At Mont Joli without a car

Visiting the Gaspésie requires planning ahead. We booked the accommodation, got that right, but should have checked that its facilities were as advertised. On Tuesday morning we discovered that the promising on-site restaurant at Mon Joli Motel is actually closed this summer, because the management can't find enough staff. No matter, the restaurant at Le Gaspésiana, competently managed by Mme. Geneviève Raîche and upgraded in recent years from a mere motel to the status of a proper hotel offering une panoplie de services pour votre plus grand confort, was open and accessible a short walk away, so we breakfasted there for the duration of our stay. The restaurant has been thoroughly renovated, with panels in place to keep guests socially distanced. Here's a picture of us sitting at a window table there on our last morning in Ste.-Flavie:

We made a slow start to the Tuesday, strolling down the road to the Gagnons' Centre d'Art to see Le Grand Rassemblement once more, which includes some wooden rafts. 

My insides were slightly upset that morning, so I spent an hour or so lying down in our room, not eager to search for any lunch yet. Eventually I was ready to walk back up the hill to the airport with Chris so that we could pick up the car I'd booked online, and start exploring La Mitis, the local region. Unfortunately again, the car was not forthcoming: nobody was at the rental office and we hadn't received a message from the rental company either, although they swore they'd sent one. They're based in Rimouski, half an hour's drive away, so we couldn't walk there and complain. We had a none-too-productive phone conversation with their rep during which he asked for a photo of Chris' credit card to be sent. Chris was not willing to do that! He sent a message of complaint.

Well, this is not a bad place to be stuck, we decided. Mont Joli might be worth seeing too. We could get there on foot.

We could avoid traffic on Rte 132 by following the Rte de l'Aéroport and the Blvd Jacques-Cartier in a straight line towards the the imposing church on the hilltop, Notre-Dame-de-Lourdes. By this time I was beginning to recover my appetite for lunch, but there wasn't a restaurant to be found — sadly the places that used to be there have all gone out of business — and just past the Avenue du Sanatorium, when we were about to give up and go back to a Tim Horton's we'd caught sight of in the distance, I thought of asking for help from a shopkeeper. I went into an artists' supply store also selling pottery, Céramiques de la Mitis, where a nice lady recommended we either call a taxi (she kindly gave us the phone number) or walk for 20 minutes (it actually took us five minutes — drivers rarely estimate a walking distance correctly) down the Av. du Sanatorium towards a pub on Blvd Gaboury, called Le Frédérike. Chris used the Maps app on his phone for reinforcement. It was too late for lunch, too early for supper; we lingered there for a satisfying mid-afternoon meal; I ordered spaghetti with meat sauce from a menu with plenty of choice. The meat sauce had a good quantity of chopped carrots, onions and herbs in it, which I appreciated. The Olympic Games were showing on the TV screens, few people sat at other tables and a heavy rain storm went through while we ate.

A la croisée des chemins

The once lively town of Mont Joli now looks run-down. It seems to offer multiple car maintenance services but not a lot for tourists, apart from its murals, collectively called Les Murmures de la Ville, which are wonderful. The Ville de Mont-Joli lists 36 stopping points at which you can admire its works of art or heritage buildings.

Mont-Joli vous propose d'explorer ses rues, de rencontrer ses citoyens, de découvrir les richesses de son patrimoine, d'admirer les couleurs qui habillent ses murs ...

We didn't encounter many citoyens, but I took pictures of some of the captivating artwork. The painting below is by Marcel Gagnon's son, Guillaume Gagnon.

Le Château, phare de Mont-Joli

L'evolution des communications à travers les âges

La médecine de campagne

Hommage à nos héros d'hier et d'aujourd'hui

Then we walked the 4.4 km back to Sainte-Flavie and for future reference we note that there's no grocery store here, although we picked up some small snacks (they sell packaged drinks and locally-made nougat, baguettes, honey products, nuts, salad veg, sauces, soaps, T-shirts) at the Épicerie & Boutique annexed to Le Ketch. The rain storm cleared the air, giving way to a lovely evening and another limpid sunset across the water.

