This summer, when I had been raving for hours about the beauty of the Côte-Nord, I walked into a convenience store and saw for sale, for the second time on the trip, a legendary Route 66 cap for United States, the one that goes from Chicago to Santa Monica. Moment of discouragement. This road may well be, for Americans, emblematic of great road trips (I prefer the expression “great machine tours”), I was sold the 66 while I was on the 138, one of our legendary roads !
Posted at 5:00 a.m.
Route 138 is 1420 kilometers long. It begins at the New York State border, joins Montreal by the Mercier bridge, briefly becomes Sherbrooke Street, leaves the island and takes the name of Chemin du Roy, the first real road in New France, road who notably saw Charles de Gaulle welcomed in an atmosphere that reminded him, he said, of the Liberation.
Returning to the 138, it joins our capital, the cradle of French civilization in North America, and passes through the heart of the crater of Charlevoix, a corner of the country which boasts of having the most artists per inhabitant in Quebec.
It continues to Tadoussac, where the first Franco-Aboriginal alliance was celebrated between the First Nations and those who would one day form the Quebec nation.
The 138 then crosses towns and villages such as Forestville, Baie-Comeau, Port-Cartier and even Sept-Îles, which have been at the heart of our mining and forestry industrial development. The 138 leads to the 389 which goes up to the north, the route de la Manic, where a part of modern Quebec was built, crosses the 50e parallel, offers unique views of the majestic St. Lawrence River, overlooks the Moisie, one of the most beautiful salmon rivers in the world, and ends in the sublime Minganie with dreamy villages: Rivière-au-Tonnerre, Longue -Pointe-de-Mingan, Havre-Saint-Pierre, Natashquan.
It will have passed through six Aboriginal communities with names from a thousand-year-old culture — Essipit, Betsiamites, Uashat-Maliotenam, Mingan, Natashquan — to end, when the asphalt disappears, in Nitassinan, an immense traditional territory of the Innu where “the horizon gives you a land without end of the world”, country of Joséphine Bacon, Ghislain Picard, Naomi Fontaine and other Florent Vollant.
If it’s not a mythical road, I don’t know what is… and they sell me a cap of an American road?!
All of America’s strength and all of the threat it poses to us is in that cap. The United States, by the extraordinary power of its cultural industry, imposes on the rest of the world its myths, its language, its conception of history and even its political ideas. In 2022, there are few fights more modern than the fight for the survival of languages and cultures. These languages and these cultures carry a vision of the world, a way of telling it, an originality, which make the richness of humanity.
Not all roads should lead to California. The more legendary routes there are celebrated in the world, the more ways we will have to dream it up, transform it, improve it. Biodiversity is to nature what the diversity of cultures and languages is to the human soul; without it, it atrophies.
One of the most urgent responses to the force of standardization of the United States is therefore to invest, we too, massively in culture. So that our imagination is not replaced by an American imagination, we must fund our filmmakers, help our writers, support our poets, our visual artists, our lyricists, and so on. The electoral campaign is launched, I hope that we will debate the ways to follow so that our culture resists the American steamroller, flourishes in its own way and continues to enrich the world.
Culture is what makes the Quebec nation. If it weakens, we will all disappear under American caps.