A summer road trip to the end of Route 138 delivers whales, vistas, Habitant food, and laughter.
By Christopher Frey
THERE’S A DRIVER’S LOOKOUT JUST OUTSIDE OF BAIE COMEAU, where a massive pinnacle of Canadian Shield makes its last stand before yawning into the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Inland, a bowl of boreal forest cradles a sun-dappled lake. Ripples of exposed bedrock undulate, occasionally showing through the forest. A cordon of hydro pylons marches onward, giant exoskeletons playing hopscotch, carrying electricity from the megaproject dams of the area to the rest of the province.
The horizon is lost in a fleur-de-lis blue where the ocean meets the sky.
We’re halfway along Route 138, Eastern Canada’s better-paved answer to the Dempster Highway. The 138 runs 1,100 kilometres beyond Montreal, hugging the north shore of the St. Lawrence where the river broadens into a gulf, connecting the province’s most cosmopolitan city with many of its remote towns and villages.
My companion, K., is counting the hydro pylons as she swats a veil of mosquitos away from her face. I’m examining a map of Québec. Facing the reality of this landscape, a topography only suggested by the map comes to life. I focus on the profusion of blue lines running from north to south, from the grand boreal watersheds, emptying into the St. Lawrence. The veins of this province are cold and clean.
Motorcyclists-solitary outriders, doubling Honda Goldstream couples, small gangs-stand out in the light traffic. Montréaler Claude Villemare could once be counted among them, until his wife Francine convinced him it was time to ditch the hog in favour of the sweet convertible coupe they can both enjoy. The two now regularly ply this route on summer vacation, and when we share a B&B with them nearby, they are the very picture of middle-age contentment. In the past they’ve come for the birds, this time it’s the whales.
Unlike the Dempster, the only danger comes from playing cat-and-mouse amidst the walls of hard rock with tail-gaiting truckers. The road is well-groomed and provisions are sufficient—at least until Sept Îles. The 138 may be North America’s least-heralded but most rewarding road trip: it deserves a good, long run.
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PEOPLE ARE SUPPOSED TO BE LEAVING THESE HAMLETS—Forestville, Godbout and Pointe aux Anglais-for the jobs in Quebec City, Trois Rivières, Montréal. And if there’s one Quebec narrative emblematic of such migrations it’s the story told in the 1968 film Entre la mer et l’eau douce. Protagonist Claude Tremblay hops a cargo ship from his home at Pointe aux Anglais and lights out for Montreal, with dreams of becoming a famed chansonnier. A blue-collar poetry-singer. Sensitive Guy from the North Country.
But visiting these towns, with the weather on our side, there’s a surprising liveliness, raw beauty and cultural pride: the graceful sandbanks studded with herons rolling into the Gulf at Ste Anne de Portneuf; the perfectly modernist Musée Louis Langlois devoted to studying the 18th and 19th century shipwrecks off the coast of Pointe-des-Anglais; the infusion of young people who come here out of interest in its landscape each summer.
Lean and muscular, 30-year-old Jean Poirier is a reverse Claude Tremblay. During his many years working in Montreal’s film industry as an Assistant Director of Photography, Poirer spent summers around Charlevoix and the Côte Nord as a rafting and kayaking guide. This year he made the move here full-time, forsaking his film career.
“I wanted to be outside, to live at a slower pace. Something more in keeping with my values,” he says. “The contact with people is different, too, the further along the Côte Nord you travel. Near Québec City people can be a bit grumpy. Too close to the city and too far away from being really far. Up here they treat everybody like their neighbour.”
Québec is one province where the North might actually figure constructively in its future. If it shares the same demographic dilemmas as the rest of the country, the province’s north shore feels like a less provisional, more wired frontier. A log-constructed, A-frame trading post wouldn’t appear out of place sandwiched between a dépanneur and an electronics store.
Jacques Cartier, the St. Lawrence’s original European wayfarer, could not have foreseen this. After spotting land at Ponte des Monts, just north of Baie Comeau, in 1535, Cartier continued south, favouring the rich estuaries, islands and wooded slopes down river. He could do without the North Shore, he sneered, calling it “the land God gave to Cain.”
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IF YOU CAN TAKE YOUR EYES OFF THE SEA long enough, and study the vast hinterland it embraces, an altogether different sense of this country emerges.
