Finding a way home

I intended to write about the blue whale this week, or perhaps the eastern caribou; both of them are rarities I hoped to encounter on the Gaspé Peninsula before summer wrapped up.

I set out on this adventure the week before last, blissfully unaware that after 11 hours of driving and before any of these animals could cross my path, a transport truck full of gravel would quite drastically change my plans.

It was over in an instant as far as I was concerned.

One moment I was slowing down, making a left turn into a colleague’s driveway, the next I was in the ditch, my car in ruins and my clothes soaked from the rain.The truck driver who had hit me approached apologetically and my colleagues charged onto the scene to make sure I was alright. It wasn’t until the next day that the headaches set in, accompanied by attacks of nausea which landed me in the hospital.

It was whiplash, the doctor told me. Stay off any boats and avoid driving.

To say this threw a wrench in my trip would be an understatement. Every day I stayed my expenses grew, yet I couldn’t meet either of the animals I’d come to see.

One swam off the coast, too far even for the spectacular viewpoints of Gaspesia.

The other grazed atop Mont Jacques-Cartier, a three-hour drive for a man with no car. There was no bus nor train nor rental which could convey me home; I was stuck there, relying on the charity of strangers to make the best of my spoiled trip. They offered me company and headache cures, but none could give me a ride.

Among the many noteworthy events on this trip, I’m forced to focus on the most serendipitous, occurring two days after my unfortunate collision.

While walking on the roadside, my notebook in hand and my head downcast, a noise caused me to look ahead.

There, in the driveway of the restaurant I’d been walking toward, was a van with its nose in the ditch, its back bumper hanging in the air.

I ran toward it with more than a little empathy, finding the drivers were both alright and spoke absolutely no English. They signalled for me to jump on the back of the van, thus weighing it down like a teeter-totter so its back tires could gain traction. But I was too light.

From the restaurant there came four people, young and spirited, each leaping on the van alongside me and, with the added weight, rubber met road.

The van was saved and I was left standing in a parking lot with the four young people from the restaurant.

We got on the subject of my car accident two days previous and they offered me a ride to the national park down the road, one of the many destinations otherwise beyond my reach.

I accepted.

We found a beach inside Forillon National Park where my new friends immediately broke into groups of acrobatic yoga (impressive) and swimming (cold). Throughout the day these people produced the most spontaneous music I’d ever heard, sometimes with instruments and sometimes their own bodies, using combinations of snapping and clapping which seemed as natural to them as breathing.

We explored the park until well into the night and, in spite of my ongoing pain, I kept up.

We watched the sunset from sheets of rock spilling into the ocean and hiked to a place called Land’s End. It’s a lighthouse lookout at the very tip of Gaspesia, where the torrents of mountain and forest making up the peninsula come to an abrupt stop at the border of the Atlantic Ocean.

We ate lunch on the beach and I hosted them for supper, and from a reservoir of kindness shared between the four of them, they offered to take me home.

They weren’t going to Halifax before meeting me.

In fact, they were preparing for a return trip to Montreal, which put me 11 hours out of their way. All the same, we left the next morning.

There was enough seen and said on that drive to fill several pages, but sufficed to say, we grew together as people and by the end of it, we each counted the others among our closest friends.

Their only price was gas money, as well as a night on the town when we reached Halifax. My head was on fire by the time we arrived, but I held up my end of the deal regardless.

I offered these humble heroes a place to sleep that night and the next morning they were back on the road, heading home themselves.

I make these people out to be saints but they were just people — wonderful, artistic, kind people — and that’s why I’ve written about them. I typically profile endangered species in this column, but through these folks and others I met in the wildest places of Gaspesia, I discovered something just as rare: the realization that at their core, most people are incredibly decent.

Spending a week in a hostel, where you’re always at the mercy of strangers, I was humbled by the number of friendships waiting to be made and the help readily offered.

Not all people are friendly or worth trusting, of course, but it wasn’t until I summoned the courage of the hitchhiker that I found my way home.