Texas to Labrador (7)

STATISTICAL SUMMARY:

Dates: April 30 – Oct. 1st

Total Elapsed time: 155 days (5 months and 2 days)(includes a break of 14 days)

Total time in Sad­dle: 101 days

Total Dis­tance: 6,332 miles ( 10,131 km)

Aver­age dis­tance per day: 62.7 miles (100.3 km)

South­ern­most Point: Sabal Palm Bird Sanc­tu­ary, Texas (South­ern­most point in TX)

North­ern­most Point: Red Bay, Labrador (North­most black­top road E. of Manitoba)

East­ern­most Point: Cape Spear, Nfld (the east­ern­most point of N. America)

West­ern­most Point: Kingsville, TX

Lat­i­tude Range: 25.90 – 51.82 N = 25.9 degrees

Lon­gi­tude Range: 52.65 – 97.87 W = 45.2 degrees

Red Bay, the north­ern­most point, is at the lat­i­tude of Clac­ton or Frinton-on-Sea, Essex, Eng­land, sea­side resorts 25 miles from where I grew up in Ipswich, and fre­quent des­ti­na­tions of cycle rides in my teen years.

Nights Camped out: 46 (33%)

Nights in Motel: 46 (33%)

B&B, Hos­tel, Ferry: 49 (34%)

Weight Loss: 45 lbs, from 230 lbs to 185 lbs.

NARRATIVE OF LAST SECTION OF RIDE:

My last report was from L’Anse-au-Clair, Labrador. On my last night at the Bed and Break­fast there the cod fish­ing sea­son opened for a day, and the son of the owner brought back two huge crates of cod, which had to be gut­ted and packed away that night. The next morn­ing the Moose sea­son opened, and it seemed that every­one in south­ern Labrador was off to “Get their Moose”. This is not a mat­ter of sport: the peo­ple of the area buy no pro­tein – they live on the fish they catch and their one annual moose and cari­bou. This is true of a large part of New­found­land and Labrador, and gives rise to some humor­ous songs by local musi­cians such as “Buddy, Wha’s ‘s Name, and the Other Fel­low” . It also means that there is lit­tle need for super­mar­kets, and between that and the low pop­u­la­tion den­sity, this means that there are no super­mar­kets over an area about 500 miles across.

From Blanc Sablon, which is just over the Labrador line in Que­bec, I took the ferry to Rimouski, Que­bec. This ferry, the Nordik Express, con­nects many of the lit­tle set­tle­ments on the North Shore of Que­bec, includ­ing Har­ring­ton Har­bor, the scene of the movie La Grande Seduc­tion (The Seduc­tion of Doc­tor ___? in Eng­lish, I believe). Almost all of these set­tle­ments are Anglo­phone, and there is no road that con­nects any of them east of Natashquan. The ride takes 3 days and nights, and at each stop we spent an hour or two off-loading con­tain­ers and on-loading oth­ers, since this is the only con­nec­tion with the out­side world.

The east­ern part of the coast is beau­ti­ful, with high hills and bare rocky out­crops: the set­tle­ments are few and far between, their brightly-painted wooden houses perch­ing on the bare rock or, in some cases, nes­tled in lit­tle lush coves. On the first morn­ing we woke up at St.-Augustin, and then pro­ceeded west through a straight, nar­row chan­nel like those in the Stock­holm skar­gard. At La Tabatiere most of the pas­sen­gers got off and walked into the vil­lage, or in the cases of three of us, rode our bikes in, and explored: we did this at each oppor­tu­nity. This area is out­side the area of really rich cod fish­eries, and so is infa­mous as the locale of the baby seal hunts – seal­ing was a means of sus­te­nance and pro­vided the only cash income. On the ferry we were shown an old doc­u­men­tary (in French) about seal hunt­ing – in this case hunt­ing of adult seals, their trans­port across the ice by sled dog team, and their rendering.

