Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 8, 1992 TAG: 9203080306
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BY NEAL THOMPSON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
From the diary of David McCord, written in a lighthouse. (circ. 1930)
I kept thinking, hunkered down on my bike, as two friends and I neared the tip of the peninsula called Gaspe: this is the end of the world I'm pedaling toward!
Well, the very tip of non-arctic North America, at least.
The peninsula of Gaspe - from a Micmac Indian word meaning "land's end" - is the northeast tip of French-speaking Canadian Quebec province.
People we passed on the peninsula - sitting on front porches of weathered, utilitarian homes - seemed 100 years behind the world. For that, it seemed to us, they were fortunate. Because on rare breaks through the language barrier, we found them friendly, trusting and generous.
Biking offered a slow-paced way to see both the details and the more obvious highlights of Gaspe peninsula. We were part of the land - it's rocky shores, sheer cliffs and quaint villages - not viewing through the television screen of a car window.
Mountain climbs of up to 19 percent grades, though, proved to more than three weekend warriors had expected.
Biking Gaspe took seven days and a 330-mile loop - not including a 100-mile train ride to make up lost time.
Seven days on a bike has many ups, but some downs, too.
One up came on the second night when, at a seaside campsite, we saw the aurora borealis - the northern lights. It was a first for all of us. It was moving.
Other ups: moose, seals, a bird colony, spending a night in a train station and meeting Gaspe's very generous regional manager for Labatt beer.
One of the downs came when I slammed into the side of a car, bounced off the hood and rolled through the gravel.
The only other downs were rain and steep hills - especially dangerous when combined.
Gaspe peninsula juts like a bumpy thumb for many miles north of metropolitan Quebec and Montreal. To the left of the thumb is the St. Lawrence River, which enters the Atlantic Ocean below the middle knuckle at the town of Matane - the last chance to see anything resembling a franchise gas station or food chain. From there on, it's small villages separated by vast, rugged seaside beauty.
Planning the trip began six months earlier over drinks at a party. Two friends and I decided to bike somewhere, but where? From our respective states, we later exchanged phones calls and faxed copies of maps with proposed routes before deciding on the oceanside Gaspe route.
Biking finally began in early September at the town of Sainte Anne des Monts. A guest checking into a motel there spoke just enough English to translate to a manager our request to park our car there for a week.
After just five miles that night, we camped illegally on the shore in the next town, Tourelle. A beautiful sunset was later compromised by kids who bombed our tents with rocks, yelling at us in French.
At 6 a.m., circling and squawking gulls woke us just in time for the sunrise over inland mountains. It was cold, but a good cold. Bundled-up and ruddy fisherman pushed wheel barrows of equipment to their wooden boats to row out to larger fishing boats moored offshore. It was our first look at the fishing industry that dominates the lives of these people. Huge framed nets called flakes, used to salt and dry cod fish, were everywhere.
The next two days and nearly 150 miles were a consistent but gorgeous succession of towns. Typically, we would leave one town, wind along the vacant coast with a rocky shore to the left and sheer cliffs to the right. Then the road would bend inland, we'd crest a hill and look down on a village nestled in a cove.
Most towns in this heavily-Catholic province (where they still conduct Mass in Latin) had a church whose steeple was the highest man-made point in town. Usually, there was one gas station and one store. Architecture was inconsistent and often more useful-looking than pretty. What was consistent, though, were the mountains of firewood that surrounded most homes.
One of the prettiest towns was Mont Sainte Pierre, the hang-gliding capital of Gaspe. It adorned many a postcard.
Misfortune came in one of these towns.
After 75 miles one day, we entered Grande Vallee as a car pulled out of a hardware store and was riding slowly beside me. The driver made a quick right turn. I pulled on both brakes, screamed and skidded a few feet before I slammed into the front right fender and flipped. It felt like a long body-surfing tumble, but on gravel.
I was bruised and scraped, but lucky. My bike wasn't. The front wheel got sucked under the car's front wheel and was mangled. My rear wheel was bent, but not as bad.
The driver's name was Peter and he turned out to be a nice guy and apologized a lot. At least that's what it sounded like in French. He also offered to take me to the clinic. I think.
In fragmented English, Peter told me most folks in town were fishermen, copper miners or loggers. Very cold in the winter. Plenty of snow. That was about all I could get out of him, but we smiled and nodded a lot.
Peter towed my bike and me to the campground and pointed out one of the only sporting goods stores we would see on the whole trip. The next day, the shop replaced my front wheel and straightened my rear wheel as well as possible.
The next two days were up and down. Not until later did we admit they were mountains, not hills. When the shore got too rough, the road entered the wilderness, sometimes climbing 2,000 feet up and out of a seaside town. First, we thought 10 percent grades were bad. Soon, we were doing 13 percent and 15 percent grades that lasted a mile or two.
Our reward came at the end of the second day when we flowed down out of the mountains into Parc Forillon.
The national park is the very tip of the peninsula - the tip of the thumbnail. The end of North America.
