The observer observed

As we walked through Ste. Flavie again, today, I read Chris another poem by the artist, Marcel Gagnon, which I thought very appropriate for our flying adventures:

J'ai regardé plus loin que le large du fleuve.
J'ai regardé plus haut que le dernier nuage.
J'ai découvert l'immensité de mon être.

"I hope that's not true," commented Chris drily, bringing us down to earth, "because I've been on a diet."

Anyway, we have bought one of Marcel Gagnon's paintings, interrupting him in the middle of painting another. The one we chose is a brightly coloured oil and acrylic canvas called Un Matin de Tendresse, showing imaginary figures on the pilgrim's road to Santiago de Compostela. Marcel Gagnon recently walked its 800 kilometres in 39 days, so he told me this morning, having shaken hands when I told him I liked his art and poetry. When he sold us the picture, into which he told us he'd put "beaucoup d'émotion" he also threw in one of his books of poetry and prose (L'Observateur Observé), writing a quotation from one of his poems on the front page:

Alison et Chris, un seul chemin possible, s'aimer d'abord. M Gagnon

Partly because we wanted another look at the Grand Rassemblement of figures on the shore at this place and because we had such an appealing hotel room, we decided not to fly home to Ottawa just yet. I went down to see if we could stay in the room with the balcony for one more night; unfortunately it was taken, but we could move into another room down the corridor, the lady said ... this one has a vast picture window through which I'm gazing at the rockpools and calm, grey sea as I write this, my husband luxuriating in the ensuite jacuzzi, meanwhile, with The Surgeon of Crowthorne!

Otherwise we've been walking on the beach with all that bladderwrack that smells of my childhood and visiting the Mont Joli airport again to make sure PTN is fuelled in case we need to take off early tomorrow. In the terminal building, where yesterday we saw Denise Djokic passing through with her 'cello, is an interesting little exhibition about the Battle of the St Lawrence during the 2nd World War, about which Chris and I had known nothing. Apparently Canadian merchant ships as well as Royal Navy vessels such as the corvette, HMCS Shawinigan, sunk with 90 souls lost, were torpedoed in the St Lawrence Gulf and Straits of Belle Isle from 1942 onwards and these "torpillages" were quite a threat to the local fishing boats as well, although ironically 1942 turned out to be the best fishing season since 1919. One ship, the Meadcliffe Hall, carrying a cargo of pulpwood, had a lucky escape when the German submarine (that later that month was sunk in the Bay of Biscay with 51 crew on board) missed its target. The description in the present tense went as follows:

Le 5 septembre 1942 une torpille frappe le cap et son explosion ébranle le village.

This was the village of St-Yvon on the Gaspé peninsula.