At Tete-a-la-Baleine we hitch-hiked the few miles from the har­bor to the vil­lage with the sis­ter of one of the crew mem­bers. This lady had lived in Mon­treal and as a con­se­quence was very bored with the vil­lage, and felt trapped in the sum­mer because you can’t go any­where with­out a boat. Win­ters are bet­ter, because then peo­ple can go all over the coun­try­side on their snow­mo­biles, and across the ice to neigh­bor­ing set­tle­ments as well.

We reached Har­ring­ton Har­bor in the late evening – it was a large set­tle­ment and very beau­ti­ful indeed, but when we woke up the next morn­ing the moun­tains had receded from the coast, and soon after­ward we stopped at Natashquan, a small Fran­coph­one vil­lage, and most of the pas­sen­gers got off to drive home to Quebec.

There is no way to con­vey the stark iso­la­tion and beauty of this rocky shore: the bare grey gran­ite scant­ily clad in patches of moss and low shrubs, the iso­lated brightly painted houses (used mostly in sum­mer) scat­tered far from any set­tle­ment, and the tight lit­tle coves run­ning between rocky cliffs. The light (when the sun is shin­ing) is bright and clean, and in the val­leys the low shrubby veg­e­ta­tion is lux­u­ri­ant with a dozen kinds of berries.

After Natashquan we stayed fur­ther out in the estu­ary, and by evening could see the north coast of Anti­costi Island, a place I had very much wanted to visit. How­ever, we stopped at Port-Menier on Anti­costi after mid­night, and the dock was so far from the vil­lage that I didn’t man­age to walk all the way in. It is

impos­si­ble to visit Anti­costi for less than 4 days, or a full week if you want to con­tinue in the same direc­tion, since this ferry is the only con­nec­tion. The whole island, which is about as big as Con­necti­cut, was owned in the late nine­teenth cen­tury by Henri Menier, a Swiss choco­late mag­nate who used it as a pri­vate hunt­ing pre­serve. He intro­duced White-tailed Deer and a vari­ety of other ani­mals, and the unique flora of the island is now under extreme stress, pri­mar­ily from the huge pop­u­laion of deer. The island is now a national park, and peo­ple pay dearly to hunt. The scenery, accord­ing to another of the ship’s doc­u­men­taries, is appar­ently spec­tac­u­lar. The island has a rel­a­tively mild cli­mate, and I still can’t fig­ure out why it was never set­tled and farmed.

On our last morn­ing we awoke on the approach to Sept-Iles, where we had a long stop, since it is the largest town on the north shore. I rode my bike into town and found a bike shop where my spoke was quickly repaired. The port for the Labrador Iron Mines was quiet because of a long-lasting min­ers’ strike. We spent the rest of the day steam­ing obliquely across the estu­ary towards Rimouski, watch­ing the coast of the Gaspe Penin­sula grow higher and closer. I was sort of glad that I had not attempted the ride around the penin­sula, although cyclists that I met later all gave it rave reviews: this was the ONLY thing on my orig­i­nal loose agenda that I did not do – it would have taken eight days, and I knew already on the 27th June when I had to make the deci­sion that I was run­ning out of time.

We arrived late in Rimouski and I spent the night there, and then set off south-westward along the south shore of the St. Lawrence. At Trois Pis­toles (lovely name!) I had lunch and did a load of laun­dry in a Buan­derie (Laun­dro­mat) that, like most of those in small towns in Que­bec, was hard to find. Every­one knew where it was, under­neath the Cin­ema, but nei­ther that nor the Buan­derie had any signs indi­cat­ing their pres­ence. From Trois Pis­toles I crossed the St. Lawrence again by ferry to Les Escoumins, an Innu vil­lage. I never did get clear the dif­fer­ence between Innuit (Eskimo) and Innu (Mon­tag­nais in French). The lat­ter are appar­ently con­sid­ered Indi­ans, in spite of the sim­i­lar­ity of their name to that of the Eski­mos, and the fact that this coast used to be called the Cote des Esquimaux. This vil­lage appeared well-cared for and prosperous.