Sur la Côte aux Moutons

View from our balcony

I'm writing this on the balcony of our room at the Mon Joli Motel up the hill from Sainte-Flavie, with a magnificent view of the sunset over the St. Lawrence fleuve, shimmering in the twilight. The water is mauve, the clouds indigo stratus, the remaining sunlight golden. The hill we are up is locally known as the Côte aux Moutons because of Marcel Gagnon's concrete sheep that are grazing on its steep slope, with a concrete shepherd and sheep dog alongside, part of the motel property. I have mentioned them before in this blog. And a few hundred metres along the road is the Grand Rassemblement of concrete people processing onto the shore from the seabed. This evening we walked over to check that they were still intact. They are.

Finally, this morning, we got away from Ottawa. As recently as Saturday, I didn't think this would happen, because it looked as though torrential rain would be falling all over this part of the world, and there's not much point battling through storm clouds for the sake of a wet stay in the countryside. So we had cancelled the first night of our stay. Miraculously though the weather system moved through eastern Canada sooner than forecast and just as unexpectedly dissipated into occasional showers, with sunny skies in its wake. So I promptly rebooked our room here.

Setting off over the Ottawa, looking east

Countryside near Trois-Rivières

Wheels up at 10 a.m. for a worry-free ride to Trois-Rivières, following the course of the Ottawa and St. Lawrence Rivers downstream past Montreal. The IFR route, more or less direct, actually takes us north of Montreal. We passed Petrie Island, the two ferries at Cumberland and Rockland, the Chutes de Plaisance, Papineauville, crossed the Rivière Rouge, saw Lachute in the distance to the south, Lac Simon to the north, all familiar sights from previous occasions. Visibility was good, so I noticed the Montreal skyscrapers too. The mountains of New York State and Vermont were sheathed in cumulus. Trois-Rivières airport was a busy place this morning, as the ATC man warned us, with so much traffic in the circuit that we had to do a go-around on our first approach, because the plane ahead of us didn't pull off on Taxiway Charlie as they could have done, to let us land, but kept on the main runway all the way to Taxiway Alpha. Chris got annoyed about that and when he approached as Number Three in the Circuit for the second time round he pointedly asked the Unicom Operator whether or not Taxiway Charlie was available, thus giving a strong hint to the pilot in front of us this time to move out of the way asap. That worked. Another unexpected phenomenon was the sudden drop in the crosswind as we descended below tree top level, which slewed us sideways for a moment, but my skillful pilot recovered rapidly and landed successfully on the centreline, on one wheel. I gasped, but he didn't.

Reaching Trois-Rivières

The plane was refuelled from a gas tank that had a very realistic plastic eagle perched on top of it. The usual eating place, Le Pilote at the airport, is closed on Mondays, but luckily we'd checked first and knew about this, so had brought a packed lunch, that we ate on a bench outside the terminal building.

On the ground at Trois-Rivières

About 15 minutes into the 2nd leg of our flight, Chris had to make an embarrassing confession to ATC at Montreal Centre: he had dutifully written his allotted clearance onto the "scratch-pad" of his tablet and had read it back correctly, but hadn't thought to press "Save". The clearance thus disappeared from the screen and he had to repeat the process otherwise we wouldn't have known in what direction to fly after the Quebec VOR. Another lesson learned.

This flight was longer, 2 hours 18 minutes, and we went through a surprisingly cloudy area just beyond Quebec city; ATC even asked if we wanted a diversion "around the weather" but the darkest clouds were south of our route and no lightning was showing on the StrikeFinder. We didn't lose our views of the scenery nor of the fascinating, changing clouds to the south as we flew past Montmagny towards Rivière-du-Loup, over the mouth of the meandering Rivière Ouelle, over a sphagnum peat moss farm with its russet fields and an extensive windfarm. Between Rivière-du-Loup and Rimouski comes the attractive stretch near Saint-Fabien and then we have almost reached our destination with the Mont Joli runway visible in the distance just beyond the bluffs above Sainte-Flavie.

