down the streets at Christmas with a flatbed truck handing out gifts for children. Hadn't I heard those stories?

Indeed I had. But they weren't my stories.

Another neighbour--another sidewalk confrontation--said I wasn't allowed to make up stories about where she lived. 

But I live here too now. 

Writing fiction in the realist tradition is a balance between consensual reality (assuming a common ground can be found), the emotional/ethical truth of the story, the imaginative process. I don't write about a place unless I feel I know it well enough to adopt the point of view I've chosen. And as a writer, yes, I claim that right. 

The Gaspé is a landscape I've been visiting for almost 40 years. The protagonist of this story, "Our Ladies", is seeing it for the first time. It was delight to experience it with him.

We were last in the Gaspé in late September and early October. Moose-hunting season had just started so we weren't able to walk in the woods. We stayed by the shore. Mountain ash trees were heavy with berries. We saw a flock of snow geese, who don't normally fly so far east when they're migrating, wheel from the sky to land in the river. The sight and sound was so magnificent that I didn't even think of pulling out my camera until they had almost all landed. 

Even when I return to Montreal, part of my heart stays behind with the waves and the hills. 

back home in the garden

Some of you will know that R is cycling from Montreal to our house in the Gaspé. The trip is approx 800 k. Now, as I write, he has less than 100 k to go. He's been doing valiantly, because it's far and he's cycling into a headwind that gusts up to 35k according to the weather app--and his windburn. He also had a problem with a tire on the first day. He hasn't been able to replace it since bike repair shops are either out of stock or closed when he's cycling by. So he's cycling with a patched tire. Fingers crossed that it holds. I won't write about his trip here, because it's his story which he will tell himself when he gets back.  

I've been at home working, having a private writer's retreat, doing whatever suits me. If I want eggs and toast for supper, but I had them last night, that's fine, I can. I am still getting out for walks but at erratic times.  

It's also that time of year in the garden. I have basil ready to harvest which means making pesto. I saw bushes heavy with gooseberries yesterday when I was out walking and I'm wondering about getting some gooseberries at the market to make jam. 

In the garden the tomatoes are only starting to pop fruit. The onions are twice as high as they were last year at this time. I have lots of hot peppers, a couple of different varieties. 

For now, I long to get to back to writing...  

Here's the pic R sent this morning. Sainte Flavie, Quebec.