In English Canada, it is still called “Victoria Day”, to mark the birthday of the sovereign who imposed the moral and supremacist corset of England on half the planet, and whose imperial offspring continue to reign symbolically. — and what a powerful symbol! — on the neighboring dominion, Quebec being the only one, with its Patriots’ Day, to proclaim that the king is naked.
Traditionally, this long weekend marked the beginning of the real summer, with the opening of walleye and pike fishing on the northern lakes and the return of black flies — sometimes mixed with a few snowflakes.
If I talk about it in the past tense, it’s because I sometimes wonder if there are still “summer chalets” in Quebec, unheatable, uninhabitable in winter, chalets like the mononcle’s Ti-Oie from my childhood, where a water heater was an unknown luxury. One of those somewhat crooked constructions that we were going to ritually close at Thanksgiving—stopping the pump, emptying the pipes, securely chaining the wharf to the mainland to prevent it from leaving with the ice, then the final touch : shore up the cabin with a few planks to prevent the roof from collapsing under the weight of the snow.
I can see us braced under these big pieces of wood like Zola miners at the back of their gallery. The mononcle scrupulously suspended all the mattresses from the ceiling using a complicated system of pulleys, in order to prevent mice from taking up residence there. Hours of fun.
When I look at the edge of the lakes today, I mostly see buildings that look like suburban houses.
These log cabins from before our era of comfortable resorts and urban sprawl had to be reopened in the spring, a business that was waiting for the first holiday of the year and which marked the passage of the seasons as surely as the flowering of the trilliums and the return of the hermit thrush.
Yes, on this weekend of the patriots, I remember: the ice has stalled for a few weeks, the rabid speedboats are still hibernating and the lake is blue as ink and very quiet. He is alive, mysterious. The loon cleaves the water as master of the place, and perhaps the frightened bass is already on guard under the worm-eaten planks of the wharf. The nights are so calm that in the evening, the osprey returns to its perch in the fork of the dead aspen which dominates the chalet.
Like all its fellows scattered between the forty-fifth parallel and the north of Abitibi, this lake calls for the line and the hook, it calls for the paddle, and when you log a cord of firewood, or come back to run a few kilometers or to pedal a few dozen, the slightest glimpse of the sun becomes an invitation to take a dip at the end of the quay.
Too cold, you will say, softened as you are by your pools heated like bathtubs. Never before Saint-Jean-Baptiste, said the Ti-Oie of this world. But even after Midsummer, you were more likely to come across a bear picking raspberries on the mountain than to see it in a bathing suit.
For a while now, I wanted to write about swimming, this sport of returning to the sources for the protozoa that we were, wriggling in the original soup. I have to believe that the public swimming pools where my family sometimes drags me don’t inspire me too much. This greenish and chirping atmosphere of an aquatic aviary. As someone I know would say: it changes the jar. But precisely, swimming in a jar is a poor substitute in the eyes of those for whom taking a dip is the pinnacle of communion with wild nature.
It happens to me, it’s true, to envy the human torpedoes who, in winter, imperturbably chain the lengths of the swimming pool while joggers like me wade through the sloches of the gutters. And I do not despair of learning to swim, one day, a clean crawl.
In the meantime, have all the Caribbean dolphins you want and let me swim in peace with the loons of my lakes, those who tolerate my clumsy strokes and let me approach, immersed up to the nostrils, close enough to distinguish their language pink when they throw their heads back and let out a long chuckle. I’ve also happened to porpoise a few feet from a chubby beaver that floated like a log, and while I kept it company I half-expected it to address me in squealing dialect. of the Ewok from the forest moon of Endor.
In one of my fondest travel memories, I come out of an old wooden Finnish sauna, somewhere near South Karelia, and beat myself up with fresh birch twigs before galloping naked like a madman towards the end of the quay and freedom. It was late August, the equivalent of November at this latitude, and the water was freezing. But if there’s one thing Finns have long understood, it’s that whatever doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.
In Finland there is a law called Joka miehen oikeudet (“the rights of the ordinary man”) which stipulates that no one can prevent someone from frequenting a forest, even a private one, if this person is there to fish with a line, pick berries or mushrooms or practice, while respecting the natural integrity of the site, any other form of recreational or nurturing activity.
This is a real culture of the territory. Such a law, applied to the shores of our lakes, would perfectly complete the work of “declubing” the government of René Lévesque. That said, I’m writing this 90 kilometers from the US border, on May 17, and it’s snowing all over the sky. Good swim !
Novelist, freelance writer and atypical sports columnist, Louis Hamelin is the author of a dozen books.