I had crossed to the North Shore again with some trep­i­da­tion, but to con­tinue along the south shore would have meant retrac­ing my steps from Riviere-du-Loup to Que­bec City. Also, Tadous­sac, which I reached the first night out from Rimouski, is the whale-watching cap­i­tal of the area. But I was fore­warned that the rid­ing on the North Shore wa rough in terms both of topog­ra­phy and heavy traffic.

Tadous­sac is at the mouth of the Sague­nay fjord, in a truly spec­tac­u­lar set­ting. One day I would like to take a boat up the fjord. At Tadous­sac I went on a whale-watching cruise, and saw plenty of Bel­uga and one large fin whale, and then pro­ceeded to St. Simeon, a dis­tance of only 30 miles but a ride that tested my sta­mina with huge long hills and lots of log­ging trucks, with no shoul­ders to ride on.

The next day was more of the same – gor­geous coun­try, but huge hills, but I got as far as St. Tite, which is just before the descent into the low­lands around Que­bec City.

From St. Tite I rode down a long hill to the Canyon St. Anne, which is a tourist trap but well worth a visit. The St. Anne river has eroded a steep gorge, with many water­falls, along the fault sep­a­rat­ing the Cana­dian shield from Pale­o­zoic lime­stones. In St. Anne-de-Beaupre, about 25 miles from Que­bec, I was stopped by a musi­cian as I left a drug­store and offered a lift through the city. I accepted, with some mis­giv­ings, as it would save me at least half a day and a lot of rid­ing in heavy traf­fic: St. Anne is already vir­tu­ally in the sub­urbs. This musi­cian, Jean, was small and round and bald and quite weird. He had been born in the Roman­ian part of the Banat of Temes­var. He was dri­ving a very beat up van in which he clearly slept most of the time. He pres­sured me to buy a CD by his wife, and whgen I did so imme­di­ately stopped to buy gas. I think he offered me the lift because he needed the money to get home. The CD turned out to be quite good: mostly sung in Yid­dish, with a lit­tle French and Eng­lish. Oy vay!

That night I got as far as St. Georges, where I had my sec­ond punc­ture of the day out­side a camp­ground. Very con­ve­nient! The rear tire that I had put on new at Whit­bourne, New­found­land, had worn out in only a thou­sand miles (what do you expect for$8?), so the next morn­ing I went to a bike shop and bought and installed a new one. The road (Que­bec 173) fol­lows Fleuve Chaudiere and one does not realise that one is climb­ing steadily all the way. From St. Georges to the bor­der was only about 25 miles, and an easy ride, but once in Maine is was down­hill for a long way. I stopped for lunch and to get on the inter­net in Jack­man, Maine, and then had a tremen­dous climb for about 6 miles to recover all the alti­tude lost since cross­ing the bor­der. At these alti­tudes the Fall col­ors were already quite advanced – they had begun to appear on the North Shore of Que­bec a cou­ple of days earlier.

I stopped at The Forks, Maine, for my first night back in the USA, and was made quite a fuss of by the peo­ple in the hotel bar/restaurant. This is a cen­ter for white­wa­ter raft­ing on the Dead and Ken­nebec Rivers, and I was per­suaded to spend the next day raft­ing on the Ken­nebec. This was a load of fun, more espe­cially so because four of the peo­ple on the raft were vis­i­tors from the Sud­bury, Suf­folk, area of Eng­land, about 20 miles from where I had grown up. They were on a two week hol­i­day in new Eng­land, and were hav­ing a great time, which was catching.

