I DIDN’T KNOW that my new tablet had something that might have been deemed “magic GPS.” There I was, standing in a gymnasium full of so many relatives that we almost didn’t all fit. My parents were there, and my daughters, and their mother, and that neighbor who love/hates me, and I was being turned “every which way but loose”, to reference that old Clint Eastwood movie, the one with the orangutan. “Can you do this?” “Can you do that?” “He is the problem!”
Then I set the controls for the north and voila. I was floating above the Saint Lawrence River. Rick Rickard, an anthropologist from William and Mary who specialized in the study of indigenous peoples, was also there. He was sort of like that George Carlin character from Bill & Ted’s Most Excellent Adventure. Rufus! He was even wearing a black trench coat and curating the area to me. The American side of the river looked more wooded, with gently sloping landforms that gently descended into the rushing clear waters of the river. I could even see the boulders deep below the water’s surface. On the other side, cold, barren stones emerged carrying Canada up on their stony shoulders all the way to the cold north and frosty Nunavut.
Rickard showed me the Mohawk settlements of Kanehsatà:ke, Akwesasne, and Kahnawake, and there was some discussion about the limits of Haudenosaunee control, the Saint Lawrence Iroquoians, which once numbered more than a hundred thousand strong, and he showed me the site of the Attignawantan villages, who would later evolve into those Wyandot or Huron. “But as we know, not all Iroquoians were friends,” said Dr. Rick Rickard. And then he was gone.
Disappeared back to his university office.
I began to drift westward down the river. In my mind, I didn’t want to go in this direction, having some innate fear of Niagara Falls, and decided to head east. Holding my magic tablet, with its magic GPS, I meandered along the river, encountering beautiful French villages built into the bluffs around it. You would have thought that I was in Grenoble or some such place. It was almost night now, and I could see the glowing street lanterns of the Quebecois villages.
At some point, I noticed there was a sort of castle built on the east side of the river, and paused by an old bridge to take a photo of it. I thought my relatives would appreciate a snapshot of my river journeys. They were still messaging me, as if I happened to be lost somewhere outside that massive family gathering. But so far nobody had specifically requested that I do anything. As far as they knew, I was still on hand. They didn’t know that I was lost up in Canada taking photos of Quebec bastions along the Saint Lawrence River.
My plan was to follow it as far as I could east and, if I still had some time, to even swoop down to Nova Scotia, before returning quietly to the family gathering. But then the tablet stopped working. A passing car soaked it in mud and snow and the whole thing fell apart. I tried to put it back together, but the screen just wouldn’t work. I was truly screwed. I was stuck up on the Saint Lawrence River with no way home. Another car passed by and I flagged it down. It was being driven by an old Quebecois in a plaid shirt. His son was in the passenger side seat. I explained to them what had happened and the son, a good-natured lad, couldn’t believe it.
“Incredible! It cannot be true!”
We drove through a series of tunnels that had been built, perhaps, in the early years of Nouvelle-France. The roads through these river-side tunnels were paved with cobblestones. It had a particularly French feel. They let me out somewhere around Kamouraska, on the east bank of the Saint Lawrence River. The ancestral home of the Kerouacs. I felt disappointed about being unable to get that photo of the castle. I also had no idea how I would be getting home from Canada to the family gathering back in wherever. It was getting quite dark now, and a light snow began to fall. I was standing in an apple orchard along the Saint Lawrence.
I jumped up into the wind and began to fly away.
north! 