Is there anything more forlorn than a long unused passport, still brimming with hope of adventure for its bearer, though its pages remain unstamped, the whole of it the very epitome of unrealized potential and unfulfilled dreams?
So it was for my passport, it having sat idly in a dark closet throughout the nearly seven years since I last renewed it. Mocking, no, make that pleading with me regarding its mint condition, it was languishing in danger of expiration without ever having come under the squinty gaze and worn thumb of an inquiring border agent asking about my intentions in entering his fair country.
The mind, of course, churns right along with such ships, especially on their ocean-bound course to the northeast, the imagination securing a seat in the wheelhouse, or even mid-deck with the rugged somber seafarers…
That inquiry about our intentions finally came last week as we entered the transition zone between the USA and Canada, and it inspired me to exclaim to our young agent, perhaps a bit over-enthusiastically, “To have big fun!”
Whereupon his next question was, “Are you bringing any cannabis in with you?”
My enthusiasm now giving way to at least a baseline decorum, I thought the better of piping up with a jocular, “Not since the ’80s!” So I simply shook my head no, after which he bid us, with only the slightest, almost grudging smile, on our way.
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We spent our first night off U.S. soil in the seawall town of Sarnia (pictured just above). Though it’s long been associated with a thriving petrochemical industry that compels most visitors to zip right on past toward the rolling farmlands of Ontario, my own personal rule is never to talk smack about a city with a robust shoreline, which Sarnians seemed to flock to in the usual abundance common to such settings. So: good on them.
From there, a few nights each through the Toronto outlier city of Guelph (population 143,000), and then the mostly French-speaking, bedazzling cities of Montreal (1,800,000) and Québec City (556,000).
All capped off with four nights at a unique Airbnb (more on that below) on the southwestern tip of Île d’Orléans, a lovely island of sprawling farms, quaint villages, abundant roadside produce stands, a perpetual bumper crop of patisseries, and startling sea views across the St. Lawrence River to Québec City.
Much to our delight, we have beheld from our front porch, with no small degree of awe, the specter of a parade of large ships proceeding both north and south in numbers more commonly associated with sailboats on nicely breezy-but-not-howling spring days. One is at the top of this page, another I will present to you right here. Yes, I have a few more (French-speaking) baker’s dozens where they came from.
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There they proceed, one after another, quiet and majestic in both their coming and going, maybe 150 yards off the rocky shoreline that reveals itself to us at low tide in the village of Sainte-Pétronille, the ships (very) occasionally bird-dogged by jet skiers seeking thrills in the boats’ wake, along with seagulls seeking far more elemental fare.
The mind, of course, churns right along with such ships, especially on their ocean-bound course to the northeast, the imagination securing a seat in the wheelhouse, or even mid-deck with the rugged somber seafarers, duty-bound with their tasks mid-river but already straining to shelve their land burdens snugly into their ship lockers once they reach the open sea.
Sure, an almost unimaginable boredom and aloneness may lie in wait across the vast oceans from which there is no ready return. But that possibility holds little weight in deflecting the forces that wax poetic and frothy in the human imagination and the longings central to it. The kind of poetic frothiness exemplified in 19th century American poet Richard Hovey’s…
THE SEA GIPSIES
I am fretful with the bay,
For the wander-thirst is on me
And my soul is in Cathay.
There’s a schooner in the offing,
With her topsails shot with fire,
And my heart has gone aboard her
For the Islands of Desire.
I must forth again to-morrow!
With the sunset I must be
Hull down on the trail of rapture
In the wonder of the Sea.
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Hovey seems to have been a Jack Londonesque character, resolute about tearing into life and wresting its meaning from the effort he gave it—along with poetry about it. And like London, he died young, at age 35 in 1900. (London was 40).
As if in an effort to stow away from his birthplace in the unfortunately named “Normal,” Illinois, Hovey set about collaborating with another poet in three volumes of “tramp” verse that was casting its lot for relevance in turn-of-century America. The deliciously titled “Songs from Vagabondia” (1894) was followed, of course, by “More Songs from Vagabondia” (1896). Finally, published posthumously just after his demise from a routine surgery intended to correct a scrotal condition, his publisher churned out “Last Songs from Vagabondia.” (No, I made none of that up.)
Further cementing his break from middle America, Hovey died in New York City, which is a long way from Normal, but apparently not far enough to have spared his life at the time with superior medical care.
But say this for Mr. Hovey: in those precious few years of vagabonding, he cultivated and shared the profoundly satisfying “fever” of worshipping sunsets and being “fretful with the bay,” his inner siren calling him to “Hull down on the trail of rapture/In the wonder of the Sea.”
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Our lodging from where I write is a former religious retreat site (shown above), run by an order of nuns from 1900-2016. The vintage home has been lovingly (and exhaustively) converted over the past nine years by an artist into a river-perched and spacious one-unit Airbnb on the bottom floor of his home residence up top, all of which his painstaking years of rehab work managed to make look like original construction.