The Innu had the right idea. The Natives hunted and fished this rocky, unyielding Eden of granite shield and forbidding bogland-long before the first trading posts, whaling stations and fishing outports in the 16th and 17th centuries-and lived by a principle of surrender to the land.
Read their mythologies: the Innu developed a finely-tuned sense of irony, ambiguity and the absurd long before they became useful coping mechanisms for our life in the 21st Century. Their myths could be humourously crude-consider the tale of a woman who takes a penis for a lover. Or the man who is forced to live out his days in a caribou’s ass. They defy easy moralization. The stories artfully express the absurdities of life set in an impossible landscape, and minimize the value of life kept in balance—although there’s a bit of that, too.
The Innu creation myth describes how Wolverine created the world. It was a time of floods, when the earth was covered in water but for the few stones sitting above the waves. Wolverine leaped from stone to stone, fearing that more floods would soon submerge the stones entirely. So he summoned the water animals.
“Can you swim to the bottom of the ocean and bring up some ground?” he asked Otter, and then Beaver. Otter insisted there was nothing down there but weeds and fish. Beaver said it was too deep. Neither were of help.
Muskrat agreed to try but asked that Wolverine tie a rope to his foot while he dived. Muskrat stayed down for some time. Wolverine, fearing the worst, pulled in the rope. Muskrat wasn’t there.
About to resign himself to a watery existence, up came Muskrat, his mouth crammed with muddy earth. So much earth he couldn’t breathe or speak. Wolverine picked up Muskrat and put its ass to his mouth. He blew with all his breath.
From Muskrat’s mouth new land spewed forth, continuous earth as far as the horizon and beyond. When Wolverine stopped blowing, a land without end had appeared.
So if this land appeared unruly, bleak, you could say, “What do you expect? It was blown out a muskrat’s ass!”
The Québecois settlements of the coast have their own histories. Tales of original Indian missions and cod fleets; how the whalers first traded with the Innu, metal implements for a seemingly infinite harvest of furs; the arrival of sawmills and pulp plants. In Forestville an old log flume still cuts straight across town to the river.
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AT SEPT-ÎLES THE LAND ZAGS EAST, unfurling toward Newfoundland, toward the Labrador peninsula. The distance grows between towns, each feeling less ambitious than the last.
The terrain flattens into coastal plateau, home to a mix of Acadian, Innu, Francophone, and, as you travel further east to the Labrador border, Anglophone villages. Only half of this region is connected by road-and just recently. The paved 138 only arrived in the past decade. The villages east of Natashquan, where the 138 officially ends, are connected by container ships in summer; in winter travel improves, as a marked ice road provides an ideal route for snowmobiles.
Fresh laundry and Fleur de Lis flap serenely in the light maritime winds. Globular wooden lobster traps stacked three high and washtub Marys adorn the lawns. The crystalline blue of the sea almost matches the blue of the flags.
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INDUSTRIOUS HAVRE ST. PIERRE is a refugee town from another time, another Empire. Founded by displaced Acadian families in the mid-19th century who arrived via Îles de la Madeleine, the town announces its ethnic heritage fondly, with a predominance of tricoleur flags, and a star intended to symbolize the Virgin Mary-patron saint of the Acadians-set in the top left corner.
It’s one of those exceptions, a bustling northern town. I venture out onto Rue de L’Escale early enough one morning to witness a slow-moving train rolling toward the docks-ferrying iron oxide from the mine at Lac Allard 45kms north. A modest hospital that services much of the region enjoys pride of place near the water. Motel rooms are scarce; the beginnings of a Hydro Québec project at the Romaine River has brought a large influx of outside workers. The town is busy enough, in fact, that the fledgling tourism industry seems a bit out of place.
Luckily, the town sits across from Parc Mingan, an 85-kilometre archipelago of limestone islands that provide summer habitat for large populations of fin, minke and humpback whales. Strolling the beachfront boardwalk, one local tells me to stop and watch for a particular minke that often comes into the harbour at this hour. I’m more interested in the tides-we’ll be kayaking out to the islands today and need to figure out the most advantageous hour for our departure.
