I swallow a lot of kilometers for personal and professional reasons this summer. Sometimes the children are with me, including a five-year-old who hasn’t yet grasped the notion of distance. There is a point A and a point B; the rest is just a blur filled with McDonalds and Tim.
“Are we still on the Île d’Orléans, Mom?”
– Well no ! It’s been two hours since we crossed the Pont de l’Île. When you cross the bridge, you leave the island!
“OK then… are we in Montreal?”
— No, we haven’t crossed the Jacques-Cartier bridge yet!
“But this is Laval?” ! (He sees dealerships on the side of the highway.) It’s a lot like going to grandma’s…
— No, from here, Laval is AFTER Montreal. And dealers, my dear, there are lots of towns you don’t know… I’ll explain that to you with a map!
Because it often takes meeting points and a clear line between the two to understand. Even better: human contact.
Chicoutimi, I first saw it on a map in a geography class. A unique name that we memorize without realizing it. But it took a passport crisis for me to go there for the first time, decades later. Absurd, I know, but that was the solution to get the passports in time: go where we could be given an official meeting time.
Ah, so much for the Montreal-Chicoutimi round trip (which was no less long than the wait in line next to the house), we took the opportunity to climb the majestic Monts Valin and then do some barbecue on the banks of the Saguenay River at our charming motel, Le Panoramique, a vestige of the 1950s. We would have spent a week in this peaceful place reading, watching the current and having all our lunches at the traditional Café Mont-Royal, where the best wines in Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean are served.
Anyway, we knew where we were going to stay last week during the La Noce music festival.
But this time, something was different. We had a party place, we walked around. And I had feelings of déjà vu so strong that they still live in me.
— My love, I saw Chicoutimi before the passport incident.
– Oh yes ?
— The Goddess of Fireflies, by Genevieve Pettersen. I swear to you, there: the atmosphere, the places, all these impressions of deja-vu… It’s overturned steeply. I don’t believe that they are caused mainly by the visuals of the film, but by the book.
Even people, I swear.
— Tsé, the young people who were crossing the boulevard, there, when we arrived?
— Yes, those who were going to La Noce like us…
“No, they were in the book!”
A conversation ensued about young adults who dress like they did in the years they were born, even though they knew nothing of the era. Example: today’s 20-year-olds who dress like peak of Nirvana, blah blah.
– I do not care. They were in the same book!
A book I read almost 10 years ago now and I remember it like it was yesterday: a real page turner ; I turned the pages as quickly as the character’s desire to do another chapter of mess.
And without realizing it, I was also visiting Chicoutimi, yet without a meeting point, without a passport to pick up, without wandering around.
The power of words, huh?
Sometimes greater even than human contact.