coupe de cheveux

Before I came to Quebec, I had heard that the Quebecois were very proud of their French heritage. And I had heard about the referendum for Quebec's independence that failed by only half a percentage point. But I guess I had thought that the whole "French" thing was something that the Quebecois did on the side. Like wearing a kilt, perhaps: you might do it every once in a while in order to "celebrate your heritage," but it's certainly not the sort of thing you'd do all the time. Maybe the Quebecois made a big deal out of their French-ness in public; but in the privacy of their homes, I was sure, they all spoke English.

So it came as kind of a shock when I realized that there were many people in Quebec who spoke French not only as their first language, but as their only language. A few of Lise and Carroll's children were in an English-immersion program at school, but most were not. Lise was fluent in English, but Carroll spoke it only haltingly. And their friends who came over regularly knew almost no English.

So it is possible to live your entire life in Quebec (in the countryside, at least) without knowing English. It's difficult to wrap your head around the fact that the people of Canada cannot all talk to each other -- not just as the temporary result of immigration, but as the permanent, accepted condition. And yet I suppose that the maintenance of Quebec's unique identity depends to some extent on some of its citizens not being able to speak English. If everyone here could speak English as well as they spoke French, then why speak French at all?

On the federal level, English and French share official language status, so food packages in Canada are all bilingual. Sometimes the label designers seek to economize by combining the French and English labels into one, taking advantage of the English language's tendency to put adjectives before nouns and the French language's tendency to do the opposite. Hence such redundant labels as "Tomato Ketchup aux Tomates." Bombarded by this constant bilingualism, I'm surprised the Canadians don't all develop split personality disorder.

But Quebec does not equivocate; there is only one official language in the province, and it is French. At first, the stubborn refusal of the French Canadians to accomodate English speakers may seem absurd -- don't they know what continent they're on, and what century they're living in? -- but once you see things from the perspective of the Quebecois, it doesn't seem so silly. French America used to stretch in a wide arc from Nova Scotia to New Orleans, but since the early 18th century, the French language and culture has been under continual assault by the spread of the dominant English-speaking population. There may still be some Cajun communities down south and some Acadians in the Maritime provinces, but Quebec is the last, purest stronghold of French language and culture remaining in North America.

In Quebec City, it is true, practically everyone seems to speak at least enough English to communicate with the tourists. Quebec may be a French island that must be defended against the ever-encroaching sea of English that surrounds it; but that sea is also the source of a lot of its tourism, so Quebec does its best to be accomodating. Most of the museums, for example, have displays in both English and French, and most waiters can take your order in English. I've been able to get by without learning any French beyond "Je voudrais..." and "Un billette, sil vous plait."

But on the fringes of Quebec City, outside of "Vieux Quebec" -- a UNESCO World Heritage site, the only fortified city in the Western Hemisphere north of Mexico -- the tourist effect starts to wear off. So it was that I found myself in a chair in a barber shop about to have my hair cut by a woman who didn't speak English.

I really needed a haircut. My last one was in June or July, and my hair was getting long enough in the back that it was starting to take on the proportions of a mullet. I was going to try to get a haircut when I was in Vancouver a couple of weeks ago, but I ran out of time; then, I hoped I would find a barber shop near the farm in Gaspesie, but I wasn't on the farm long enough to find out. By the time I got to Quebec City, the situation was desperate. But it proved surprising difficult to find a barber shop in Quebec. I encountered many "salons" on my walks through the city, but where were the plain old regular barber shops? I was looking for something with a red-and-white striped pole outside, but I couldn't find it.

The internet was not much help, either. On Monday, I went across the St. Lawrence River to the town of Levis, where Google Maps told me there was a barber shop (this was not the sole purpose of my visit; the view from the ferry was spectacular). I found the red-and-white pole, but alas, it was "ferme" on Mondays. I went back to the internet and found a smattering of barber shops around Avenue Cartier. It was kind of far from the Old City, but if I walked to the art museum, then perhaps I could walk back along that route. There was also a Western Union branch located nearby, where my parents had arranged to wire me some money when they found out my attempts at getting cash from an ATM had failed. It seemed worth a try.

I found that elusive red-and-white pole, and, more importantly, the shop behind it was open. I went inside and asked, "Parlez-vous Anglais?" The woman said, "Non." I had given some thought to what I would do in this situation -- a few days ago, I had tried to memorize some essential hair-cutting vocabulary -- but it all escaped me at that moment and I considered running out. But I sat down, and as she started trimming, I thought, "Well, this should be an interesting haircut."

