Muskeg and Minke
Driving back from Kegaska, I kept looking for THE spot. Someplace I could get up high and do a 360 and really take in just how vast and flat this place is. Classic Wil asks me what I’m looking for and then finds it a few minutes later (like his parking horseshoe), pulling a 180 on the highway and wending his way up this granite quarry road. It looked a bit like a moonscape with a backhoe and different grades of rock around but once we got out and walked beyond the manmade destruction, it was exactly what I wanted. Massive, round lumps of pink granite sticking up above the landscape. Getting to the rocks was a bit of challenge through the aforementioned muskeg. No sprained ankles this time but we certainly never expected the moss to be what it was – a place where one can easily sink six inches before hitting something solid. Or not. The sponginess of the soil was insane. It was like walking on a memory foam bed. But one that forgot. As soon as your foot lifted out of the moss, it was like it had never been there. How deep one sank changed from step to step. Granite underfoot or six inches of sphagnum moss. Gingerly stepping our way, I literally stumbled upon this crazy plant. One I could only identify because of this amazing podcast with Joseph Pitawanakwat we’d listened to on our two 600 kilometre days to Kegaska. The pitcher plant. In the podcast, Joseph talks about how, in the Anishnaabe language, plants and animals often have names that tie them to place, like, in this case, a muskeg. He was in one particular community where the elders insisted they’d seen the pitcher plant, prized for its medicine, but they didn’t offer a lot of specifics as to where to find it. He looked and looked, with a whole group of schoolkids in tow. It sounded worse than looking for a needle in a haystack. In the end, he heard the song of a bird that he knew spent its life in the same environment as the plant. He played a recording for his students and they ended up zeroing in on the bird which lead them right to the plant. Anyhoo. In my nerdy, birdy way I found Mr. Pitawankwat super inspiring and then, inching my way through this crazy muskeg, there it was.
If a frog were a plant, it would be a pitcher plant, except instead of green it’s red and purple and deeply veined. Like a vase filled with water only with a scalloped, frilly hood to keep it from drying out. It is unlike anything I have ever seen. Case in point of a plant name doing a really good job of letting you know what it looks like. There it sat with a few of its friends, nestled into the sphagnum moss (which, in passing, can hold 30 times its weight in water!) just doing its thing.
When you actually get down low in this kind of landscape, so much pops out at you. Like there are berries everywhere. Little red berries, little white berries, little blue berries (that are not blueberries, although you’d definitely find blueberries here earlier in the season). The blue berries are juniper berries which, if you love gin half as much as I do (which is a lot) make you very excited. There’s no doubt that walking here makes one slow down. And bend one’s knees. And look. Really look. It makes me think of this interview I read with this anthropologist in the Judean Desert who found this intact Neolithic basket and the only reason she found it, she said, was because she squatted to pee. All the guys had missed it. There’s a lesson in there. Get low. Get slow.
We make our way down the coast stopping to camp outside Rivière au Tonnerre. Past a little cemetery (the dead in these towns always get the best views) to the top of a sand dune, we find a spot that’s a little on the windy side but super beautiful, tucked into the sea grasses. The town is scattered along the shore to the south of us. Directly below us is beach and these beautiful rocks framing a quiet cove. Big lumpy bits of pink granite colonized by different coloured lichen. I always thought lichen was like a dried out moss but it’s not. It’s actually two things. Fungi and alga, together. The alga does the photosynthesis and feeds the fungi and the fungi keeps the alga from drying out. 8% of the planet’s surface is covered in the stuff (!) and, I tell you, the more you look, the more you find. It’s everywhere. Without the flashy colours of deciduous plants, lichen provide the bulk of the colour spectrum in these parts. We rockhop as far as we can go, disturbing a bunch of herring gulls that are just hanging out. We watch them coast over a school of fish, biding their time ‘til they see what they want, dive for supper and then bob around in the surf to digest. I cannot get over any sane creature swimming in water this cold. Another cool fact we learned today is that gulls, like all birds, have a special gland on their skull that acts like a kidney to filter out salt. So they DO drink sea water and then pee out the extra salt through their beak. If you haven’t yet become addicted to the Ologies podcast, now’s the time.
The way the grass moves in the dunes is hypnotic. The wind is constant. Relentless. We feel like we’ve explored all there is to explore and then find another cove right next to ours. Another perfect beach. More rocks. More lichen. More beauty.
