We spent the weekend at a friend's house out in the wilds of Quebec, somewhere between the little villages of St- Jean-de-Matha and St-Emelie-de-l'Energie, in the foothills of the Laurentians. The house is quite remote, a small French manor set against a forest of spruce, birch, and bare tamarack, absolutely silent and drifted with pure, deep snow broken only by the tracks of the forest creatures: red squirrels, rabbits, an occasional deer, and a bear that ravages the bird feeders during its rare visits.
I had brought my sketchbook, but although I spent a long time looking out the window of our second-floor room toward the forest, I couldn't see any strong forms. Warmth from the huge stone fireplace downstairs drifted up along with music: Flemish renaissance polyphony performed by Jordi Savall's ensemble. One afternoon J. and I took a long walk, up and down the icy rang with its widely-separated dwellings. At the crest of one hill we stopped and looked over into a gully, listening. There was no sound at all: no traffic, no airplanes; just the occasional call of a bird and the flapping of shreds of paper-birch, peeled loose but still attached to the trunks of trees.
A community of Trappist monks, pledged to silence, had recently left their 126-year-old foundation at Oka, west of Montreal, and moved here, our host told us, a few hills to the east. I could see why.
The wood box on the porch was empty, and so we helped our friends dig a path to the woodpile and then pulled numerous sled-loads of firewood up the driveway. I hadn't stacked wood for a long time, not since our early years in Vermont, and it felt good to work hard in the crisp cold. I rubbed snow on my cheeks and placed some crystals on my tongue when I got hot and thirsty, and in the morning we ate currant scones baked in the bread oven beside the fireplace, heated with the wood we'd carried.
Later I looked up St-Emelie-de-l'Energie, and found a biography of one Magloire Arbour, a farmer who had lived in the village in the late 1800s.
Magloire was the 14th child of a family of 20 children... On the 15th of January in 1866, when he was 20, he married 15-year-old Leocadie Chartier-Robert. It was a momentous time -- the following year, the British North America Act would unite all the British colonies of North America and create the Dominion of Canada but allow the people of Quebec to keep their French language and Catholic religion. Severe economic depression hit in the 1870s. Magloire and Leocadie and eight children are listed in the census records of 1881 in St-Emelie, but the hard times eventually caused them to moved west, to work at Waubauschene, Ontario, where there was a lumber mill. Magloire died in 1924 and Leocadie in 1926; their descendents numbered 14 children, 116 grandchildren, and 281 great-grandchildren.
At the same time, my ancestors were farming in a tiny settlement called Beaver Meadow, New York. They were British descendents, but had become fiercely independent Yankees, of Protestant or Unitarian faith, with homes full of books...my great-great-grandfather sent his four daughters to college, and while they all married, none had more than two children, and all headed toward relative prosperity. In Canada, the French peasants stayed under the oppressive thumb of stern local priests who demanded that women stay in their homes, producing a child every year, and told the men they could only work as farmers, teachers, notaires, or priests, while the British counterparts of my own ancestors grew wealthy from the territory's resources.
We took small roads on the way home, along the Rivière Blanche and the wide fields above the St. Lawrence valley; in each small settlement we passed a typical Quebec roadside cross with a wheel intersecting the vertical and horizontal posts, some also bearing wooden ladders or arrows pointing to heaven. The land looked quite a lot like Vermont, but in spite of all the changes in Quebec society in the past fifty years, it still felt very far apart: a place I can visit but never really enter.
Perhaps it was ironic, but I was grateful that all our ancestors had given us a love for nature and the land, and that this was the bridge where my rural French friends and I could meet...
Lovely post about your lovely weekend, Beth. This gave me a wee twinge of homesickness for the similar looking woods and snow of my childhood and youth growing up in Manitoba. Also an interesting comparison of the lives of the French-Canadian Catholics and the your Protestant ancestors just a few generations ago.
Posted by: Marja-Leena | February 20, 2012 at 06:29 PM
Beaver Meadow beside Cooperstown? Or another?
Always like your thoughtful rural visits...
Posted by: marly youmans | February 20, 2012 at 06:35 PM
That looks so peaceful. Good food, good friends, beautiful surroundings.
281 - what a horrifying number of decedents!
Posted by: et | February 20, 2012 at 09:49 PM