There was a man in the barber shop who did speak a little English, and through him I managed to communicate that I wanted it "not too short." It turned out pretty well, actually. I'd post some pictures of the haircut, but I'm sure you'd rather see pictures of Quebec. I know how much you all like UNESCO World Heritage sites.

... And I packed the USB cable deep in one of my suitcases. It'll have to wait till later.

le poop

I suppose that working on any farm, you can expect to get dirty from time to time. And I suppose that at one point, all dirt was poop. But the dirt on Sue's farm in BC was comfortably removed from its poopy origins. Once you got used to digging around in the ground, it really wasn`t so bad. The dirt was primarily an aesthetic problem: it got wedged under your fingernails and stuck in the creases of your hands, and, of course, all over your clothes. So you scrubbed your hands extra-hard and threw in some more soap with your laundry, and you learned to live with a little bit of dirt in your life. It was alright. It didn`t smell or anything. You probably could have eaten it if you wanted.

But on Lise and Carrol's farm in Quebec, the poop is still very much poop.

There's never any shortage of poop on a farm with hens, geese, six cows, seven calves, a dozen or so pigs, a couple dozen rabbits, some horses and ponies and more sheep than you could ever possibly count. With so much poop being produced, it was of course necessary to clean the animal enclosures once or even twice a day, lest the poop pile up so high that it starts to ooze out the gaps between the wall boards of the barns. Poop-shovelling is a Sisyphean task; often, one of the cows or horses pooped immediately after we had cleaned out its stall, as if in mocking defiance of our measly efforts at cleanliness.

It took a while for me to get used to the poop. There's the smell, certainly, which lodges itself in your nostrils and has a funny way of popping up again when you're eating dinner. And it takes a while to figure out how to navigate a wheelbarrow full of poopy hay through the mud to the dumping-ground. But the hardest thing was to get used to touching the poop. I wear gloves whenever possible, and of course I tried to use shovels and pitchforks to move the poop, but the fact is that at some point your bare hand is going to make contact with animal waste, whether you want it to or not. I learned not to let it bother me so much, and to wash my hands really really really well.

Anyway, I shouldn't make it out to seem like life in Quebec is all poop, all the time. The farm is located on the Gaspé peninsula, the part of Quebec north of Maine and south of the St. Laurence River. It's sort of like a seaside version of Vermont. Very windy, too: windmills dotted the landscape around the farm. Not the sort of fabric-sail Don-Quijote-type windmills, of course; these were of the modern, skyscraper-high, jet-wing steel variety. I could never really decide if they made a positive or negative contribution to the landscape, but I'll leave that for you to decide. Here are some pictures:

I was planning to stay on the farm for five or six weeks, but things didn't quite "work out." We disagreed about the amount of work that should be expected out of a WWOOFer -- I wanted more time off to explore and do some reading -- so I left on amicable terms. It's too bad, though; the farm was beautiful, and the family was wonderful, too (eight children, all under age 14).

In any case, I'm here in Quebec City now, convalescing for five days before heading off to the next (and hopefully final) farm before I come back home in time for Thanksgiving. If you're reading this entry, then leave me a comment, sil vous plait, because I'm kind of going crazy in the absence of any native English speakers and I'd appreciate some reminder of the Mother Tongue. And if you have been checking regularly, I apologize for the delay between postings, but the dialup internet connection in Gaspesie did not want to make friends with Blogger. What's your excuse?

photos, finally

I'm flying to Quebec tonight, to begin working on another farm, this one mostly an animal farm -- sheep and cows and such. I don't have time for a full post right now, but I figured I should show you some long-overdue pictures from the farm in Sorrento. Enjoy.

so much Canadian news

Often, when I was in the packing shed on Sue's farm, washing vegetables or stuffing them into bags or boxes, we listened to the radio to help pass the time. There were only two radio stations that came through clearly on the packing shed radio. One station was the local branch of CBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, a kind of Canadian equivalent to NPR. CBC plays a lot of interesting interviews and programs, but it's a very talky station, and it was kind of hard to follow what they were talking about if somebody was using the power hose. So usually we ended up tuning to the other station, which happened to play "easy rock." This is a code word for a mind-numbing playlist of the same twenty to thirty stale love songs, repeated over and over again until you find, rather against your will, that the music has insinuated itself into your brain and the repetition becomes calming and reassuring, in a way, and while you still don't really like the music, you find yourself humming one of the songs hours later when you're in bed, trying to fall asleep.

