Last night in Phantom St. Norbert

C’est ma derniere nuit dans le St. Norbert qui n’est pas le St. Norbert de naissance de ma grandmere. I simply love it here. I feel like this place was created for me. Organic farms, farmland as far as you can possibly see, fragrance everywhere – flowers, plants, sun. Old quebecoise farmhouses. French speakers/non-english speakers abound. That is, I’m *forced* to speak French, which is exactly what I want. Everyone speaks at least a few words of English, but many speak only that, less than my French, so this is perfect.

I’m less intimidated speaking French here than in Montreal or Paris, because there, people can easily have an attitude about it, simply, I think, because it’s a city, and people in cities have attitudes.

I rode the Louise and Francine’s (the owners of l’auberge) bike again today, this time to Berthierville. Took the small roads, and then a not so small road. There’s a pretty river with old houses there. I took lots and lots of photos on my ride home. There are many houses here that have HUGE crosses on their front lawns. It’s so interesting. It doesn’t seem, however, nearly as gaudy or in-your-face as something evangelicals would do/say, even though I’ve never seen something like this before. It seems like simply something that is, and that was created way back (these houses are older), in a time when that’s simply what people did. I then took my car to Joliette, another city about 30 km from here. It was a medium-sized city, with some nice areas, and some depressed areas. I spoke for quite a while with a woman who lives in the mountains about 20 minutes north of there, and said I should definitely visit there. She barely spoke English, so that was good for me. She was cool, like many of the people I’ve met here – artistic, of the earth, invested in things natural, organic. She was funky too.

There’s a French family staying here. They’re from Bretagne. They are just lovely. It makes me sad, nostalgic for a time when things could have been different for me as a child. These parents are so clearly happy, in love, and the children have no apparent hostilities toward them at all. The teenaged daughter is gorgeous, incredibly smart, well-spoken, educated, just lovely. Their interests are attended to and observed. For me growing up, we were simply fed and attended to in an emergency. Our interests weren’t noticed, much less cultivated. My parents felt their job was done if they simply met our basic physical needs. These people provide so much richer an experience for their kids. The kids will be better people because of it, I think. Better adjusted, educated, better citizens. I do truly believe this. When people are raised like I was raised, it takes everything to just keep on track in some basic human way. So much energy goes into tending to humungous gaps that were left behind; whereas for these kids, those gaps won’t be there, and they can continue on a higher path of development. This is very clear in my mind, and is why I feel firmly that one ought never have a child if they don’t know for certain that they will support their children openly, love them openly, attend to them physically, emotionally, mentally, etc. as best they can for as long as they are dependants. Anything less is neglect.

I’m very sad this is my last night. Very sad. I feel like I found a part of me, and so soon after, an instant after, I have to leave it behind. It’ll soon feel as if I never discovered it at all, I fear.

I also fear that my grandmother’s ‘real’ town will be a dump. This will depress me. Vraiment. In any case, I can know that this is her land, her country, her region. And it’s just astonishingly beautiful.

jem

Here

I am here. Well, 10 minutes from here, my grandmother’s birthplace, that is. All I can say is mon dieu holy cow wow wow wow. I’m ashamed. J’ai honte. Why have I never been here before? Why why why? This is my history. These are my people, through and through. The way they look, the French they speak, their mannerisms.

I’m staying in a bed and breakfast owned by two lesbians (whose lesbianism I didn’t have the courage tonight to confirm…tomorrow, bien sur). It is in St. Cuthbert, 10 minutes from St. Norbert, my grandmother’s, my great aunt’s birthplace. It is a different world up here. This is only about 6 hours from where I was born (southern Maine), but what a world apart in some ways, so alike in others. Here, is the most farmlandish I’ve ever been to. I’ve *always* longed for fields, to be in them, to run in a field of cornstalks, sunflowers: this is that. It’s quite possible I love fields more than the ocean, where I grew up; I’ve always longed for the smell of crops growing, the vastness of fields…is it possible my heritage was showing itself before I even knew a thing about it? My grandmother grew up on a farm. We’re talking farm farm. Tomorrow I’ll see her little town.

They pick chamomile on the side of the roads here. This is like the quaintest, smallest European village I’ve ever seen.

It’s so bittersweet. I have one remaining great-aunt left. My memere is long gone, and my other great aunts, who I adored, are also gone. Why couldn’t I have done this travel 10 years ago? I was certainly old enough to be interested. Two of my other great-aunts were still alive.

