cycling from Montreal to the Gaspésie

Several people asked me whether R would write about his cycling trip. He's done one better (IMO) by doing some sketches. I include a couple of my favourite here, as well as the link to his blog where you can find an account of his travels, the places he saw and people he met en route--with more sketches! Not bad for a Dollarama sketchpad, a pen and his finger. He was travelling light.

https://pointesaintcharles.blogspot.com/2021/07/cycling-from-montreal-to-gaspe-riviere.html

I direct you to his blog for more. https://pointesaintcharles.blogspot.com/2021/07/cycling-from-montreal-to-gaspe-riviere.html

back home in the garden

Some of you will know that R is cycling from Montreal to our house in the Gaspé. The trip is approx 800 k. Now, as I write, he has less than 100 k to go. He's been doing valiantly, because it's far and he's cycling into a headwind that gusts up to 35k according to the weather app--and his windburn. He also had a problem with a tire on the first day. He hasn't been able to replace it since bike repair shops are either out of stock or closed when he's cycling by. So he's cycling with a patched tire. Fingers crossed that it holds. I won't write about his trip here, because it's his story which he will tell himself when he gets back.  

I've been at home working, having a private writer's retreat, doing whatever suits me. If I want eggs and toast for supper, but I had them last night, that's fine, I can. I am still getting out for walks but at erratic times.  

It's also that time of year in the garden. I have basil ready to harvest which means making pesto. I saw bushes heavy with gooseberries yesterday when I was out walking and I'm wondering about getting some gooseberries at the market to make jam. 

In the garden the tomatoes are only starting to pop fruit. The onions are twice as high as they were last year at this time. I have lots of hot peppers, a couple of different varieties. 

For now, I long to get to back to writing...  

Here's the pic R sent this morning. Sainte Flavie, Quebec. 

cycling cycling cycling

We packed overnight bags, rented a car, and escaped the city for a couple of days.  

Monster fern, butterflies, dragonflies, dappled sunlight. A beaver dam in the river where we had lunch. 

We saw a deer springing about, tail flashing white. I didn't know deer had such long tails. I've looked it up and see that Whitetail Deer have tails up to 36 cm/14".  

Cardinals called from the trees--"Chew Chew Chew"--but stayed hidden. Turtles warmed their shells in the sun.

I stopped to take a pic of a pond of water lilies not yet blooming, still in bud. A man with a Provençal accent who was cycling by--presumably not all the way from France--stopped to tell me that I should return in a week when the lilies will be blooming and the entire marsh will be yellow, but I won't be here next week. Maybe next year.

We rented a room in an auberge, which I was excited about since I haven't slept anywhere but in my home since before the pandemic. I like renting rooms, even though I have a lot of bad hotel/motel/B&B/Airbnb memories. Faulty plumbing, drunken patrons, saggy bed, thin walls, all-night traffic, NO BEDSIDE LAMP FOR READING. Even if people go to hotels to have sex, don't they still read before falling asleep?

The auberge was a heritage building. Every effort had been made to retain a sense of history--or at least age--including floors that tilted and stairways that creaked, while at the same time equipping each room with a mini-fridge, a Keurig machine, an a/c unit, a firm mattress. I have no complaints but am happy that I'll be sleeping at home tonight.

Here's my cycling buddy about to dip his head in the water. It's something he does.  

first cycle of the year

Toward the end of April is when we usually get out for our first cycle. *Our* first cycle. R has been out many times already. I don't have as much energy nor endurance as he does. Though I think I do pretty well given my cardiac irregularities and that I'm an older spring chicken. 

I wasn't sure how far I was ready to go today, but I have a dangling carrot mentality and had secretly promised myself a croissant au chocolat and a latte at a certain café halfway. 

We followed the Lachine canal for some post-industrial urbanscape, stopped at the aforementioned café in Lachine, and then crossed over to the river.  Greys and greys, sometimes silvery, winter ochres and browns, only the rare fresh sprigs of greenery. Lots of magnolia trees!  

R and I were sitting on a bench when a woman walking along the path called across that with my hair so short, it would be very easy to dye. Any colour I wanted. Now, what colour would that be? R suggested my original strawberry blond. Not, he assured me, that he minded it grey. 

Oddly enough, I'd noticed the natural hair dye only yesterday when in the Branche d'Olivier, a healthfood store. But the colour I was looking at was called Sunset Red. I mean, if I'm going to dye it... 

I was, of course, wearing a helmet while cycling. 

Those little black bugs that fly up your nose when you're cycling? It's still too early in the year for those, but R pointed out that wearing masks against Covid will finally solve that problem. 

Once we got home, I collapsed on the bed for a snooze. He made a grocery list and cycled off across the city. 

  

cycling in the spring / Tomifobia 2020

An exchange with a friend about sliding her kayak into the reeds to READ reminded me that I never posted these pics of a bicycle trip we did on our anniversary in mid-May. Our one trip out of the city since the start of the pandemic.

Restrictions about travel between the regions (of Quebec) had just been lifted, and R surprised me with a car rental and a map of the bicycle trail from Ayer's Cliff to Tomifobia. The drive would take a little over an hour, we could bring our food and return home in the evening.

Except for grasses, little had started growing. Trees were only in bud. But after a few months of nothing growing, a little feels so promising.

I saw the first butterflies of the year. They were white, nothing extraordinary, but the first.

Birds were nesting. Lots of exuberant birdsong.

A man was pushing a baby stroller along the path, but he had no child. The stroller was for a camera with a long telescope lens.

There were brilliant yellow marsh marigolds. You had to look for the red trilliums where the sunlight picked them out.

I wasn't surprised to find this boulder since we were in Louise Penny territory. Obviously a mystery.

