Thinking backward can be a perilous business. Once or twice while preparing to leave for the lighthouse, as we frantically paid bills and combed the local Whole Foods market for organic worcestershire sauce (desired by British friends who’d be joining us on the GaspM-i Peninsula), I reeled back in time, searching for the spark that ignited so much activity.
Curiosity fanned the flame. “Tell us again why you’re going to a lighthouse?” people would ask. “Who came up with that idea?”
I had, but I probably hadn’t explained why. The truth was trivial: One day over a year earlier I’d been procrastinating at my computer and had entered “lighthouse accommodation” into a Google search. Within moments I was looking at a photograph of the maison du phare — the French term meaning “house of the pharaoh,” recalling history’s first lighthouse in Alexandria, Egypt — at Cap d’Espoir, on the GaspM-i Peninsula in Quebec. I instantly imagined my friend Marguerite and myself and our dog, Tenby, wind-whipped and light-beamed, standing on a treeless headland. We looked good. In the white clapboard keeper’s cottage behind us I imagined stacks of books we’d finally read, typescripts of long-delayed writing projects, and Marguerite’s ambitious needlepoint pillow, tackled at last.
That was the sum of it: procrastination and the romance of mental projection — the lure not just of the sea, but of those extra hours we’re always sure we’ll find for ourselves in places we consider remote. I’d e-mailed Raymond, the lighthouse caretaker, and reserved a month during Marguerite’s upcoming sabbatical.
The GaspM-i Peninsula, or in French the Gaspesie, is a lizard’s tongue that southern Quebec sticks into the Gulf of St. Lawrence. New Brunswick is its lower jaw; Newfoundland and Nova Scotia protect it from the full rages of the Northern Atlantic.
It took us 16 hours to drive from Northampton, Massachusetts, to Cap d’Espoir. We broke the journey in Thetford Mines, a town that turned out to be the center of Canada’s asbestos mining industry, and a dead ringer for Middle Earth’s Mordor (it possessed the only motel en route that accepted dogs). From there we followed the St. Lawrence River along the GaspM-i’s northern shore. This is where the world’s oldest mountains either begin or end, depending on your point of view. The Appalachians began to form 900 million years ago when the continents were still a nuclear family, in that geological Eden before continental drift. We had the impression, heading north and meeting land’s end ourselves on the banks of the seaway, that this was the chains’ last gasp, the place where the mountains tossed their old memories of one world, indivisible, into the sea.
Eventually we left Route 132, the GaspM-i’s coastal ring-road, and cut across one of the rare, two-lane highways that bisect its forested heart down to the southern shore, where we were enveloped by fog. Not mist, an absolute gray absence of vision. From the demands of the road, which spun itself in knots alongside a guessed-at sea, the scenery held tremendous promise. “Kind of fortuitous we’re looking for a lighthouse, eh?” I asked. Marguerite groaned, feeling ill from tension and curves. Tenby smelled fear and began to whine in the back seat.
My hopes, however, were misplaced. We didn’t discover the maison du phare by its beam (hidden from us by the corrugations of the coast), but by the more pedestrian means of a street sign gleaming reflectively in the fog. It wasn’t the tallest lighthouse in the world, yet it didn’t disappoint us; like the second hand of a clock that told luminosity rather than time, its beam heroically swept the night in perpetual rounds. I’d expected a foghorn to be sounding as well, but the headland was silent.
Our cottage was about 30 feet from the tower. Boxy and symmetrical, it offered just the right architectural antidote to the random, roaring sea. Inside were four bedrooms and an immense kitchen with a big table in the center, where I foresaw our days unfolding. Outside I foresaw nothing: the fog retained all the translucence of a bowl of cream of wheat. When I was about 10 I’d read a book called Fog Magic, the plot of which was simple. Whenever the fog rolled in it brought with it people from long ago that only the hero (heroine?) could see — people who invariably faded as the mists cleared. Cap d’Espoir was different. We saw no one that first, isolated night; it was the morning sun that revealed we were not alone.
