A Delightful Driving Tour through New England to Montreal
By Jim Rue
The two-lane blacktop of upstate Pennsylvania and New England is a delightful driving experience for someone from Southern California such as myself who has become overexposed to the Interstate highway system. This driving tour occurred in the winter of 1999. That area, and especially southern Quebec province, had recently experienced one of the most devastating ice storms in history.
Lake Champlain
Upstate New York features Lake Champlain, site of the first naval battle of the Revolutionary War. On October 11, 1776, Benedict Arnold was yet a Revolutionary commander, and had not yet defected to the British. Arnold, in command of a fleet of fifteen newly built gondolas and other small boats, ambushed the British gunship Inflexible, two British war sloops and several other large British ships in the lee of Valcour Island on Lake Champlain. The British had at least fifty naval guns between them, the rebels no more than fifteen. The rebels were routed, but the Revolutionary War was underway.
Valcour Island
Valcour Island is now uninhabited and environmentally protected. An abandoned hotel still looms on the small island's skyline, though. Valcour Lodge is for sale. The small army airbase on the mainland is closed. I take the car ferry across the lake from NY to Vermont to get a closer look at Valcour Island, in which I have a personal family interest.
I ask the ferryman about local colonial history. He gripes long and loudly to me about the manipulations of the current caretaker of the army base. It seems the caretaker is trying to wrestle from the state the power to develop the island. The ferryman is a lifelong New Englander, but he is not of the stereotypical taciturn stock. He is no fan of commercial development, nor of the government either. The ferry trip across the lake to Governor Clinton point is only a few minutes long, but by the time we arrive he is yelling and stomping his thick rubber boots on the deck of the ferry for emphasis, spitting mad at the guv.
Rural Quebec
I drive across the border into Quebec Province just east of Lake Champlain. There is a small border town just north of the national boundary. It is severely depressed. Unpainted shacks are collapsing all over. Shabbily dressed men are gathered on a street corner by a dark storefront with a hand-painted sign - "Biere Froid." A few hundred yards further down there is a small pub, the "Penalty Box." Even here, within a mile of the border, the lingua franca is French. Many houses have small shrines to St. Mary on their front lawns.
I don't know which way to go next. The transition from USA to Canada is abrupt. The street signs are all in French here, which I speak not at all. No one can give me directions. No one understands a word I say, and after an emergency stop at the 'Gaz Bar' I get back on the highway.
A few miles further on, I turn into an extremely muddy driveway in a tiny town called Le'ry to buy maple syrup. The farmer speaks English though his adult son does not. He gives me directions and I buy some syrup. Sugar maples are still tapped sometimes, but modern farms now pipe the sap into indoor rendering vats. This sanctuary from the bitter cold makes it much easier to hire people to do the hard work of making syrup. He says the recent storm damaged his sugar maples very badly.
The Ice Storm of 1998
As I drive on, the destruction on the sides of the road begins to soak into my consciousness. Thousands of paperbark birches were bent to the ground by the weight of the accumulated ice. In boggy areas thousands of trees were uprooted. I drive past a large stand of lodgepole pines. At least half of the pines are snapped like matchsticks, roughly halfway up. The branches are ten feet deep on the forest floor in places. Nearly every house and business has a pile of logs neatly stacked by the curb. Sometimes shards of construction materials share that space, waiting for pickup.
The ice storm of 1998 caused millions in damage, coating every surface with ice up to eighteen inches thick. Millions were left without power after the heavy ice pulled down thousands of power lines. And those homes without power were soon evacuated to public buildings where it was warm, the residents driven out by day after day of temperatures well below zero. Water pipes for whole communities froze solid. Winters are harsh in Quebec province, but the winter of 98 was beyond anyone's ability to imagine or anticipate. Some Quebec denizens, including my disabled brother, stayed in public shelters for as long as three weeks before power and heat were restored to their homes.
Nudists Ahead
A few miles into Quebec, I pass a public roadside sign announcing a 'plein air' camp - a nudist camp. The diamond-shaped yellow sign depicts mom, dad and child from the back, holding hands, their backbones drawn on their nude backs in thick highway sign-like lines. The signs remind me of the Camp Pendleton signs on the California Interstate, mutely warning that mom, dad and child dart across the freeway at any time, trying to dodge 'los emigres.' It occurs to me though that of all the climates in the world, Quebec must be one of the worst in which to be a nudist.
Montreal
Montreal is ancient. It was first settled in 1535. The home Cadillac lived in before traversing the St. Lawrence River to found Detroit ('the right bank') still exists on a street of Montreal.
Montreal is probably the most cosmopolitan city on the North American continent. St. Laurent Street is the home of dozens of ethnic neighborhoods from all over the world, intermingled and spilling over. The multilingual signs on the restaurants and shops make it very clear. Chateauguay across the river was the site of an uprising by Mohawk and Iroquois Indians a decade or so ago, and harsh feelings can still be seen here and there on the reservation. Rebel flags fly above clapboard gift shops. But redwing blackbirds abound here, too, and neither they nor the French are leaving.