The house was shaking. It was beyond hissing and rumbling. In the middle of the river on an island this week. The wind that the islanders call nordet. Strong.
I live there 100 days a year. A little hunting, a lot of artist’s patents, a lot of walking (10 km almost every day) and above all a contemplation of nature away from urban commentators and pixels. Nature then, you know, this thing whose existence we often forget for the benefit of ourselves? In the spring, after winter, I walk around the houses, barns and other buildings to check their condition. It’s going fast, because I’ve learned to only look at the facades that face northeast. Prevailing wind. This is always where the materials wear out first. If the northeast sides are OK, the rest will be. Things have been planted like this for four centuries.
Mallard dads (their real name is mallard duck) are alone around trails and ponds because mallard dads lay and incubate the nest. It’s like that. Don’t write to the Grand Order’s ombudsman to complain, it won’t change anything.
Here and there, skunk cabbages appear and the ferns (those of the fiddleheads) begin to green. Also the chrysanthemums, our daisies, get out of hand. Geese everywhere in the sky and in the fields; returned from the south for a stop before going up to reproduce in the Arctic. Cormorants. Eagles, tree swallows, vultures…
With muted – and echoes, because it happens not very far from here (Lévis is 60 km away) – this story of the third link and the magnificent theater that bears witness to it and entertains us.
So here I am on one of these daily walks with my dog and an employee’s dog. The latter, an English spaniel, is an impressive tracking machine driven by an instinct that has been shaped a lot over the centuries. He flushes out deer and all the animals of the meadows and the forest. Across a path in a ditch filled by the high tide, a muskrat swims and dives. The spaniel saw him, runs, jumps into the water, grabs the rodent, shakes his head three, four times and releases the muskrat on the dirt road, stiff dead. Then, the dog resumes its walk like nothing. I wondered if he was proud or by what order of fate we had managed to modify and maintain this instinct until today. This weaving fascinates.
Well, is there really anyone (even the sweetest dreams of unicorns or prince charmings) who believes that a tunnel intended for public transport will be built? We will do studies and then the most plausible conclusion will plead to develop Quebec towards its northwest, open and without a river.
I found myself having empathy for politicians this week. Nothing serious or lasting, but enough for this: why?
Bin, because.
Why criticize them with such vehemence and rage? I know they’re thinking about giving themselves 21% pay raises.
We can therefore see that it is not because they are elected that they are exceptional. On the contrary. Alcohol, money and, we learn, power are powerful revealers of truth and ugliness. Put his face on a sign too.
Since when is being elected a dogma of infallibility? Will there ever be a hospital Philippe Couillard ? A Congress Jean Charest on the financing of political parties? A university research chair Justin Trudeau on ethics and conflicts of interest? Or a bridge-tunnel Francois-Legault ?
With all these recent slippages, I am nevertheless happy to see that the people in power are only people who have been given power. In the private sector, they would have lost their job. But we are not private. These are the rules for being governed publicly. Some are immensely intelligent and others more dodgy. It’s quite a big average of us that comes out of this case.
We find ourselves wishing for more admiration for those who govern us. So few politicians will be elevated by office, it’s sad, but that’s it. With the consequences that some frolic, make mistakes, false promises or lie. It looks a lot like the real theater of life. It’s crazy the loss of balance and values that comes with the desire to “govern”.
Two days later, the dead muskrat was devoured before my eyes by a vulture vulture. And I, as a poet, can relate this strange natural chain. And let others make sense of it.
I don’t think much will change. We get what we deserve and what looks like us.
And as the islanders born here say when I ask them how they protect themselves from the northerly wind: we make do with it.