Five Years Ago Today: Among the bohemians

From our rental car
on the ferry to Tadoussac

By Moristotle

[Originally published on July 31, 2012, with the addition today of a grammatical correction, a capitalization, a couple of commas, and two bracketed clarifications. The activities took place in the province of Quebec, in Canada.]

Second-guessing home

Another sign on Pleasant Street in Woodstock, Vermont made me stop and think. Didn't we start coming to Woodstock in Anno 2000?
    I couldn't remember at the time whether our son's first summer at the Killington Music Festival had been 2000 or 2001 (later I confirmed that it was 2001), but when I first noticed the sign, I felt a sort of personal historic attachment to it, as though it and we (my wife and I) had shared the years together. I felt especially connected to Woodstock. I felt that Woodstock had become a sort of summer home for us.
    At any rate, I did feel a little as though I were relatively home after returning from places we'd never been before: Baie-Saint-Paul (where we'd stopped for dinner on our way to La Malbaie, before it got too late to eat before going to sleep), Saguenay Fjord, Tadoussac,

Image from Francis H. Cabot's DVD presentation
on the maturation of his gardens at Quatre Vents
(pigeonnier is shown in the foreground, and across
the bay is the neighborhood and former municipality
of Pointe-au-Pic, where Cabot's great grandfather
George T. Bonner summered in the early 1900s)

La Malbaie, Les Quatre Vents. They had been unfamiliar places and we had driven many miles and spent quantities of money per day to visit. My head was buzzing from the 400-mile drive back (which included over an hours wait in the heat of sun and running automobiles and trucks at customs to re-enter the United States), and I felt the vacation fatigue that anyone would from staying in a hotel, waiting to be served in restaurants, eating more than usual, and struggling to comprehend a mostly foreign language.
    Yes, it was great to be back in Woodstock. I actually felt a tingle of excitement as we drove into town and approached The Woodstock Inn. The one night we'd already spent in Vermont before driving to Quebec hadn't included Woodstock. We'd stayed at an inn in Killington to which we had been planning to return after Quebec, but our bed had been too uncomfortable for my wife to sleep in, and I'm not sure how well I slept myself.

But however homelike Woodstock was feeling relative to Quebec, here we were for four more nights away from Siegfried. It felt to me as though we had already been away from our actual home long enough.

Among the Francophones

My wife and I spent three days in Quebec province last month. Quebec is the only region in North America with a French-speaking (or Francophone) majority. French is its official language, and about 95% of all Quebecers are capable of speaking French. Almost 80% list French as their mother tongue. People from around the world can experience America in Quebec, but from a distance greater than in other Canadian provinces.
    Contemporary Quebec culture is a post-1960s phenomenon supported and financed by both of Quebec's major political parties, who differ not in a right-vs-left so much as federalist-vs-sovereignist/separatist. (Note that the stop sign pictured is not bilingual, but in French only.)
    I studied conversational French intensively my senior year in college and visited a family south of Paris for a week in 1966. That was over forty-five years ago, and I was a little surprised that I could grasp most road signs and the gist of brochures and travel booklets and websites. (I was glad for the bilingual menus, though; even English menus in "nicer" restaurants in the United States use too many French and Italian culinary terms for my taste.)

The French we heard and saw in Quebec had an effect on ma femme also. But, then, although she hasn't studied French, she has read Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past in translation. And now, I see, she's reading it again.
    Our first day back in Vermont, she said, "I keep expecting people to speak French to me."
    And the second day back, I heard her say, "I keep expecting to see ARRÊT on stop signs."
    Remembering the cultural pride many Francophones take in their language, I took the opportunity to opine: "It gives you an idea of the effect a lifetime's speaking French can have on a person."

Moose version (elan)

Rest area ahead (what a relief!)

Vacation's destination

Our son arrives later today, following his twelfth consecutive summer at the Killington Music Festival. Visiting him in Killington was the reason we went to Vermont two weeks ago, and the reason we have gone eight or so times in the years of his summer residency there.
    The summer that his wife and son came to Vermont with him (2002), we had lunch with her and our grandson at Bentley's Restaurant in Woodstock, a beautiful town of about three thousand east of Killington on U.S. Route 4. That might have been the first time we really visited Woodstock.

