Month: July 2016

July 12 to 18, North Shore of St. Lawrence, or Beguine the Baleine

 

From the ferry landing at Les Ecoumins we drove a short ways to find somewhere to have a quick picnic lunch. Drove down a seashore road to the headquarters of the St. Lawrence River Pilots, the guys who board all commercial ships entering the upper river and take over the helm to guide the ships to port. There was nice bluff and a pile of flat rocks high above the river. There was a sign in front of the bluff that said, in French, roughly, that the property was the private property of the Pilots organization and that if you chose to enter it you did so at your own risk. I mention this because it is the closest thing to a “no trespassing” sign we had seen since entering Canada. Over the past weeks we have encountered very few signs saying that you were on or about to enter private property and the few we did see just said that, “this is private property”—not “no trespassing” or anything prohibitive. In all of Canada so far I have seen only one sign that explicitly prohibited entry.

(The other day we pulled off the side of the road because the environment looked interesting, hiked into an expansive dune-like area with scrub pine forest and found ourselves on a treeless, sandy plateau hundreds of feet above the St. Lawrence. We sat for an hour or more enjoying the view, looking for whales and watching the ships go by. Also on the plateau were a couple of impromptu campsites, one involving a trailer. A beautiful spot that belonged to someone who could have monetized or restricted it, but there it was for the enjoyment of all, no prohibitions on use and no trash in sight.)

We had reserved four nights at Camping Bon Desir, near the cape of the same name, in the town of Grande Bergeronne. A pleasant spot in an open field by the river with lots of attractions nearby—a maritime museum, a couple of high perches from which to watch for whales, a resort town. It’s all about the whales here. The west side of the St Lawrence is a famous whale road,  owing to its underwater geography—there is a 300 meter deep trench in the St Lawrence just offshore here, that extends from the Gulf of St Lawrence to  the fjiord at Tadoussac. Tides bring in salt water from the Gulf into the St Lawrence river  which drains one-fourth of the world’s  fresh water (mostly from the Great Lakes). The nutrient-rich fresh water feeds phytoplankton and zooplankton, particularly krill, whose numbers explode in the deep water canyon. Whales of all types cruise the canyon from May to September—pilot whales, minke whales and beluga whales are present year round. Sperm whales, fin whales, and humpback whales come and go. We spotted some whales from shore, and big fat gray seals, but goddamit we came here to see whales, so we signed onto a zodiac boat tour.

Two hour tour with about a dozen people on board a 500HP inflatable boat (80$ C, each), we raced down the coast to Tadoussac, where the underwater canyon rises at the point where the Sanguenay river dumps in a bunch of cold freshwater. Soon we were among minke and fin whales, twenty feet away, blowing their air tanks through their topholes the second you see their heads rise above the water, then arching their endless backs and disappearing, leaving little whirlpools that linger. Sometimes they rise higher in the water, ploughing forward sideways with one side of their mouth in the water and the other turned up to the sky. At one point we were surrounded by several whales surfacing at once, hearing their exhalations and seeing the accompanying sprays of water. They were busy feeding on the krill which we could see filling the water, and to my mind they were oblivious to our presence.

 

 

A blue whale had been reported in the area. We did not see him. The captain of our boat said blue whales were boring anyway. And they were bad for business because regulations required him to keep his boat a certain distance from all whales (a regulation universally ignored), but if he encounters a blue whale he has to back off 400 meters and the local marine police take that one seriously.

In the museum we learned about Beluga whales among other things. In the 1920s Canadian fishermen and government believed that the salmon fishery was declining because the beluga population was growing fat on them. They declared war on the beluga, a whale which is bright white. The government paid a bounty for every dead beluga. They enlisted the nascent Canadian air force to drop bombs on beluga pods. They kept this up until scientists determined that mistakes had been made and that beluga don’t really eat all that much salmon. (The next day I read (in Mark Trail weekend edition) that the Australian government was going to release thousands of gallons of herpes virus into a huge watershed to kill an invasive carp species. Plus ca change, plus ca meme chose)

When we left camp we took the ferry across the spectacular Saguenay fjiord and just before we docked we spotted a lone beluga surface several times not far off at the mouth of the river. No mistaking that fish.

 

Some random observations about the Canada and Canadians  (being mostly drawn from the Quebecois and mostly from Gaspesians at that)

Either people don’t trespass on one another’s property or land owners don’t care if someone crosses onto their property.