On the ground at Mont Joli, by means of the Zoleo Communicator placed on our tail wing, Chris sent a message by satellite to our friends and relations, including George in Australia, to let them know exactly where we are. A couple of the airport officials came over to greet us and help us refuel (at great expense), one of the men telling us that he'd moved here from la grande ville — Montreal? — for the sake of a more peaceful existence, and that in winter it is really quiet in these parts.

Approaching Mont Joli airport

 

View of the runway from the base leg

We decided not to bother with a car rental or taxi; there was no one at the airport offering either, in any case. We therefore walked down the road with our luggage, a little further than I'd remembered but of course it's easier if you aren't encumbered. No trouble checking into the motel because we had a reservation although two other couples who arrived at the same time as we weren't so lucky, pas de disponibilité. One couple was travelling by motorbike and all of them, positively pleading for a room, but in vain, seemed exhausted by the long drive. On a roulé toute la journée! I hope they found somewhere to stop before much longer.

In the early evening we were also lucky to get a table at the local microbrewery, Le Ketch, painted bright red, with its eponymous, bright yellow ketch parked in the yard in front. The blonde beers they served us were excellent, the atmosphere relaxing, and we ate Beyond Beef (vegetarian) burgers, also good. The fries were a bit soggy. The buns were decorated with little paper parasols.

Rembrandt's memorable faces

Rembrandt himself

Rembrandt's wife, Saskia

According to the explanatory notes at the current Rembrandt exhibition that I saw today at the National Gallery of Canada, the art market in the 17th century Netherlands was "funded by colonialism and global trade." The Dutch landed in New Amsterdam (New York, as it became) and the Haudenosaunee people signed a treaty with them, hoping for peace and cooperation. They made symbolic wampum belts, the two parallel rows of beads symbolizing a Dutch ship and a native canoe moving side by side down the "River of Life". One such beaded belt is on display in the first gallery of the exhibition, alongside Rembrandt's early sketches. To me, the deliberate juxtaposition of an Indigenous art form and the Old Masters of Europe smacks of political correctness and condescension, but I tried to keep an open mind. The intention is to make us see Rembrandt's creations from a "new perspective". There were also allusions to the slave trade of those days.

Context is everything, as another artist says, in another context.

Some of Rembrandt's portrait subjects in 17th century Amsterdam certainly flaunted their wealth and status, achieved at the cost of various kinds of exploitation. Only the wealthiest could afford to have their full length portraits done. I do see the point about their beaver fur hats. Beavers were pretty much wiped out in Europe by that time, so north American beaver pelts were valuable to those who wanted fur-trimmed hats; Dutch traders negotiated with the Mohawks to acquire them.

Go to the exhibition, though, and the images that will linger in your mind are not the beads and furs, but the faces Rembrandt sketched, etched or painted: his self-portraits, of course, but also the faces of men and women whose expressive eyes still seem alive, or of groups of people in the streets, such as a destitute family being helped by a kind, elderly man in his doorway, and the faces in imaginary sketches of biblical scenes. Even the expression on the face of the angel who stops Abraham from murdering his son Isaac, about to slit his throat like a sacrificial lamb, is showing human emotion. (Rembrandt did an oil painting of this subject as well as the sketch, with the figures in a different configuration.)

Portraits of Saskia, Rembrandt's wife, of Hendrickje his mistress and of his daughter-in-law, Titus' wife, all executed with great intensity, are included in the show, as well as a few less beautiful female faces (he painted the truth as he saw it, was not inclined to flattery) and there's a self-confident lady in a red dress and pearls with deep, dark eyes, reminiscent of the Jewish Bride. The red paint, known as Dutch scarlet, came from the addition of crushed cochineal insects from the desserts of Mexico.