We settle into the van, counting our lucky stars that we have a perfect sunset to cap the day. The ripples on the fleuve look like they’re woven in silver. The sun sets at a different time than yesterday. An indication of just how far along the coast we have moved and there isn’t a cloud in the sky. I’d noticed a faint light behind the village earlier in the day and it turns out it is, in fact, a lighthouse of sorts. As dusk settles in, we find it illuminates the inside of the van and is bright enough to cast a shadow of the vehicle on the surrounding hills. It is brighter than a full moon and it is shining right into the van. I suppose our loss is some sailor’s gain.
In the morning, we find our way up to Grand Sault Falls, on the Rivière au Tonnerre. A fifteen-minute drive up a windy, sandy road and a quick walk down a steep path takes us alongside a churning, violent mess of water. This being hydroelectric land, much of the trail systems around the rivers are funded by HydroQuebec or one of its subcontractors and it’s funny to find the interpretive signs mentioning very little in the way of the ecological or historical significance of the falls but they often specify the kilowatt potential. I suppose this is an aptitude we have in spades in Quebec, assessing the hydroelectric output of a particular waterway. And while I don’t want to dismiss this amazing source of renewable electricity, it does seem somewhat demeaning to reduce these majestic and powerful wild rivers to a nothing but a capitalized resource.
We drove down through Maliotenam, an Innu reserve. The stop signs say Nakai, and we hear construction workers shouting to each other in Innu-aimun, which totally thrills me. Down the road to Moisie, a beautiful spit of wild beach that wraps around the end of the peninsula. We watched a mini murmuration of sea birds flit along the shore. It turns out birds in murmurations are only responding to the movements of the seven birds around them and so, while it looks like they are all moving in unison, it’s actually them moving with their little posse, and one posse responding to the next.
Back toward Baie Comeau and the terrain is cliffs and mountains again. Wild little lakes that could be in the backwoods of Maine. We stop at a real campground this time, on the Pointe aux Outardes, a little peninsula that juts out between the Fleuve and the shores of the Rivières aux Outardes. The campground is a not-for-profit nature centre with three groups of guests. A family reunion of five, a lovely couple from Ile de la Réunion humping their massive zoom lenses around in a frenzy to capture as much fauna as they can in ten days, and us. The centre has erected wooden walkways through the dunes and the woods and along the estuary to allow foot traffic without damaging the fragile ecosystems. Little trails with info-displays of local history and nature and killer views everywhere. The tide drops and the beach goes on forever. A stopping-off point for the traditional hunters coming off their winter traplines, it’s easy to see how this place would have been an amazing place to reunite with family after a long winter. It was definitely a welcome stop for us after four nights of wild camping. I can’t overstate just how pleasurable and extravagant a hot shower can feel.
The sunset is, again, a riot of orange and purple. How mother nature can get the whole spectrum of the rainbow into the inch above the horizon (yes, from a great distance) and keep it tasteful is a constant amazement to me. The stars are brilliant -- the Milky Way a bright swathe stretching out gloriously, mirroring the direction of the Fleuve. Wil makes an amazing dinner of Labrador cod and whelks and we sleep like babies.
We spend the morning strolling along the trails. We run into a couple of ‘stealthy’ partridge whose idea of hiding is to stand mostly still. A few minutes later, Wil hustles me off the path because a massive porcupine is lumbering toward us. It wouldn’t have taken that much to convince me it was a black bear cub, it was so big. I’d never seen one moving around before and was surprised at how long its limbs and tail were and what a struggle the creature seemed to have coordinating them all to get where he wanted to go. They can live until their late 20’s, it turns out. I hadn’t realized that their first line of defense is poofing their quills and chattering their teeth. Followed by a stinkbomb (who knew?) and, if all else fails, attack! I don’t think you’d have to run very fast to avoid the latter but I’m pretty happy we didn’t experience a porcupine fart either.
Heading back down the coast, we debated Haute-Gorges vs. Grands Jardins, or skipping across the river for the full experience and coming back via Gaspésie. We’d totally forgotten about the paradis that is Paradis Marin, which is where we are now. #53. Cap 1. Our usual spot. Sitting in our camping chairs with beer and binoculars. Totally engrossed in the variety and multitude of water birds, watching the spouting of the minke whales and taking in the awe-inspiring beauty of the mighty Fleuve.
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