Next to the Montreal General Hospital they are building an addition to the hospital. Or maybe it is just a parking garage, I don’t know. Since this is literally in the mountain they have to remove a lot of rock. When I passed they were just finishing up drilling deep holes in the rock with a giant drill, mounted on a crawling vehicle.

Then the covered the just drilled hole with these big grey mats. Suddenly it dawned to me and my suspicion was confirmed when I saw this sign.

They were going to blast the rock with dynamite, right there before my eyes! Being a Dutchman I’ve never seen any blasting. The only rock we have is the one used by junkies, our soil is sand, mud and clay, so a backhoe will do fine to remove it. This suddenly became very exiting. I asked the guy that waited on the side walk how long it would take before the blast. “Five minutes,” he answered so it was an easy decision to wait.

I had to get off the sidewalk onto the street but managed to get a picture anyway.

(Okay, in reality the blast was not nearly as exiting as this photo suggests. It was only a very muffled boom, and then some dust emerged from the pit. Those protective mats really work.)

After the blast they removed the mats and bulldozers went into the pit to remove the rubble. Then the drilling started again for another cycle. From the daily report that hung over a fence post I learned they did about 25 blasts a day. Preparing a building site in this location sure is a lot of work.

It’s getting cold and I’m feeling lonely. I jump on the bed. Nice and warm under the duvet. I crawl towards the top of the bed, past the giant. Wait! What’s that? There is somebody else in my bed. A little white fellow. I growl ferociously at him and he backs away. Good. That’ll teach him who’s boss around here.

I turn and snuggle my back against the warm belly of the giant. I slowly rest my head on his knee and close my eyes. I hope the giant won’t twist and turn as often as he did last night. That really annoyed me and if he does it again I have to growl at him as well. There can only be one alpha dog in this bed.

I missed the 5 year anniversary of loglog on the first of September. My first post on loglog —which I wrote in Dutch back then— was about the preparations for my move to Canada. I moved 11 days later, on September 11, 2003 and that date was not chosen by coincidence.

Without the events of September 11, 2001 I probably wouldn’t have been in Montréal today. I was in Toronto that day, investigating if I could relocate to Canada. My plan was to spend a 3 month period to see how living in Toronto would be and to find out if there would be any work for me.

I had just attended the wedding of Dolph and Mansa, a Dutch friend-of-a-friend of mine and his Canadian wife, and the first couple of weeks I could stay in their apartment while they were away on their honeymoon. The apartment was on the 14th floor in the flight-path of Pearson airport and I could actually see the pilots when they started their landing.

The morning of the attacks on the WTC, I was checking my email when I received an email that a plane had hit a building in New York. I ran to the TV and ten seconds after I turned it on I saw the plane hit the tower. I thought it was a replay but from the commentary I soon understood it was a second plane. I didn’t stop watching TV that day. New York City felt so close, even though I had never been there.

The week after that Toronto, with some sort of delusion of grandeur, was afraid to be the next target. No planes were landing anymore, the CN-tower was closed and I was all alone in a foreign city with nobody to talk to. My meetings with prospective employers were cancelled and I decided this was just not the right time for a try-out. I already hated it for its americanism and urban sprawl, and now everybody was very tense and it was even worse. I wanted to go home.

Dolph, coming back from his honeymoon, convinced me to pay Montréal a visit before I would fly back to the Netherlands. He said it was good to just experience Montréal so I could decide if it was worthwhile to come back later.

And so I travelled on the train to Montréal with all my luggage. Way too much luggage.

When I arrived in Gare Centrale and schlepped my luggage from the railway station to the Metro ówho designed all those narrow passages and stairs?ó I noticed the atmosphere was so different than in Toronto. It was more European, the people friendlier and less stressed and I felt like in a warm bath. I spent two nearly sleepless nights in a youth hostel and met a guy there who knew a place were you could rent a room per month. I decided to stay a little longer than originally planned. I got myself a small room, installed telephone and ordered an internet connection. All for only one month, but I wanted to see how it would be to live in this city, and not just being a tourist.

