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magazine / jf08
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January/February 2008 issue |
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FEATURE
'It’s the freedom, b’y’
The raw, roadless beauty of Quebec’s Lower North Shore
has drawn settlers for hundreds of years. But as residents
abandon the coast in search of work,will the region find
hope or hindrance in a highway linking it to the province?
By Christopher Frey
Little remains of Wolf Bay. A wharf, some sheds
and some shuttered houses. The Jones
family cemetery. My travelling companion Gilles Chagnon
and I dismount our snowmobiles where the trail descends
from the hill country to this abandoned coastal settlement,
next to a cabin that has collapsed under snow. A multitude
of paw prints, fox and hare, radiates from beneath the
bright red roof. The corner of a lobster trap pokes out
from a snowdrift like an ancient relic savaged by winds.
These are the remains of a community that fished for cod,
lobster and salmon for more than a century.
top
You don’t have to stray far from this trail to find other
dead villages. Lac-Salé, Baie de la Terre, Musquaro — all
of them deserted in the 1960s and 1970s as residents
moved to bigger, relatively better-serviced towns or forsook
the region entirely. Today, there are a little more than a
dozen communities left, forming Quebec’s Lower North
Shore, or Basse-Côte-Nord, a cord of fishing villages nestled
on the rocky coasts, studded outcrops and outlying
islands of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, from Kegaska to
Blanc-Sablon, on the Labrador border. Across these subarctic,
oceanic barrens resides a shrinking population
of about 5,000 people connected to the rest of the country
in summer by a weekly supply ship and expensive
flights, and in winter, most reliably, by a snowmobile
trail glazed with ice.
It’s a remnant of an early version of Canada, where the
country’s founding peoples — French, English and First
Nations — coexist in an isolated, rugged frontier environment.
To some, the Lower North Shore is even the “original
Canada,” where Jacques Cartier did his first poking
around and some of the earliest seasonal fishing stations were
established.
For the rest of this story, visit your local newsstand or go to our store to buy this issue.
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