We didn't always turn the radio on. Sometimes it was better than silence; sometimes, not.

Even the soft rock station, which boasted of how much music and how little "talk" it featured, occasionally condescended to reading the news headlines. I didn't usually pay too much attention, but I heard snippets about the state of the Canadian dollar and the actions of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and so on. And so one afternoon, I found myself wondering, "Why do they have so much Canadian news on this station?"

Here in British Columbia, it's easy to forget sometimes that you're in a different country. They speak the same language here, and the Canadian accent is not really so different from any American accent. Oh, perhaps the Canadian language relies a bit too heavily on the word "eh," but you get used to this verbal tic pretty quickly. Canadian culture is fairly similar to American culture: no strange customs to get used to, no pyramids or palaces to remind you how far you are from home.

It's hard not to notice, however, that Canada's relationship with America is very different from America's relationship with Canada. Sure, we're friends and all, with the "longest unguarded border in the world" and so on. But does the United States Postal Service print a stamp specifically for sending mail to Canada? I don't think so. Canada produces such a stamp for mail directed towards the United States. And the Canadian newspapers and radio stations (even easy rock stations) cover much more news about the United States than the American media covers Canadian news. The actions of the United States affect Canada more than vice versa, which I suppose is the natural consequence of having a nation of 30 million next to a nation of 300 million.

For that matter: how many of you knew the name of the Canadian prime minister before I said it above? Believe me, everyone in Canada knows George Bush.

When I say that Canadian culture is similar to American culture, I do not mean to say it is identical. There are many small ways in which Canada manifests its differentness on a daily level. I have already mentioned the peculiarities of Canadian currency -- the loonies and the twoonies, and no one-dollar bill. Traffic law is another way in which Canada is different. The standard warning sign in Canada is a square, rotated 45 degrees, with a checkerboard black-and-yellow pattern, and in the middle, a small black arrow indicating the direction in which one is supposed to go. It's effective in getting your attention, but trying to figure out what the sign says is a little like looking at one of those optical illusions and trying to see the two faces or the wine goblet. American drivers are familiar with the blinking red light, which is equivalent to a stop sign, or the blinking yellow, which means yield, but Canadians also have a blinking green light. A blinking green light -- what could this mean? Slow down? Be careful? I have not yet had the opportunity to ask a Canadian.

(Fortunately, I have not yet been required to do any serious driving in Canada. The most driving I have done was moving the old gray pick-up truck around the farm, and even then, I managed to back into the wall of the packing shed and mess up the tailgate so it wouldn't close. Sue knew how to fix it, luckily.)

The Vancouver mass transit system provides another point of contrast, in its apparent reliance on the honor system for fare payment. There are the SkyTrain elevators that do not require you to go through a turnstile or show a ticket at any time. Today, on a ride through the Kitislano neighborhood (Vancouver's equivalent of Brooklyn or Queens), I was struck by the fare collection system on the city buses. They allow you to enter through one of two or three doors. It is assumed that if you need to pay the fare, you will get on through the front door and do so. If you use one of the rear doors, you are presumed to have a monthly pass or whatever.

This may seem strange to one who, when he thinks of mass transit, thinks of the MTA's jail-cell-style super-jump-proof turnstiles. I could say that Vancouver is a more trusting city than New York, a cleaner city, a safer city, a younger city, a smaller city, and so on, but I feel it is unfair to keep talking about Vancouver only in terms of comparison. The city has its own peculiar charms, after all, chief among which is the natural setting. Downtown Vancouver is on a peninsula between two inlets, and it makes full use of the waterfront with promenades and parks. The view to the north is spectacular -- green mountains sloping right down into the water -- all the more impressive when the blue-white skyscrapers of downtown are silhouetted against it. I took a walk along a beach today near UBC, the University of British Columbia (an "infamous" clothing-optional beach, as I believe the guidebook put it, but being a cloudy October day, most people were fully attired), and I decided that perhaps Vancouverites are not being disproportionately boastful when they say their city has the highest quality of life in the world.

