Toronto to Montreal. 5 hours.
Sights:
Potato chip-rippled lake waters streaked with one narrow coat of sunlight armour.
The unruly bed head of fields of dead grass.
Patchy scabs of snow, waiting for the sun to pick them apart.
Paint-chipped red barns held together with good luck. “Deb in the house” tagged on the dirty cement walls of rural Ontario.
A naked tree in an otherwise empty meadow, arms up in surrender.
The New York State line close enough to touch with a paper airplane.
Frozen forests, trunks like popsicle sticks in white icing.
Brick and wood and lean-to homes across a spectrum of life and deterioration. And I wondered what they look like inside and who lives there and what they ate for breakfast and what they dream about at night.
Montreal to Quebec City. 4 hours.
Sights:
Flat fields of a winter desert, a patchy adolescent stubble of wheat poking through the snow.
Green-gabled farm houses, no Anne.
A white owl resting on a holey upturned boat, head twisting with Linda Blair style.
Serpentine streams, banks a metre high with marshmallow.
Narnia. No lion.
A snow globe. A blizzard. A complete wall of white.
This is the kind of trip you have to take in the winter.<