Yet, I have one remaining great aunt left: she’s still alive, and she was born in St. Norbert, where I’m visiting tomorrow.

One of the women who owns this has a friend who works at the Church in St. Norbert where all the birth records are kept. She got me an appointment with this woman for Tuesday morning, for an hour.

There’s a full moon over the cornfield which is just about 50 yards from this amazing old house. It’s almost surreal, mystical, this experience, like the entire family rose from the dead to greet me here.

We had a 4 or 5 course meal for dinner, just me and the women who own the place. Couscous, homemade ‘sausage’ (ham-like), asparagus, bread; followed by lasagna made from zucchini and with some ground meat of sorts, carrots and pea pods; followed by cheeses and crackers and dried fruit; followed by homemade fruit bread with strawberries; followed by hand-picked chamomile tea. We spoke in both French and English. One speaks some English, one not at all. We talked about Quebec separating from the country (they are for it…must confess, in a foreigner’s humility, that I am too), about conservative religious beliefs, about separation of church and state.

Good god I wish my French were better. I’ve regressed with it. The next time I come here, I promise myself to be much, much better. I wanna come back soon. Within the year.

So amazing this experience. So, so amazing. Better than I imagined so far. I feel at home here, in this little town. I do. I feel like it’s a home to me.

En Route, cont.

Still en route. Was supposed to stay at this hotel in a town of 1000, in the mountains, but woke up anxious about it, after yesterday's night in a town of 4000. I cancelled that reservation, and ended up here in Petawala, Ontario at a place that ain't so perty. Am longing for the place in the mountains right now, where the couple that owned it sounded lovely. I wanted to try to find a place to work out - my back is hurting from so much driving - and thought I'd have a better chance in a larger town. This is an army base town, apparently. That right about there describes it for you. I heard the army base had a great gym, which I excitedly went to, only to find it was closed. The male owner of this place creeps me out. But there are a lot of families staying here, etc., so I feel safe enough.

It's interesting how much this has come up for me on this trip: safety. I become more aware of my real or perceived vulnerability as a woman, traveling alone. I feel like a target, 'Are you traveling alone?' a lot of people, mostly men, want to know. This scares the crap out of me. I have an elaborate story about picking up a boyfriend in Ottowa tomorrow, if anyone here asks me. I feel safer having a fantastical male waiting for me, than not.

Looking forward to being in/around Montreal tomorrow. Traveling these parts has been interesting, but the anxiety of traveling alone really got to me today. Once I'm in a safe spot again - Montreal-ish - I'll be able to relax more. It's familiar, I feel I know the 'rules.' Here, I don't really know what's what.

The woman owner of the B&B I stayed at last night made me this awesome breakfast in her kitchen today. It was sweet. Her husband and their friend/guests played music last night - the violin and the guitar - and the women were singing. It was cute. One of the daughters of the B&B's owners lives in Maine. We got a kick out of this coincidence.

Will be happy when tonight is over, and I'm Montreal-bound. Send me warm wishes dear readers!

jem

En Route

I left Marquette (Sand River, where I was staying outside Marquette) today. Drove westward toward Montreal, my final destination, and stayed in Blind River, a small town of 4,000 in Ontario. Crossing the border was no problem at all. I stopped in Sault St. Marie, on the U.S. side for lunch, and found a cute little café with great sandwiches and soup, and internet access – a jem when you’re on the road. Got great ice cream afterwards, and then headed for Canada, getting lost, and then unlost. From the Canadian border, Blind river was about 2 hours away. Let me tell you. This town is a small little economically depressed town with zero industry. And what made me especially anxious staying here was the B&B, which is someone’s home. So, here I am typing this in someone’s kid’s former room, B&Bized a touch. Some family friends, apparently, are staying in the other kids’ rooms.

This got me thinking more about the nature of a town’s evolution: fledgling, boom, steadying, and if businesses/industry dissipates, decline. That was this town’s fate, apparently. A saw mill existed here once, and now it is gone. A local whom I encountered on a walk I took – who was ‘grilling’ out on his porch and stopped me to talk, for which I was actually thankful – told me this. He called me ‘honey’ every other word, and said ‘eh’ a lot. It was cool. He invited me in for a beer or for a ‘shot of rye.’ I had to have him repeat this 2^nd thing, because I wasn’t sure I heard correctly. What is a shot of ‘rye’? I said no. (I would have liked to, for the mere experience of it, but out of pure self-preservation, and fear of safety, I said no. I have a feeling that everything would have been just fine, but still. This is the burden of being a woman. Were I a man, I definitely would have said yes.)