Vancouver

I left the farm yesterday, five weeks and one day after I arrived in September. I had originally planned to stay for six weeks, but I suppose it was the weather that did me in. It started raining the last week of September and it never really stopped. And if it wasn't rainy, it was always cloudy. Cloudy and cold and damp all the time. The clouds that hung low around the tops of the mountains and settled down in the valley no longer seemed beautiful and mysterious to me; they were just oppressive. It was time to go.

I wanted to spend some time in Vancouver, too, before I leapt eastward towards Quebec. So at 8:15 AM, I boarded a Greyhound bus in town, after saying goodbye to Arnaud and Sue (Colleen was in Calgary with her boyfriend, Patrick, and it was Sophie's day off, so she opted to say goodbye to me the previous night and sleep in that morning). As we set off down the Trans-Canada Highway, the sky was just as overcast as it had been the past few weeks. I opened up my copy of Middlemarch (well, I suppose it's my mother's copy -- "L. Perry" is written on the upper-right-hand corner of the first page, and when I found it in the basement, it still had a Harvard Bookstore 1974-1975 bookmark calendar wedged halfway in) and began to read, staring out the window every now and again, not making much progress against the long winding paragraphs of intricate sentences.

Autumn in interior British Columbia is a primarily yellow affair. Most of the trees on the mountains are evergreens and hold their deep bluish-green through the cold weather. What deciduous trees there are, are primarily birches (so far as I could tell with my Mountain School tree-identifying skills). The birches were blazing a brilliant golden-yellow against the scrubby quasi-desert landscape. It was beautiful, but I felt that this monochromatic fall wasn't really fall, somehow, without the red- and orange- and purple-turning trees that dot the October landscape in the northeast.

We ascended some mountains, and then descended, and I noticed as we headed westward, the landscape grew damper. There wasn't any rain outside, but the hillsides seemed lusher and the rocks grew moss and lichen coatings as we plunged through a canyon and into the flatlands of the Fraser Valley. The pure golden autumn of the interior had rusted into a moist, mottled orange. The sky began to clear and the sunlight shined through the leaves overhead, yellow and orange and red. Soon enough, the suburbs came into view, and, in the distance, the tall buildings of downtown Vancouver. I had almost forgotten what civilization looked like.

I emerged from the bus into the sunniest afternoon I had seen in weeks. Besides my backpack, I had a large wheeled suitcase and a smaller duffel bag. Not exactly what one would call "travelling light," but when I arrived in BC in September, I had two large suitcases and a duffel bag (I sent some of my t-shirts and shorts home; the rest was accomodated through some very tight packing). Outside the train/bus station, there were taxis waiting, but I figured it would be a more authentic experience (and less expensive) to take mass transit to the youth hostel. After all, the SkyTrain station was across the street. I looked around for an elevator for a while but couldn't find one, and was about to take the stairs, luggage in hand, when a man passing out free newspapers called over to me and pointed me in the direction of the elevator.

I bought a ticket for the SkyTrain, but I didn't have to go through a turnstile or anything. The Vancouver public transit system seems to operate largely on the honor system. Weird.

I emerged from the Sky Train (which by this point had gone underground) on Burrard Street, and wandered a block in the wrong direction before a businessman with an Australian accent directed me towards the nearest bus stop. The first bus driver that came had never heard of Burnaby Street, the street that the hostel was on, but I consulted the somewhat confusing map at the bus stop and figured that the second bus was probably going in the right direction.

It was a rather awkward bus ride, me with my three pieces of luggage. If anyone who knew me had happened to be on the bus with me, they probably would have started laughing as I tripped over myself trying to get my big suitcase through the aisle and off the bus. As it was, everyone around me was a stranger, and I imagine they looked on with a mixture of pity and impatience.

But I managed to get off and find my hostel, check in, deposit my suitcases in my room, and walk down to the waterfront. I sat on the beach and wrote a letter as the sun set over the bay, and then walked in search of dinner. I ate at two different pizza places, neither of them very good.

My first impression of Vancouver: a smaller, cleaner, friendlier version of New York. Decent mass transit system. Terrible pizza.

loonies and twoonies

I set three alarms on my cell phone each morning, spaced at fifteen-minute intervals, to make the process of getting out of bed a little more gradual. Usually I set my first alarm for 7:00, or 6:45 on the mornings when I take a shower (it seems kind of silly to shower every morning when I know I'll just get dirty all over again a half hour later, so I usually take a shower every other morning; my goal is not cleanliness so much as keeping the dirtiness to a reasonable level). And usually I'm out of bed after my second alarm, and downstairs eating breakfast by about 7:30, ready for the start of work at 8:00. It's a system that works well for me. Perhaps not quite as well for Sophie and Arnauld, whose room is next to mine and who claim they can hear my alarm every morning. And it's true that sometimes I let it go for a minute or so before I wake up enough to roll over and turn it off. But they have to wake up too, you know.