Geographically sea, sky, the low, blue mound of Bonaventure Island on the horizon, and a ring of red sandstone cliffs filled the bowl of our vision. Inside of which, nearest at hand, were friends from Britain who had arrived around midnight. Annie and Caroline are good, hearty companions, great walkers, readers, dog lovers, and drinkers: everything you’d want in a pair of Brits at a lighthouse. They shrugged off my failure to find organic worcestershire sauce and immediately roared off to the local market in their bright red, rented PT Cruiser, returning with champagne and a carton of organic tofu (they’re also vegetarians). Their announced priorities were hiking, whale, moose and bear-spotting, and eating.
A stone’s throw from our cottage was a larger wood-frame house, its clapboards pitted and peeling like ours from the salty, corrosive wind. This was occupied by the Lalonde family, our hosts on the headland. In another life Raymond had been a businessman in Montreal, but he and his wife, Isabelle, had moved progressively farther from the city until they’d exhausted continental Canada and bought the lighthouse complex at the edge of Cap d’Espoir. Now Raymond maintains the light and weather station for the Canadian government and rents out the keeper’s cottage, and Isabelle, a doctor, works at a local clinic. Their daughter Genevieve was 4 when the family took up residence on the promontory 60 feet above the sea; now, at 13, her favorite pastime — often foiled by bad weather — is to visit Montreal.
Isabelle spoke halting English but Genevieve was too shy to try. Raymond, however — dark-haired, tall, and just the ironic side of courtly — was bilingual and became a frequent visitor, happy to share his knowledge of things Gaspesian.
That first morning also revealed evidence of secondary neighbors. You will not see it on Raymond’s Web site nor in any of our photos, but at the western tip of Rue du Phare, opposite the lighthouse complex, is the new home of a crab millionaire. Although we found only Alaskan crab in shops, Raymond assured us that Gaspesian crab is a delicacy whose stock is on the rise. Local fishermen have scaled Canadian tax brackets like alpine climbers. The tangible result on Cap d’Espoir is a large, faux Southern mansion with plastic columns that Raymond referred to as “J.R.’s House” and we called “Tara.”
“He’s not a bad neighbor,” said Raymond, “but his only culture is in his yogurt. He got to the land before I could.” The Crab King now owns vast tracts of the treeless cliff tops — “and built the monstrosity because he wanted to be near the lighthouse. Then he complained to the government about the foghorn keeping him awake. And you know what? They turned it off.”
We never met the Crab King, though Tenby was often joined on walks by his nervous, collarless little dog. Beyond our headland the tourist season was sputtering to a close, which meant that our interaction with residents was limited to the market, post office, and several gas stations. Everyone but the postal workers, who must be bilingual, spoke Quebecois French almost exclusively and, despite television’s evidence to the contrary — our cable provider tapped into two American networks from Detroit, and one from Manhattan — gave little indication they’d ever encountered a language called English.
Annie and Caroline, for their part, gave no indication that they were aware of any language spoken on the GaspM-i other than English; Marguerite and I provided translation as needed. And that was infrequent, for as I said, spoken encounters were few. On Cap d’Espoir we were essentially free to invent our own ideas of what it meant to live at a lighthouse, while French bubbled in the background like voices on a radio signal caught from somewhere very far away on a clear night.
Our strongest ties were non-human. Spouting whales spied from our front porch; silver birches; quartz-veined basalt beach pebbles; sea urchins shaped like miniature Russian hats; the amber light of late afternoon that tinted rather than illuminated, dyeing the bluest blues pea-green in photographs; sunsets that broke the sky into shards of magenta and orange: these were our closest companions, and we each developed particular crushes. It soon became apparent that Annie and Caroline were enchanted with the waterfalls and conifers, the berry-beaded moose poop and rank lichens of Gaspesian forests. These preferences, coupled with their unquenchable desire to tackle steep hikes every day, rendered us separable.
In addition to being less hardy, Marguerite and I couldn’t bear to lose sight of the sea. Both she and Tenby were happy to spend a few hours poking along the crumbling red beaches that flanked Cap d’Espoir, then curl up in the cottage. I fell in love with the night. Raymond said he believes the greatest draw of a lighthouse — besides the promise of heart-stopping scenery — is its constancy. Even in daylight when you can’t see it, the beam is always present, revolving in an egalitarian circle with no preferential loitering on any one of its 360 degrees.