By the time we set off at mid-afternoon the waters are placid. Sun sparkles off the crest of each micro-wave. For the first half-hour we accustom ourselves to each other’s stroke, not always successfully, in our two-person kayak. I nearly pay for my irregular pace with a slap of a paddle blade to the back of my head. We navigate our way out of the channel and point the kayak southwest, toward a line of islands, one floating in the hazy shadow of the next.
Whales migrate to the region’s highly productive eco-system; the islands are geologically connected to an underwater gorge beneath the Jacques Cartier Strait that separates the archipelago from Anticosti Island. A large eddy at the western end of Anticosti helps make these waters among the most highly oxygenated in the St. Lawrence, drawing a highway of nutrients that begins further north in the Esquiman Channel and Straight of Belle Isle off Newfoundland. Capelin, herring and krill, the preferred food of minkes and humpbacks, are plentiful, sustaining stable, healthy whale numbers.
The first minke we spot is more than a hundred metres to our left, comfortably between us and open sea. Only its back arcs elegantly out of the water. It’s bigger than I expected: unconsciously, I look back and measure the distance to mainland.
I halt my paddle, and a moment later K. does, too. We float to a list, sitting slack-jawed, tracing the whale’s bobbing outline-and exchange mutual admissions of cosmic insignificance.
As we pick up the pace again, more minkes appear, cresting above the flatwater. The channel has turned into a shipping lane at rush hour, one calf trails its mother, two other minkes engage in watery play. Now another rises less than 50 metres away, slithering in the same direction as we are headed. It feels as though we are crossing into another frontier, a realm parallel to the one we normally occupy. The mainland recedes into the distance.
There are too many whales now to count—how do you distinguish one from another? Unease and wonder accumulate in my chest. The outer radius of the whales’ circle of activity progresses nearer. My paddle grip tightens. Then our bodies get used to this natural adrenalin, and the tension levels off.
Under my right armpit I notice a flush of rising water, and I turn. A whale’s back is cresting a mere paddle’s toss away-10 feet?-it is swimming with us now, and taking an eternity to complete its submersion. Ten metres of shiny black, prehistoric mammal smoothly glides through the water, scarcely causing a wave against our kayak.
I lay down my paddle and make to pull up my skirt.
K. doesn’t approve.
“You’re not going to take a picture. Put your paddle in the water.”
“C’mon. Nothing’s gonna happen.”
“How do you know? You don’t know. Keep moving!”
K. bobs as she thrusts her paddle forward into the water, hoping in one mighty lunge that we will make land. I, too, feel a rising a panic-not from any conscious fear, secure in the practical knowledge that a) he is probably just playing with us, b) has no interest in bumping our kayak, and c) has absolutely no interest in making us his snack. I caution K. to stay calm, and to paddle at an even pace. I repeat aloud the checklist that’s just passed through my mind.
Then I add:
“Think Free Willy!”
But there are times when the right-brain cannot beat back the primordial power of fear what’s bigger than you, and beyond your comprehension. Especially this far from land. I pick up the pace to match my heartbeat. We point the kayak toward the next island, still a half hour away, and keep looking straight at it.
“What’s that ahead?” K. asks.
There’s something motionless in the water ahead. The light hits it differently.
“I don’t know,” I say. “It doesn’t look like it’s moving. Maybe it’s a rock.”
Then the “rock” is gone.
“U-oh.”
“U-oh?”
“U-oh.”
But we’re past it. The whales move off, swimming fast seawards, leaving us with shot nerves. You imagine your reaction at seeing a bear, a rhino or a tiger up close, in the wild. You want to imagine you’ll be consumed with awe, that it will be transcending. But you can’t imagine how much it can scare the shit out of you, too.
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AFTER FOUR HOURS OF PADDLING we land at our campsite, in a bay on Île Niapiskau. Whales skim the horizon all evening, feeding just beyond the bay’s mouth. Running the capelin against the limestone shoals, and trapping them in their mouths. The pressurized puff of whale spray provides percussion for dinner.
Across the channel, visible on the mainland, is the town of Longue Pointe, home to the Mingan Islands Cetacean Study. The centre, founded by ex-New Englander Richard Sears, has become the focus of whale research in the region.