Rembrandt's son's wife

Hendrickje, looking sad, but impressively framed

Wanderers Nachtlieder

Chris and I had a most satisfying music lesson this afternoon. We have one of those most Tuesday afternoons, when Gavan meets us at 5 p.m. online to check on our progress learning various songs, usually by Franz Schubert, and gives us advice on how to improve. With a microphone plugged into the computer, Chris does the voice part and I accompany him at the keyboard. 

It was 2002 when we started taking these duets seriously. Chris had just turned down a job offer in California and was wanting something to substitute for the challenge he had missed, so he told me he was going to start learning Schubert's famous Winterreise song cycle and taking voice lessons. Jack Cook was his first singing teacher, who died in 2013. As for the piano parts, I had a big uphill struggle ahead of me! 19 years later, here we still are, still working on Winterreise and other Lieder from the repertoire.

Wanderers Nachtlied 1 

Der du von dem Himmel bist, 

Alles Leid und Schmerzen stillest, 

Den, der doppelt elend ist, 

Doppelt mit Erquickung füllst; 

Ach, ich bin des Treibens müde! 

Was soll all der Schmerz und Lust? 

Süßer Friede, 

Komm, ach komm in meine Brust!

Anyway, this afternoon we concentrated on two short songs, the Wanderers Nachtlied 1 and Wanderers Nachtlied 2, as they are called: Wanderer's Night Songs. They are settings of two poems by Goethe, both about peacefulness at the day's end: he had scribbled the second poem onto the wooden wall of a gamekeeper's cabin as a young man in 1780 and returned there as an old man in 1831, without long to live, to see if his words were still decipherable. They were. It is said that Goethe burst into tears when he rediscovered his graffiti; this may or may not be a romantic fiction. This poem does have a valedictory tone to it. 

Wanderers Nachtlied 2 

Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh 

In allen Wipfeln 

Spürest du Kaum einen Hauch; 

Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde. 

Warte nur, balde 

Ruhest du auch.

Schubert set both songs to music in the 1820s. The first one is only 11 bars long, the second 14 bars long, but the subtlety in their melodic expression and harmony is phenomenal, Schubert's modulations being a sort of tribute to the words. 

Chris and I assumed these short songs would be easy to master. Quite the contrary!

As a performer, you have to understand which notes / syllables / chords to emphasize, and how to do that. Over-emphasizing is not good at all. It's not obvious for a teacher how to give instructions in how to change the mood of a song from phrase to phrase. Gavan says things like, "This section has to start gently, tenderly, with more warmth ..." but what does that mean exactly? Some students may not understand what he's talking about, although I think Chris and I usually do. The singer also has to know where to snatch a breath or refrain from breathing; the pianist must learn where to make the left hand more predominant and which chords to tone down in the right hand, or where to bring out the melody line, and both performers have to know when to hold back and slow down slightly, where to pause, crescendo or decrescendo ... There's no end to what needs thought and experimentation while preparing to perform songs like these. But an audience must experience the performance as a spontaneous one. 

Here's an old recording of Fischer-Diskau singing the second song:

During today's lesson Gavan gave us, as he often does, an analysis of the harmonic progression in both the melody and its accompaniment. An unexpected sliding from major to minor and back again is characteristic of Schubert and we're beginning to think that his favourite chord may have been the diminished seventh. I wondered whether Wagner (creator of the "Tristan Chord"!) was familiar with Schubert's compositions, but Gavan thought probably not. Wagner would have preferred a more bombastic sound, he thought, such as a Beethoven symphony.

