A LONG WAY FROM MANY PLACES

Vieux-Quebec

Ann and I have a travel ritual. We scavenge stones from wherever we are and when we fly way back home I pack our souvenirs in my head with the other rocks. Our little collection is situated by the edge of the first of five stairs up to our front porch. There’s a chunk of black lava from Hawaii, something red from Prince Edward Island and something green from a Vancouver Island beach. Our latest addition is a rectangle of granite, debris light-fingered through the temporary fence surrounding the restoration of a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Old Quebec is the only walled city in Canada. The site was originally and for who knows how long an Iroquoian kanata known as Stadacona. French explorer Jacques Cartier came upon the bustling, permanent settlement in 1535 after he’d mapped the mouth of the Saint Lawrence River and then kept sailing up its wide waters. Canada is a European mangling of the Iroquois word for village. In 1608 restless sailor Samuel de Champlain ordained Stadacona the hub of nascent New France. To this day anything designated ‘royale’ has absolutely nothing to do with the House of Windsor.

In the early 1980s Quebecois comedian Yvon Deschamps whose everyman performance persona natters squirm-inducing, idiot savant observational humour, gave his audiences a succinct history lesson of France’s colony (paraphrase): “Everything was fine until the English turned up at the bottom of page 62.” Or, 1759.

Last week Ann and I strolled every narrow, winding street in the old town. We cut through ruelles, 18^th century greystone walls Frankenstein-stitched with 20^th century-modern black iron fire escapes. We spun happily and confusedly in the charming maze for two days, encountering curving inclines laid with uneven toe-stubbing pavers when we expected level straightaways. We tripped, we stumbled, but we never got lost. Vieux-Quebec is a tight area, constrained by its geography and its ramparts.

Perched atop a sheer promontory, Quebec was assumed to be impregnable from the river by French military strategists. Consequently Quebec’s initial fortifications faced every other point on the compass. The British, perhaps buoyed by the Royal Navy’s noble tradition of sodomy, scaled the cliff in the dead of night, audaciously coming in the back door. They then buttressed the existing wall and built the citadel. The threat wasn’t rebellion so much as the Americans feeling their manifest destiny oats following their victorious war for independence.

La citadelle is a national historic site but still operational. It is the home of the legendary Royal 22^nd Regiment, the ‘Van Doos’ in English mangled French. The fort’s walls are asymmetrical, spurred to deflect cannonballs. It is surrounded by a deep ditch and a sloped, manicured glacis – a clear field of fire. I tried to tug Ann through the base’s main gate but we were halted by a sentry. He asked me politely in French what the hell I thought I was doing. I said, “Nous sommes tourists.” He replied in English, “Yeah, I figured that out.” We retreated, passing a NO DRONE ZONE sign, my imagination in the stratosphere: the past, the present and future fiction colliding.

Perhaps because my holiday reading was ‘Trigger Mortis,’ a new and delightfully engaging James Bond novel by British author Anthony Horowitz, I said to Ann, “Can you imagine a sequence in a Bond film here? Maybe twenty minutes, crazy, hilly streets, stone walls and a fortress, I don’t know why he’d be in Vieux-Quebec but this city would look great on celluloid.”

Ann replied that she was thirsty and maybe it was time for lunch. I bowed my head and we walked on; I was looking for a piece of history.

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