It was on a July 4th like this one, exactly 30 years ago, when Sears got his first taste of the archipelago. The summer of 1976 Sears was a young biologist participating in a salmon management project down the road in Moisie when he was invited to check out the Mingan Islands. Back then the lack of a road meant a four-hour drive, instead of today’s two, managing a 4-wheel drive over the riverbeds, then an occasional dirt road where one existed. But one day of watching minke and fin whales cavorting off the islands changed what Sears wanted to do with his life.
“I realized what a wonderful natural laboratory it was,” he tells me later. “That first day there was pivotal for my thinking about what I wanted to do.”
For the next three years he tried finding a way that would put him back in that laboratory, working. In 1979 he returned and pitched a tent on the beach at Longue Pointe not far from where a proper building for the centre sits today.
Even with all the research that’s been done, relatively little is known about the whales. Fin and minke populations have remained stable, while humpbacks have dramatically increased their presence. On the other hand, blue whales—the largest mammal to grace the earth—have almost disappeared entirely.
“In the early ’80s,” Sears says, “you would see at most five or ten humpbacks in a day. Now you might see, on a good day, 60 or 70. We know part of that is a baby boom, but also other adult whales migrating there, because the food is right for them. Splish is one whale I had ID’d back in ‘81-and she’s still there, and so are her off-spring.”
Sears the scientist, however, is circumspect about drawing firm conclusions based on the blue whales. It could be a domino effect of the changing food chain. “Maybe, but I say maybe, it has something to do with the collapse of the cod fishery. It could be an in-balance caused by the lack of sub-predators. Maybe the krill are getting hammered, and the blue whales don’t find what they need there anymore.”
As our campfire fades, and we finally tire of going back over what we saw that day, the whales are still at it, spitting their mist into the sky. For an Ontario urbanite it’s quite a switch to hear the lonely, emotive call of the loon from your sleeping bag replaced by the sound of the ocean breathing.
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THE BOYS FROM EXPEDITION AGAGUK-Gilles and Pierre-run a wood-panelled cantina out of their back office. After kayaking out of the islands through a thick obliterating mist, we arrive at their weather-beaten doors.
Agaguk is Gilles’ nickname, a reference to a famed Inuit character from Quebec literature. The locals gave it to him, he says, because they thought of him as “some mythical man from the North.” This, even though, he was born just outside of Montreal-which is where he met his future partner Pierre during the ice storm of 1995. “They needed people who could use chainsaws,” Pierre says.
It is easy to picture both men handling chainsaws with competence. Heroically carving away glissades of hard ice from homes and hydro towers. Tall Pierre, with his bear-like build and ruddy face, could easily pass for a lumberjack. Gilles, smaller, more tightly-wound with energy, the pint-sized explorer or river runner.
Gilles came here first and fell in love with the coast and its villages. He immediately recognized the opportunity to expand on the area’s growing sport-fishing industry with a kayaking operation. Down the coast, Pierre was studying wildlife habitat management in Beau Comeau. One invitation was all it took—Pierre who had never even kayaked before, visited once, and within two weeks was learning to pilot a kayak amidst the archipelago.
“I can live with solitude,” Pierre proudly announces over a local brew. “In fact I need some. Here, it’s a good place to live that way. You can always find a place to camp, to be alone.”
While the arrival of the paved road hasn’t diluted the promise of solitude it has changed the area. “Now everything is accessible. People who were tired of having to drive hours to get a litre of milk-a reason people might leave-now don’t have to.”
With the mine, hospital, fishing and new Hyrdo Québec projects there’s a new abundance of good jobs, says Pierre. “A lot of young people may go away to study in Montréal, Québec or Rimouski, but now more are coming back after their studies. Compare that to other towns that are dying.”
Both Pierre and Gilles confess something that Sears also admitted to me—that as migrants to the Côte Nord it hasn’t always been easy being accepted. Like many other places, locals were suspicious of the outsiders’ interest in the archipelago and now express surprise that they know these waters better than people who have lived here for generations. But over time they’ve integrated. “It helps,” Pierre says, “when you involve people from around here in your business. Then they’ll be more approving of your success.”
But despite the challenges, Pierre insists the people are integral to the region’s charm.
“Ultimately, they like the sea, they love this land. They are happy people, festive people. Like me.”