Via my Internet connection I kept in contact with friends in the Netherlands, with some clients and even did some programming work for a client in Montréal. But I didn’t know anybody and felt rather lonely, so I put up an ad on an Internet dating site.

Alison was the only person that replied. We met for lunch and she fell in love with me over a bagel with cream cheese and smoked salmon. My first bagel ever.

Partly because the encounter with Alison I ended up staying for almost two months in Montréal. While waiting almost two years for my visa I visited many times. In the end of August 2003 I finally got the green light and it was not a hard decision to pick September 11, 2003 as the date of my official arrival in Canada as a landed immigrant. Just to make that date a bit less evil; to give it also a positive side.

Since then lots of things have happened. I wrote about some of them on loglog, but many things I kept to myself. Sometimes because I was too lazy, sometimes because I didn’t feel like it and sometimes for such trivial reasons as lacking a suitable photo.

Five years in Montréal is a good occasion to make up the balance. What is my current life compared to what it was 5 years ago? What has changed? What is still the same? Which of my expectations have come true? Which haven’t?

I’ll write about that in the next post.

That post may contain Too Much Information, in which case you should just skip it. It also might just vanish from this site someday, in which case I got either second thoughts, cold feet or was abducted by aliens.

We went for a picnic with Leanne, her son and her big dog. Alison sometimes babysits Taotao but I have a stronger bond with the dog, Gretchen. There is a reason for that.

Her name was Narda. She weighted around 40 kilo and looked wonderful with her red, white and black coat. She was a pure-bred Saint Bernard which explains her name. Less than a year young, she was very playful and good with kids, especially with me. It was my dog, my parents gave her to me when our previous dog, a boxer, had been stolen from our yard.
I petted her a lot, and sometimes I slept with my head on her soft pink belly that made nice and soothing noises. When I told her my secrets she looked at me with her brown eyes and it was as if she completely understood what I said.

We lived in the country. My brother and other sisters already lived on their own, so our family consisted of my parents, my older sister Barbara and me. My parents had bought our house, a small former farm house whose origins dated back to the 17th century, a few years earlier and had, with blood, sweat and tears, converted it into their dream house. It wasn’t exactly my dream house however, since living in the countryside was a bit too lonely for me. No other kids to play with and my friends from school didn’t come to our house very often because it meant they had to bike 10 kilometres. And 10 kilometres to get back. Living close to nature was very nice though, and I enjoyed that a lot. The birds and other animals and above all the pond in front of our house. It wasn’t very big, but also not very small. About 200 by 300 metres and only 4 metres deep. It was the remnant of a dike failure that happened more than 100 years ago. The water was of very good quality and in the summer we swam in it and when we had a cold winter we ice skated on its frozen surface.

Another advantage of living in a rural area with a big yard was that we didn’t have to walk the dog. The dog walked herself. Of course we did went on walks with her, along the shores of the Maas river, at the other side of the dike, and in the small forest that surrounded the pond. Narda was a real winter-dog. In her first summer she had suffered from the heat but now, halfway through January, the temperatures around freezing and even with a bit of snow, she really was in her element. She jumped into the river and came out like a moving canine icicle. But she loved it.

