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Published: July 23rd 2006
The Saint Lawrence
where it meets the Atlantic OceanMotorhome News from North America 17 10th - 20th July 2006
‘Bienvenue a board’
Quebec, The Saint Lawrence River, Grosse Ile, Cap-Saint Ignace, Saint Jean-Port-Joli, Rimouski, Gaspe Peninsula, Forillon National Park, Ile Bonaventure, Perce, Campbellton, Sugarloaf Mountain National Park, Caraquet, Kouchibouguac National Park - and on to Prince Edward Island!
As we travel east we move against the time-line of North American history, heading for the lands first discovered by Jacques Cartier in 1534 and later, by Samuel de Champlain. This French influence becomes strikingly evident in Quebec City with its narrow cobbled streets, tall dormered houses built of stone, flamboyant churches and cobbled market squares. We didn’t get beyond Quebec City in 1988, but the lure of the Gaspe Peninsula and The Maritimes beyond was always there, a magnetic yearning to escape from the rush of modern life to the mystery of remote islands and romantic notions of ‘Anne of Green Gables’.
Leaving the motorway about 50 miles out of Quebec, we stumbled upon the stunning little town of Montmagny on the southerly shores of the Saint Lawrence River. It’s one of those towns you’d be proud to call home, a community of bright houses, thankfully, but
conveniently, separated from the noisy sprawl of modern development by the busy highway by-pass. A short boat trip away lies Grosse Ile, a tiny island once used as a quarantine station for immigrants entering the Port of Quebec. The practice ceased in 1937, but more than 7,500 people are buried there on the island, most of them Irish, who fell victim to typhus in 1847. I have pondered long and hard to understand how cruel life - and death, can be. So many hopes, so many dreams; lost forever with such a tragic ending at the very gates of a new world. How young this country - and how harsh its history. I first learned of the practice of immigrant quarantine and the horrors of disease aboard ship in Joseph O’Connor’s gripping book, ‘The Star of the Seas’ - a great read.
Elegant timbered houses line the banks along the Saint Lawrence estuary, all freshly painted in pretty pastels, with beautiful gardens, colourful roofs, grand external staircases, ornate verandahs and tall dormer windows - a la France. Each village has its exquisite stone church with slender silver spires and finely decorated wooden interiors adorned with all the familiar trappings
of Catholicism. Our favourite was the delicately spired, Sacre Coeur at Cap-Saint-Ignace, breathtakingly beautiful for its shining silver roof, its magnificent pillared gallery and off-white and gold interior.
As many of you will know, I have a special love of wood, for its malleability, its many colours, textures and grains, its touchy feel and its tantalising odour at the blade of chisel and lathe. There might just be a place here for me! Woodcarvers have gathered along this northern coast for many years; their early work evident in many of the wonderful churches, and their legacy lives on, with many fine craftsmen earning their living through carving and sculpture here today. We stopped awhile at the small harbour in Saint Jean-Port-Joli to wonder at the work of the many talented sculptors from across the world who have been invited here each year to craft their offerings from an eight foot tree trunk. A picture paints a thousand words they say, so we have included two!
There are certain though hardly discernable signs that we are both putting on a little weight. Nothing too serious you understand; the belt has shortened a bit along with a few pairs of
trousers shrunk from too much washing. We’re not sure why, but the effect is shaped rather like a Tim Horton’s doughnut - and a new slimming regime starts tomorrow to try to put things right.
A jaunty nautical flavour exists beyond the busy town of Rimouski; an air of rustic living once gathered from the sea, of fishing and boating where time is of little importance. To our right, beyond the strip farm fields and cattle barns, rise the tree-clad hills of the remote Gaspe Peninsula, and to our left the ever-widening Saint Lawrence River, calm and placid on a warm summer’s day, its far shores fading ever thinner on the skyline forty miles to the north. Even here, amongst all this beauty, Canadian history unfolds another tragic page. Here, in May 1914, more than 1,000 men, women and children perished when the Empress of Ireland, outward bound from Quebec to Liverpool, collided with a collier in thick fog off the lighthouse at Pointe-au-Pere. And within just a few weeks, Europe would be at war.
This week has marked a significant moment in our journey. ‘Here, take my hand a moment; careful now, mind the slippery cobbles. Let’s
walk down to the grey-sandy beach and smell the air. Yes, it’s saline, unmistakably the tang of the sea. There are telltale signs along this misty St Lawrence shore; grey rocks bronzed with seaweed, that small flock of black guillemot bobbing on the waves, that ridge of spent mussel shells on the tide-line and, look there, a flight of eider skimming the waves. We have finally reached the Atlantic, 5,800miles and nine weeks from Tofino on the Pacific coast of Vancouver Island; and almost six months to the day since we arrived in North America.’