You could spend a week here. A visitor center explains the origins of Gaspe fishing. A nature walk follows the shore where seals play. A hiking trail leads to the absolute tip at the magnificent cliffs of Cap Gaspe. And boats are abundantly available for fishing or sightseeing.
That night's cozy campground gave us our second taste of nature's laser show. The northern lights filled the sky with streaks of light. Red, then green, then yellow. They melted and bent into each other like a spectral lava lamp.
Inland from there is the peninsula's namesake, where three salmon rivers converge in a harbor. There, we met the man who put the trip into perspective by providing the missing piece to the Gaspe puzzle: its people.
It was frustrating to buzz through a village and not speak to a soul or learn something more about a town other than its beauty. People were friendly, but the inability to communicate was like a wall between us.
Then, we met J. Hugues "Johnny" Gerard at a bar.
It had been a miserable, rainy, 30-mile ride from Parc Forillon to Gaspe, the peninsula's largest city and port for international commerce. The first of Gaspe's two motels was booked and the second had just one room left.
In early evening, we ventured to a basement of a bar called Pub d'la Vieille. Half-way through our three Labatts, the bartender dropped three more in front of us.
"They're from the gentleman at the bar. He's the regional manager for Labatt beer and he'd like you to have one on the house," she said in French-tinged English, and added before skipping off. "He's also my dad."
We invited Johnny Gerard to join us and soon were pummeling him with our stored-up questions about the city where he was born, the peninsula and the people of eastern Quebec.
Gerard was a hefty man who enjoyed beer and talking - and did a lot of both. With his graying beard, tan and rough face, big laugh, foul mouth and blue eyes, he seemed to embody the toughness of a people who get nailed with cold winds and depths of snow throughout much of the year.
Gaspe (pop. 17,350) used to be mostly English 50 years ago but has since colonized and is now 90 percent French. But it is a language and a culture that has become difficult to maintain, Gerard told us.
"I am French, yes. And I am proud of it," Gerard said. But he married an English-speaking woman, Monica, and they maintain a bilingual household.
Economic troubles add to the difficulty of keeping up the French culture. Gaspe's once dominant fishing industry was badly hurt in recent years by aquaculture - a word Gerard spits out - and by a growing fish industry in Japan.
Because of that, jobs are scarce and young adults leave the peninsula the first chance they get, Gerard said.
In fact, on a train two days later we met Monica - a recent college graduate who lived with her parents but hoped for a job in Montreal. That's where she was headed on the train, to visit friends who had found jobs there.
Coincidentally, Monica remembered Gerard from her college parties in Gaspe, which he used to attend doing PR work for Labatt. Judging by his yacht and Tudor-framed, antique-filled home on a high hill above Gaspe, we figured Gerard was pretty good at selling beer.
Gerard treated us to more Labatts at the Bzise Bise Bistro Bar, beneath the fancy Belle Helene restaurant, which Gerard and others said was Gaspe's best restaurant.
The next morning - hung over thanks to Johnny Gerard and the Labatt company - we began riding from Gaspe to Perce, the peninsula's two biggest cities.
Half-way there, it started to rain. Again. A lot.
For hours, we huddled and shivered beneath an overhead at an elementary school. Sitting on concrete steps, we cursed the rain, each other, Canada and Labatt. We later agreed that the school was the low point of the trip.
We rode back to a small train station and learned no trains came through that day but one would leave the next day from Perce. It would take us to New Richmond and would cut off 100 miles. People told us later it was the least impressive section of the peninsula, consisting mostly of industrial towns, smoke stacks and bleak, flat farmlands.
As it turned out, we couldn't have planned it better.
That afternoon, skies cleared and the cliff-lined hills outside Perce didn't seem as steep. Especially when we were rewarded at the top with a magnificent bird's-eye view of quaint Perce, it's famous rock and Bonaventure Island, home to a rare colony of 50,000 gannets.
In summer, Perce is jam-packed with tourists who clog motels and take ferries out to Bonaventure. Or they walk during low tide across the jetty that connects to Perce Rock, a breathtaking monolith that juts from the surf.
Artsy shops line the main road in central Perce and there's plenty to eat in its many restaurants.
South of Perce are a few smaller coastal resort towns, but we only saw them through a train window. Glenn, the baggage handler at New Richmond, left the station open and let us sleep inside.
From there, we left the coast and went inland and north along the salmon-packed Cascapedia River on Route 299. It was a stunning change of pace. No homes. No civilization. Just us and the river cutting through deep valleys, with occasional logging trucks interrupting the quiet.
Three-fourths of the 100-mile route across, we hit Parc de la Gaspesie's animal reserves and 4,000-foot peaks - some jagged-topped, red and rocky, others strangely rounded and green from the copper. From far off, we once spotted caribou sauntering across a hillside. Later, we saw a lone moose knee-deep in a marsh.
From there, it was down hill back to Saint Anne des Monts. Seeing the ocean again from high in the hills was exhilarating and rewarding. We had completed the circle.
We exchanged high-fives and hugs (yes, men who hug) when we reached the car. We hooted and hollered listening to tapes all the way to the first McDonald's a half day's drive south. Bic Macs never tasted so good.
by CNB