oh Canada, how short the summer months...

The skies are misty blue, the air is still. The wind turbines are quiet. We hike to the central gas station in Cap-Chat. It's where the bus will stop on its way west and south. A Saturday morning in what I must now call late August. I get the feeling somehow that there aren't many summer days left here. That suddenly it will be beautiful, all orange and gold in the mountains and then, equally suddenly, there will be the beginning of the longest season -- winter.

Am I imagining that people are in a hurry here? As if you'd be foolish to waste these precious warm days of an already fading summer?

I look around me. Salt bags. I can't figure them out.





Not for snow. Let's not be ridiculous here. And what's sulphur moose salt? And why does this bag have salt with apple flavor? When you end up in small communities far far from where you live, you try to imagine what it would be like if fate placed you here instead of, say, in Madison. Would I be saying 'salut' to the people that come and go, filling tanks, containers, motorbikes with gas? I give hugs to the town boys? Would I smoke cigarettes?

And would I be sick of crabe, crevette, and homard on all menus? Would I learn to say dejeuner for beakfast (instead of petit dejeuner, as they call it in France) and diner for lunch (instead of dejeuner) and souper for dinner (instead of diner)? Would I have great upper body strength from shoveling snow?

One last look over the calm as can be waters of the great gulf...





...and we're off. The bus is nearly full today. The ride is long, with a change in Rimouski. By 6 in the evening we are in Quebec City.