I took his point, but at the risk of typecasting us as steady Canadian and edgy American, it was the restlessness of the beam I admired, a quality present only at night. In the heavy, zebra-striped air (the first evening’s fog never returned) it sought, lost, found and lost in an eternal cycle a headland, a dog, a fire pit, a battered shack that was Raymond’s weather station. Depending on my mood, it was the finding that would stick with me, or, usually after drinking Annie’s duty-free whisky, the losing. I could have it either way.
Above the beam was the deepest night sky my eyes have ever bored into.
“Shortly after we moved here,” Isabelle told me, “the town up and installed a streetlight — you know, sodium vapor — right here at the end of our lane.” She made the words “sodium vapor” sound like a French perfume. “They thought they were doing us a favor, but we were devastated.”
None of the town officials in PercM-i, the larger community that incorporates villages like Cap d’Espoir, could understand why she and Raymond had pleaded for it to be removed, but reluctantly they’d agreed. “It’s odd to think we came to a lighthouse and then begged for darkness, Isabelle said, “but we love the stars. They finally took the streetlight away after I threatened to throw a rock at it and put it out.”
I applauded Isabelle’s guts, and borrowed her star charts. In the darkness she’d saved I found Mars, blinking red on the southern horizon. At 11p.m. sharp Orion, the hunter of the night sky, climbed directly over the lighthouse followed by his constellated dog, Canis Major. On an American dream of an evening when my baseball team, the formerly hapless Red Sox, won their first Series in 86 years — a rare night in which the ordinary world back home, flowing to us through in-ground cable, was good enough — the Gaspesian sky sensed competition and pulled out the stops, giving us a full lunar eclipse. Autumn colors nibbled at the moon’s disk until at its zenith it shone like a neon penny above the sea.
The Brits were dismissive as I wore a path between the front porch and the television set (Marguerite was more amused than scornful). “I thought you came here to leave all that behind,” Caroline scoffed.
“Statistically, this is a rarer event,” I retorted, gesturing at Manny Ramirez.
Despite our different ideas about what constitutes a hike — never attempt to keep up with a Brit when it comes to walking, drinking, or plunging into cold water — there was domestic tranquility at the lighthouse. We all colluded in piecing together a jigsaw puzzle of Harry Potter and his friends Hermione and Ron, discovered in a coat closet. And having had the bad luck to arrive on the GaspM-i on the first afternoon of Quebec’s 10-day moose-hunting season, we drew together in horror as local hunters wheeled around Route 132 with bloodily severed heads tied to the hoods of their pick-ups. The Crab King was one of the offenders.
“What do they do with them when they start to stink?” asked Annie, looking away from “Tara’s” driveway in disgust.
Her question was answered a few days later on the beach, when Tenby led us to a waterlogged moose head that had been tossed off the cliff top. Death’s harvest at the beach grew into a household obsession. We would leave home wearing light-weight parkas that on our return would be a good 5 pounds heavier, pockets bursting with sand dollars and urchins, bits of driftwood shaped like ducks or claws, tiny seabird skulls, wine-red scallop shells, smooth chips of mint-green sea glass, and especially pebbles. The beach pebbles of the GaspM-i told beautiful, unique stories of volcanic drama, sedimentary deposit, and the patient sculpting of the sea. They were (geologically) young, solo voices raised above the mountains’ sad choral memories, each clamoring noisily to be heard as they twice-daily tumbled in the receding tide.
It was not lost on me that creatures had to die — either recently or, in the case of our agates and jaspers and slivers of limestone, unrenderable eons ago — for us to have our nightly show-and-tell sessions of local flotsam. These ended when Annie and Caroline left, having successfully spotted whales, otters, seals, and two porcupines, but no bears or moose. The weather changed then too, promptly on Nov. 1, ushering in a solid week of rage that took the form of rain, sleet, wind — especially wind — and the snow we’d long anticipated. Marguerite and I, driven by a two-week deprivation of grease, rushed out and ate drumsticks at Dixie Lee, a Southern fried chicken chain wildly popular on the Gaspesie. We also went shopping in the town of GaspM-i, the only arguably “urban” area of the eastern peninsula. Its lone mall didn’t boast a single music store: the best justification, we thought, for Lonely Planet’s claim that despite its beauty, “socially the region feels static and at times listless.” The mall was ill-lit and not over-crowded; on a weekday afternoon the mostly male shoppers looked as if they wouldn’t have minded fading away with a good fog.
