(The original post below is from September 2011. On July 6 there was a terrible explosion of a derailed train loaded with crude oil in Lac-Megantic, the county town for this part of the world. A lot of the town was destroyed, including the library, which had a phenomenal collection of artifacts and archives related to the history of the region, one of the most beautiful in beautiful Québec.
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| Hwy 212, near Notre Dame des Bois, QC |
One of my favorite roads in the world: the route from the Maine coast to Montreal. There are actually many different ways to go, none of them involving major roads and all featuring moose--rather than traffic--as the main road hazard. This stretch near Notre Dame des Bois Quebec is on my current favourite route: Quebec Highway 212 from the Maine border at Cobourn Gore ME/Woburn QC to Cookshire, QC. Then to Lennoxville and on to Montreal.
I like this road because of the farms, villages and mountains. The mountains are
les Appalaches, elsewhere known as the Appalachians, which start way down in Alabama and end as the Notre Dame Mountains in the interior of Quebec's Gaspé Peninsula.
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| La Patrie, Qc |
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| Upland dairy farming near N.D. des Bois, Megantic County, Quebec. |
It is interesting how much borders matter. I've heard people say the Canada/US border is meaningless, barely noticeable....it is actually one of the more dramatic and telling borderlines in the Western world. For one thing, along most of its three-thousand-mile length it corresponds to a geographic divide, usually riverine. In most of Quebec, the border is a squiggly line between the watershed of the St Lawrence, and the watershed of the Atlantic coast of New England. North of the border everything (water, business, culture) slopes toward the St Lawrence Valley; south of the border, rivers and the cultures flow elsewhere, toward the Atlantic seaboard and its cities. Civilizations--Amerindian and others--were shaped by this divide. (Likewise, in the West, the 49th parallel pretty much marks the divide of the Hudson Bay watershed and the Gulf Coast watershed (east of the Continental Divide in the Rockies, that is). The Canadian "Nor'West" was explored and organized into the Hudson's Bay Co. fur empire, along rivers running into Hudson's Bay: from where company ships would sail to England.
But I digress.
Cobourn Gore, Maine is about 2.5 hours from Montreal, but it feels a lot further away than that. Borders signify.
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| Montreal. Not Maine. |
Peter . When I was in my late teens we used to drink Labatts 50 in quarts and play pool at a little hotel that was literally on the border of Ontario , Quebec and New York State . The border was painted on the felt of the pool table . Depending on your shot , you were shooting from a different province or country ...almost 3 different countries . Most of the patrons arrived and left in motorboats . Alex
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