Saturday, though, is market day. And since the market opens at 8:00, that means we have to be down there by about 7:15 to start setting up. And that means we have to be ready to leave the farm by 7:00, which means that we have to start loading the trucks at about 6:00.

It wasn't until my third alarm went off at 5:45 that I forced myself out of bed to face the day. Or, rather, the night. It's still completely dark outside before 6. Fifteen minutes is not really enough time to eat breakfast, put on four or five layers of warm clothing, and make my way over to the packing shed, but I've noticed that as the seasons change and the sun rises later and later, everyone else seems to be rising slightly later on market days. It's as though we can't get started before we see the slightest hint of deep blue light outside, the guarantee that the sun will rise and the day will come. This morning, we got outside at about 6:20 or so.

Colleen and I emptied the boxes from the cooler and piled them into the two pickup trucks, followed by the three folding tables and the poles that support the tarp that hangs over the stand. The sky was beginning to brighten outside (or at least as much as it was ever going to brighten in this gray, gloomy weather we've been having), but the metal of the six-foot-long poles was still freezing cold. I shoved them in the truck as quickly as I could while still taking great care not to swing them into some vegetables or somebody's head.

The market is right in town, in the parking lot of the shopping center with the post office and the 99-cent store and the little grocery store. Colleen and I arrived first, in the gray truck, a handful of small peaked white roofs already rising above the asphault. We set up the tarp, and then Sue arrived, and we unloaded the trucks, unfolded the tables, set out the vegetables, and put up the little signs with the prices.

There are maybe a dozen regular stands at the farmers' market. There's a guy who sells chainsaw carvings and a woman who makes these really delicious date squares (also called "matrimonial bars," she informed me today, because they were traditionally served at bridal showers), as well as a couple of stands with some tomatoes and carrots and such, but Sue is definitely the main vegetable attraction. Squashes and leeks and lettuce and spinach and cauliflower and broccoli and beets and potatoes and chard and carrots and kale, piled high on the table, a rather attractive display of the abundance of the harvest. The market has not been too busy -- I'm told that it's much more crowded during the summer, when all of the tourists are here -- but every once in a while we'll get four or five customers at the same time, and I'll be reaching over Sue at the scale to get to the cash box while Colleen ducks by to weigh a cabbage.

Today, the Saturday before Thanksgiving (in Canada, they celebrate it on what we Americans would call Columbus day), is the last market, so I'm beginning to get the hang of it. I still have to shout over to Sue sometimes for the price of a bag of carrots, but usually (with the help of the electronic scale's addition function) I am able to charge customers approximately the correct price for their vegetables. But for the first couple of weeks, I was a mess. Trying to add together $8.40 and $11.85 in my head, I would invariably give customers the wrong change and forget to ask them if they needed a bag. One customer, a friend of Sue's, kindly suggested that I take a deep breath before helping the next customer.

I'm inclined to blame it on the Royal Canadian Mint, which makes a one-dollar coin (called the "loonie," because of the picture of a loon on the reverse) and a two-dollar coin (the "twoonie") but no one-dollar bill, and whose coins all look alike because they all have the same person on the front. But I suppose that my poor mental math skills may be partly to blame. In my second week at the market, I turned to Sue and said, "You know, I'm actually really good at math. I did really well in calculus." But there's a world of difference between knowing how to find an integral and knowing how to make change, and I don't know which is more useful but I definitely know which one Riverdale didn't teach me.

For some reason, though, I couldn't stay away from the scale. I felt a magnetic draw towards helping the customers, even though I was so bad at it.

But I've gotten better over the past few weeks, I swear. Still, I don't think a customer service job is in my future.

Speaking of money, the big news story on the radio the past couple of weeks has been that the Canadian dollar is actually trading at a higher level than the American dollar. I suppose it's a point of national pride, but I'm not sure how proud you can really be when your unit of currency is named "the loonie." But I guess it's better than the alternative. Sue told me that the original plan for the dollar coin called for a picture of a beaver.