Canadians are not overly worried about unlikely catastrophes, and/or they think people are smarter than they are. We paid to camp on the edges of cliffs at sites that, had we been in the U.S. , would have been either condemned by some branch of government or plastered with warnings. A rickety fence tacked to some fenceposts that are already leaning out over a ninety foot drop; a 75 step stairway down a cliff face to the beach, made by a good carpenter but not somebody specializing in cliff face stairway construction, I can tell you. Maybe it has something to do with universal health care—if something happens to you it doesn’t matter who caused it you will get fixed up.

 

The coastline of the Gaspe Peninsula is more dramatic and beautiful than that of northern California. There, I’ve said it out loud. It is.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Any town large enough to have a stoplight will have some major roadwork being done, with passage through town restricted to one lane for at least a block or as much as a half mile.

Chardonnay might be a French word but there is no wine by that name to be had, which is okay by me but offends Brenda’s sensibilities.

One is constantly reminded, along roadways, that many moose are lurking nearby. Experience suggests that whatever their number they are not nearby, lurking or otherwise.

French Canadian men, especially older men, prefer to be unencumbered by a shirt. I think there is a photograph of an older Pablo Picasso that is to blame.

In every Canadian family there will be at least one member with a dry, unproductive cough.

In the U.S. we can buy Cadbury mini-eggs at Easter. In Canada they are on sale year-round and say that right on the bag, “Available for your enjoyment all year.”

Canada has a more bowling alleys than the U.S. They call it “Quilles.”

Nothing good is made in Canada. That’s not my observation but a comment by a Canadian who was admiring our camp chairs and other gear.

Canada is expensive. Even tho the exchange rate was working in our favor things were still priced 10 to 20% higher than home. Except wine, cheese from France (I enjoyed making acquaintance with a creamy blue cheese from France called St Agur), and locally-smoked fish, which were a bargain.

The Quebecois for the most part don’t really care whether or not you understand. Even if it means foregoing a sale. It’s your problem.

There is at least one man in Canada who blows his nose, strenuously, into his open palm. What he does after that I do not know as I looked away out of a sense of decency and a desire not to know.

July 11 to July 12, 2016

We left our camp on the bluff above the Gulf of St. Lawrence as a cold fog enshrouded the site amidst allegations that I was going native. Incroyable, non?

 

I have been having fun dredging up my one semester of French in college. When I engage someone I prepare a sentence of introduction, anticipate their response, and have another sentence ready. After that my correspondent usually starts firing something in French and I have to come clean, meaning the conversation is pretty much over.

We went to the Reserve Faunique de Matane, a wilderness area in the middle of the peninsula. It has the largest concentration of moose in Canada, which is saying something, but we managed to avoid seeing one. After setting up camp we drove ten kilometres on a dirt road and walked a half mile on a logging road as the shadows grew long. All we saw were moose tracks for which I have yet to find a tidy metaphor—“the hoof print looked like someone had split a large russet potato and pushed it into the mud;” “The print looked like someone had pushed two biscotti into the soft dirt.” You can see that the comparisons are unwieldy, leading one to think too much, about why foodstuffs would be pushed into the mud or why you would have two biscotti in the woods and so on. We didn’t see a moose but did discover why we had seen so many Gaspesians along the roadways diligently picking something from the undergrowth—wild raspberries. Delicieux!

We had a three night reservation at the Reserve but we bailed out the next day. The campsite was in the middle what I took to be the Canadian equivalent of a State Highway Administration work depot. In the early morning the workers started pulling in, one every few minutes for half an hour, with radios blaring and trailing clouds of dust. They started ragging one another as construction workers will do, which was kind of interesting to me, and set about collecting, working on, testing, and loading various pieces of machinery. Generators, weedwhackers, air guns, jive talk and billowing dust, all before 8 in the morning. In the list of things this place was, campsite was the last on the list. After talking to two levels of Canadian bureaucracy to get a refund we split.

Found a lovely little campsite outside of Rimouski on the east coast of the St. Lawrence river. It had an American west motif, which many of the campgrounds in this region advertise with a teepee symbol.

I had made a reservation for the ferry to cross the St. Lawrence. Fortunately we arrived early; unfortunately we were told that the camper was too tall—they couldn’t accommodate anything over seven feet, a fact unmentioned on their website. I knew there was another ferry at Trois Pistoles, 45 kilometres down the road, that made its only crossing of the day sixty minutes hence, and they said it did not have a height restriction. The French personnel in the ferry office talked amongst themselves, ignoring me, until I realized they were debating whether or not we could possibly make it there in time. A  philosophical question for them that they found very interesting and they had many views on the subject. I bid them a hasty au revoir, jumped in the truck, backed a hundred feet out of the queue and beat it south. We were the last vehicle on the 3 Pistols ferry with only minutes to spare; if three other cars had showed up before us, or if I had stayed to hear the final decision of the Rimouski ferry office, we would have been left behind.

