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January/February 2008 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Feature: Polar vision Feature: Carbon cemetery Feature: North Shore highway The Inside Story Editor's Notebook Reverberations Explorer À la carte Mosaic

On the road Writer Christopher Frey embarked on a two-week journey through Quebec’s Lower North Shore to learn about the region’s rich history and culture and to discover what a planned road through the isolated towns and villages might bring Story by Christopher Frey
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Day 12: St. Augustine
It’s a bright Saturday morning on the St. Augustine River, 10 kilometers by snow machine from town. The air sparkles. Small snowflakes dance in the light breeze, tiny crystals catching the sun. Darrell Driscoll crouches on the ice and baits the line of his girlfriend Lucie Laliberté’s makeshift fishing rod with a piece of frozen scallop. In her lap, their six-month-old baby Yoan sleeps swaddled in blankets. Driscoll has invited half a dozen friends on this ice fishing excursion, along with anyone who happens past. To Innu families and Québecois teachers from Pakua Shipi, he offers up a hole, a rod and some bait.

Driscoll is the last of his direct family to remain on the coast, the rest having settled in suburban Toronto long ago. But like most of St. Augustine’s men, he leaves every summer to work. While the coast may lack specialized workers with backgrounds in hi-tech or engineering, its self-reliant working class culture has always favoured the jack-of-all-trades—carpenters, electricians, people who were multi-purpose, with needed skills that are in high demand elsewhere in the country.  They rarely have problems finding well-paying work when away.

From May to September Driscoll guides at a fly-in fishing camp in northwestern Ontario. Laliberté, who arrived here seven years ago from Québec and teaches at the Innu school across the river in Pakua Shipi, remains at home. The separation they endure every year has always been difficult; now that their family has grown it promises to be even more so.

When Yoan wakes, Lucie straddles her Skidoo and finds a friend’s winter camp five minutes away in a cleared wood. The tent is a typical Innu enclosure — a white canvas tarp spread over a birch frame, the ground covered in spruce boughs. A tin stove breathes heat onto those inside. The family has carved up a leg of caribou, the lower joint knifed clean so it can be split and the marrow, considered sacred, spooned out.

Laliberté never expected the Lower North Shore to become her home. She had planned to stay a couple years, gain some experience and seniority, then apply for a teaching position elsewhere in the province. Romance and a surprising affection for this place intervened. While Driscoll is plainly optimistic about the road, Laliberte is more circumspect. Will, she wonders, this sense of community, of interdependence be diminished?

“I like it without the road,” she says. “It will change something fundamental about the town. Its closeness, its community.”

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