 | CANADA |
| CANADA |
THEY CALL ME TRINITY
Back on Highway 138 again and I have a further distraction before I can go to investigate the town of Baie-Trinité
Just like most of the rivers out here along the North Shore, Quebec Hydro has become involved in the rivière de la Trinité here on the edge of town and has built a little hydro-electric generating plant to serve the town and its neighbourhood.
There wasn't very much by the way of detail to tell me anything about the hydro-electric plant but although there isn't a very big drop just here, the force of the water makes it quite powerful so I imagine that there's enough electricity produced here to supply the village and its surroundings.
But the river is quite well-known as a famous salmon fishing river. So much so that at one time the fishing rights were purchased in the 1930s by a couple of clubs in Quebec, firstly the fishing club of the Compagnie St-Laurence Paper Ltée and subsequently by the DOMTAR
And so what about the salmon? How are they going to travel upstream past the barrage??
Quebec Hydro solved that problem by building a kind of fish ladder at the side of the barrage when the barrage was constructed, so that the salmon could move upstream and downstream. I haven't heard whether or not it's as successful and whether the fish are as numerous as before the barrage was built.
Maybe it's a pure coincidence, I dunno, but control of the fishing rights of the river was wrestled back by the villagers in 1976.
Back in the Ranger, and I can't believe it - something else comes along to distract me.
There's a vehicle going past me in the direction of Baie Comeau and it's towing a trailer. And on that trailer is a traditional-shaped Mini. I wasn't aware that they had been exported to North America, and so I remember being surprised when I encountered one near Truro in Nova Scotia in 2003 .
But I've seen a fair few since and so there can't be too much doubt that they were definitely imported here.
I finally manage to arrive in Baie Trinité
This is in September 2016 and you might remember that we've been here before. In 2012 on our mega-ramble down Highway 138 to be precise, but I'd only driven through the place without having the time to have a real poke around
Seeing as it's quite close to where I was staying in 2016 (a mere 37 kilometres - which is "right next door" over here on the North Shore of the St Lawrence River) I reckoned that I would come back for a look around and to add to the notes that I had made when I was here last.
The first thing that you notice is a rest area, right in the centre of what passes for the village and right by the shore. There are all of the usual facilities here, but it goes without saying that seeing as we are at the end of September in 2016 they are all closed up for the winter.
When I was here in May 2012, they were also closed up. It does make me wonder if they are ever open. I reckoned that if I were to turn up here in the middle of August, they would be likewise closed.
But anyway, enough of that. It's gone lunchtime, my stomach thinks that my throat has been cut and I have my butties to eat. Although I've run out of hummus I do have some vegan cheese that I picked up in the Atlantic Superstore when I was in Woodstock, New Brunswick the other day. That will go nicely with my tomato and lettuce.
It's a good spec too, despite the lack of facilities, because there's a reasonable view of the sea from here so I'm in my element.
Baie Trinité's claim to fame is that it is the home of the Centre National des Naufrages du Saint-Laurent - the National Centre for Shipwrecks of the Saint Lawrence - and contains artefacts recovered from wrecks during the period from 1600 to modern times.
This is a place that I would love to visit, and I've come here twice now to visit it, once in May 2012 and again in late September 2016 and as you probably realise, it's been closed on both occasions.
Despite rumours to the contrary, it does not contain any relics whatever from the shipwreck off the coast of Havre-St. Pierre when a ship carrying red paint collided with a ship carrying blue paint, and all the survivors were marooned on the Ile d'Anticosti.
The museum offers you the opportunity to "experience several major tragedies that have marked the history of Nouvelle France" but they must be joking. I've no intention of being shipwrecked once, let alone going through several shipwrecks merely to satisfy my curiosity.
It is however a little-known fact that whenever I'm on a ship I always carry a bar of soap in my pocket. That way, if ever I do end up in the water I can get washed ashore.
There have been plenty of shipwrecks along the St Lawrence shore as you probably know, because we've visited the sites of a few of them. And without any explanatory panel (which wouldn?t do you lot much good anyway because here in Quebec the Tourist Information is written in French only, just to spite the Anglophone tourists), I would say that this cannon is from a real shipwreck.
The amount of erosion on the barrel would seem to me to be a good indicator of many centuries of immersion in salty water. The chassis is, of course, not original.
In 1690 a mariner by the name of Admiral Phips sailed up the St Lawrence with a fleet of ships in an attempt to capture Quebec from the French. He was unsuccessful, not the least of the reasons being that he lost several ships on the way up.
And on Christmas Eve 1994 the remains of one of them - the Elizabeth and Mary - were found just off the headland at Baie Trinité.
And as you might also expect, just like every other centre of population in Quebec, we have a church here, built in 1939.
I forgot to go over and see to whom it was dedicated (I'm really forgetting myself these days) but as this place is called Baie Trinité, apparently because Jacques Cartier is supposed to have visited the bay on Trinity Sunday in 1536, it's quite possible that this could be the Church of the Holy Trinity - l'église Sainte-Trinité.
As we have said before, the beaches around here are magnificent, with all of the sand that has been deposited by glaciers as they receded at the end of the various ice ages.
I'm not a big fan of the beach here at Baie Trinité though. It's right by the main highway and while Highway 138 is hardly the M25, you?d be surprised at the number of heavy lorries that go past here. It's far too noisy for me. Give me the beach at Godbout or at the Anse de Sable any time.
