E-mail A Friend Tell a friend about the information found on this page by sending them an e-mail.   Your Name: Your E-mail:   Type an e-mail address, then click add: Add a Personal Message: (Optional)

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
		Click map to enlarge

Day 13: St. Augustine to Harrington Harbour
Harrington Harbour is unique among the villages of Lower North Shore — it’s the only one that hasn’t found it difficult to draw tourists. As the setting for the 2005 Quebec film “Le Grand Seduction,” the picturesque fishing village received what one local calls “$6 million in free advertising.” Oddly, the film crew added a touch of white-wash to age village buildings, and touches of it are still visible on the odd house and store.

The recent spate of visitors, however, is an increasingly touchy subject. Too many of them, it seems, fail to realize that this is a living town, and not a historical simulation of a 19th-century fishing village. Every summer, Keith Rowsell, the town’s tourism representative, answers angry calls from fellow residents. “When people walk up to somebody’s house and take a picture they don’t realize they’re standing on private property,” he says. “I often get calls like, ‘There’s someone looking in my window!’”

Day 14-15: Harrington Harbour to Natashquan
The sky is orange and the snow is blue. As we carom over the last few hours of trail toward Natashquan, the sun is dipping beneath the horizon ahead of us. The fading light, smeared red lipstick with tendrils of violet, disguises the bumps and banks of the track. The mountains now behind us, we are crossing flat bog into a hard wind.

In Kegaska, I drop off my passenger, Marie Josée Desrosiers of Sept-Îles, who needed a lift from Harrington Harbour. I offered the rear seat of my machine. Once her business is done, she will hitch a ride back. Speeding along the darkening ground, I realize something fundamental about the coast — everyone still participates in the supply lines. There may be a patina of modernity here, as the snowmobiles get flashier and more satellite dishes point out from rooftops, but the mix of self-reliance and communal interdependence remains ingrained. The question is how much the much-talked-about road, if it is finally built, will tamper with that.

top