Editor’s note: Mark Bradford is contributing occasional posts from his diary on traveling the country with his wife Wendy while they rent out their Mishawaka home for six months.
Day 36 of our 190 day sojourn
July 31, 2023 — Quebec
This is a tale of two streams.
One stream is an extrovert, the other is an introvert.
We visited both today, and we liked the introverted stream a lot more.
After grocery shopping in the morning, Wendy and I decided to go see a waterfall called Montmorency Falls. We had not done our homework (to be honest, Wendy has kind of given up) but we expected it to be your standard 15-minute walk through the woods to where you find the magic that waterfalls are.
We were surprised to discover that the place was very much like the madhouse that has become Niagra Falls. Thousands of people crowded into small spaces (reminded me of Fat Wally’s Bar on a Friday night in the early 1980s). We paid $12.00 a person to park and then we joined the throngs pushing around to get the photo at the perfect spot.
The Montmorency Falls is an extroverted site, The falls are magnificent, the ziplines across the falls are busy, the walkways are wide but congested, and there is a $17.00 per person tram that takes you to the bottom of the falls, where you are invited to walk up the 489 steps to the top, where your car is parked. Ummm, no thanks.
Don’t get me wrong, the falls are magnificent and my guess is the extroverts who love crowds and shoving people out of their way would love the place. I was always the guy at Fat Wally’s who stood next to the trash bins, trying to escape the noise and the pushing and shoving that my extroverted friends so coveted. I become very introverted in large crowds.
Later in the day, Wendy and I needed about 2,000 more steps so we took the little bike path 10 feet away from our condo and started wandering down the St. Charles River. No noise, no people, no pushing, no shoving, kind of like the Tippecanoe Place Restaurant in South Bend on a slow night.
We walked as far as we could on the coolest boardwalk ever. Imagine putting a wooden plank boardwalk right on the St. Joe River in St. Pat’s Park. The river quietly wound its way to the same St. Laurence Seaway that the Montmorency Falls did, just in a less verbose way.
Occasionally we would run into another person or two and they, too, were trying to escape the noise that extroverts seem to thrive on.
We happened on an older man who had his radio tuned up loud in one of the alcoves, and he was singing along at the top of his lungs. Whether he was slightly mad, or slightly high, we did not stop to ask. Had he done that at the larger falls, the cops surely would have been summoned. The old man knew his place.
Tomorrow we hope to see an exhibit of the First Nation settlers and then try to get a parking spot later in the day in the old city section of Quebec.
Quebec is amazing. There is a rhythm to the city that is decidedly international. At the falls today, we were among the very few folks whose first language was English. But despite their culture, they love their kids and try to get by on this earth exactly the same way we do.
It brought to mind the song by Sting that was written during yet another confrontation between Russia and the US. T his one was during the Reagan Administration. Sting simply says “I hope the Russians love their children, too.”
They do, I am just sure of it.