Instead, I'm going to take myself off up the beach westwards. That's far more sheltered behind the Tourist Information Centre and the church, and where I'm less likely to be disturbed by passing traffic.
Except, it has to be said, by someone on a quad who decides to come for a ride out here to disturb me as I'm walking along. Still, I do my best to avoid him and think pleasant thoughts instead as I take advantage of the beautiful sunshine.
All of the beaches, shores and river mouths along here are littered with rocks as you have probably noticed, and they too have been brought down here by glaciers (and latterly by rivers) from their places of origin.
Geologists can and do have hours of endless fun tracing rocks back to their original source and thus they can plot the paths that glaciers and rivers have taken during prehistory.
It's a fascinating hobby, so I'm told. Over a period of time, geological earth movements and glacial deposits can dramatically alter the paths that rivers have taken.
But this lump of rock on the beach is quite interesting. It caught my attention because it was glistening in the sunlight so I went over to photograph it. Unfortunately, the glistening hasn't come out at all.
The rock is totally different from most of the others along here and to me (not that I would know very much about it) it closely resembles a lump of iron ore similar to what we saw when we tracked down the old iron mine at Gagnon last year.
There are many deposits of iron ore in the interior. Gagnon, Fire Lake, Mont Wright, Labrador and Wabush are just five out of dozens of names that spring to mind, and it's interesting to think that this rock might have come all the way down from up there in the interior.
This river is called, rather unsurprisingly, the rivière Trinité and as I said earlier on these pages, it's quite famous for the quality and the quantity of the salmon that was caught in it.
This area was quite popular with a certain band of Innu - the first-Nation Canadians who inhabit this area. This particular band used to live off the salmon from the river in the summer and off whales and the like from the St Lawrence during the winter.
There was no reason for them to live a nomadic lifestyle like many other Innu bands.
Meanwhile, I?m back on the beach again heading east this time. Right over there is the fish-processing plant that we visited when we were here in 2012.
Formerly, it was the forest products that provided the major source of employment in the village. The place was quite a hive of industry, with a log flume and even a small railway network, but the 1960s put an end to all of that and the economy collapsed.
Nowadays, it?s fishing and the fish processing plant that provide most of the employment opportunities around here.
One thing that Baie Trinité does have going for it is that it has a fuel station and convenience store, and you can see it peering through the trees over there, left of centre.
I went in there for a wander around and to my great surprise they sold bread. Baguettes too, albeit frozen ones that need to be thawed out before I can use them. But it was good news for me when I was staying in Godbout in 2016 - it meant a round trip of just 78 kms for the bread instead of 116 kms to Baie Comeau and back.
But back to the story of our drive around in 2012. You may remember that when I was out on the rue Poulin, I mentioned that I would be looking for a decent place to take a good reverse-angle photo of Baie Trinity. This place will do, won't it? You can see just how beautiful the setting really is.
The 500-odd inhanbitants of the place must be lucky to live here, because they do have the beach at the side of the road (even though I said that it wasn't for me).
It does however go without saying that right now, whether May 2012 or the end of September 2016, you wouldn't catch me going in the water around here.
Where I was parked to take the above photo was on a quayside on the edge of town. And here with me was an enormous cross.
I went to inspect it to see if it was a Cartier cross, one of those erected to mark one of the landing places of his early expeditions, but it seems not to be. It has a religious message or text inscribed on the reverse, talking about "Mary, our Mother".
I'm not by any means a churchgoer and not being a Catholic, I have no idea about the importance of this cult of "Mary, our Mother". Furthermore, none of my devout Catholic friends has been able to explain it either.
I always understood that Christianity was all about Christ - ie Jesus, and not his mother. Whatever happened to "thou shall have no other Gods before me" and "thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image ... (nor) ... bow down thyself to them nor serve them"?
The cross is right by a fish-processing plant dealing with crustacés, and the smell is overpowering. I'm not going to be hanging around here for long, that's for sure.
However, one thing that I do notice while I'm standing here this morning is that just for a change, despite everything that we've been through on the May 2012 trip, there is hardly a breath of wind on the St Lawrence today.
Well, maybe that's an exaggeration, but there is nothing like what there has been. It's probably the most beautiful morning that i've encountered so far on my travels.
And they are correct about the widening of the river just here, because from a suitable viewpoint not long after leaving Baie Trinity I happen to glance across the river and I can't see the far bank at all.
So having left the Bay, and Trinity Is Still My Name
Apparently there was a flood here on 20th July 1996 and 5 people were carried away by it to lose their lives, including a little girl of about one year old. It shows that even in modern times, the forces of nature around here should not be underestimated.
And I was intrigued to see the use of the word deluge instead of the more usual inondation. But then again, the Quebecois always have been rather biblical.
But it ought to ring a bell with you about everything that I have been saying about the use of archaic French here in 21st-Century Quebec. Remember Louis XV and his famous comment after the disastrous Battle of Rossbach in 1757?
"Après moi le déluge"
That's French of 250 years ago round about the time of the fall of Nouvelle France and is considered to be quite archaic today.
From the brow of a hill in the vicinity I catch yet another glimpse of the southern shore of the St Lawrence away in the distance. I must have been lost in a cloud 10 minutes ago, for it doesn't look as if, despite the dramatic widening of the river, we have finished with it quite yet.
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