excursion no. 1/09: quebec topography

The drive to Quebec is quiet. It’s a long drive, at least five hours from our house to the Vieux Port, but it takes us that long to go to New York City. The weather has held, the predicted ice storm bypassing us, the roads clear. By the time we are in the wide flat plain above Magog and Sherbrooke, on the last leg of the journey, the sky turns violet and blue, the setting sun over our western shoulder washing the atmosphere in dusk. A large herd of deer graze in a snow-covered field. Sugar shacks hide in maple sugar bushes, dormant and boarded up until the March thaws. Roadside truckstops and casse-croute herald two hundred kinds of poutine, those gravy-laced fries. Highway traveler hotels are built like castles on the Loire in France. Neat-as-a pin farms show glowing barn windows suggesting evening milking and warm cow bodies huddled together. The sky darkens to blue, a half-moon lighting the snow fields, and on the radio the talk is of the just-opened Ice Hotel where you can sleep on an icebed in a down sleeping bag for $300/per person per night. The lights of the city yellow the horizon ahead.

--Deirdre