From The Forks I rode down to Augusta, Maine, through grad­u­ally more and more farm­land and lots of pic­turesque vil­lages and a few rather decayed old mill towns. And then on into Freeport, Maine, where I stopped at LL Bean to buy a cycling jer­sey before cycling the last few miles to Yarmouth, Maine, and the offices of DeLorme Map­ping, where my old remote sens­ing friend Jonathan Per­shouse works. Jonathan gave me a great wel­come, and I spent two nights with him before tak­ing the train from Port­land to Boston, MA, where I stayed with an old col­lege friend, Julius Levin, for three days, and boxed the bike up for ship­ping to Texas.

I had intended to take the bus from Boston to Brownsville, TX, but when I got to the bus sta­tion with Julius we found that all buses down the East Coast were can­celed from Fayet­teville, NC, because of Hur­ri­cane Jeanne. The alter­na­tive was to go through Albany, NY, and this would take a day longer. By this time I had com­mit­ted myself to be in Church in Hous­ton, and the added tran­sit time would not allow for that. I also real­ized at the bus sta­tion that I suf­fer some degree of ago­ra­pho­bia: the noise and crowds really upset me.

Julius helped me find cheap tick­ets on SW Air­lines from Hart­ford, Conn., to Har­lin­gen, Texas, and the fol­low­ing morn­ing drove me out to the air­port. Good old Julius!

On arrival at Har­lin­gen I found that the ride to the Motel I had reserved in Brownsville would be expen­sive and involve quite a wait, so I booked myself into the Motel 6 in Har­lin­gen and took a taxi. That evening I put the bike back together again and re-packed.

The fol­low­ing morn­ing I rode down to Brownsville, got some immi­gra­tion offi­cers to pho­to­graph me at the Inter­na­tional Bridge – it is for­bid­den to do it your­self, and then rode on South­most Road to the Sabal Audubon Bird Sanc­tu­ary at the south­ern­most point of Texas. From there I rode another 25 miles to Boca Chica, where Texas High­way $ runs into the Gulf of Mex­ico, the south­west­ern­most access to the sea in the east­ern USA.

On the way back to Har­lin­gen I got very dehy­drated – the warmth of south Texas caught me with­out enough water on the bicy­cle. I left Har­lin­gen early the next morn­ing and made the easy run up to Hous­ton in 3 days, aver­ag­ing 110 miles a day, and tak­ing care to carry enough water, espe­cially for the empty 62-mile cross­ing of the King Ranch. The wind was with me, the sun was pleas­ant, there was a nice shoul­der, although it got a bit rough around Vic­to­ria. There were no inci­dents, except for a punc­ture near Rosen­berg, and two occa­sions, both on Dairy Ash­ford Road in Hous­ton, when dri­vers rolled down their win­dows and yelled at me to get off the road and ride on the sidewalk.

In Hous­ton I stopped briefly at the Arendts’ for water and pho­tographs, and at Shell Wood­creek, where I had really begun the trip 4 months and 2 days ear­lier, to say hello to Allen Scar­dina and Mike Cooper. I arrived at the Dolds’ house, the offi­cial point of begin­ning, almost exactly 4 months, 2 days and 2 hours after I had left it.

SUMMARY

All in all, it was a won­der­ful trip, and along the way I met some won­der­ful peo­ple. The scenery in East­ern Canada, espe­cially in New­found­land, was spec­tac­u­lar, but there was also great scenery in Maine and in the Midwest.

I found much to admire in the Cana­dian way of life, which seems to be delib­er­ately less stress­ful than our own. I was able to watch the final run-up to their elec­tions, and also a Federal-Province Con­fer­ence of Pre­miers (Prime Min­is­ters) on the sub­ject of how to pay for the health care sys­tem, and was struck by the col­le­gial, non-adversarial approach taken in their pol­i­tics. Cana­di­ans seem, to a per­son, to value their health care sys­tem highly, and to want to see it con­tinue to succeed.

