alicubi journal :: among the quebecois

Growing up in Detroit is a natural impediment to pronouncing French correctly. Detroit itself is mispronounced in the American idiom, and there are many more local names Detroiters mangle. Gratiot Avenue, or "Gray-shit" Avenue is one, and Livernois Road, pronounced "Liver-noise," is another.

My father lived his whole life in Detroit, first a scrappy Irish hood in an Italian neighborhood--back in the 1930s, when that was like living in the barrio is now--and then as a suburban Rotary club member. When pressed to pronounce a French name, he could not. Once, he asked me if I'd like to watch Jack Kusta's television show with him. I said I'd never heard of it. "You know Jack Kusta," he said, "the captain of the Calypso, the scuba diver."

Although art school taught me to say things like mise en scene and Fragonard, I have inherited my dad's aversion to the French language. The way some people feel when they see two men kissing, I feel about speaking French; and when I must, I add a sarcastic tone, or blatantly mispronounce the word to mask my insecurity.

You can imagine my apprehension, then, before my first visit to Quebec. Having seen European Vacation, I know what awful derision Americans are subjected to in France. Among the fiercely proud Quebecois, I expected worse.

My wife and I drove 12 hours from Brooklyn up to the rural Charlevoix area of the province, just to get out of the city, which I had not left in over six months. I chose the place on the mistaken belief that I knew people who had vacationed there. As it turned out, all those people had never heard of it.

Nevertheless, it was lovely. We arrived, as is becoming our custom, a month in advance of the tourist season. Only the evergreens were green, and snow still clung to the hills. We lodged in a cottage, or chalet as they call it, on a bluff overlooking the St. Lawrence seaway, where we spotted whales not 50 yards out, and where we drank our fill of Labatt's, broiled steaks, played gin rummy, and frolicked with our puppy (a French bulldog, of all things).

The locals surprised me: They suffered my French graciously, even as I begged them for mercy when they rung up my groceries and freshened my coffee. The shocker, though, was that exactly three people we encountered spoke any English: the guide on the whale-watching tour, the proprietor of the pottery barn, and one waitress.

I had never been any place where English was not spoken. In India, of course, they speak their version of the language, which is charming if at times confusing. For the most part, the Nepalese speak good English, as do the Thais and the Hungarians (although in Budapest I did have to resort to my high-school German twice--once in an antiquarian bookshop, and again at an art museum).

In retrospect, I shouldn't have been so surprised. I received this email in response to my reservation request at the Chalets Bo-Fleuve, in St. Simeon:

Claudine must have put a lot of care into composing the message, for when I met her at the front desk, she didn't understand a word I said, including, "Are you Claudine?" She shrugged, smiled, said, "No?" then signed her name, Claudine, on the receipt.

It seems to me that there are two kinds of tourists: Those who want to visit every landmark and see the natives dance in their traditional costume, and those who obsess over the details of daily life, like how well people speak English, signage, the way food is served and products are packaged, what color predominates in people's clothes, how much nudity is allowed on television, what's brewing in local politics. My wife and I tend be the latter kind. We got very excited when in La Malbaie-Pointe-au-Pic, a few villages down route 138 from St. Simeon, our pizza was served with packets of mayonnaise on the side. Mayonnaise on pizza!

We cataloged a lot of such information during our vacation, while we probably should have been out hiking.

You'll notice in the Appalachians there are gravel ramps on the sides of steep roads you can shoot up if you lose your brakes--the idea being that you'll slow to a stop going uphill. Up in Charlevoix, there are similar ramps, only they are on a downhill grade, painted with red and white checkers, posted with scary warning signs--a graphic depicting a car being torn to bits. The emergency ramp is studded with spikes that will shred the tires off your car before you hit a cushioned barricade.

We bought our groceries at St. Simeon's one market, where, I noticed, no butter was sold--only tubs of margarine. All the Canadian beers were available in 40-ounce bottles (how many milliliters is that?), cans the size of Howitzer shells, and kegs about one-quarter the size of a pony. A package of potatoes may be labeled divers, but that has nothing to do with the potatoes diving into boiling water, as my wife speculated. It means assorted.

Ottawa has been running an ad campaign in Quebec, trying to win over the secessionists by putting the maple leaf on water towers and billboards. No one's going for it, and there was recently a flap about the government's choice of ad agency: Owing to cronyism, bidding for the contract was less than fair, and funds were mismanaged.

At the dollar store in La Malbaie, we purchased eight items, and were floored to discover our total was eight dollars. Unlike all the so-called dollar stores I had been to in my life, this one charged exactly one dollar for every item in the store.

Our friends think my wife and I lead an exciting life, because we're always so thrilled about things. "How was Quebec?" they ask. We rave about it, leading them to believe we have been somewhere really exotic. Now, you understand, we're just easily impressed.