Romantic Canada

by Victoria Hayward

Just for a moment down there, our heart went back on our conveyance. Our allegiance weakened. We said, “Oh, for a car!” But up here in this “land of the sky”, where the road comes out on the mountainous brow of ’Tite de Cap and the gray St. Lawrence lies far below like a silver ribbon, the blue mountains of Northern New England against the southern sky, and away behind to the West, a smoke in the sky that is Quebec, our faith in the cart returns with smashing convincingness. The two-wheel cart’s the thing!

When madame begins to stop in front of cottage gates to pay out of her deep pocket the proceeds of each morning sale and we hand out to eager hands the right number of lard tins going to repeat their mission as berry containers, to our minds nothing is wanting in the Romance which weaves itself about the scene and the figure of the old cart and its mistress.

But we must not ride forever in this mountain-climbing and thrifty “hope of the hills”. Other carts are calling. Let us drift down stream on the bosom of the St. Lawrence, far out where it is “The Gulf”, away past Prince Edward Island to the Magdalens. In this corner of Quebec the two-wheel cart is practically the only means of land transportation. These Island carts, like the islands themselves, overflow with originality and character. They are soft and full of the sea’s wetness as they come toward us along the treeless, island-landscape. We notice, too, a difference in the horse. The Magdalens cart is drawn by an island pony. Mares are accompanied by shaggy colts, all legs, running beside the mothers, or following behind the cart, noses over the tail-board. When the load is a long mackerel boat going into winter quarters, after a season’s fishing on a distant beach, it is indeed a strange procession, the up-hill-and-down road causing it now to heave in sight and now to disappear as if the boat still rode the mobile crests and valleys of the Gulf.

But the most romantic of all the carts is the procession across the long barachois, a winding procession crossing the sands—cart after cart—a Canadian caravan of the desert. All sorts of weird and bizarre shapes of dusk and distance and creeping sea-fog add to the romance of this strange train.

What takes the caravan into the desert? Not the trade in rich silks and carpets of far eastern looms or the bringing of precious stones from one mart to another, but a trade just the same—an individual and romantic trade peculiar to the Magdalens—the culling of the clam, the tiny, hard, white mollusc with as pretty lights in it as the pearl when it comes wet from the underseas sand-home out there where the wet sea-fog begins in the eye of the wind.

One may think the path-finding lead-cart of this caravan has nothing to do. But try to find your own way across these sands and you will soon be glad to follow along behind any old cart that heaves in sight, even if it is navigated by an old cow in harness. Out here the sea-wind licks up the sand and fills in and levels off landmarks just as the Scirocco levels off the shifting dunes of old Egypt.

Over there, there is the instinct of the camel, the desert knowledge of the man, and the light of the stars to guide—but out here on the sands of the Magdalens it is a woman’s hand that holds the reins of the lead horse. Her cart may be made of bits of driftwood and in the half-barrel tub, in the waist of this semi-sea craft, a rusty three-pronged homemade digging fork, and a lantern by her side, may be the only gauges to a rising tide.

Could your eye follow the long caravan winding its way across the sands at night, lantern after lantern, a Will o’ the wisp line of light and black figures in whose path lies the sinister quicksand, you must easily fall under the spell of this wet and mystical wraith of the night which, coming nearer, resolves itself into a succession of carts coming from or bound to the clamming.

Like light comedy, sunny and bright and tenderly human by contrast with the night caravan of the barachois is the scene of children of the Islands playing in the two-wheel cart next morning in the home yard. Elder brother plays Dobbin. Two garcons and a habitant maid occupy the driver’s seat. Mother in Breton cap and ample apron gives confidence to the baby who fain would ride too, but fears the big adventure. Another year, however, and he will ride with the boldest....

At Percé the two-wheel cart is a beach character. Sometimes “le cheval”, but just as often “le boeuf”, comes swinging along over the beach shingles and sand with the cart for codfish heads. Nowhere but among coastal folk is the codfish head either available or prized as garden fertilizer. Tradition says that our forefathers learned the value of the buried codfish as fertilizer from the Indians. The fish-guano of trade is ground into a powder. But old-timers of the seacoast let nature do her own pulverizing. They bury or half bury the heads which are now the only part of the fish spared to the land. Every old woman’s turnip or potato bed hereabouts rests on a but partly concealed foundation of heads. Every afternoon when the boats come in from sea with fish you can watch the old men and boys coming with their carts to spear up with pitchforks the residue of the splitting-tables. And when it is not heads that are up, it is a load of seaweed they are after. The sea can always contribute something with which to make or enrich a garden.