That night we were watching television when my father remarked that Narda was still outside. It was her habit to scratch the door with her big paws when she wanted to be let in. I went outside to see how she was doing. The moment I opened the door I knew what was wrong. I couldn’t see her but I heard her barking sadly. It sounded very strange and distorted, close and far away at the same time with a sort of Doppler effect. A bit like when you throw a stone on a frozen lake. Narda apparently went onto the thin snow covered ice that had formed on the pond and almost in the middle the ice sheet couldn’t support her considerable weight and she fell into the cold water. She was swimming in the hole she had made and tried to warn us with an almost apologetic bark. I called my parents and sister and immediately ran into the shed to get the small play boat I got a few years ago for my birthday. Before my parents could stop me I slid in the boat onto the ice, pushing myself with my bare hands against the layer of snow, towards my dog. A few metres before I reached her the ice cracked so I ended up in the same hole in the ice as Narda, floating in my small boat. The boat was just big enough to hold my weight, but some water had already poored over the edge. I got hold of Narda’s collar and tried to drag her into the boat but she was too heavy and the boat too unstable. In retrospect I know what I should have done: use the boat as a sort of icebreaker and make a channel to the shore so Narda could have swam out by herself. But at the time none of us thought of that. I just held her collar and talked to her to calm her down. In the meantime my father and sister dragged a ladder onto the ice and my sister, the lightest of them, crawled onto it. But the ladder was too short and she couldn’t reach me.
My mother, now worried about our health, called the fire brigade. Ten minutes later they arrived with a couple of trucks and half the village in tow. They parked their cars at the top of the dike and the car’s head lights bathed the whole scene in a flood of light, almost like a movie scene.
The firemen went onto the ice with their long ladders and dragged my sister and me to the shore. We were, slightly hypothermic, put into a lukewarm bath, still fully clothed. The bath was then slowly filled with warmer water to warm us up. Our village doctor came by to check in on our health and he brought us the news: Narda had drowned. The firemen had tried to pull her out of the water with a rope, but they had attached the rope to her collar and it had slid over her head. Shortly after that Narda had given up swimming and had disappeared under the ice. The doctor explained that death by hypothermia was a very quiet way to die but that couldn’t ease my pain and sorrow. My sister and I cried all night.

A few days later we bought another dog, again a Saint Bernard. We named her Arolla. She lived a long and happy life and died when she was fourteen, which is ancient for a dog her size.

[This happened in 1977 and was originally written in a Dutch newsgroup in 1999]

[This necrology I wrote while sitting next to my dying mother. It is rather factual probably because I’m not ready yet to become personal. It’s still too close, too recent. But I want to tell my mother’s story now as a way to distract myself and at the same time getting closer to her. There are certainly a lot of factual errors in it. I will talk to Amadou, her Mauritanian friend who considers her his second mother, to fill in some details and make additions and changes. It’s telling that he knows more about her life than her own children.]

Margrit was born in a upper middle class family in Sankt Gallen, Switzerland. Her father was head of the bleu collar civil servants, and amongst others responsible for hiring labourers for snow removal. He had a lot of friends when visiting a bar. She was the youngest of 4 children, two girls and one boy. Her mother became very ill when she was a toddler and spent her last years in bed. Because little Margrit was still at home she got a lot of attention from her mother, who told and read her a lot of stories. Her love of books and reading must have been originated at that age. The blow for her when her best companion died when she was 6 must have been quite fierce. Her father immediately started an affair with the live-in house keeper which surely didn’t help.

During her teens she got a major traffic accident that scarred her face and caused major damage in other areas.

Margrit went to university to study physical education. However after a year and a half she herself fell ill with tuberculosis. She spent two years in a sanatorium in the Southern Alps where she read a lot and had extensive conversations about religion with patients and staff. During this time she decided to change her religion from Protestant to Roman Catholic, much to the dismay of her family.

When she was cured she wanted to change subject and start to study medicine to pursue a career as a doctor but her father told her that her study funds had been depleted by the sanatorium dispenses and that instead she should get a job. And thus she started to work as a doctor’s assistant. She didn’t have any diplomas but soon she did many medical procedures because she was better at them than the doctor she worked for and he was not afraid to acknowledge that. She really liked her job but one night she found out that her boss also carried out (illegal) abortions which totally conflicted with her moral and religious beliefs. She quit her job and after some other small jobs managed to become a sports instructor and landed a position as a group leader and sports instructor at a boarding school for Dutch asthma patients and children of diplomats (the latter financed the other, poorer students) located on a steep cliff near Montreux overlooking Lake Geneva. There she met Karel, a Dutch Language teacher from the Netherlands who proposed to her shortly after they met. She hesitantly accepted. Soon thereafter the school was closing its doors because of a lack of funds and the pair got married in a ceremony in the school’s auditorium followed by a short honeymoon in a hotel at the other side of the lake to where they travelled in exotic modes of transportation like a funicular and a Mississippi paddle boat.