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THE ROAD TO NATASHQUAN IS NEWLY CHRISTENED WITH FRESH TARMAC. It delivers our car gently past the stands of sticky spruce and mossy carpets of bog. The unbroken paving reveals little of the duress our northern highways are prone to suffer. Inland, unsolved jigsaw patches of low-lying bush surrender to a contusion of hard rock hills. Eruptions of whale-back rock suggest the remnants of the life-lines Wolverine skipped along before this land of the Innu was created.
Natashquan has enjoyed this paved entrance since 1999. Throughout the town arrangements of coloured lights form the number “150″ in anticipation of its civic birthday celebrations. The aura of romance it exudes as the end of the road is enhanced by being the birthplace of nationalist singer-icon Gilles Vigneault.
As almost everywhere else in rural Quebec the church dominates town. Behind it the town cemetery. I wander the rows of graves, reading tombstones. The youngest deceased is 73 years old; most others lived into their 80s and 90s.
Thanks to Les Galets, the town is perfectly framed-a row of old white fishing shacks, its windows and doors now sealed with lobster-red plywood cladding, are perched solemnly at the end of a spit that unfurls into the Gulf. We split up to quietly wander the beach and shacks. Sprouts of long grass find purchase in small dunes near the shore. Due south, but invisible from here is Anticosti Island.
Back at the beach, three men and a woman huddle around a video camera. There is much gesticulating and animated discussion: a choreography is planned. Judging by their neat, styled appearance, they are a rock band shooting a music video. When I look over again, a few minutes later, I notice the girl singer is strolling off on her own toward Les Galets. She appears wistful, pensive. She hops along the water, face downcast, and the quiet pace of her step suggests a meditation.
Are they filming a scene? Maybe she’s only acting morose and contemplative for the camera. She’s playing out the same story as Claude Tremblay—The Girl from the North Country.
But then I look back at the guys, and they’re still horsing around with the camera. She’s in her own private movie. Like twenty-somethings everywhere, plotting their next grand move.
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THERE IS NOTHING SPECIAL TO ANNOUNCE THE END of the road beyond Natashquan. The “Fin” sign was removed last year. Without ceremony, Route 138 peters out a few kilometres past the town of Pointe Parent.
This ramshackle settlement, divided into Innu and Francophone districts, offers up little quaintness in the flat, noon-hour sunlight. The drab sight suggests the road ceased due to fatigue and indifference. Fenced off, the Innu section is a colourless compound of squat trailers and pre-fab homes.
The road ends officially at a cracked asphalt cul-de-sac. There’s a no parking sign. Set down in front of the encroaching bush where the road terminates, a yellow sign with a single black arrow points indecisively left and right.
Off to the side a wide gravel road carves through a dense tangle of forest. Wide enough to accommodate the highway extension being built to eventually connect the most northeasterly Côte Nord town of Blanc Sablon to the rest of the province. Without a sign to advise otherwise, we continue onward, timidly navigating the loose gravel. Far ahead is a rising bend in the road that eventually pulls the strip of grey rubble out of sight. On either side a riot of gnarled, ill-tempered spruce bush hunkers down. Dust clouds sit suspended in the noonday light, stirred up by trucks long since passed.
We arrive at a sign that says “Route en Construction/Entrée Interdit” and halt.
This is it, then. The only landmark acknowledging you’ve made it this far.
A handful of other cars crawl cautiously over the gravel behind us. The drivers not really sure where the road ends, at what point they must turn back. They lean forward into the glare of their dashboards, squinting and trying to read the signs. Nonplussed, they pull into pokey U-turns and retreat.
Nothing in this land gains the eye, except for clouds of black flies, and they’re such a vicious shock to the system that only a few minutes can be tolerated outside the car unprotected. Barely time for some quick snaps, posing under the construction sign.
Here’s the existential end to this road, then. No pretty scenery, no reclusive beach, no promontory. No finality, either. Just an improvised highway further onward into this boreal frontier-and black flies. The bugs of eternity. I imagine Vladimir and Estragon waiting for Godot in a soft mist of insects.
Invasion—the car doors open long enough to permit an infestation. We turn violent, smacking anything that moves with full force. We smack so many bugs dead, it’s as though the car has been turned inside out.
I relax back into my seat, examining the galaxy of bug guts splayed across our gummy windshield.
It’s still, now.