Outing to Almonte

Yesterday we drove to Almonte on the Mississippi, in Lanark County. "Mishi zibi" are the Indigenous words for "big river". In the nineteenth century Almonte, rather surprisingly named in honour of a Mexican general, was a woollen mill with surrounding houses and public buildings for its mainly Scottish settlers; its townhall and post office, still there, and quite imposing. Chamber concerts sometimes take place in the town hall. We parked our Bolt opposite the town hall, crossed the road and walked down Mill Street to the next bridge. On the other bank — part of Mississippi Mills rather than Almonte — at the offices of the hydro electricity station are public EV charging stations which we checked out but didn't need, because the drive wasn't far enough for our range to be of concern.

The riverside at Almonte has recently acquired pretty walkways through gardens, with a fountain in an inlet that was dedicated to the memory of a local man (a retired teacher, town councillor and scouts leader) who was shot. His widow can see the fountain from her home with waterlilies blooming in the river, where there's a series of rocky falls. Nearby is a pub, the Barley Mow, with attractive-looking patios on two levels, decorated with colourful hanging baskets and tubs of parsley, so we decided it was time for a rather early lunch, and sat there to eat it.

Coming home it was my turn to steer, so we drove along the back roads, not the highway, past the home of friends who live on Old Carp Road and the QNX offices where Chris has not been at work since March 2020.

Anna Kiesenhofer

Anna Kiesenhofer is a mathematics lecturer at the "Eidgenössischen Technischen Hochschule" (technical college) in Lausanne. She studied maths und physics as an undergraduate in Vienna, did her Master's Degree in Cambridge and gained a PhD in Barcelona, her special subject being partial differential equations. She has published a paper entitled "Noncommutative integrable systems on b-symplectic manifolds" and one last year on "A $b$-symplectic slice theorem" (sic). Yesterday we saw her on TV, winning a gold medal in the women's road cycling race, in the Olympic Games! She collapsed after crossing the finish line in an agony of leg-cramps but was composed again and calmly euphoric when receiving her medal on the podium. Her unexpected win had startled the other contestants.

An article in an Austrian journal comments 

Sowohl Mathematik als auch Radsport erfordern einen ähnlichen Charakter – man muss sich auf eine Sache konzentrieren können, braucht viel Willenskraft.

In translation, mathematics and cycling demand similar qualities  – the ability to concentrate and determination.

There's no stopping these determined women!

I'm going to use the article about her as reading material for my German conversation group when we resume our get-togethers in September.

The big-screen TV on which we watched the race was on the Earl of Sussex pub's patio on Sussex Drive. We'd met Barbara outside the National Gallery by arrangement on Sunday evening because we hadn't seen her for a while and had then crossed the road for a beer with her. While we were drinking and talking a thundercloud rolled in and would have soaked us to the skin, if there hadn't been a substantial awning to shelter under. The broadcast from Tokyo distracted us while we waited for the storm to pass.

Back to Kingston and Point Lemoine

 The weather on Friday was fine but hazy because of the smoke lingering over Ontario from forest fires hundreds of mile northwest of Ottawa. The good thing about this was that the 'inversion' as seen in my photo of the Ottawa River as we turned over the YOW-VOR made for a smooth ride, a bonus at this time of year.

Chris did a straight-in approach to Runway 19 at Kingston and when we landed, swallows darting all around us over the field, we saw from the instruments that it had taken us just a minute over one hour to fly there. The FBO was open but quiet, the tables in the lounge spread out for the sake of social distancing, with just one chair per table. We walked across the grass to the lakeside to eat our packed lunch at the picnic table there, with little waves breaking on the shore.

Our picnic eaten, we set off down the road to the entrance of the Point Lemoine conservation area, so that we could walk on the paths through the fields (Monarch butterflies on the milkweed preserved for them) and the woodland. Raspberries for the picking there, but not many left. We sat on a bench by the water and enjoyed our surroundings.

The flight home was smooth again and event-free, which is good, with up to 30 knots of tailwind at times, the only "bumps" detected being during the last few minutes as we descended into the Rockcliffe circuit, caused by thermal turbulence or perhaps a rising crosswind from the south. The flight had been six minutes faster than our outbound one.