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.