La Côte Nord
The soil isn’t soil. It’s sand. The texture of breadcrumbs. A very fine layer of topsoil perches atop it. Not even topsoil. It’s moss. Moss and lichen and the life that has grown on top of it and because of it. We listen to a podcast with Robin Wall Kimmerer, the author of Braiding Sweetgrass, and she explains that moss is the first colonizer. The soil maker. The moist, soft bed where seeds and spores land and flourish. I hadn’t realized that moss doesn’t even have roots. All its business is done on the topside. It pulls all the moisture and nutrients it requires out of the air. It has adapted to survive on 5% of the light spectrum. Sperm and egg find each other in the little water circulating above ground. It is the beginning of everything and the end of everything and it is everywhere.
The Fleuve, when it makes an appearance along the road, takes my breath away, golden beaches, coves with black boulders scattered in the shallows, green water shimmering in the sun. The woods that line the lovely, sinewy roads look impenetrable. Black and white spruce, poplar and birch vie for space, leaving very little room for anything else. Even a machete wouldn’t get you through these woods. The light seems to reach in an arm’s length and then it’s just blackness, or a green so dark it seems black. The little underbrush is yellow and orange. Sumac and snowberry getting ready for winter. The trees seem to have more lichen on them than needles. Big scabs of pale green oakmoss on their trunks and branches, bristly beard lichen hang in tufts. The ditches are sand or bog. Cars and pickups are parked on tracks that snake off into the woods. Everyone is out for the first weekend of the moose hunting season. The moose haven’t caught on yet. Heads and racks strapped to dozens of cars and ATVs.
The bright red sugar maples that popped against the spruce further south and west have disappeared. Every few minutes the side of the road opens up to reveal a lake, little or large, inky depths, the kind of bottom that smells like rotten eggs when you step out of your canoe. The spruce crowd the edges like they’re being pushed by the trees behind them. When it’s not lakes, it’s rivers. Not little streams like the Richelieu or the Yamaska but beds a kilometre wide that streak past you on their way to the Fleuve. The water moves so fast. There is nothing welcoming or meandering. It is in a rush and it’s all wildness. I can’t even fathom what these waterways must be like in the spring thaw. The view opens up for just a second so you have to choose whether to look left, at the mighty river, or right, where it meets the mammoth Fleuve. I find myself thinking I’m happy we have to take the same road out so I get to see both sides.
The few towns feel funny because there are just no trees. The houses look like they’ve been plunked down in a field and I can’t help thinking about them in the howling winter wind. These are hardier folk than me. Living in their accessorized mobile homes and bungalows riding out what must be a brutal winter. If the snow poles and the man-made wind breaks that line the 138 are any indication, it gets deep and it blows. Carports are lined with huge pieces of colourful carpet to make the sand stay put. Woodpiles and skidoos stand ready for what’s coming.
Creative cottage industries appear. A fishing pond dug into someone’s lawn, a little bridge jutting out over a big pool seeded with trout. One municipality has built a huge obelisk and life-sized fiberglass dinosaurs to tempt passersby. Wil says the “no camper van” signs have appeared since Covid, when Quebecers who couldn’t get to their regular summer holiday places south of the border invaded Gaspésie and the Côte Nord.
We spend our first night in Godbout. Getting the directions wrong, we head down a little dirt road through some sizeable puddles and find a little clearing along the Godbout River just inland of where it meets the St-Laurent. We are all alone. It is very quiet. The river has a wide beach that goes forever. It looks deceivingly calm but a stick thrown in upriver sails past us at a clip. We are cozy on our new mattress and sleep ten hours in a shot.
Huge swathes of squat forest are mowed to make room for giant towers bringing hydroelectricity hither and yon. Behemoths in any other setting, they are dwarfed by the landscape that rolls on and on and on. We tune into the local radio station, getting static until finally the sounds of voices singing an endless monotonous song in unison and then a priest preaching about l’amour de Dieu. I follow our route, flipping a consecutive string of pages of the mapbook. There are no pages for what lies north of us because there are no roads. When you spend a whole day driving and barely make a dent (of the small part with of Quebec with maps in this book) you come to appreciate just how gigantic this province is.
After Sept-Iles, the spruce start shrinking. We could reach the tips of the tallest trees with our hands and they get fewer and farther between.
We stop to check out the falls on the River Manitou. We walk down a poorly indicated path, the wood floor a brilliant green blanket of creeping snowberry and bunchberry, feather and peatmoss. One podcast and I’m feeling like the moss is the star of the show as the trees would never have found purchase here without them. A rumble in the distance turns into thunder and we come upon a dramatic set of falls. The volume of water is indescribable. I can’t help thinking of the damage it would do to an unsuspecting canoeist. We follow a series of staircases down into the valley, thinking they will lead us to a better view of the falls or at least let us stretch our legs a bit. One staircase leads to another and as the rumble of the first set of falls subsides, another louder rumble takes its place. We finally arrive in the crook of the valley and find a waterfall that makes the first look puny. Just the mist being kicked up by the water gushing into the valley floor shoots thirty feet up. The air is heavy with spray. Suddenly the very healthy moss makes sense.
For what seems like a hundred kilometres, the trees are bare skeletons. Little clumps of charred needles clinging to the very tops. A massive forest fire ripped through here in 2013, leaving the burgeoning tourist infrastructure in ashes. With slow-growing trees and a very short growing season, it looks like it happened yesterday. We cross over the Pontbriand River and suddenly everything is green again.
The sandy soil gives way to huge lumps of granite and endless bog. Lichen covers every inch of the pink rock -- scales of pale green to deep burgundy and everything in between. The flat land is rosy muskeg cut through with a maze of round ponds that reflect the bright clouds and the setting sun. A huge obstacle course one could never learn by heart. A walk in the dark would be a soggy adventure of swearing and sprained ankles
It is eery and unsettling. It is so unlike anywhere I’ve been before. My inner compass feels all wonky and I feel vulnerable. The last forty kilometres of washboard makes me grateful for the pickup in front of us (even if it’s going too slowly) because it will be there if we break down.
We finally make it to the literal end of the road. Kegaska is a tiny fishing hamlet on a peninsula that dangles off the mainland into the Fleuve. We follow a rough little track that leads us to the west side and come upon a cove and a perfect sunset setting. It’s low tide. Granite ribbed with quartz reaches out into the surf. Gentle waves break every which way. The shore is littered with empty urchins that that been gobbled up by gulls. Around the point is a wreck. The bow of a ship, further up the rock than seems possible, steel mast intact, its rusty shell bleeding ocher all over the rocks. We get out our chairs and some wine and watch the sun set on Quebec.
Comments