Anyway, this guy, John, told me that most people in this town are on welfare. He cleans houses for $10/hour. So, how do people exist? We create need – entertainment, health, way of life. We create a way of life that then leads to a need for a certain kind of health attention, for example. But more than this, I’m fascinated by the evolution of villages, towns, cities, now. It just seems to be the same; or, some succeed in perpetuating, and some fizzle out. But, ‘high culture,’ it seems, is nothing more than the perpetuation of a village with longevity.

I’m having a hard time grasping the idea that humans have only been around for so long, and that we’ve had a definitive, singular path of ‘evolution’; the European evolution of coming to a land, taking it from native Americans, clearing it, establishing businesses (i.e., mining it, taking resources from it), booming, persisting. It doesn’t seem more complicated than this, and it seems that sustenance on that path is finite.

I didn’t realize that human evolution was so quantifiable. That it is, scares me.

jem

Last day in Marquette

Went to the Marquette County History Museum today, where I saw an exhibit on the earliest settlers of Marquette. Looked especially closely at the French Canadian stuff. Mostly, they were lumberjacks. I saw photos of what the lumber camps were like - crowded, sparse. Like prisons more than anything. My mother, who I spoke to on the phone, confirmed that my great-grandfather indeed was a lumberjack here. (Wish I'd talked to her about this before, instead of deducing based on research! But, was happy to see I'd guessed correctly.) Was cool to see the clothes the lumberjacks wore (fur gloves, long underwear, wool hats, etc.), and the tools they used. Yep, these people were cutting trees all day with little hand-held axes.

Also saw a bit about the culinary preferences of each ethnic group here, and one favorite snack among the French-Canadians, of course, was this maple syrup, brown sugar, butter concoction they'd cook and then place on snow to cool; the end result would be a taffy like candy. This started me thinking about how who you are - where you were born, who your 'people' are - affects your food cravings, your preferences. I thought warmly, fondly, of my mother, who LOVES maple-sugar candy, and, on pancakes, likes maple syrup AND brown sugar. She's a French-Canadian through and through.

Also saw from the exhibit, how the various ethnic groups here would have little festivals or societies to celebrate their heritage (the French-Canadians had a church - St. Jean de Baptiste - and church festivals), and that, eventually, over time, sometime in the 1900's, these societies, groups, etc., faded out, and everyone became sorta one big miscegenated culture. This sorta made me sad. I *like* being French-Canadian, and hate to see identifying aspects of that fade away. Food, language, cultural appearance...I guess these are the biggies. I like the idea of preserving these things.

Also realized that the European settlers - of course - took the land from the native americans who'd been here forever before, and that this only happened about 150 years ago...like 2 lifetimes ago. How horrible. Made me think about what we consider "advancement," and how such is actually quite violent and brutal, and these thoughts distilled after hours of thinking about it, make me think that status quo is actually good. We will never survive by pushing and pushing to "advance" and be bigger and stronger and more influential. We'll die off in a fraction of the time populations such as the native americans existed doing what they did.

The purpose of life? To exist. Persist. The native americans had it right. Just keep doing what works. European culture destroyed this notion. Anxiety over *not* doing better turned on them, us, and now, we have a world that will not sustain itself for much longer. We could have persisted endlessly, perhaps, but European settlers ensured a quick, anxious, wasteful demise.

I feel, slightly, like I've felt meeting some of my favorite writers: a bit disappointed. That is, now that I know my history a bit better, there are things I almost wish I didn't know. It was almost better to fantasize, than to realize how we participated in the destruction of a peaceful/better way of life, how my great-grandfather was participating in an archaic, brutal mindset toward women (getting a 13 year old pregnant...), etc.

Cool to have been here, seen this, felt all this, though. I definitely feel wiser, more informed.

Tomorrow, I begin my 3 day trip to their birthplace, St. Norbert, Canada, about an hour north of Montreal.

jem

Notes on Marquette

Random notes on the area, from emails, etc. -

I'm in Marquette, michigan, which is in the upper peninsula, which is GORGEOUS. Amazing. on lake superior, the nicest of the great lakes, methinks. I went swimming in it twice yesterday. Cold (like ocean in maine), but nice.

