abercorn gold

La Côte Nord

The maples and the splashes of colour dwindle, replaced by birch and their golden  leaves quaking in the breeze. The only contrast to the black spruce, gnarled and stunted, scabs of lichen and decorated with garlands of wispy spanish moss. The soil is an inch deep. One good kick and you’d wipe away a hundred years’ of topsoil and moss.

 

The fleuve. Vast. Majestic. Glittering in the sunshine. How can you feel anything but insignificant, watching it flow past. Herring gulls jockey for position on the one spot in the sun, bullying each other off the rocks with comical squawks, the immature birds with their buff feathers ceding the spot to their white elders. Flocks of eider scoot past, strung in long lines, frantic wingtips brushing the surface of the water.

The river is a broad band of colour across the horizon, in a million shades of grey, interrupted from time to time by a small cloud that appears and, for a few seconds, hovers over the dark water. The size of the puff of mist, basically whale snot, determines who made it. On this lucky weekend, a minke is responsible for the smaller ones and the bigger spray belongs to a humpback. We get to know the difference between the two, the shape of their tail fin, the minke’s more like a jester’s hat while the humpback’s like the thorn of a rose. The sheer size of these creatures is enough to take your breath away. Hours of staring at the unbroken surface of the water, everyone waiting  for a glimpse or the telltale sound and soon all eyes are trained on that puff, knowing we’ll get three or four more. The minke, inky black, moves more gracefully, a body length or more between dips. The humpback lumbers, bobbing and sinking more than moving forward, up comes its massive head, the blow hole distends as it expels air, then collapses as it slowly sinks, barely below the surface. A real life giant, the breadth of what little we see of its back a hint of the spectacular mass under water. Seeing the tail fin means the creature is diving and we all settle in to wait for its next appearance. Just once, we are treated to the show of a tail, broadside, the very tips crusty with barnacles. Barnacle species are whale

specific. There is only one species that lives on humpbacks. They hitch a ride during mating season when the whales hang out in shallow, warm water. A humpback can be host to 1,000 pounds of barnacles. Seems like a lot until you consider that the whales weigh up to 80,000 pounds. The equivalent of them wearing clothes.

Every once in a while a sea lion’s head pops up above the surface. It bobs in the 4 degree water, scouting around and then disappears. A beluga also makes an appearance. Jarringly white, even from a distance and although submerged one can watch the creature move along the river, its icy whiteness turning the dark waters above him a pale green.

 

The coast a fun obstacle course of boulders. Up, down, into the surf and back. A single starfish. Splayed out on a rock. Perhaps a seagull bit off more than it could chew.

Clouds look like a child painted them on the sky. The wind turbines on the opposite shore 35 km away, glint in the late day sun.

 

Rock in sections, crisp lines delineating strata. Geology I don’t understand. All this was once a sea until a shift in the plates tipped the water back into the ocean. Smooth grey stone. Ribbons of chunky pink, the texture all wrong, cut through the grey, weaving its way across the shore, in and out of dips and gullies. Worn smooth over millennia, perfect pockets for water to collect. 

Minuscule creatures skitter through the clear pools. Tiny, perfect ecosystems. Limpets clinging to the surfaces crunch underfoot. Like arriving at someone’s cottage with a table laid out with a huge jigsaw puzzle with pieces too big to move. Very satisfying and grounding. The Canadian Shield has always been home.

 

Aurora borealis, champagne shimmer, fingers of light burst from the horizon, like the headlights of a car driving past seen through a gauzy curtain. Visible ripples of energy coming from the sun, connecting overhead, making shapes like Christmas angels. Talking to our neighbours in the morning, no one else has seen it. Thank you, small bladder.

Drive up the coast, through villages stretched along the only road. Lots of glassed-in shelters and carports tacked on to the sides of homes. Impressive piles of firewood. How the wind must howl up the fleuve in the long, dark months of winter. Behind a line of trees to the north, bundles of peat moss sheathed in white plastic, like soldiers in formation waiting to be shipped out, covering many football fields. One of the world’s best carbon sinks, peat bogs store twice the carbon as all of the planet’s forests combined. Any disturbance to the soil turns these amazing photosynthesizers from carbon sinks into carbon emitters. 12,000 years’ worth of carbon released so gardeners can loosen the soil in their flower beds.

Rivière à Saute Mouton, a rock face battered by water, the shapes of spring rivulets etched into the face. One of countless waterways that feed the fleuve which, with all its tributaries, counts for 20% of the world’s fresh surface water. The vestiges of concrete piers meander down the rock face, on the slope along its side and out into the fleuve. The skeleton of a flume, the bay too shallow to load a boat, the loggers created a structure to transport the lumber far enough off shore to load them. How the pillaging of their forests must have horrified the Innu. What a different place this would be with old growth. We wander along a beach that emerges at low tide, the sand strewn with seaweed and enough sea glass to keep me hunched over for an hour, my pockets barely able to hold my treasure.

It was all treasure. Two days of heaven. 

Thank you fleuve.