Immediately after the honeymoon, Margrit and Karel moved to the Netherlands where Karel, being a Dutch Language teacher, had more chance of landing a job. She never worked in the Netherlands, lacking the required certificates.

Even though it was a couple of years after the German occupation and the Second World War the Netherlands was still lacking resources and there were big housing shortages. So the pair moved in with Karel’s mother and youngest sister in Nijmegen, a university town in the East of the Netherlands. Margrit was shocked, being used to the rich Swiss circumstances where they gained from the war instead of suffered from it. Living in with her mother-in-law also caused a great deal of tension.

To their great joy Margrit became pregnant, even though the doctors had told her that conceiving a child would be impossible after her accident.

Their first child was a girl they named Aagje, and soon after her birth Margrit got pregnant again and a boy, Peter-Jan, was born. After a few months he suddenly died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome leaving the young couple devastated. Soon thereafter, when Aagje was 2 and a half, they adopted Ronald.

Margrit got pregnant two more times and with Maaike and Barbara the family now consisted of 6 people.

They moved to another house, located opposite from the care facility that she lived in during the last year of her life and where she also died.

There, seven years after Barbara, Mark was born. Karel and Margrit tried to conceive another child as a playmate for him but after a late miscarriage their doctor strongly advised against getting pregnant again.

Even though she had many children Margrit never was a very warm and dedicated mother. The marriage with Karel was also not always easy as he often retired in his office to work on his dissertation, that he finally finished after 13 years, leaving most of the care for the 5 children to her.

She did the best she could but also tried to get as much away-time as she could by reading large quantities of books in as many as four languages. She wasn’t very happy in the Netherlands, but also didn’t feel welcome in Switzerland anymore when she visited there, but at least the books gave her an escape to live far more interesting lives in far more interesting places.

She was often plagued with health problems, had chronic and recurring bronchitis, a misdiagnosed herniated disk that was much later diagnosed as an inoperable cyst in her spinal column, causing a lot of back pain and painful pressure on certain nerves in her leg. She also suffered from rheumatoid arthritis, especially in the morning when she hadn’t moved for a while.

In 1970 they bought a house in the country near Nijmegen that belonged to their maid’s mother. The house was in terrible shape, basically a shack, but it was very nicely located near a pond and a forest, just on the other side of the dike along the Maas river. They saw the potential in this house and worked for many years to improve it and make it their Garden of Eden.

Then Karel’s aging mother moved in with the pair and their two youngest children who still lived with their parents. This caused a lot of tension in the family when Karel had to decide where his loyalties lied, with his wife or his mother. It culminated in Karel getting a major stroke that, although it didn’t cause physical damage, made him less capable to do his work and after a short while led to his early retirement.

A few years later, Karel developed a major manic episode during which Margrit didn’t feel save anymore so she left the house that she loved so much to live alone which eventually led to a divorce.

The divorce turned out to be very positive for Margrit. Instead of relying on his circle of friends she had to make her own now. She started to do volunteer work for the refugee aid organization “Vluchtelingenwerk” that made good use of her strong language skills, and became really good friends with a couple of refugees. She also went on long and adventurous organized hiking journeys to faraway countries where she often was the oldest participant, but nevertheless connected with some like-minded people. During these travels she also made strong connections.

After Karel finally acknowledged he was ill and received successful treatment for his mental problems they became good friends again, maybe better friends than before. But she didn’t want to give up her newly found independence by moving in with him again.

Karel’s death a few years later caused quite a stir in the relationship with a few of her children. Accusations were made back and forth and only after many years they came on speaking terms again.

Over the years Margrit’s health also began to deteriorate. She suffered from a series of Transient Ischemic Attacks (TIA) and then a major stroke on the day she bought a ticket to visit her emigrated son Mark in Canada. That stroke paralyzed the left side of her body which turned her suddenly from a very active hiker to a wheelchair bound. She had to leave her own house, had to get rid of a lot of her art and her beloved dog.

[I was writing this story while I was sitting beside Margrit’s deathbed. After writing the previous line my mother coughed twice and then stopped breathing and died.]

