There are no doubt, basically, only three ways of looking at a mountain: as something that one can climb or descend and, among pantheistic nations, as the place of residence of certain spirits.
During my life, I practiced (or was introduced to) nearly thirty sports, including golf – a mistake of youth -, handball and the throwing of the javelin in the physical education courses of the ‘secondary school. But downhill skiing is not one of them. I have never, in my life, worn rigid ski boots. Never used a ski lift. Alpine skiing is not far from inspiring me the same kind of disdain as water skiing: beyond the exhilaration of speed, here are activities that are more social than physical and require mechanical assistance.
I can already hear the loud cries. But no one will tell me that a “healthy body in a healthy mind” needs a full-throttle outboard motor to express itself. My dispute with alpine skiing also has its roots in ecology, the deforestation of mountain sides appearing to me to be incompatible with the protection of the landscape.
The Autoroute des Laurentides has always had a disconcerting effect on the lover of the North that I am: all these hills showing off their tonsure where the pylons of the chairlifts run like so many seams in a scar! With this aggravating circumstance in the eyes of a declared lover of log cabins: the ski slopes attract unsightly condo villages like carrion attracts vultures.
On this day after the vernal equinox, under a mouse-grey, snowy sky, I was nevertheless driving between two rows of these settlements which vaguely remind me of the hastily built settlements of an occupied zone, with four children at my edge. Soon, the Orford stood before us. It was snow class day for the sixth graders and my guy, already an accomplished cross-country skier, was going to experience his first downhill skiing there.
After dropping off the hotpot, I headed west to the start of the Ruisseau-des-Chênes trail, where I parked the car and put on hiking boots and crampons to tackle the same mountain , but by the opposite slope, covered with forests. Announced as difficult, the track with a drop of 400 meters climbs straight away like in the face of a horse. In the hollow of the valley it runs along, the said stream, with small cascatelle falls, murmured under the plump gangue of ice which filtered the clarity of its emerald water like a wedding veil covering the old face of the rocks.
I am a secular pantheist who likes to think that the summits of this massif are haunted by the spirit of the poet Alfred Desrochers, whose Tolstoyan bust sculpted in Appalachian granite and the rough bark of large hemlocks accompanies me while, sweating despite mercury below zero, I manage my breath in the climb.
“And I dream of going as the ancestors went / I hear the great white spaces weeping within me. »
The snow remains thick around. The well-trodden path cuts a deep furrow there which, in the steep slopes, becomes a slide along which the two or three solitary hikers that I meet, between Route 112 and the viewpoints that await me on the ridges facing east, play walking sticks. I’m the only one who doesn’t walk around with my two state-of-the-art crutches, say $170 German-made Lekis, $330 if they’re carbon. I consciously deprive myself of these gadgets, thinking that the legendary porters of Haute-Mauricie, the Thomas Lahache and the P’tit-Louis Descôteaux, did very well without them when they embarked on “trails” in good shape. obstacle course with 200 kilos of pelts or flour on your back.
I record, in passing, the golden shine of leaves that have spent the winter flapping like tiny pennants on the branches of young beeches; amuses me, further on, to untangle the hare’s leaps on the surface of the Orford. I try to remember not to think about anything, but I’m already writing parts of this column in my head.
There comes a time when the mountain blocks the distant roar of the highway and the only thing left to hear is the howl of the wind.
Sitting on a patch of snow hardened by the northeast, I eat my sandwich while contemplating the whiteness of Memphremagog breaking from the south and thinking of this hamlet of pioneers that is the Magog of Gursky, the masterpiece of 1989. Because that Estrie is also Richler’s country.
During the descent, carried away by gravity, I gallop over long stretches and come close to dislocating my kneecap. Then, without witnesses, a mute cry of joy on my lips, I slide down a steep hill on my buttocks.
Here I am sipping a hot chocolate at the foot of the Orford commercial, scanning the tracks in the hope of catching a glimpse of my son. Squinting in the timid spring sun facing the wide white corridor that stretches to the top for four kilometers and where human beings like gnats evolve, I admit to being quite impressed myself. So I’m anything but surprised when my happy-looking son tells me that he prefers this sliding sport to ski touring. “We’re just bringing down…” he tells me with that air of sudden understanding that Newton must have had just after the apple affair.
And even if he fell several times, it’s me who limps… You old fart, I say to myself, you’re really ripe for walking sticks.
The return home takes place under the beautiful snow which has begun to fall, in the open sky. Hard to believe that in two weeks, we will be talking about baseball.