The property includes a former chapel that the artist had moved 50 feet up from the shoreline just days before an enormous full moon tide swamped the property and would have seen the chapel become driftwood on its way to the Atlantic. It now serves as his studio, even as he has left in place, among various other items reflecting the site’s history, the statue of the Virgin Mary seen below. Here she stands, beckoning…
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Multiple other churches dot the island, including a still thriving religious retreat center just up the road from us. Religious iconography such as road turnouts with Christian statuary are a common sight. This despite the fact that like most all advanced industrial nations, Canada in general and the previously dominant Catholic population of Québec Province in particular have seen dramatic drops in religious belief, church attendance, and religious vocations over the past half-century.
In Montreal, we spent part of an afternoon in a beautiful old church-turned-library (photo just below), a not-at-all uncommon phenomenon of repurposing known by the term, “en mutation.”
Daunting as “mutation” may sound, what is the history of religion, and history itself, but an endless series of mutations, of ideas and experiences, races, cultures and tribes, beliefs and doubts, questions, speculations, experiments and answers all intermingling, challenging and changing one another mostly for the better but sometimes worse, but most always seeking, in its very multiplicity, for the new, the fresh, the novel?
That primal urge to peek around the corner, pry open the sealed door, pluck the apple from the Tree of Knowledge, is what drove Richard Hovey to board his beloved schooner and behold “her topsails shot with fire,” with his heart headed “For the Islands of Desire.”
All our distant travels, it seems to me, are shot through with that same hot fire/desire—to know more than we have known, to see more than we have seen, to meet the stranger and see ourselves in him and her anew.
“Whoever you are, motion and reflection are especially for you,/The divine ship sails the divine sea for you,” wrote Walt Whitman, an acknowledged influence on Hovey, in “Song of the Rolling Earth.”
Whitman, ever the universalist, the poet of no religion but of all religions, every ship divine and every person sailing on or merely longing for a journey upon it made of the divine. The divine seeking the divine, in motion always, slaking Hovey’s “wander-thirst” that has launched a thousand ships from the shores of those who beheld them and who could not, for the life left to them, look away.
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One more, proving the point……
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I didn’t see Québec on this list, but then again, it went by really fast…
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Comments, questions, attaboys or arguments suggestions for future posts, songs, poems? Scroll on down below, and/or on Facebook, where you can Follow my public posts and find regular 1-minute snippets of wisdom and other musings from the world’s great thinkers and artists, accompanied always by the kind of creative photography you see on this post. https://www.facebook.com/andrew.hidas/
Deep appreciation to the photographers! Unless otherwise stated, some rights reserved under Creative Commons licensing
Homepage rotating banner photos (except for library books) by Elizabeth Haslam https://www.flickr.com/photos/lizhaslam/
Library books by Larry Rose, Redlands, California, all rights reserved, contact: larry@rosefoto.com
All other photos by Andrew Hidas https://www.flickr.com/photos/andrewhidas/
Superbly crafted, as always. Thanks for the entertaining read.
My pleasure, John, thank you! This part of the world is just waiting for you & your camera…
Five years ago, the summer before COVID shut the world down, Claire and I made a similar journey through Canada. If we ever get back to Quebec, we’ll definitely spend at least one night at the religious retreat from which you wrote this blog. This is a partial entry from the journal I kept on our trip.
Sunday, June 9: We entered Quebec and shadowed the St. Lawrence River as it made its way into Montreal. When we arrived at our hotel, Auberge du Vieux, dusk had descended. Our 4th floor hotel room on Rue de la Commune overlooked the Old Port and the St. Lawrence Seaway. Formerly a 19th century warehouse, the room’s charming decor included oak floors, post and beam ceilings and brick walls…I wrote this poem on our last night in Montreal stay.
“Montréal”
Boy Age 9: Mommy, how did Montreal get its name?
Mother: Well, in Mohawk muntaril” meant “many hills.”
Canucks claimed it was an old Yankee card game.
Grandpa after downing a gallon of swill,
told me only he and this priest knew the truth,
that it came from a crypt under Notre-Dame.
Boy: Is that how you think Montreal got its name?
Mother: Well, I think one day a man sat on a hill and said,
“What a magnificent and royal sight,
Three lovely hills overlooking a riverbed.
Wouldn’t that make a perfect place to live,
Hey, maybe Mount Royal sounds about right.”
The French simply called it Montréal.
Now it’s bisected by the St. Lawrence Seaway,
Its pebbly shoreline and man-made walls,
connect our city to all the Great Lakes,
That’s why all those ships line the Cartier quay.
Boy (Now 55 years old): Yesterday I walked along its old cobbled streets,
Horse-drawn buggies carried gawking tourists,
Nearby the Seaway, the Old Port’s heartbeat,
ran from Lake Erie to the Atlantic Ocean,
Waves lapped the banks as the River crested.
I moved to land-locked Phoenix years ago,
while the mountains possess a certain allure,
I’ve always missed my Seaway’s flow,
Montreal will always be heart and soul,
It’s only here that my life seems so pure.