Slate hillsides lined with trees dropped steeply to the shoreline as we journeyed further eastwards past little houses and little villages on sandy coves. A small smack headed out to sea from a quiet harbour rimmed with white cottages and the winding road dipped and rose towards the remote coastal reaches of Forillon National Park at the very tip of the Gaspe peninsula. Our climb to the lookout at the summit of Mount St Alban was yet another memorable moment on the same day. High above the ragged limestone cliffs teeming with nesting kittiwakes in the cool fresh breeze of the Labrador air-stream, Mount
St Alban marks the northernmost point of the Appellation Mountain chain; the southern tip is somewhere way down in Georgia. Perhaps we’ll get there sometime before journey’s end.
Now, I guess you all want to know what I had for my birthday. I thought you’d never ask. Well; there’s the brass pin for my hiking hat, (a beaver with ‘Canada’ written underneath), a 'Smiley' mug (something I’ve always wanted), and a ‘Birds of North America’ card game for ages 7 and over. As if that was not enough excitement for one day, Janice had yet another trick up her sleeve. The day started overcast and cool, and a fresh breeze swept across the water as our boat bobbed out from Perce, a ‘touristy little town by the sea’, to Ile Bonaventure, a truly magical island just a mile out into the Atlantic. 100,000 gannets arrive on the island in the spring each year, to court, breed, dive spectacularly for fish and argue noisily about which tiny piece of ground belongs to whom on a cliff-top carpet of white feathers half a mile long. The deafening ‘cara, cara, cara, cara.’ could be heard a mile away on the towering eastern
cliffs even before we crossed the crest of the hill - and the sharp tang of guano reached our nostrils. The gannet, for those who have never had the chance to meet one face-to-face, is a most striking bird of the ocean, its head designed by an unknown artist of considerable talent, six feet from wing-tip to wing-tip, so graceful at sea and extremely clumsy on land. It’s almost possible to touch these beautiful birds on Ile Bonaventure, they have so little fear of humans - and anyway, they have more important business to attend to. Love is truly blind. Ask me what I would like to do on my birthday and a trip like that one would tick most of the boxes. It was one of those spellbinding experiences, leaving sharp images of a most amazing bird etched in gold to keep in a drawer for a rainy day. There was yet another rather special surprise to come the following day.
Early immigrants came to Ile Bonaventure from Jersey, Guernsey, Ireland and Scotland, to fish for cod and till the soil. It was a tough life then, and life moves on; the fish are no longer there and
the land is too harsh, leaving a handful of decaying cottages to stand testament to the 170 brave people who lived and worked there for the Jersey Company Store through many generations, until, in 1961 the island passed to Quebec Parks. There’s only one other place in the world with more breeding gannets and that’s the island of St Kilda. ‘No, Janice, we’re not going there.’ (Well, not yet a while)
Oh yes, I was saying, the following day - Saturday. Still buoyed up from the birthday trip to the island, we booked a boat for a whale safari, an hour out into the bay. Our guide, a very tall lanky French-speaking Canadian, shouted his commentary over the buffeting waves and roaring engine, his DeGaulle nose pointing skywards and his mouth gaping like a dried cod with every word. “There she blows at six o’clock!” he’d cry. Several hump-backed whales obliged with much blowing and thrashing of tails - mostly at a discrete distance as passengers dashed from side-to-side barging and bumping to get their cameras in focus and on target. We managed to get one frame of the tip of a tail using ‘rapid shoot’! We’d do it
With Dixie-Lee and Ron
Overlooking Bonaventure Island again, if only to see more species, though we must admit, it is a touch like chasing lions across the African Plains in a jeep.
It’s a long drive along the south of the Gaspe Peninsula, on the coast road lined with well-kept cottages and small fishing harbours looking out to sea. This gentler land survives on its lumber and associated industries, fishing - mostly cod for drying and export to Europe, shellfish, a bit of farming - and tourism today. The tradition of woodcraft continues around the coastal trail, from carving in the north to model ship making here in the south. A number of talented artisans stood at the roadside outside their workshops proudly holding aloft their hand-made boats - in anticipation of touching the pockets of high-speed travellers passing by.
Holidaymakers by the thousand come here from Montreal and Quebec, many during the last two weeks of July when ‘tradesmen’ traditionally take their summer break. Each south-facing bay has its campground, packed with tents, trailers and picnic tables, mum and dad, the children and granny, paddling in warm shallow water and tanning white bellies on towel and weed-strewn beaches; a honey-pot for workers making
a quick exit from the humdrum of work in the city. We stopped only to admire a harbour or two and the white painted wooden churches crowded with parked cars on Sunday morning. Finally, we crossed the river from Quebec Province into New Brunswick at Campbellton, leaving behind a province resolutely sure of its origins, certain of its culture, but insecure about its position within Canada even after all these years. Meanwhile, many immigrants from every other nation in the world have made this great country their home.