Ferry crossings are great (especially ones you barely make). You really feel like you are going somewhere.

 

 

 

It took one hour to arrive to the west shore of the St Lawrence, at Les Ecoumins, and a half later we finished setting up camp just before the storm came in. It rained all night.

 

July 5 to July 11, 2016

We have been on the Gaspé  peninsula between the villages of L’anse au Griffon and Riviere au Renard. We came here because Brenda wanted to see whales and I wanted to revisit a place I had been to in 1971. I think I was scouting an alternative to the draft, frankly, when I came here then, taking a bus to Montreal and then hitchhiking around the peninsula and back to Maryland. The geography appealed to me—almost the far north, mouth of the St. Lawrence, dramatic coastline—and just the fact that it was remote and seemed to be unknown territory.

 

We are on the edge of a steep, 90 foot cliff overlooking the gulf of St. Lawrence which from this vantage has no end—as limitless as any sea. Not the best time to be here, however. The temperature is normally in the mid  70s but has barely risen above 60 since we arrived. We have spent a couple days walking the beach. The cliffs are black, shale-like rock, emerging at all kinds of twisted earth-evolving angles, shot through with bright white crystal bands (calcite, I think) and the occasional layer of granite. The black rock is soft and once it breaks from the cliff it quickly erodes into small pieces of smooth, regular shapes—triangles, discs, rhomboids–each shot through with bright white lines. So the beach is filled with these little works of abstract art in black and white.

We have seen pilot whales (triple-size dolphins in appearance that stay under a long time) off shore below us, and a seal that shows up just after the lobster fishermen have refilled their traps. When the sun shines it is a beautiful sight, the waters clear and all kinds of blue and green, the rocks in the surf multicolored and interestingly shaped. When the sun goes behind the clouds the whole landscape becomes dismal and soul-deadening. Sun shines, all is bright with the chatter of birds and the promise of a good harvest from the sea; sun hides and you look with despair on the past and the future. Sun is out and you look forward to the Catholic feast days; sun disappears and you become a Calvinist. It’s been mostly sunny and we have taken some great hikes in the Parc National de Farillon which surrounds us. Today’s arduous hike brought us close to a bear. We paused on the trail to examine a dead porcupine and a French hiker caught up to us. We speculated that a bear had killed the porcupine. He went on ahead and soon I heard him yelling French phrases with the word “bear” in them. He told us later he had indeed made effort to shoo off a bear.

 

Few people we have encountered speak English, which surprises me. I managed to get the oil changed in the truck at a small garage (at least I think I did—maybe he just refilled the windshield wiper fluid and charged me 40 dollars Canadian.) I thought I was hitting it off with the next door neighbors until he brought up the American election and asked about Trump and I said “absolument non.” His wife laughed too hard and he kind of scowled and I got the idea he liked Trump. So I said “Hillary, comme ci, comme ca” which he found funny but he kind of gave me the cold shoulder after that.

 

Jacques Cartier made his first landfall near here in 1534, establishing France’s claim to Canada in the eyes of France. The sun must have been shining when he laid claim, otherwise I think he would have kept looking. I mentioned in a previous post the Loyalist cemetery we had seen on the St John river. The Loyalists, I’ve learned, were british-americans who supported Britain in the American revolution and had to hightail it to Canada after the war. The Gaspe received a fair number of Loyalists tho most settled in the maritime provinces.

 

As I say, it has been unseasonably cold here, tho I write this outside at 8pm sitting by the fire. I had talked to someone in the Bay of Fundy who was 150 miles (as the crow flies; 500+ road miles) northeast of here in late May and had seen icebergs offshore. I never mentioned this to the rest of the crew because morale has been sinking with the temperature.

I have a fondness for the geography and foodways of the  Gaspesie. Can’t say I know the people well, but they seem quick to laugh and evince the fatalist attitude of people who live in harsh circumstances. They paint their houses and their boats in bright colors, which is always a plus. The native people, the Micmacs, called this region, their world, “Land’s End.”

 

 

We are going to be in the region for another week. We head up to a wildlife reserve for a few days of more rustic camping then across the St Lawrence to La Bergeronne where the whale hunting is good, I’m told.