I was struck by the loy­alty of Cana­di­ans in gen­eral to the “way things were”, an innate con­ser­vatism. You still see the Union Jack every­where, and even some­times the old New­found­land flag (a tri­color) from the days when it was an inde­pen­dent domin­ion, before it went bank­rupt in 1925 and reverted to being a colony. Every­where there are delib­er­ate attempts to pre­serve her­itage build­ings and her­itage skills. The preser­va­tion and repeated updat­ing of old build­ings means that in many houses and hotels there are doors and floors out-of-kilter due to poor foun­da­tion work in the orig­i­nal con­struc­tion. There is less hurry to adopt new forms ways of doing things just because they seem bet­ter at the moment. How­ever, there is an empha­sis on effi­ciency, and groups of towns are gath­ered into new, larger munic­i­pal­i­ties in a way that is incon­ceiv­able in the US: Miramichi in Nova Sco­tia, for exam­ple, was cre­ated by amal­ga­ma­tion of the old towns of Napan, Chatham, and New­cas­tle, where Max Aitken (Lord Beaver­brook) was born. Inter­est­ingly, a Prime Min­is­ter of the UK, Bonar Law (Con­ser­v­a­tive, 1922–23), was also a New Brunswicker, from Rex­ton, near Richibucto.

There is accep­tance of dif­fer­ent groups within soci­ety, so that there is much less empha­sis on the idea of a “melt­ing pot”. Unfor­tu­nately, though, there is lit­tle attempt on the part of the vast major­ity of either Fran­coph­o­nes or Anglo­phones to be flu­ent in each oth­ers’ lan­guages. Since Anglo­phones are the major­ity, this still results in the main bur­den of learn­ing the other lan­guage being placed on the Fran­coph­one pop­u­la­tion, espe­cially if they work in the tourism indus­try. Fran­coph­o­nes were con­tin­u­ally amazed that I speak French as well as I do, which is not per­fectly by any means. I kept hav­ing to explain that I grew up in Eng­land and learned it there. Unfor­tu­nately, it was quite a way into the trip before I was able to under­stand Que­be­cois as well as I spoke French. The break­through came when some­one explained to me that the “t” and “d” sounds of French are dis­ap­pear­ing, and being replaced by Ger­man– sound­ing “ts” and “dz”. The “oi” sound of French approx­i­mates Eng­lish “oy”, and the “ere” (car­riere, der­riere) sound is replaced uni­ver­sally with “are”, as in the Swedish a-umlaut-r. This is anal­o­gous to the Eng­lish sound shift from Derby and clerk to “Darby” and “clark”. Even­tu­ally I was able to rec­og­nize var­i­ous dialects: in the Mar­itimes a dol­lar is gen­er­ally a “piece” and a penny is a “sou”, which in old France was ten cents.

In the USA, in Ohio in par­tic­u­lar, I was amazed to see the pros­per­ity and pride shown in the cen­ters of small towns that were not on the free­way sys­tem – Nor­man Rockwell’s Amer­ica still sur­vives there. Also, in Ohio, Indi­ana, and Ontario, the neat­ness and clean­li­ness of the Amish/Mennonite farms stood in strong con­trast to those sur­round­ing them: an obser­va­tion that has often been made.

I also found out that I have no prob­lem being alone with myself for sev­eral days at a time, but that I do enjoy the encour­age­ment of oth­ers in my efforts. In addi­tion, on the way back I found that large build­ings full of peo­ple and noise dis­turb me greatly, whereas crowds in the open air do not. I found that no hill is so steep it can­not be climbed, and no rain and wind are so cold and wet that they can­not be endured. That bicy­cles are gen­er­ally more robust than the hor­ror sto­ries of other cyclists would have us believe – after all, a story would not be a good one were it not for the bad things it relates! Again, that once a Geol­o­gist always a geol­o­gist – some­how I always seemed to end up stop­ping to look at, even sketch, inter­est­ing rocks, or mak­ing a diver­sion to see some famous locality.

The End