Front yard of the Woodstock Inn

This year, as you may know from my posts earlier this week about our sojourn among the baleines, the bohemians, and the botanics, we also went to Quebec.
    I had a comfortable feeling, when we arrived back in Woodstock on Sunday the 22nd, that we had come back home, and I would be sad to leave on Thursday. I would miss Woodstock.
    We went to Bentley's on Monday, even though we'd discovered the previous evening that its menu was severely limited because of a recent fire. From where we sat for lunch, I pointed toward a table below, where the mirrors came together in the corner. "That's where we had lunch in 2002."

Le Manoir Richelieu, terrace of
Restaurant Bellerive

During our few days in Woodstock I realized that, now, not only was I going to miss Woodstock, but I was also going to miss La Malbaie, just as we were both of us already missing home.
    In fact, after we collected Siegfried at the kennel the following Thursday afternoon and entered our house with him, my wife exclaimed, "It is so good to be home!"

Going on vacation seems to be a way of acquiring more places that, if you're lucky, will feel like home to you. And maybe no one would ever go on vacation if they thought they wouldn't be able to return to home soon.

Among the botanics

Francis H. Cabot
(1925¹-2011)

Last November my wife read the NY Times's obituary of Francis H. Cabot, described as "a financier and self-taught horticulturalist who created two of the most celebrated gardens in North America."
    I suppose that she was attracted by the article's title, which included the clause, created notable gardens. The second of those gardens was les jardins de Quatre Vents, which we visited eleven days ago, on Saturday, July 21. In the course of our guided tour through Mr. Cabot's "gardens of the four winds" (conducted in French, with my wife's questions kindly answered in English), we walked around the house in which Mr. Cabot had lived, and died on November 19:

    The map appears on the inside front cover and flyleaf of Cabot's 2001 book, The Greater Perfection: The Story of the Gardens at Les Quatre Vents, which was of course mentioned in the obituary. And there's another (interactive) version of the map here.
    I was delighted, when I requested the book from a UNC library, to learn that it was in the art library's collection.
    The publisher's website describes the book, but I like the following description from anobii, a website devoted to "finding better books":

The story behind the creation of one of the world's most breathtaking public gardens. Les Quatre Vents in Charlevoix County, Quebec, has been acclaimed as the most aesthetically satisfying and horticulturally exciting landscape experience in North America. The garden seamlessly combines elements from the best gardening traditions with the original and the unexpected into a splendid composition that is nevertheless perfectly compatible with its natural surroundings. The Greater Perfection illustrates the delights, diversions, and surprises that await a visitor to these extraordinary gardens. The book chronicles the family origins of Les Quatre Vents as well as the story of its expansion during the last twenty-five years. Author Francis Cabot's account of the challenges of developing and enlarging Les Quatre Vents reveals the fascinating process behind the creation of a world-class garden that has become a mecca for horticultural enthusiasts from around the globe. Featuring photographs by five of today's leading garden photographers, this is one of the most beautiful books on gardens to appear in years. 382 color photographs, 25 black-and-white photographs.

    A dedicatory quotation demonstrates that Mr. Cabot agreed with Voltaire's Candide, that it's necessary to cultivate our garden².

The reason we went to La Malbaie, Quebec at all was to visit les Quatre Vents. That is, our day trip to be among the baleins and the bohemians was but an extra.
    Because les Quatre Vents is open for tours only two weekends in July, my wife made reservations for us within a week or two of reading the obituary. We could combine the trip with our visit to the Killington Music Festival in Vermont to see our son, who, unfortunately, couldn't get away from the festival to join us in La Malbaie.

Here are a few of my own modest photographs, taken with my wife's Nikon Coolpix P100, before its battery expired about half-way through the tour (I had failed to remember its also expiring quickly in Bulgaria last year or to bring along my P300 as well; we weren't carrying our Droids in Canada). Shown in chronological order:

The group ahead of us assembles

And listens tautly

Cabot's house
(picture an opening to the right, not in picture)

The opening imagined in the previous photograph,
featuring the long, stage-managed vista
(what I call an allée) that Cabot seemed to relish

Cabot's house on left, La Malbaie to the south beyond

A shallow, ground-level pool favored by Cabot

Our guide (image upside-down)

Delphiniums, which we saw in great
abundance at Les Quatre Vents
(my wife was amazed at how tall they were)

Another allée

A silhouette, the book tells us, of "Phoebe and her dog,"
"an interesting way of lending excitement and
interest to a terminal focal point" [–p. 130]
(placed at the approximately east end of a long
allée, where, somewhere near the middle,
I stood for the zoomed photograph)

Sculpture opposite Phoebe, out in the pasture,
perhaps 200 meters away
(extreme zoom, not cropped)

There was so much more my camera wasn't up to capturing, especially le pigeonnier, the performing frogs (whose recorded performance plays when a tourist trips an infrared signal), and the authentic Japanese tea house.
    But perhaps you can borrow or purchase the book, visit the garden's website, obtain the DVD of Cabot's presentation on the development of the gardens (we brought one home; it contains a French version and an English version)—or travel to La Malbaie some future July!
_______________

1. Francis H. Cabot was born on August 6, a little over two months before Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (born Roberts on October 13, 1925).
   