She was moved into a care facility where she spent her days reading and watching television. Her paralyzed leg became very painful and she required a lot of pain medication which in turn made her very drowsy. She couldn’t concentrate on complicated tasks and only pretended to read the books her friends brought her. Her friends played along, not wanting to make her feel more miserable as she already felt.

During a heat wave she developed serious pulmonary problems which resulted in yet another hospital visit. But her body wasn’t ready yet so her heart fully recovered. She also survived a double pneumonia combined with heart problems a year later.

In December 2007 her lungs started to deteriorate and she was often out of breath. When the nursing home doctor wanted to admit her to the hospital she refused and said she was tired of hospitals. They administered pain medication and she died peacefully after a couple of days, in company of her son Mark, who was coincidentally just visiting the Netherlands.

[photo: Goedele Monnens]

There were two of them. Two very big moose, right there in our backyard!

Slowly, silently, they stepped over the low fence into the garden. They were huge. Pepe started yapping at them. One moose stepped forward and crushed Pepe under its gigantic foot. It then bowed down and started with ripping Pepe’s hind leg from his body. It was a rather bloody affair, and Pepe, still conscious, cried as he used to do when Alison cut his nails, but then louder.
From the porch I watched the things unfold in absolute shock and horror but at the same time I couldn’t stop looking. I just stood there, frozen. Didn’t, couldn’t interfere and totally forgot to take pictures. Strange thoughts went through my mind like “at least he won’t pee on the floors anymore” and “finally I’ll get uninterrupted nights sleep”. Both guilt for my horrible thoughts and relief over Pepe’s sudden demise filled my mind. In the meantime the moose had finished eating the final bits of Pepe, and he and his mate slowly stepped away, back into the lane-way. A bloody patch in the snow was all that was left of the dog.

Poupoune, when asked for comments, thought it was an excellent dream.

I went with a client on a hunt today for a bathtub. He’s quite tall and wants me to make a new, larger bathroom for him, but he has a hard time finding a bathtub that fits his frame, one that is actually big enough for him to lie in.

After visiting a number of stores we both have to pee. But asking “Do you have a bathroom?” in a bathroom store is kind of awkward, and pissing in the showroom toilets is generally frowned upon (apparently it does happen though, at least that’s what I heard). So we head to a Tim Hortons nearby and have a muffin and an orange juice. Coincidentally we order exactly the same muffin and the same kind of juice.

Afterwards we drive the long way home and even though a lot of people are on vacation, there is still a lot of traffic and it takes quite a while. I drop of my client, and when I arrive at home I can’t find my bag. I search the car, but it’s a big red bag and not easily overlooked.

The dogs are barking around me while I try to concentrate and think where I remember I had my bag the last time. I think it was at the Tim Hortons. I get the Yellow Pages, but can’t find them. Wait, the internet! But on the Tim Hortons website there is no restaurant finder. Canada411.ca. No Tim Hortons in Montréal on that street. O wait, Pierrefonds is de-merged and is a separate municipality now. Yes, there it is, in the long list of telephone numbers. I call the number and start talking to the woman who picks up in English. They all speak English in the West-Island so I’m surprised when she asks “French, please?”. I repeat my question (“Have you found my bag?”) in French, she goes to look in the place I tell her I was seating and then she comes back: “Non monsieur, votre sac n’est pas là…”

Fuck.

It now really dawns to me. I lost my bag. My really nice red bag. With my camera in it, and my cigars. And my brand new MacBook Pro laptop.
I thank the woman for watching and give her my phone number just in case. Just before I hang up I ask if there are any other Tim Hortons in Pierrefonds? She answers me that she’s not in Pierrefonds but in Côte de Lièsse. OMG. I called the wrong restaurant! Yes, it is the telephone number just below the one we visited. I get new hope. It’s not even an hour ago since we left. I call again, making sure to call the right number this time.

Unfortunately my hope proved futile. My bag hadn’t been found. I call all the bathroom stores we went to, one at the time. No luck.

Shit.

I call Alison and she has no idea what to say to cheer me up.