June 29 to June 30

Got frisked at the Calais/St. Stephen bridge crossing. The Canadian border authorities held us up for over an hour going through everything while we sat inside the guard station with the cats. Don’t know what set them off. During routine questioning about bringing weapons into the Commonwealth we admitted we had some pepper spray and a pocket knife. “Pepper spray is considered a lethal weapon in Canada.” (Not the pocket knife’s fault this time.) We surrendered Brenda’s little pink canister of spray without regret, after filling out some paperwork (we have a receipt) but I guess they figured that since we were there they might as well do the whole drill—feeling under seats, shining lights in corners, opening cabinets and Quaker Oats cylinders. I crossed here on foot in 1971 into US and exchanged waves with US authorities as I walked by. Oh well, these are the times, I guess.

A longer-than-it–needed-to-be drive to a remote place on the St. John River after stopping in the city of St. John to exchange some money. The drive was longer than it needed to be thanks to Google maps which I later learned routinely sends people an hour out of their way to get to Crystal Beach campground.

 

The owner was another 3^rd generation inheritor of an aging campground. He said his grandparents built the camp in the 1930s for short-length campers like ours and they haven’t upgraded to accommodate the 30 and 40 foot behemoths that many favor. “We serve campers; people come here and get upset because we don’t have hot tubs.” He teaches high school physics and only opens the camp after school lets out (and after the spring flooding of the St. John River inundates the property. He said, straightfacedly, the St. John River the “Nile of New Brunswick.” We both laughed after a beat. But he did explain that the river drains most of the province and parts of Maine.)

He had a little pub in his campground and some locals came round for a cribbage match. Prize for best score was three t-bone steaks. I declined offers to participate (but did not say that “I couldn’t afford the steaks”  or anything like that.) Talked to the campround owner for a couple hours about his marriages, his kids, fracking, (“The scientist in me doesn’t like it but the campground owner who has roughnecks for renters appreciates the trade.”) property rights (there are certain species of ash and maple tree sacred to local native peoples and they have the right to cut down any one that strikes their fancy; mineral rights are deeded separately from land rights so unless you purchase the mineral rights of your property you could wake one morining to find someone driving stakes in your front yard to mark their claim.)

Two ferries serve the peninsula this campground is on. We crossed on the Gondola ferry coming in and walked down to the Westfield ferry the next day. Rather than build a bridge they operate two boats that cross in unison, electric motor-driven cable-guided affairs, each accommodating about 30 cars. They move the traffic pretty quick. We passed this graveyard on the walk to the ferry.

 

 

The area was settled by Scottish immigrants in 18^th c. I don’t know enough Candian history to guess who the cemetery’s residents were loyal to –resistance to the French I imagine.

Down by the ferry was another campground. The owner of Crystal Beach where we stayed said that sometimes people overshoot the entrance to his camp and wind up there and the owner of that one tells them that Crystal Beach is closed or some other lie to get them to stay at his campground. And that guy was president of the provincial association of campground owners. The cutthroat world of New Brunswick campgrounds.

June 30 to July 5, 2016, Five Islands, Nova Scotia

Near the head of the Bay of Fundy, home to highest tides in the world. The bay recedes nearly a mile from the base of the cliff we are perched on, and comes rushing back again, twice daily.

 

 

 

 

 

The five islands are of different size and geology. The whole area is a mishmash of geologic epochs and famous for gems, minerals, and fossils. We haven’t found any but then we haven’t devoted a lot to it, hiking inland mostly.

We were here on July 1 which is Canada Day, or Dominion Day, celebrating the union of the provinces in the late 19^th century. We went into the nearest town, Parrsboro, 30 minutes away, to see their national day parade. The short description and the long description would be the same—first came the Royal Canadian Mounted Police SUV with all lights flashing, followed by the Parrsboro FD engine also with lights flashing, the Parrsboro Rec Team (a youth group) dressed in red and white (not uniforms or costumes, just street clothes) throwing candy to kids, five spiffy cars including this one, Preston

 

 

then the rest of the Parrsboro FD and rescue squad with lights ablaze and a siren going. Our fellow campers laughed when we told them we were going to the Parrsboro parade so when we got back and asked how it was I told them it was still going on, we left because it was going on so long—pachyderms, a troop of baton twirlers with flaming batons, precision drill teams, clowns on tiny motorcycles, the provincial governor’s wife, not one but three Justin Trudeau imitators. Had them wound up for a while.

 

This bit of sculpture from Parrsboro I send without comment.

 

The camp was completely booked for the holiday weekend and we were boxed in pretty tight with partying Canadians. Everyone is very open and generous. Given the late onset of night their fireworks and serious partying doesn’t start until ten pm. We slept through it as best we could.