2. Pangloss disait quelquefois à Candide: "Tous les événements sont enchaînés dans le meilleur des mondes possibles; car enfin, si vous n’aviez pas été chassé d’un beau château à grands coups de pied dans le derrière pour l’amour de Mlle Cunégonde, si vous n’aviez pas été mis à l’Inquisition, si vous n’aviez pas couru l’Amérique à pied, si vous n’aviez pas donné un bon coup d’épée au baron, si vous n’aviez pas perdu tous vos moutons du bon pays d’Eldorado, vous ne mangeriez pas ici des cédrats confits et des pistaches."
       "Cela est bien dit," répondit Candide, "mais il faut cultiver notre jardin.”
                               [—Voltaire, Candide]

Among the bohemians

From our rental car
on the ferry to Tadoussac

So as not to miss the ferry 75 kilometers away at the Saguenay Fjord or the whale-watching boat in Tadoussac, we left our hotel in La Malbaie before 5 a.m. I added three half-hour contingencies, one for traffic, one for the ferry, and another for good measure. The Deans were nothing if not prudent.
    The first traffic of note that were cars and trucks just unloaded from or waiting to be loaded onto the Tadoussac ferry. Indeed, we did have to wait about twenty minutes for the next ferry, during which time I had a pleasant conversation with a Québécois towing a boat behind his SUV. He had more English than I French, so informed me in English that he was going fishing. "I'm going to catch a trout."
    The Deans were also lucky. (I started to say are lucky, but why tempt fate?) We arrived in Tadoussac with plenty of time to have breakfast at the restaurant where we planned to have lunch after whale-watching:

    Café bohème tries to live up to its name, with many canvases on its up- and downstairs walls reminiscent of the twenties and thirties:

    Upstairs was cozy, with the bay partly visible through its windows:

    Although I didn't know it yet, the embarkation point for our whale-watching boat would be to the left of the private boats in the distance, and the Centre d'interprétation des mammifères marins to their right:

Click to enlarge

And, back for lunch, there were those desserts I spoke of on Saturday:

Click to see Saturday's post

If you are ever in Tadoussac, let a hostess at the Café bohème "assign you" a table. She'll even let you sit on the front veranda if the weather permits.

Among the baleines

Got some great photos up off Tadoussac, Quebec ten days ago, where we'd taken a day trip from La Malbaie for a boat tour to watch whales on the St. Lawrence River and the Saguenay Fjord:

I of course have to confess that I didn't take those from the boat, but from the back-lighted display at the Centre d'interprétation des mammifères marins (Marine Mammal Interpretation Center), which we visited afterwards:

[More such images here]
    As my friend Ken Marks kindly remarked to comfort me: "If you get a good shot of a whale, you've had a damn lucky day. I once when out on a boat in search of orcas. Got nothing but a black flash here and a black flash there."
    Or, as the guide at le Centre d'interprétation des mammifères marins told, "It took three years to get the photographs for the 18-minute documentary you are about to watch."

A few of my own, modest photos follow, taken of and from the boat, using one or the other of our Nikon Coolpix cameras (my wife's P100 and my P300, which I use for digiscoping—all shots hand-held):

Our boat, as we waited to board

Zoom to the Hotel Tadoussac
(We didn't stay here; it was a day trip from La Malbaie)

One of twenty or so images in "sports" mode

Another one of twenty or so images in "sports" mode

Haut Fond Prince Lighthouse,
out in the St. Lawrence from Tadoussac

St. Lawrence coast east of Tadoussac
(the north side of the river)

Mouth of the Saguenay Fjord
(Tadoussac ferry harbor to the right)

A Minke whale (a baleine)

A couple of Beluga whales
we were told that they live here year-round

I tried to make movies, and did manage one that shows several belugas jumping (white flashes, to paraphrase Ken), but it's so jumpy I fear that you'd suffer eye strain or headache if I showed it to you.