The setting of Grand-père Évariste’s waterside farmhouse calls to mind this striking evocation of the region from the Georgian Bay Biosphere Reserve website – https://georgianbaybiosphere.com/ – “The Bay is an amazing resource we must share; seasonal cottager, transient tourist and year rounders… and we must all respect the Bay to ensure the next ‘seven generations’ will have the good fortune to be amazed like we were.”
The house “stood on a granite ridge with a view over the Bay. Conifers growing from crevices in the rock flanked its two storeys. Every few years one or more of them blew down, but volunteer replacements gradually filled in the gaps. The jagged outline of those trees was an icon of north-country resilience…
“A wider than usual band of fertile soil lay between the house and the shore. To squander no arable land, Évariste had perched the family home on bare rock higher up. Then he laid out the entire open space as an enormous truck garden. Its north-to-south rows caught every ray of sunlight. That attention to detail was richly rewarded….” so that “the contrast between lush cultivation and its weather-beaten backdrop bore witness to the value of diligent labour.”
(Providence Point, pp. 58-9)
In common with other settings you’ll visit within the covers of Providence Point, Évariste’s hard-won garden vibrates with the tension between a parsimonious landscape and the irresistible promise of abundance. But as skilled and methodical as it may be, dedicated toil is far from always rewarded. Such is the essence of life in either the city or the boondocks. See more about it in the novel itself, and if you have your own example of the same principle, add a comment below.
(Illustration generated by AI)
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