I was awakened early the next morning by a loud clammer in the tidal flats.

 

 

Well, he wasn’t that loud. (In a related vein, after I was awakened by the clammer I went for a walk and saw growths of green and red spongelike matter on rocks, the lichens of which I’d never seen. Then I got hungry and went into a fish store just for the halibut which hadn’t come in yet and the noisy fishmonger gave me a haddock and a desire to drink Canada dry.) People wade into the flats when the tide withdraws with shovels and pails and harvest the local littleneck clams called Economy clams after a local port. One of our neighbors, Frank, said they were exceptional-tasting clams. Sunday morning I was looking out over the flats and thinking what gear I had to outfit a clamming expedition (I knew I had an entrenching tool buried in the truck and was debating about digging it out) when Frank took a break from packing to leave and brought me a bucket full of clams he had caught; his family couldn’t eat them all. Problem solved. Economy clams for me, anyway. I changed the water and added some cornmeal to help them clean out. They were small but sweet, cooked in a little seawater and wine, served with linguine, garlic, parmesan, lemon, local asparagus on the side. Oh Canada!

 

 

We hiked the trails of the near provincial park.

One overlook gave us a glimpse back to our home cliff.

 

With a couple of exceptions all the fellow campers we have talked to in our travels to date, US and Canada, live within an hour or, at most, two, from their homes. Strange.

In my limited experience English-speaking Canadians, at least those who stay in campgrounds, cuss a lot. Maybe a remnant of their maritime heritage. Also their roads are impossible to keep smooth, with the winters being so harsh. Like washboards, and sometimes worn down to bare earth. Even the highways in places. It beats the living shit out of the Scamp, and my nerves, traveling these roads unless I slow to a crawl, so 4 hour trips take 6 or more.

 

 

 

June 24 to 29, 2016, Acadia NP at Schoodic Woods and Mt. Desert Island

 

 

In parts of Acadia National  Park the points of land are big, solid slabs of granite with colorful inclusions cut through with bands of solid black rock called diabase. (I don’t know how that word is pronounced; made me think of a girl in school I fancied named DeeDee Diabasi.) The diabase gives way after thousands of years of the forces of nature (unlike the unerodable Ms. Diabasi) leaving channels and canyons straight down into the harder, uneroded granite.

 

(Me over an eroded channel moments before I undressed and dove off.)

The twelve foot tides and spray of the crashing waves fill pools in the gone diabase, and the pools sustain amazing varieties of colorful sea life.

 

Then you go  around a corner and there is a mile long beach of perfectly rounded cobbles of all sizes and types of stone—small discs of perfectly smoothed black and cannonballs of orange granite and white granite ovoid rocks. They make a sound like chimes when you walk on them.

Around the next corner is a perfect little pond reflecting a perfect blue and white sky and the perfect pine trees around the edge. Looks like it came from the set designer’s crate marked “Maine.” All that’s missing is the moose who is out on a cigarette break.

Then  you go around a corner and there is a vast floodplain either draining to or being filled by the gulf of Maine through a narrow opening that is rushing in one direction or another. You can walk over a bridge, in a little town in Maine, under which the water is rushing as hard as any mountain stream in one direction, have breakfast at a little store, and when you walk back over the bridge the water is rushing just as hard in the other direction. The sea is always busy here.

Then you go around a corner and find that $4 shower place that you’ve been looking for, for days, because Acadia NP doesn’t have shower facilities and the Scamp doesn’t have the storage capacity for the water needed to rinse the acreage under my authority.

Around the next corner is a sandy beach surrounded by steep rises of fir, the only sandy beach in northern Maine judging by the cars parked along the road and the crowds flowing towards it. You look down on it from a bend in the road, turn another corner and you are on a 200 foot cliff overlooking the whole of the Gulf of Maine to the Atlantic with terns and gulls wheeling around the massive columns of rock just offshore and fog creeping around the far point.

You go up and around and now you are on a ridge looking across a green valley and fog is massed on the far ridge and spilling over like the vapor from dry ice. A little further on you are on top of Cadillac Mountain and can see to the horizon in all directions, the fog moving in towards Bar Harbor and sweeping over the near islands like a demonstration of a wind tunnel, snaking up one side of a cliffed island and streaming away over the lee side.

 

Then you have to leave and just outside of the park you pull over and there are work boats tied in the harbor, in the mist, looking mystical and toy-like.

Not bad for $15/night courtesy of National Parks senior pass (which one of us was entitled to.)