I awoke early this morning and lay there in the dark, listening. It was early. Something had popped me awake. Then, faintly, echoing through the leaf laden bush, a long, drawn out soaring howl. Wolves. I checked the little clock I keep by the bedside, 4:30, then slid out of bed and opened the window wider. The stars were shining across the sky, the darkness soft and velvety, the temperature a little coolish, but comfortable. I stood and listened to a couple more fainter howls, the music soaring up into that vault of star-studded late summer sky. Is there some remnant of genetically inbred primordial memory in humans? A memory of a time when being instantly aware of sounds was important for survival?
We went auctioning today, across the mighty Ottawa River and into 'La Belle Province'... Quebec. Our property is on the far western edge of 'The Valley', up in the hills. Within a 30 minute drive S and E, we enter flat farmland. At first it is sporadic, interspersed with bush, then further south, the farms get bigger and more prosperous looking. There are no road bridges crossing the Ottawa river north of the National Capital Region of Ottawa and Hull, until Chenaux, where the river narrows and plummets through several channels it has carved over millennia,through curiously black bedrock. What an amazing sight it must have been for the Voyageurs who traveled up the Ottawa to the Mattawa and across to Lake Nipising and on down the French Rver to Georgian Bay. Perhaps the name of the little hamlet on the Quebec side says it...Portage du Fort. (Fort meaning....strong or hard which is what that portage would have been back then!)
The highway from the Ontario side cruises through flat farmlands, then at the hamlet of Chenaux, it begins to gently slope down, the bush closing back in until it winds through a channel of blasted rock cuts where one gets tantalizing glimpses through the trees between the cuts, of glimmering downstream water. The face of the blasted cuts reveal black rocks veined with white, like ripple ice cream, the swirls of white tortuously contorted from some ancient cataclysmic force. The highway crosses three bridges, actually the top of the dams, the big hydro-electric generating station visible off to the side.
The last bridge terminates right at Portage du Fort, and once through the tidy little village, and just beyond it's outskirts, the farmland commences and flows off to the far tree lines, blue in the distance. The landscape is gently undulating, dotted with silos and grain bins as far as the eye can see. Acres and acres of productive, beautiful soil.
The auction was at one of those farms, 110 acres of productivity, the owners pulling up stakes and moving to Tunisia in northern Africa! That job offer must have been very good to leave their verdant Eden. I wandered around a bit beyond the barns to find long, black-plastic mulch covered rows, one labeled "d'arachide”. Yes.....peanuts! The vegetable garden beside the house was amazing, just overflowing with large, healthy plants..and the herb garden! I was green with envy...particularly of the two varieties of lavender, big and blooming vigorously. I am having trouble overwintering a Munstead variety, supposedly a hardy one.
I scored on a big, heavy, hardwood butcher block that fits perfectly on my kitchen counter for bread-making and dough-rolling; a pair of stainless steel mixing bowls and a large tray with handles for carrying meals out to the verandah for dining ' al fresco'.
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