I hang up, and I don’t know what to do. I haven’t even paid off my credit card bill of the new laptop and I already lost it. Visa will be happy. Then I remember that my bank just recently upgraded me to a new credit card that included an extended warranty or something. I frantically try to find the leaflet that came with it. Yeah, there it says: “The Purchase Security Plan protects most purchases made with the card for ninety (90) days from purchase.” I quickly try to find the line that says what is meant with that word most. I’m sure I will find a line saying that “computers are excluded”. But there is no such line. I call the toll-free number, and someone takes my card number, address and the value of the item I lost. Thanks to Apple’s online invoices I can still find that information. She’ll send me a form that I’ll have to complete. Wow.

For the first time in an hour I can sit and calm down a bit. There is a possibility I didn’t lose a huge pile of money, but just some.

I eat a cracker with cheese and try to recall what I’ve lost, what haven’t I backed up yet.
Some photos, obviously. But for the rest I just lost the changes I made today and last night to the drawings of my client’s bathroom. Just a couple of hours to re-create those, so that’s not too bad. A good thing I worked on woodworking projects the past week and that I make regular backups. But not daily, even though I bought a new hard drive just for that purpose. But I haven’t had time to set it up yet.

I even manage to look at it from the bright side: I now have an excuse to replace my 6 year old camera.

An hour later the phone rang.
“Um, is this the person who lost his bag?”
My heart skipped two beats. “Yeah?”
“We’ve found it.”
I almost started to sob. I asked her until when she worked (“until ten”), called Alison with the good news and jumped, high on adrenaline, in the car.

First I drove to a cinema and then the whole 35 kilometres back to the Tim Hortons in Pierrefonds.

I gave all people working a cinema gift certificate (Not all of them could pose for this picture). They were happy and surprised about my generosity. I felt good because giving away things is fun. I still don’t know what exactly happened and why it took so long to find a bright red bag in an almost empty Tim Hortons but I don’t really care. Everything is still in the bag, and it doesn’t seem that anybody touched my computer since the same application is still active when I wake it up from sleep-mode.

Having it back saves me a lot of time and stress not having to recover files from backups and re-create stuff that I made today and yesterday on a current project that I hadn’t backed up yet… That is well worth the reward.

It’s funny how happy you can be with something you had a couple of hours ago that wasn’t particular special at that time.

Just losing things makes you realize how much you care about certain things. Maybe I should lose things more often. But I almost never lose things. Fortunately.

I have my camera back so I don’t have to buy a new one. And my bag! And my cigars, water-bottle and my dropjes! O… and my MacBook Pro too of course.

for a computer translation.]

Helaas geloof ik niet in engelen, maar ik heb wel enorm veel geluk gehad.

We hadden een paar dagen gewandeld en gekampeerd in de Adirondacks, een heel erg groot nationaal park in het noorden van de staat New York. Onze terugkeer in de bewoonde, lawaaÔge wereld was iets later dan gepland en we moesten nog een heel erg lang eind rijden, terug naar Montréal. Over kleine, bochtige wegen, met veel tegenliggers. Maar A. keek op de kaart en vond een shortcut, letterlijk dwars door de middle-of-nowhere. Okay, die namen we dus, want dat scheelde een uur of zo. De weg werd steeds verlatener en na een kruising met een oude spoorlijn stond er plotseling een groot bord: “Pavement ends”. Dus die weg door de middle-of-nowhere was gewoon een zandweg. Een tamelijk goede en brede zandweg, maar toch. Ik had zelf op de kaart moeten kijken, want het was inderdaad een uiterst dun lijntje. Maar inmiddels hadden we al vijfentwintig kilometer in deze route “geÔnvesteerd”, en we hebben een vierwielaangedreven auto en het was maar 15 km zandweg en daarna beloofde de kaart ons weer een asfaltweg.

De kortste weg tussen twee punten is niet altijd de snelste. Zelfs Google maps stuurt je via de zuidelijke omweg.

