It was not our typical island trip. I hesitated to bring diving gear and at the end of the day decided against it. Mostly out of temperature and currents concerns, that was probably wise.

L’Isle Verte is a small island situated across the Saguenay Fjord close to the St-Lawrence river’s south bank. It’s the kind of place where if you don’t like the weather you just have to wait fifteen minutes and it is only accessible by a tide timed ferry. Big ferry if there’s a car to shift, small boat if it’s only people. The ride can be smooth as glass or really really bumpy. As in, please go inside the cabin sir, it’s about to shake a little. Sailors have cool euphemism.

There are currently about 49 people living year round on the 13 km long island, and I’m thinking the winters there must be brutal. Once the ferry stops running in November there’s a helicopter service for essentials and emergencies, but it does not run daily, and locals did not seem to know that much about it. There used to be an ice bridge, but global warming and all that. Last winter the river only froze for about two weeks in January and people either crossed on foot or on ski-doos, no cars.

L’Isle Verte is not that far, about 460 km from Montreal, but you may as well be in a different country and in a different time.  The pace of life is certainly more relaxed, it might be cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey (a legitimate naval expression), but it still runs on island time. The isle itself is currently officially called Notre Dame des Sept Douleurs, which translates into Our Lady of the Seven Pains (or Hurts?), but it used to be called L’Isle Verte or Green Island.

Today, L’Isle Verte technically refers to the village on the mainland in front of the island and not to the island itself. Go figure.

Friends invited us for the weekend, to stay at what is literally the very last house on the island, after that it’s pretty much rocks and water until France. We were promised strong winds, salty spray and many many variations of blue. How could we say no to that?

We left early enough on Friday in order to make the only ferry of the afternoon/evening at 1930. A night in a no-tell motel on the side of the river had some charm, but it was not what we were hoping for, so I included a generous time buffer into the schedule and we headed north-east.

We got to the small village well ahead of the ferry, decided to check out the dock first and then see the town. Except for an old man in a white minivan playing 45 rpm records on a turntable (very David Lynch), the dock was empty and the small fishing boats (for urchins I believe) silent.

An old Dodge pick-up with a rather makeshift crane on top stood guarding the boats.

Comfortable with our knowledge of how to get to the dock and the ship, we went to see the hamlet and have a beer. This being Friday evening we figured it would not be too difficult. We were right. In a really small village the bar isn’t hard to find.

Those small Québec villages are pretty much all built around a massive church, way bigger than anything you’d expect for its current, or past, population, and it is simply staggering to realize how central churches used to be to life in Québec, and how forgotten and almost useless they are now. I mean, we’ve seen in recent years petitions to stop bells from ringing because people complained it was too damn loud. Good grief.

It was of course not just (or even primarily I imagine) the exclusively religious function of churches, but the social one that made them so important. It’s where you met the community once a week, it’s why you bathed and dressed up, it’s where you got news of neighbours and the outside world, it was, in fact, facebook. It even came with its own form of spam. I would conjecture that the reason small American villages don’t have those massive churches is because of the variety of Christian denominations, which divides the community’s resources for building. While Québec was pretty much monolithically Catholic, making it easy to pool money into a single building project. Well, that would have been one factor anyways, the basic tendency towards less ostentation/physical aspects of worship among Protestants might be the other one.

So we stepped into the first bar we found, simply called the 109 after its street address, to have a brew. It’s one of only two pubs we saw in the village, the other being at the no-tell motel.

When you live in urban centres in Canada, it is easy to forget how much of the country is made up of little communities with a completely different way of living, with a completely different set of needs, worries and attitudes. Literally 5 minutes after we went up to the bar to have our beers, a gentleman started telling us all about his somewhat exciting day. It involved almost tipping a semi-trailer and not going home in a hurry to his slightly fat wife (but it’s great because her wrinkles don’t show), because since he lost a lot of weight (he showed us all his ID cards to prove it, including dynamite permits), his wife’s libido had gone through the roof. There you go. This is not disparaging him in any way, au contraire, it’s an appreciation for a different way of being. All through our brief stay, there was this immediacy of contact with people, this lack of pretense or filter and no bullshit directness. You like it or you don’t. All the people we talked to were quite nice, polite, even the tired and a little surly fishmonger exhausted by a busy season. Need a tool to fix a bicycle? Just knock on any door, if they can help you they will.

After a few beers and a lengthy talk about the finer points of righting a tipping rig carrying stuff for wind turbines using a backhoe, we went back to the dock. We left the car there for the weekend with some clever advertisement.

We even took a selfie. Beer makes you do the craziest things.

The sun was going down and the ferry, the Peter Fraser, so named for the initiator of the lighthouse on the island, a man also known for designing an early plan for the use of beacons all along the river, was just coming into view.

Through the years and for a bunch of reasons, I’ve had the opportunity, sometimes the pleasure (other times less so) of spending quite a bit of time on boats and ships, even sinking one. I am quite fond of them in general. A smallish but well-designed ferry, the Peter Fraser carried us smoothly across the river. It was dark by the time we got to the other side.

We arrived to an empty dock, except for the two people waiting for us.

Once we left the jetty it got properly dark in a hurry, the kind of dark you never ever get in the city, because if you did, you would probably quickly have plenty of light from burning cars. The stars, even with the half moon high in the sky were unbelievable. A book I recently read, Star.Ships by Gordon White,  posits the important role of stars in the emergence of humankind’s culture. Among other things, the author wonders how the sky must have looked during the last ice age, what with zero light pollution  and a lot of atmospheric moisture locked up in the glaciers. I have been thinking about this, it must have been almost psychedelic.