I'm actually in this little town sand river, right outside of marquette. I drive into marquette every day, sometimes twice. It's a 15 minute drive. Marquette is very cool - at first it reminded me of Biddeford, Maine, but now, more like Portland - cool little restaurants, funky younger people - though a lot of sort of 'townies' too, uneducated folk who never went away - right on the water, which is GORGEOUS. Water everywhere you can see. i swear, it looks 'bigger' than the ocean.

jem

Discoveries

So, I'm in Marquette, Michigan, trying to find out a few things about my family. When I first saw Marquette, this moved me very much; I imagined my family arriving, seeing this city (beautiful, on the water, a city) for the first time, and perhaps seeing it as a place for hope. The farm in Canada wasn't doing well; my great-grandfather had a heart condition, actually, and couldn't work it anymore. They went to Marquette for work.

From what I can piece together (though I'm not certain), they worked in the lumber industry. Most immigrants worked in iron ore - mining - here, but apparently, the French liked the independence of the lumbering, and the low-committment of it; that is, they could take off when lumbering season was done, and go back home.

One deflating discovery: my great-grandfather was 21 and my great-grandmother FOURTEEN when they had their first child. This makes me think of my great-grandfather as a rapist. I'm sure it's not far from the truth... Fourteen. I noticed this while looking at a 1930 census resport from Maine, which showed who was living in their Sanford house at the time. I noticed my great-grandmother was 56 at the time...and her oldest child, 42!!!! The youngest, my one remaining great-aunt, was 14. This floored me.



Likely, my great-grandfather worked in the woods during the week, and drank away the money in town on the weekends. This was suggested to me, but I'm not sure. I'd like to ask my great-aunt if her father drank much, but I'm afraid it may be too sensitive a subject.

I can't find any record anywhere of my great-aunt - Matante Rosilda (Rose) - or my great-uncle - Mononcle Alfred - who were supposedly born here. I looked in:

* City Clerk's office, for birth records - nothing.
* Baptism records at the French-Catholic Church of the time - the lady can't do the search for a few months.
* City and County Directories, like old phone books (when there were no phones), which listed every resident in town during that year, and where they lived, what their occupation was. I looked in 1899-1903.
* Census reports for those years. (1900 and 1910)
* Newspapers for birth announcements, on the few days following each's birth.

Nothing. But intersting discoveries:

*the newspapers advertized tons for women 'freeing up their time,' and 'sleeping better' by buying gas stoves, as opposed to cooking with charcoal. Never knew women cooked with charcoal back then, never thought about it. I imagine it was pretty bad for their lungs.

* In the city directories, there were listings of all the businesses in town at the time: tons. There were lumbering companies, mining companies, nurses, lawyers, midwives, etc. etc. There were many, many professions then that still exist today. For some reason, this surprised me.

jem

Collecting Data

So, I'm on a research trip to the upper peninsula, Michigan, and then to Canada, to do research on how my family got to the U.S. from Canada, where they lived, what the French-Canadian migration was all about, etc. etc.

The first night, last night, I stayed in Mackinaw City, right before the Mackinaw bridge, which connects the lower peninsula to the UP. The town was pretty gross - middle america touristy, loads of families with loads of kids, white-trash touristy attractions, etc. I was miserable. My room, in some commercial strip, was quiet, though, and I managed to write and read. My suggestion: never stay in that city. Stop to get an ice cream or chocolate, but don't stay. De-press-ing.

The Mackinaw bridge is AMAZING. Gorgeous. Was built in 1957, which then made getting to the UP possible by means other than ferry.



Some thoughts so far on my family: as I was driving on roads in the UP - which were gorgeous: great lakes, woods, odd little trading posts selling furs the owners had hunted (gross, intriguing) - I noticed the train track to my left. I imagined myself driving alongside the commuter train that had carried my great-grandparents from St. Norbert Quebec, to here. It really moved me, imagining my pregnant great-grandmother on the train, feet from where I was driving, about to give birth in Marquette. This was 1902, and again in 1903. Amazing. I wondered if what I was seeing resembled what they saw. Likely in part, it did - there are still tons of woods, and the lakes, of course. This was touching, imagining these people, the parents of my grandmother, and imagining what it would be like to meet them now, and tell them that I travelled the same path they did when they were first coming to the U.S. I imagined how they'd treat me - would they think it was cool that I'd done this, or would it seem like an over-glorification of their struggle, some annoying celebration of hardship?

I can't wait to see the city where they first came to in the U.S. - Marquette - and to see if I can figure out anything about why the French-Canadians came here in particular.

More later-

jem