Helaas hadden we geen Internet in de auto (zelfs mobiele telefoons doen het niet in die buurt kwamen we later achter) dus vervolgden we onverdroten onze weg. Een bochtige weg, maar wel goed onderhouden, met een harde onderlaag en wat los zand en grint daarbovenop. Na een 15-tal kilometer, in welke we slechts een tegenligger hadden en ook maar een zijweggetje, stond er zelfs een waarschuwingsbord dat waarschuwde voor een scherpe bocht. Na die bocht ging de weg tamelijk steil naar beneden en vervolgens plotseling naar links. En daar begon onze trouwe Subaru met ABS en vierwiel aandrijving te slippen. We reden niet zo heel erg hard, zo’n 50 km, maar ik kreeg de auto niet meer in het gareel. En na zo’n dertig meter, inmiddels met nog maar weinig vaart gingen we net met de voorwielen in de lage berm, en de zwaartekracht trok ons verder het bos in. De auto kwam vrijwel meteen tot stilstand, ongeveer een meter naast een hele dikke boom. De airbags waren niet afgegaan, de motor draaide nog en we keken elkaar aan en zeiden: “Mmm, dit is geen goede plek om een ongeluk te hebben.” en meteen daarna “En de camera batterij is op, dus we kunnen niet eens een foto maken.” Het is grappig hoe ironisch men kan zijn in zulke ogenblikken.

Ik zette de motor af, we openden de portieren en stapten uit om de schade te inspecteren. die viel reuze mee, we hadden niks geraakt en stonden keurig haaks naast de weg geparkeerd, met de achterbumper nog net op de weg. Maar met de voorkant van de auto wel 1 meter lager dan de weg en zonder hulp van een sterke auto of takelwagen zouden we hier nooit van z’n leven meer weg komen. Wat te doen? Vijftien kilometer teruglopen naar het laatste dorp, Big Moose, of juist verder, het onbekende tegemoet? Terwijl A. haar wandelschoenen aandeed hoorden we een auto aankomen. Een zware pickup zelfs. Er bestond een god. Helaas hadden de twee heren geen kabel aan boord en konden ze ons niet helpen. Maar er stopte nog een auto, die ons een lift aanbood naar Big Moose. Ik moest echter nog wat pakken, -trui, water, kaart- en toen ik weer uit de auto kroop was ie al weer weggereden. Nu ja, er bleek toch wel iets meer verkeer te zijn dan wij oorspronkelijk dachten dus we besloten niet te gaan lopen, maar af te wachten op de volgende voorbijganger. Bij onze auto hadden we in ieder geval een goed excuus om te liften, mede omdat Amerikanen niet zo gauw lifters meenemen tegenwoordig, en zeker niet in de middle-of-nowhere. Die auto kwam, een bejaard echtpaar in een grote SUV, en ze wilden ons best meenemen naar Big Moose.

Daar kwamen we een twintigtal minuten later aan, en bij de eerste (en enige) public phone van het gehucht, voor het lokale jagers restaurant belden we de AAA, de amerikaanse wegenwacht. Gelukkig waren we lid van de Canadese evenknie, en we werden snel doorgeschakeld naar de lokale servicepunt. Die zaten echter wel een eind weg dus de takelwagen kwam pas een uur later. Wij gebruikten de tijd om een lekkere vis te verorberen. Toen de takelwagen kwam en we samen weer naar de plek des onheils waren gereden, had hij echter niet veel moeite om onze auto uit de berm te trekken. Het leek alsof de Subaru geen schade had geleden. Ik maakte een kort testritje, keerde een mijl verder weer om en, na een fooi, stuurde we hem weg. En toen? Toen gingen we verder, nu wel iets voorzichtiger rijdend.

Maar in weerwil van de informatie op de kaart hield de zandweg maar niet op. En voor ons gevoel ging ie ook nog eens veels te zuidelijk. Maar eindelijk, na zo’n vijfendertig kilometer zandpad, veranderde de weg in asfalt, maar verder bleef het vrijwel even desolaat. Geen verkeer en ook geen huizen. Enfin, zo’n twee-en-half uur na onze herstart kwamen we eindelijk in de bewoonde wereld aan. En om kwart over vier in de morgen (na een hazeslaapje op een parkeerterrein) waren we eindelijk in Montréal, een avontuur rijker. Maar zonder foto’s.