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, 18th century greystone walls Frankenstein-stitched
with 20th 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 22nd 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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