That was one of the things one my mind as we sat under our stars in unseasonably warm weather, listened to the waves, breathed in the briny air and the fragrant seaweed. We looked at the Pleiades through binoculars (awesome), spotted planets and shooting stars and drank a little. Good times.

Morning came awfully fast, especially when your bedroom window faces due east and does not have curtains. There was no use trying to get any more shut eye. Maybe we stayed up a touch later than we should have, oh well.

We figured we might as well take the opportunity to walk as far as there was land. Where were my boots?

It that was a most pleasant start to the day. I half expected to find standing stones somewhere.

Because my wife is so much smarter than me, after we reached the tip of the island, as I was pretty much lollygagging in my Celtic fantasy, she asked: “So what about the tide?”  And I was like, “It’s all good”,  but still we started going back without dragging our feet too much. Turns out that in another twenty minutes we would have probably had to swim (or at the very least wade in frigid waters) back to the house. Damn city folk.

After a tasty breakfast where coffee played a major role, we headed to what is certainly the island’s most renowned man made feature, the lighthouse.

It’s sort of a cool story. Peter Fraser shows up from Scotland in Québec City around 1775, the Americans are attacking the city and actually burn down his boat, he ends up taking part in the defence of Québec, he was 16 then and had been sailing since the age of eleven. A few years later he starts lobbying the government to build a series of lighthouses on the river, including one on L’Isle Verte, he gets no traction, but for the three years he kept a fire burning where the current lighthouse stands there are no ship wrecks there. Before and after that period, however, tales of ships floundering unto the rocks abound, sometimes with happy results for the islanders, as when that cargo of rum and sugar washed ashore, and predictably sometimes less so.

It’s not until 1806 that the government of Lower Canada (remember your history?) orders the construction of the lighthouse which is completed in 1809 and still stands today. It is the first one on the St-Lawrence river and the third oldest surviving in Canada. More incredibly, from 1827 to 1964 the lighthouse is kept by four generations of one single family, the Lindsays. How cool is that? An automated beacon is installed in 1969 and the job/career/vocation of lighthouse keeper goes the way of the dodo. The lighthouse is still operated by the Coast Guard today and the house next to it is one of the places where you can spend the night on the island.

We were minding our own business, chillin’ on the rocks with a pair of wild geese, when a bunch of whales showed up to make this the best day ever. Looks like a large group of fin whales, or common rorquals, were swimming around the river (it is salt water at this point) looking for food. You could hear their bellows, see their tales splashing and their fins above the surface as they dove. Fantastic.

Granted they were quite far out, but it was still an amazing experience. We only decided to boogie because we needed some salmon for the evening and the fish store is open, for real, only two hours a day, from noon to one and three to four, and the lady wasn’t going to wait for us and said as much. No filter, at least you know where you stand.

Fisheries used to be a big part of this island’s life. Traditional smokehouses can be seen throughout, but they are no longer functioning, not enough fish (our bad) and they need too much wood. Smaller capacity smokers are used instead.

Back at the house we were greeted by what we thought at first to be a seal, then a rock, then a seal on the rock. Everyone was right. The seal just laid there in the sun, catching rays for hours until the rising tide knocked him off his rock as we were slowly sipping cocktails. Pretty much everything we did this weekend, with one notable exception, was on the slow side.

There’s something unique to the rhythms of island life, no matter where the island is, when there’s no bridge or tunnel to the mainland the speed of life inevitably changes. Time is measured in bigger chunks, days or half days, basically intervals between ferries. You missed the morning boat at 10:30? Get ready to spend another night on the island.

The next morning it was not the blazing sun but an angry thunderstorm that woke us. Though the rain soon dried up, the howling winds stayed with us for the rest of the day. We could not get to the ferry landing by car because, inexplicably, the battery had died during the night, so we left our luggage with our hosts and took a pair of bicycles to the dock. We made it in time, though it was touch and go for a while, especially as one of the bikes was far more fit for the junk heap than for riding. We made the ferry landing in time and were told to get into the smaller taxi boat, as only 8 people were crossing to the mainland. We settled in on the deck but the captain asked us inside as the wind was picking up. The smell of smoked fish was heavy and pleasant in the cabin.

A third of the way across the river it seemed one of the engines gave out, sounded like a busted air hose or something, the captain had a precious WTF? look on his face and we started going much slower.  I tell you, it’s never boring to travel with us, but we get where we’re going.

We took the small roads back home and stopped along the way to eat, buy a ton of funky smoked fish and even some bison meat at a farm.

As we reached the point in the St-Lawrence where the fresh water mixes with salt water, the river became muddy brown. I knew it was pretty much back to a significantly faster pace of life from that moment,  the ocean feel was replaced by the river and I wasn’t sure which one suited us best. The metaphor was complete when we pulled off the little roads and unto the Transcanadian highway. I had thoughts of the pros and cons of living in small faraway communities in the age of high-speed internet and how those small villages might fare in the future. Condos are showing up in weird places, and yet there was a huge number of houses for sale.

In the end I guess where you live matters less (within reason of course) than what you bring to the place. Perhaps our enjoyment of life comes from us and less from our circumstances, not the other way around, maybe that’s part of the secret, after that it’s just a matter of knowing your priorities.

See you soon Ocean.