Extreme Frontiers: Racing Across Canada from Newfoundland to the Rockies (4 page)

‘You want it, Charley?’ he asked me.

‘You know what?’ I said. ‘I think it’s too big. If I ate that I’d probably hurl.’

‘OK.’ He looked at me, smiling. ‘I reckon it must be fifteen years old, but I’ve got to do it.’ So he sucked it down. Eyes
watering, with half of it dangling down his chin, he chewed hard and finally swallowed it. ‘Pretty large,’ he said, grimacing.
‘One of the biggest I’ve ever eaten.’ Then he chucked the shell into the sea, as was customary. ‘Jeez,’ he said. ‘That was
a gagger for sure.’

Philip shucked me a much smaller and more delicate oyster and it was really good, full of the taste of the sea; shucked and
chucked and eaten right there on the boat. They don’t come much fresher than that.

Back at the dock, it was on the bikes again, with Gordon leading the way to John’s restaurant. It’s called Ship to Shore and
is situated on a section of coastline dotted with colonial-style homes with sweeping driveways. Gordon told me that John,
a former shucking champion, was definitely the ‘Mr Oyster’ of the island – he knew all there was to know about crustaceans
and in another life might well have even been an oyster.

Mr Oyster had gone ahead to get things ready and was inside the restaurant, all ready with a plate of oysters and a chilled
bottle of wine on the counter waiting for us. The ones he was serving were five to eight years old, which made for really
good eating and they were, of course, the best quality. John started shucking, and man, could he shuck. He worked his knife
under the shell and a moment later the thing was opened perfectly – no grit, no slivers of shell. In his words, the oyster
didn’t even know that it was open. Gordon told me that in competition it’s not only the speed with which the oyster can be
shucked that is judged, but how well. Given that it takes between five and eight years to grow one fit for a restaurant table,
it has to be perfectly presented. John could open one every four or five seconds and they all looked like the pristine example
on the plate before me.

For the past fifty-two years, the world oyster shucking championships have taken place in Galway, Ireland, and John had been
over three times. There is no prize money on offer, just
the glory. (Although John told me that if you’re known as a world-class shucker, then of course you get more trade.) Me, I’m
not the best at opening the shells, but when it comes to eating them, the old Boorman magic just seems to kick in. All it
takes is a chilled glass of wine and, in this case, some salt, vinegar and cracked black pepper.

B
y the time we hit New Brunswick, I was full of it. I had four hours’ off-road biking to look forward to and I could not wait.
So far we’d only been on tarmac, but I grew up riding off road in the woods and hills around my father’s place at Annamoe.
God, those were the days: carefree, fun-filled; if I wasn’t blatting through the green lanes I was floating down the Avonmore
on an inner tube.

Life goes by so fast. Now I have teenage children of my own, but it seems only yesterday that I was just a teenager myself.
I know what you’re thinking: you still are, Charley, you still are. And it’s true in a way, I suppose. My dad’s always telling
me that he’s spent his life swimming against the current, while I’ve spent mine bobbing downstream.

Although Quebec is the only Canadian province where French is the official language, a third of the population of New Brunswick
speak it as their first language, and constitutionally the province
is the only one that’s listed as bilingual. New Brunswick borders Quebec and Nova Scotia and opens on to the Gulf of St Lawrence
on its north-eastern boundary. We hooked up with a few of the English-speakers, a bunch of guys who run the New Brunswick
Dual Sport Club. The guide was a heavy-set guy called Mike, with cropped hair and a wide smile. He mentioned that my 250cc
dirt bike was brand new and that I had to break it in for him Charley Boorman style. I hadn’t been on a dirt bike in a while,
though, so I thought I ought to get my excuses in early … you know, the dodgy knee and dodgy arm, the dodgy head, that kind
of thing.

Mike led the way deep into the woodland to a bespoke but very narrow enduro trail. The truth is, I felt a tad rusty, but you
don’t really ever lose it, and once the adrenalin started to fully kick in, I was back in the groove. There was this one corner,
mind you, that caught me out every time – a sharp left-hander where the trail fell away, the front wheel dug in and I was over
the handlebars with memories of my crash at the Dakar Rally in 2006 flying through my head. Every time I took that bend it
was the same, and after a while it really began to piss me off. What should have been a fun morning was rapidly becoming a
pain in the arse.

We were riding on land belonging to the family of one of the guys in the group, Denis Landry: the woods were his, the accursed
enduro course was his and the wild blueberry fields surrounding the woods belonged to him as well. I had no idea there was
any difference between wild blueberries and the cultivated ones, but apparently there is – the wild berries are smaller and
sweeter. The season is short, about three weeks, and these fields would not be harvested until August. They don’t use pesticides
or chemicals of any kind, and the berries are fertilised
naturally … as demonstrated by one of the riders, who took a pee in full view of the camera.

