Wednesday 10 April 2024--Sleep in late...get up, have a bagel and coffee, and go back to bed. I find it hard enough to motivate myself when there are things I really want to do. On a day like this, in a place like this...well, it's far past noon when I finally get out. The only thing I really have in mind to do is to check out the boardwalk trail along the Ruisseau Clair, which trickles along between the back of the village and the highway. On my way to it, I pass an artisanal sausage shop. I love sausages...stop in and think about what I might purchase later, after my perambulation.

The boardwalk runs down behind the commercial lots at the western end of the village. The wooded gully is the sort of place you might expect to find abandoned shopping carts and other detritus; thankfully, it's been kept reasonably clean. There's a pleasant little waterfall along the way. The only other humans I see are a couple of gents whom I take to be homeless. They avoid eye contact. There but for the grace.... I've been fortunate in life. I don't think I would survive long in such a situation.

There's a park where the Ruisseau Clair joins the Rivière du Diable, which rises somewhere far north of here, and runs into the Rivière Rouge a few miles south. The Rouge in turn empties into the Rivière Outaouais--the Ottawa River--some thirty miles farther south; the Outaouais, of course, joins the St Lawrence near Montréal, on its eventual way to the Gulf of St Lawrence and the Atlantic Ocean. A few centuries ago, the water routes would have been traveled by les coureurs des bois, the runners of the woods, who traded with the indigenous people for beaver pelts, to meet the demand in Europe for fur to make the felt hats that were the lasting fashion in Europe. Beaver is the only fur that felts so naturally; when beavers started to get scarce, hatters developed a method, involving the use of mercuric nitrate, to felt rabbit and other fur. Long-term exposure to mercury has terrible effects on the human nervous system. Thus was born the proverbial mad hatter. Beavers have not been trapped for a long time now, and the population has rebounded across North America. There is sign of their activity here on the banks of the Diable.

Up on the main street, I pop into the SAQ (the provincial liquor store) to peruse the offerings. I bought a bottle of whisky in New Hampshire, on the way north; the prices there are much better than here, but I'm still interested to see if there's anything I can't do without. The local products, cider and ice cider, are more attractive, but I pass on them, too. At the grocery across the street, I buy a few cans of beer and a jar of mustard to go with the sausages. I arrive at the sausage shop five minutes after closing. Oh well, there's always tomorrow.

I manage supper without sausages in my apartment, and then go for a few pints at La Maison du Brasseur. It would be nice to strike up a conversation with some locals, but I'm not so socially adept; sometimes it happens, more often it doesn't. I remember a night here on one of the bus trips, one in which I had several days free while the group stayed at the mountain and skied, when another driver and I fell in with a local couple for a few hours of bar-hopping. It was a strange evening, one I don't think I can describe in any coherent way, these many years later. I couldn't make much sense of it at the time, really. I suppose I'm too old for such folderol now, which is too bad.