Despite daily distractions — watching young terns glide on air currents like roller coasters, or low bands of mist cut Bonaventure Island off from the sea, giving it the appearance of levitating above the water — we did find time to read and write, perhaps less than we’d dreamed of, but more than we’d feared.
Shortly before our departure my dark playground of the past month, the night sky, lit up with great, throbbing chartreuse streaks in a brilliant display of the Northern Lights. We watched enthralled as the colors of the Gaspesian landscape, the green of the sea at Coin du Banc beach, the lime-yellow of autumn leaves in Forillon National Park, were writ large in the sky.
The shape-shifting lights ran metaphorical riot. One moment they were watercolor mountains, the next, green sheets flapping on Orion’s clothesline. Their evanescence was an ideal compliment to another of my favorite sights on the GaspM-i: the fossils at Miguasha National Park, the world’s enduring time capsule from the Devonian Period, which occurred about 390 million years ago. Devonian time represents that critical “moment” when sea creatures with stiffening vertebrae thought they might try their luck on land. In the interpretive center were fossils of two-foot long fish, so delicately preserved that their scales, blood vessels and branching nerves remain imprinted on the rock.
How wonderful, I thought, to have happened upon the ephemeral and the almost eternal on the same journey. The fossils were hardy time travelers, individuals that swam and grew and died, now so profoundly ancient as to have made the journey from life to mineral. They were ultimate Gaspesian flotsam. The Northern Lights were momentary space travelers, solar particles thrown from the sun, drawn blazing into earth’s atmosphere by the magnetism of the poles (a trip of about three days — only a little longer than our journey to the lighthouse).
As a travel writer I often feel the tug of war between time and space, the lasting and the transitory. Much like Cap d’Espoir’s beacon, I cast my gaze on one destination only briefly before moving on to illuminate the next. Here and gone, here and gone, the story of my life. The rush to see and write is partly driven by the need to pay my bills, but also, I think, to find a landscape that will be my expansive cognate: me, with a horizon line. Some particular combination of earth and sea that will organically — Annie and Caroline would be so pleased — tell a story without words of living and dying and recycling life from death and building beauty out of both.
I went to the lighthouse looking for this place, as I search for it everywhere, but while the GaspM-i tempted me with aspects of the ideal, it ultimately remained a backdrop where hunters, lighthouse keepers, and crab kings live their lives. In the end I found Canada instead. And Canada isn’t half bad: it’s both beautiful and brutal, and I admire its health care system, foreign policy, and fried chicken. Better yet, its inhabitants stick around after the fog disappears and become friends. When we return to Cap d’Espoir it will be to see Raymond and Isabelle, beneath their ever-revolving light.
Pamela Petro’s last story for travel was on Andorra.
IF YOU GO: GASPE, QUEBEC
For information on renting the Cap d’Espoir lighthouse, contact Raymond Lalonde at Maison du Phare, PO Box 249, Cap d’Espoir, Quebec GOC 1G0; 418-782-2926; e-mail ; Web site Note that most restaurants, shops and national parks on the GaspM-i close by the end of October, though some reopen for the winter sports season.
Other lodging options include Auberge le Coin du Banc, 315, Route 132, PercM-i, GaspM-i Est, Quebec, Canada G03 2L0, 418-645-2907, which offers home-cooked food and 17 mid-priced guestrooms year-round in a rambling old inn right on the beach. The Auberge du Parc Inn () occupies an early 19th century lodge overlooking the Baie des Chaleurs, and offers substantial savings on off-season packages that include lodging, meals, and spa treatments.
Miguasha National Park () costs about $7.
Lighthouse lovers should also see John Grant’s Staying at a Lighthouse (Globe Pequot Press, 2003).
–Pamela Petro
