As we got closer to the Mingan archipelago, the distance between villages became greater. The landscape changed - untouched by development. The number of English speakers dropped to zero.
A lobster fisherman from New Brunswick came for a visit when he noticed our Ontario plates. Weathered and darkly tanned, he was a born storyteller. He regaled us with tales of local traditions and about the woman he had fallen in love with and followed to the Mingan area some twenty years previous. Prior to his arrival, he told us, there was no electricity in their small village. Local fisherman, who needed to store their catch in a cold place in the summer months, would navigate their fishing vessels to a nearby small island with hills that were snow covered year round, fill their boats with snow, haul it back to the mainland and shovel it into well insulated storage sheds - their version of a freezer.
The system worked well, he explained, until the year he showed up those many years ago. His first summer in rural Quebec was also the last summer that the snow remained year round. Now, when spring arrives, the snows melt as the birds return north for the summer.
Although there are now roads to this region of the country and electricity in every house along the St. Lawrence, I can't help but wonder about the great adjustment these small villages must have experienced as their way of life changed and how they coped in the years after the weather warmed and before the modern world intruded.
