Long

HALIFAX TO MONCTON
Saturday

It’s almost over as quickly as it’s begun. On Saturday we packed up the van at the Katimavik office in Halifax after two weeks of training in Truro. We take computers and boxes and fill up the back of a 12-passenger van with Katimavik written all over it. They tell us we’re not allowed to park it in liquor store parking lots. It’s Tyler and Dave and Mike and I – Tyler and Dave are the other project leaders in Labrador and Mike worked there as a PL last year. He’s joining us for the drive because Dave and I aren’t yet licensed to drive the Katimavan (after 1 week of training I was already feeling like slitting my wrists if I had to hear the prefix ‘Katima’ added to another word, and you will probably feel the same) and he was stoked to make the long trip north again. After all, we’re not only getting paid to do this, we’re getting paid for everything we do – two hotel rooms every night in Moncton, Matane, Baie-Comeau, Lab City. We sit down to restaurants at every meal – one of our ‘problems’ is that we have to get up to eat before 11 if we want our breakfast expensed.

People at the Atlantic region training were from all over, most of them returning staff and a few newbies like us – and by us I mean me, Tyler, and Dave, all three. We’re all excited to go to Labrador but I can’t tell if I’m the only one that feels like we might be getting in over our heads. Like I might be getting in over my head. Kathleen, one of the project coordinators (immediate supervisors of us, the project leaders) told me when she said goodbye, “You’re going to rock Sheshatshiu.” I said, “I know.” And I know that I will. But we’re heading up to an empty and lonely place. Mike says he’ll introduce us to some of his friends there, but I still feel that same stab of fear I always feel going off to a place like this. Will I feel alone?

It poured rain in Halifax, a city I had the chance to see for a night only despite being in Nova Scotia for two whole weeks. It poured rain the whole four hours to Moncton.

MONCTON TO MATANE TO BAIE-COMEAU
Sunday and Monday

Civilization gets left slowly behind. New Brunswick was what I always imagined it to be – not that much. Small working-class towns and Moncton, and then cheap diner food in Bathurst. Why the melange of languages surprised me so much I don’t really know – it shouldn’t be much of a shock that French and English would be so interchangeable there.

We’re constantly reminding each other how luckily we are – not only is the whole trip paid for, but we’re being paid to be on the trip. All our meals are paid for and the organized staff at the office have carefully faxed pre-authorizations to every hotel we’re staying at, so all we have to do is sign the receipt. We find ourselves ordering more food, and even eating when we don’t really want to eat, just to make sure we use our allowed food budget. On top of that it’s $6/day each for groceries since we have to drive so long on our third and fourth days, and that adds up to $100 for snacks over the trip. Can it possibly be too much money? And it is.

Then back to Quebec, through small villages in on the Gaspe until the St. Lawrence. Villages get quainter and fewer and far between. We stop to skip rocks by a river and find some kind of fishing canoe, with a couple of wooden chairs and a pole for pushing it through the rushing waters. We pass the same hitchhikers, young people like us, a couple of times. It’s cloudy but beautiful.

Finally we reach Matane, the St. Lawrence. This is deep into the real Quebec, on the Gaspesie peninsula. We eat more diner food at 9pm after checking into the hotel. Even on our second night it already feels like a rhythm, the driving, sitting in squeaky, sticky booths and eating chicken and Caesar salad with way too much dressing. The way hotel rooms feel when you’ve been too transient for too long.

Now we have a whole day until we catch the ferry to Baie-Comeau at 5pm the next day. On Monday we wander around in the forest and find a waterfall, where we skip more rocks and take some pictures. It’s still cloudy in all of them, but no rain.

The ferry leaves for Baie Comeau and it feels like the Canada I know is slipping away. I like the feeling of heading north. One guy that was in Canada World Youth with me was from Baie-Comeau, and a long time ago I would always say I would visit him there. But after awhile it became clear that I probably never would. Why would I go there, so far up, even past beautiful and dense Sanguenay? Past Tadoussac, where we saw the whales a few years ago? This is one of the magical moments of traveling, to find yourself in a place that you thought you’d never go to.

Halfway across the St. Lawrence the sky clears, and the sun sets, and we arrive. When we check into the hotel the receptionist tells me to initial at the bottom of the form to say that agree not to smoke or bring animals into the room. “It’s for cigarettes and animals,” she says. I laugh but I don’t really know why. She says, “Everybody laughs at that.”

BAIE-COMEAU to LABRADOR CITY
Today

Today is the day – tonight we’re be there, in a place that three months ago I would have bet my life savings that I would never see in my life.

It’s cold already – last night was 13 degrees and this morning we turned the van on a couple minutes early to warm it up. It’s all right though – summer was already gone a week into training, and now, already, there’s that feeling of it never having been here at all. It goes away so quickly but winter memories always stay. The British Virgin Islands are certainly a million zillion miles away.

The road started out paved, then changed to gravel, then back and forth again a couple times. First there was the stretch between Baie-Comeau and the first rest stop, 211klm down the highway. Trees and lakes and some other cars. Further down became short views across nothing, and then long views across nothing. Forests burned down to nothing, an abandoned mining town that has left not even a ghost – nature had claimed it all back. We stop a couple times in the middle of nowhere. There’s nothing except quiet and wild blueberries and everything being damp and cool. We play games and listen to music and sometimes we’re just quiet and we look out.

“I’m kinda sick of the scenery,” Dave jokes.

“Don’t worry,” I answer. “Once we cross into Labrador, there’s nothing but chocolate land.”

We arrive. First sign of civilization is Fermont, a Quebec mining town right on the border. It’s the first settlement-type thingy we’ve seen since leaving Baie-Comeau ten hours before. Fermont is strange in an Edward Scissorhands kind of way – everyone works at the mine, and school buses are dropping off workers with big metal lunchboxes as we pull into town at the end of the workday. There is a huge horseshoe-shaped building that holds almost everything the town possesses – in a mall-type area are the restaurants, shops, post office, school, daycare, administration, everything. Adjoining are rows and rows of apartments – one can only assume their inhabitants don’t ever have to go outdoors to get anywhere in the town of they choose not to. Behind is a cluster of old-looking, small houses painted all different colours – the kind of thing you might imagine a mining company would build en masse for its workers. That’s all there is – the giant indoor town and a few houses hidden in behind it. It takes two minutes to drive around the whole town after we climb around on a huge mining truck in a park. For a moment the sun comes out and I realize it’s been days since I’ve felt heat hitting my face.

Fermont is one of the stranger things I’ve seen in life and I’m having trouble getting my head around it. “This is going in the blog,” I tell the guys. “In all my travels one of the strangest things I’ve seen is right here at home.”

Here’s a choice: you can travel wherever you want in the world, but never return to your home country. Or you can go anywhere within your own country, but never step outside its borders for the rest of your life. Which one would you choose? The first time I heard the question the choice was as easy as it is now, or maybe a little less easy because it only gets easier the more and more I travel. Of course stay here is the answer, and travel through a hundred different countries while never leaving my own and still never be able to explore it all in a lifetime.

We arrive in Labrador City well before darkly. Now we’re here. Everyone speaks English again. Despite having driven the whole way from Halifax, it still feels hard to imagine where we are, that we’ve almost made it. Tomorrow is another day like today. Another 550klm, another ten hours probably. And then maybe once we’re in Goose Bay I’ll be able to tell you if it’s hit me: this is where I’m spending the next year.