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.