New Brunswick. Suddenly, gas was a little cheaper and campsite charges were 30% lower. The ski resort of Sugarloaf Mountain Park, green now in the heart of summer, provided our first camp in NB for $21 (just £10.50, with electricity). We were allotted pitch number 13. “What’s wrong with that?” we said. “We’re not superstitious.” Within five minutes however, the electric trip blew (kettle and aircon together overloaded it, a rare experience in Canada) and then the toilet flushing foot-pedal broke. Now, we think we are superstitious after all! The camp handyman fixed the trip, and a piece of wood and Duct-Tape repaired the toilet pedal until we can find an
RV dealer to get it sorted - it sounded rather more severe than just the cable! The happy mature lady at camp reception spoke to us in English with a discernable French accent, a reminder that some 35% of New Brunswick people speak French as their first language. They were here before the British of course, but more of that later.
Since a chance meeting over morning coffee in a lighthouse café a few days back, we have bumped into fellow travellers Dixie-Lee and Ron, several times by mere chance. Dixie-Lee and Ron are from British Columbia, taking a three-month tour of the east in their trailer, following a similar route to us. Dixie-Lee surprised us with an unexpected observation. There were occasions on our travels in Europe when we longed to meet English-speaking people for meaningful debate and talk of travel, and it would often be several weeks between such occurrencies. I’m not sure that constant French in Quebec was hurting us to any great extent, but it had clearly taken its toll on Dixie-Lee. “You don’t know how much I’ve been looking forward to speaking to someone in English,” she told us. It was good for us
too.
Whilst timber and fishing represent major sources of income for New Brunswick and the Gaspe Peninsula, they are both also somewhat reliant on tourism as the fish resource peters out and the lumber industry becomes increasingly mechanised. This year could be bad news for tourism. The $US is fast reaching parity with the $Canadian, the latter gaining in strength as the $US continues to weaken. American tourists are expected to stay away this year as a result - even if they could afford the gas to get here. Sugarloaf campsite was half empty (or was it only half-full?), and it was peak holiday time.
It was getting dark around 8.30pm in Quebec, only three weeks or so after mid-summer’s day, but help was at hand to extend our day. As we entered New Brunswick the clocks moved forward yet again, from Eastern Time to Atlantic Time. The weather has been extremely muggy over the past few days; temperatures have been up in the 30,s with little breeze and night-time has brought dramatic storms on a number of occasions. Before leaving Campbellton, we booked the 14hour ferry from Sydney, on Cape Breton, to Argentia in Newfoundland. We sail
at 6am on the 31st July, after a night parked on the dockside, doubtless with many others taking the same route.
Flags fly from tall poles outside every other home along the coastal road to the southeast of Campbellton. For many it is the magnificent red maple-leaf of Canada, a common sight across the whole nation. For others it is the flag of the Acadian people, the French tricolour with the star of the sea, a stella maris, in the blue corner. Caraquet, where we camped, is the ‘cultural centre’ of Acadian New Brunswick, their people spread throughout the area, proud of their French ancestors and their fortitude. The Acadia region extends to the southeast from the mouth of the St Lawrence, through New Brunswick and into Nova Scotia, an area ruled by the French until the defeat of Montreal and Quebec by British troops in 1760.
New Brunswick seems to be the only province where there is no slogan on car number plates. Perhaps they are still thinking about it. Either that, or there is little to say. Certainly, our journey along the Gulf of St Lawrence has been pleasant - and memorable for that. However, it
is an endless straggling line of houses, with but an occasional sand-dune beach or visitor attraction. We have had our moments of excitement though.
The open air Acadian Historic Village at Caraquet kept us out of mischief for several hours, reflecting village working-life in the area between 1780 and 1890, with reconstructed farms, dwellings and working craft-shops staffed by local people of all ages. An enormous amount of money has been invested at the village over the years and it continues with the addition of buildings of interest from more recent times. We have seen many such exhibits over the years and would consider this amongst the best for enlightenment and enjoyment.
A morning hike took us out along the boardwalk to the sand dunes in the Kouchibouguac National Park looking for more of the rare Piping Plovers - the last ones we saw at Chaplin in Saskatchewan, many moons ago. The island dunes are divided to allow the birds to breed and share their space with the few dozen bathers and sun-worshipers on holiday. Not satisfied with our efforts, we decided to rent a double kayak for a couple of hours and splash our way over the calm
sea waters to the island for a closer look from offshore. The sea along this whole coast is shallow, particularly at low tide when the shifting sandbanks emerge like wallowing whales. It was not long before we were well and truly stuck on the sand and rocking from side-to-side trying to get momentum. It was left to Janice-the-brave to climb out and pull us free, but not without mishap. In an effort to get back into the canoe from knee-deep water, she fell backwards - up to her neck, fully dressed - and almost in tears with laughter! As a good friend of mine would say, “She looked great in the air!” She dried out Ok.
We’ll be crossing the eight-mile bridge to Prince Edward Island tomorrow, in anticipation of a very special week - poking around in corners for new excitement and things of interest. Perhaps we’ll even get to Green Gables.
David and Janice. The grey-haired-nomads
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Adi Unterberger
non-member comment
Info on Woodcarvers
I am Looking for contacts of Woodcarvers from the St-Jean port-Joli Que. In the hope to hear from you Sincerley Adi Unterberger