By noon the sun was high and bright. Much of the path followed the Tomifobia River but there were swampy areas where frogs hummed. I thought the sun must have lulled them. I used to sleep in a bedroom with a window on a swamp, and the nighttime noise of bullfrogs doing their throat balloon bellowing and droning was loud and competitive. This was more of a companionable purring. I described the sound to my mother who used to photograph frogs (long story which I might tell one day), and she said that was the sound of contented females.

R had reserved a bench for lunch under the hemlock trees, view on the river. Fresh baguette, cheese, nuts, carrots, fruit.


I didn't think it at the time--I was too hungry--but the picture reminds me that one of the first things R did for me when we met was offer to cut and core an apple. Almost forty years later, he still carries a Swiss knife. It's not the same knife. He's lost a few going through airport security and forgetting the knife in his pocket. He's cutting me cheese here.

look closer / montreal june 2020

You're walking and your eye yanks at your brain and says, Hey look, look again, look closer.

          I added my own photo-edited graffiti to this one created by Dodo (upper right corner):

  

This used to be a Bank of Montreal, built in 1901 in Pointe St. Charles by Andrew Taylor, closed as a bank I don't know when, bought by an individual rumoured to be a McGill professor who lives there now. He kindly makes the large hall, where people used to see tellers to do their banking, available to the PSC Community Theatre for performance space.
The scallop pediment over the main door is being restored. Cf the image below, taken by Alexis Hamel in 2010.

However, the building wasn't what caught my attention as I walked past.

Still working their way through pizza.

Here, I could narrow my focus to pretend I'm seeing a Great Blue Heron in the wilds. Not fishing, probably resting after a long morning of standing on one leg, neck outstretched to mimic a tree and fool the fish. Do herons shift from leg to leg when they get tired? I wonder.

But I haven't even left Montreal. Along the shore, mere metres away, is the bike path, which these days is busy with cyclists, rollerbladers, pedestrians with or without baby strollers and/or dogs, flocks of Canada Geese, skateboarders, even the odd illegal motorcycle.

So this is what I really saw.

For better or worse, birds have learned to coexist with humans, their various activities, structures, habits, even their garbage and pollution.


Or have had coexistence forced upon them.



Question is: will humans learn to coexist--with each other, with other creatures, with the world we live in? Or wait until everything crashes around us.

         

ps I cheated. One of the above pics was taken in July.

solstice cycle / Montreal / St. Lawrence River

I haven't been cycling in Montreal yet this year because there were too many people on the paths. However, it's been a tradition (if only in my own mind) that we go for a cycle for summer solstice.

I like to go in the early evening when the sun is behind us, and our shadows stretch far ahead. We cycle into them. Or *I* cycle into mine. I don't know what R is thinking. With the steep angle of early evening sunlight, the contrast of white foam against darker water is high. The white looks almost phosphorescent.

However, this year it is very hot. Right now, as I write, it's 33C (91F) at 5 pm. The sun is brilliant. I knew I would be unlikely to get on a bicycle. So we went this morning.

I didn't chase my shadow. The rapids weren't phosphorescent. They're not even very high because the river is low. But I cycled past my favourite view of the St. Lawrence around the island of Montreal.

I had to stop to take a pic of this table. A printed tablecloth, a vase with some branches. So hopeful that someone will come sit and maybe have lunch, even though the sun is high and the grass is scorched. Behind the trees is the river.

Here's me with Kahnawá:ke across the river in the background. Last fall I did a walk, organized my friend Matthew Anderson, across land from which the Mohawk had been expropriated. A walk like that isn't much, but it's a way of being aware that this act of violence was done.
https://alicezorn.blogspot.com/2019/10/walking-from-kahnawake-to-montreal.html

And after today, the days begin to get shorter again.

cycling across and under bridges / montreal

Today we crossed from the island of Montreal to Île des Soeurs (aka Nuns' Island), and from there across a narrow bridge that spans the St. Lawrence River. This narrow bridge, called L'Estacade, is a little over 2 k long. It was built in the mid-1960s to block/control the force of the ice in the St. Lawrence. In English I've heard it called the ice bridge. It's been replaced by a new Estacade that's a dedicated bike path.




The bridge it was protecting, the Pont Champlain, has *recently* been replaced. Construction began in 2015. The new bridge was finally opened for traffic this past weekend. The old bridge will be demolished. 

We cycled as far as another island, Île Sainte-Hélène, passing under another bridge, Pont Victoria. The Victoria was the first Montreal bridge to cross the St. Lawrence, also the longest bridge in the world at the time of its construction 1856-1859. It's a narrow bridge by today's standards, and taking it is an obstacle course because of ongoing repairs and construction. Nevertheless, it's the bridge we take when we head to the Gaspé.

And though you won't be able to make it, here's a picture of the FARINE FIVE ROSES sign from the other side of the river. 

cycling / montreal

My bike and I, we are neither of us so young anymore, but on the second longest day of the year we cycled 35 k.

A few weeks ago R gave my bike a tuneup, new brake cables, and adjusted the gears. My knees could have used a tuneup and adjustment too.

No matter. I have a simplistic dangling-carrot mentality and can spur myself on with the prospect of the ice cream I'll have at halfway point. Coming home I think of wine and a bbq. A lovely, hot shower to slough off the exoskeleton of salt.

The river is still high--unusual for this time of year. Trees that are normally along the shore have their trunks half a metre or more underwater.

People were out strolling, cycling, inline skating, reading on benches, having picnics. I regret not getting a pic of the man cycling with a Chihuahua on the front-mounted kiddie seat of his bike. The dog was up on front legs on the handlebars/prow of the bike, ears flared, eyes fixed like a bold, brave figurehead. A happy dog with a sense of purpose.

I only recently discovered the name is Chihuahua. All these years I thought it was Chichihuahua.