‘They do wash them before they send them out, don’t they?’ I asked hopefully.

The going was easier once we left the enduro course. This was a good dirt road, leading down to another steep section of woodland
bisected by a river that a hundred years earlier had been used by the logging companies to float timber down to the sawmills.
I’d seen a similar kind of thing in Alaska. They’d build dams across a gorge to let the water rise high enough to load it
up, then tear down the dam and watch the logs bob downriver to where they would be gathered at the mills.

Denis took me through thick woodland to a spot where we could catch a glimpse of the gorge below. He described how when it
was time to break up the dam, runners would ride the timber all the way down to the mill. Men with poles would walk the logs
as they made their journey, shifting from one to another, fixing jams and making sure the timber ran freely. I imagined peeling
off a rolling log and falling into the water with the weight of all that wood on top of you. With nobody to help you and a
swift current like that, you’d be drowned in a heartbeat. That was a different time, when men risked their lives in this kind
of country every day.

There was no logging here now; this was a recreational spot where people liked to swim and go gorge-jumping in the summer –
sometimes hundreds of feet into the water below. Rather them than me, I thought.

We were soon back on the bikes and splitting the countryside in half, with rolling hills on one side and farmland on the other,
the farmhouses built from white clapboard with
massive Dutch barns in the yards. A little further on we stopped in a forest that was littered with what looked like electric
cabling. I’d never seen anything like it; a spider’s web interweaving the tree trunks throughout the whole forest. Suddenly
it dawned on me: they were maple trees and the sap was being collected to make syrup. We were still out of season, so the
pipes were not actually tapped into the wood; in season they are connected to a different hole every time the syrup is harvested;
each hole is drilled a certain distance from the previous one and that way the tree remains unharmed. According to Denis one
tree can produce sap for decades with no damage done whatsoever.

The drained sap is collected in massive steel drums and taken to what Denis called a boiling evaporator. There it’s heated
to a certain temperature, at which most of it just evaporates – what’s left is maple syrup. It takes forty litres of sap to
make one litre of maple syrup, and there are no additives, no preservatives and no process other than the cooking. I had no
idea that that’s how it came about. Maple syrup is one hundred per cent pure and it comes from these very trees. I gave the
tree a hug. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Thank you, thank you. Without your maple syrup, I don’t know where I’d be.’

Once we’d said goodbye to the guys and the bikes, we headed into Bathurst, New Brunswick, to jump on an overnight train to
Quebec City. It was modern and we each had a very clean cabin, no bigger than a small cell but comfortable enough. Sitting
down on the bed, I took a moment to reflect on the previous week. It was without doubt one of the nicest and most varied I’d
spent in a long time, and I felt that we were starting
to get to know the real Canada – we hadn’t rushed through anything or anywhere. I was beginning to realise that this is a very
special country: there’s a kindness in Canada, a tangible sense of courtesy among the people that I’ve not come across anywhere
else. And I was really impressed that so many of those we’d met made their living from working the land or sea in the same
way their forefathers had when they first came here. Next stop was Quebec, and I figured that ought to be an eye-opener for
sure.

If you’ve never been to Quebec City, you really should visit. It has to be one of the most spectacular places I’ve ever seen.
Early the next morning we were on the Funicular, climbing up from the lower part of the city: it’s a sort of railway-cum-cable-car
and the views across the multicoloured rooftops and the St Lawrence River are amazing. This was a different part of Canada
altogether: the Capitale-Nationale region, French-speaking and the second largest of Quebec’s cities after Montreal.

Hopping out of the Funicular, we met up with Sharon Frenette, a local guide who promised to show us some of the old parts
of this place. As Quebec City is the only walled city on the North American continent, I was sure she’d have some good tales
to tell. Sharon told us that the province was founded by the French in 1608, right on the St Lawrence River, the gateway to
North America. It was of vital strategic interest to both the French and the British, and the latter tried to invade on five
separate occasions, which is why walls were built to defend the city. Unfortunately they were far from finished when the British
army, under General Wolfe, arrived again in May of 1759.
Initially he tried to attack from the eastern side, but the French were waiting, and by September the British still hadn’t
achieved their goal. On the night of 12 September, however, they managed to move 4,500 men up a dried-up stream bed to a place
known to the Quebecois as the Plains of Abraham.

The story goes that at six o’clock the following morning, a French soldier raced to the city to tell his commanding officer
that an army was on the Plains. The officer told him he’d had too much to drink and to go back to bed. In the end they had
to send a second messenger from the watch to confirm what the first guy was saying, and word eventually reached the leader
of the French forces, General Montcalm, that the enemy had indeed scaled the cliffs and were minutes from the city itself.

