Now at Ste. Flavie

This holiday gets better and better! Tonight I'm writing my blog with a view through the open window down to the waves breaking on the south shore of the St Lawrence: can you hear them? We have a double room with a balcony at La Gaspésiana, brought here by a shuttle van that picked us up at Mont Joli airport and drove us down the hill to this sea side motel.

Last night we were (or at least, Chris was) disturbed by the sound of the wind whistling through the window at La Cache in Natashquan, so much so that he woke me just after I'd fallen asleep to tell me he was going to the airport to make sure PTN was not rolling about. We had failed to push her off the apron onto gravel after landing yesterday lunchtime, nor had we put chocks under her wheels. By 11p.m. it sounded like a howling gale out there, but when we had hastily (!) put all our clothes back on and crept outside as furtively as possible so as not to wake the other hotel guests we found that only a gentle breeze was blowing down the empty road and the Quebec flag outside not flapping like a mad thing after all. It was really quite peaceful out there. So we concluded that a dash to the airport with torch in hand might not be as necessary as we'd thought, and crept back in, and back to bed.

Today we had two IFR flights west, the first one ending at Sept Iles in time for lunch at the airport terminal, with a Catholic church choir on the big screen TV jogging up and down in their cassocks as they sang O When The Saints Go Marching In, in harmony, in French. This one had been an "easy" IFR flight, with a short climb through low stratus and a long route on top of smooth whiteness, lines of cumulus denoting the location of higher ground, till we broke out of one such cloud right over the Sept Iles runway and at the last minute made a VFR landing. Our second leg of the day was simply wonderful, again up, through and then on top of the stratus that lined the shore between Sept Iles and Baie Comeau, finally emerging through a "magnificent deep gorge" (in Chris' words) between two banks of fluffy white cloud, to see the Baie Comeau area under PTN's nose. At the Baie Comeau VOR we turned left and struck out across thirty miles of water, shining and shimmering below us and mottled with shadows from a trace of mackerel cloud. It's no good; I knew I wouldn't be able to describe it adequately. And so down into the gentler country of the south shore.

Ste Flavie's main street (part of the highway to the Gaspé peninsula) is called the Route des Artistes and I shall finish my blog today with a poem written by one of the artists of this town, Marcel Gagnon, who has sculpted over a hundred humanoid figures out of reïnforced concrete that stand outside the house where we had supper and crowd into the sea. We had a chat to his son and found some admirably original paintings by both father and son. For those of you who appreciate these things, here is the poem that goes with the sculptures, entitled Un Grand Rassemblement:

L'Homme cherche une issue à sa vie

Il cherche souvent dans un fleuve brouillé par les marées
Il se fait ballotter [= he lets himself be tossed around]
Il marche vers la rive à la recherche d'une indication,
d'une intuition

Quand il émerge du fond des mers,
il est illuminé par tant de clarté
Il pense qu'il a trouvé, mais il réalise vite qu'il a été ébloui
Même si le soleil luit, dans son coeur c'est nuageux

Comment comprendre qu'il faut toujours
se renouveler et que pour y arriver
on doit y travailler sans se lasser
Le salut dans les autres n'est qu'illusion

A force de méditation, la liberté, lui seul peut la trouver
La lumière ne peut plus l'aveugler
Elle vient de l'intérieur, il en est inondé
Maintenant il peut flotter au lieu de s'enfoncer

Il faudra encore ramer, il y aura d'autres marées,
d'autres tempêtes à traverser
Ce combat, il le mènera avec d'autres humains
Et il deviendront tous ensemble

Un GRAND RASSEMBLEMENT universel