Tadoussac

We drive past our motel and reach the next town before we turn around in a lumber store parking lot. I have been entranced by the opportunity to speak French, but right now, I want to cut to the chase and get an answer in plain English: where is the place we are booked to stay at? Finally we spot it. There is no room, the proprietress tells the two elderly women who step briskly ahead of me into the motel unit that is the office. The proprietress is younger than me, plump with glasses and wavy brown hair pulled up behind her. She looks like someone who should be dressed in period costume at an interpretive museum. She speaks no English but she seems to understand me quite well, although she corrects my French as though I am a slow child, and her own sentences seem to end in mid-thought, quixotically.

*

We drape ourselves on the giant rocks, as if we are seals, looking into the cold depths from which sleek, glistening black backs and fins emerge at every angle unexpectedly. Farther out dolphins, grey seals and porpoises cut dancing silver crescents in the water. It is irrational, especially since I am a good swimmer and my kids swim like fish, but I am afraid that if one of us were to slip and fall into the icy water, we would immediately sink 300 metres to the river bottom. All except my daughter: her I picture astride one of the minkes, as if it were a horse, her dark hair streaming in the water behind her. I perch myself, leaning on a sunwarmed ledge of soft pink granite, my foot slipping once into into a slimy tidal pool behind me and I scan the horizon.

*

I meet a man dressed in camouflage-type clothing whose summer job it is to sit under the cover of a wooden shelter, counting whales and other aquatic mammals. He alternates between reading an apparently self-published thriller novel and looking out through tripod-mounted binoculars. I ask him if this is both a wonderful and terrible summer job. It must be hard on the eyes, I say. This morning, he says, I stared into the sun for two hours straight. Everything was shadowed afterward.

*

We climb the wrong dunes. We have been told that Tadoussac has impressive sand dunes. You can sand-ski down the dunes, but you may break a leg. You must climb to the top of the dunes and roll down laughing. We climb the dunes, so steep and thick that we move in slow motion and our legs ache with the effort. It is nearly sunset. We try sliding but there are rocks and scrubby plants, so we run down, thudding and laughing to the bottom. I find a bank card in the midst of this strange desert and decide I must ask a group of young adults if it is theirs. They look at me quizzically. It is not theirs. And later, we discover we climbed down the "other" dunes. But by then, we have decided we will return. And then we will find the right hill.

*

At the day's end, we seek a place to eat dinner. I am tired and do not want loud music and chatter from the tables around us. We find a pub and follow a ship's captain in full regalia into the pub. Our menu options are: flabby spicy chicken wings, steaming hot lasagna, a spinach-potato-salmon appetizer. I choose wine and the appetizer. We sit upstairs where the sea captain joins an elderly man at the brightly lit electronic gambling machine and where I have a view of the door. For some reason, I love this place. It feels like a place where the locals come, and indeed I wish we were there on one of the karaoke nights they advertise in the tiny washroom with the cherry-scented soap. Rhubarb grows in the garden behind the pub.

*

As I fall asleep at night, my husband's heavy exhale reminds me exactly of the huff of a dolphin or a juvenile minke, releasing air as it surfaces. I do not surface: I fall into deep sleep, the sounds of the logging trucks and motorcycles dimly heard as I dream.