For sixty-three days the British had bombarded Quebec, leaving only a single house standing, but they had not been able to
break down the walls. They were brutal, burning every farm within a hundred miles, hoping that that would force the militiamen
to leave the city and go home to check on their families. It did, depleting the French army and leaving them so enraged that
when they found their enemy on the Plains, they came tearing across like a horde of barbarians. The British waited calmly,
and when the French were within thirty yards, General Wolfe gave the order to fire. The volley of musket balls tore into the
oncoming troops, killing hundreds in their tracks. It was so intense that it took seven minutes for the smoke to clear enough
for a second volley. By the time the third round had been fired, the French were fleeing. The battle lasted barely fifteen
minutes and yet both the commanding generals were killed. The last thing that General Wolfe heard was someone crying, ‘Look
at that, the French are retreating!’ He knew he
would die a military hero. As for Montcalm, on his deathbed he stated that he was happy to die because now he would not have
to see his precious Quebec under British rule. There’s a monument to both men in Quebec with an inscription written in Latin
so as not to offend either country. That seems like a mad kind of sensitivity when you consider they spent months knocking
seven bells out of each other.

I was really interested to find out from Sharon how the Quebecois had managed to keep their identity, given that they spent
so long under British rule.

‘Ah,’ she said. ‘Of course the British wanted them all to be proper British citizens. No more Catholic Church, no more French
language, no more French law. But then they were already worrying about the American colonies. They were conscious that if
the Americans decided to come up and attack Quebec, they would have the French on their side. So King George passed the Quebec
Act, which allowed the people to retain their religion, language and code of law. And when, in 1775, the Americans finally
did attack, the French helped you guys defeat them.’

Entente cordiale then, only not quite. Sharon told me that before the British finally left and the city returned to French
rule, they lowered the walls by twenty feet just in case they wanted to come back some day and conquer it again.

After our history lesson, we went walkabout. What a place! It’s so European, which was all the more noticeable after the colonial
architecture we’d seen on the islands. It was like being in Paris – stone walls and turreted towers and people speaking French
in shops and cafés. Walking the walls, we
ducked into the old jail under what is now a library. Some of the cells are still there – tiny stone holes with an iron gate
across the doorway. I took a quick look inside one of them but found myself locked in when the guard, Maxim, closed the gate,
switched off the light and then secured the wooden door.

Solitary confinement for thirty days, that was what this cell had been used for. My God, it was dark. I’ve never experienced
anything like it – it was horrendous. Maxim told me that if I really was there for thirty days I’d soon begin to lose all concept
of time, and after a couple of weeks I’d begin to lose my mind. Yeah, I can see how that would happen: time to open up now,
please.
Will someone open the door?

Above the jail is a square room that’s dominated by a statue of General Wolfe, sculpted in wood by the Chaulette brothers
in 1779. The British didn’t like the statue because it was a little short in stature, and of course the French didn’t like
it because it was the guy who’d conquered their city. So they didn’t really care when two drunken ex-soldiers kidnapped it
and took it across the Atlantic, where for three years it stood as the sign outside a pub. Finally somebody figured out what
it was and eventually it was shipped back here.

I was sorry to leave Quebec City; it’s definitely somewhere I will go back to. But it was time to hit the road once more,
because Russ had something special lined up for me further north at the Saguenay Fjord.

We took the bridge across the St Lawrence that’s a copy of Scotland’s Forth Rail Bridge, only this one is all road. The Canadians
were adamant that the Quebec Bridge ought to be
bigger than the Scottish one, and it is, although only by a metre. It took them a while to get it right, mind you; I was told
that when they were building it, the construction collapsed on three separate occasions.

The Saguenay – which means windy river – drains from Lac Saint-Jean, a beautiful mountain lake surrounded by fir and spruce
trees: a hotspot for city-dwellers wanting to get away. There are all sorts of things you can do up here – sailing, kayaking,
swimming – but I was meeting up with a mountain guide who was going to lead me up the Via Ferrata, which is Italian for ‘Iron
Way’, to do some rock-climbing.

There is a rock face on one side of the lake that’s been fitted with an iron cable hammered in with pitons. It’s actually
a traverse rather than a climb, and my guide, Wade, told me the cable was there to help us hang on for dear life above the
raging water. ‘Right,’ I said, ‘so I can be like Sylvester Stallone, then, in that movie
Cliffhanger
?’

He looked me up and down. ‘I think you’re missing a little … you know … muscle there, feller, you know what I mean?’

He took me to the gear hut so we could suit up with safety harness, karabiners and helmets. It’s always a bit worrying when
you have to wear all this equipment, and I can’t deny I was feeling just a touch queasy. It’s all very well being the front
man on these expeditions, but you’re also the guy who has to do the dangerous stuff. I checked out the whistle Wade had given
me for attracting attention. Yep, it worked: good. I was bound to need it. He told me that nobody had ever fallen to their
death from the Via Ferrata, but there’s always a first time for everything.