Leaving Odanak

With its mouth wide openOur first expedition, which lasted about ten days and during which we filmed the first series of VIA Adventures Expeditions reports, is about to come to an end. Seated in the lounge at Club Odanak, the film crew is trying to rest, to take care of our aching muscles, to take the time to watch the water ripples forming on the lake. We go for a slow canoe ride, letting the water lead us, savouring every moment, our feet dangling from the dock, before we leave for Montreal, where we'll be editing the videos, choosing the best photos, writting the articles and building this website. We have a lot of work to do once we get back to town: Yanick Rose will have to sort through more than 20 hours of footage, Denis Bouchard will be looking at over 1000 pictures and I will have to put my "handwritten while sitting in canoe or a hydroplane" notes in some sort of logical order.

Tomorrow, our train will go through La Tuque and we will leave the forest, the lakes, the open spaces and the fresh air behind to reacquaint ourselves with the asphalt, the Main, the cement and the neons lights. But Yanick isn't thinking of Montreal just yet. "We have to find a way of filming one last shot of the train before we leave" he tells VIA's Benoît Laporte, and Rollande Savoie, from MRC of the Upper Saint-Maurice, a regional governing body. "Is there a place where we can film the train going by at full speed?"

Feeling both skeptical and enthusiastic about the idea, Rollande and Benoît look at each other.

"There is a good spot along the tracks, where you can see the train coming from far away and go right past us," explains Rollande, who knows this region like the back of her hand. "But once the train has past, we'll have to jump back in the car and head straight for the the station. You don't want to miss the train when it leaves for Montreal!"

"Excellent! Let's do it!" says Yanick.

The following day, as we are getting ready to leave, Yanick is getting ready for this last adventure. We're dropped off at the train station, as Rollande and Yanick speed off to that perfect spot, two kilometres away. Once there, Yanick climbs on top of the truck and sets up his camera just in time to see the train whooshing by. Yanick dives back into the truck and Rollande stomps on the accelerator in an almost impossible race with the train. At the station, we see the train coming, but there's no sign of Rollande or Yanick. We start to have doubts about this last stunt. "They're going to miss the train," says a worried Benoît.

Then, as the last suitcase is lugged on board, a cloud of dust rises on the horizon - it's the truck! This expediton will end the exact same way it began. Yanick, late? Never, "after all, a filmmaker knows the importance of timing," as we said in our second VIA Adventures Expedition cyber report.

As we ride back to Montreal, Yanick continues to film through the window, and we start to daydream about the next expeditions, which will take us back to Upper Saint-Maurice, but also to the Saguenay, Gaspésie and Abitibi. We still have more than 30 multimedia reports and thousands of kilometres to go through in the coming months. I will not always be reporting for the team, colleagues will be taking my place. I won't be able to help but go along with them though, if only in my dreams. Ten days ago we were wondering what was awaiting us. First, we learned about trains and engineers, their faces marked by the thousands of kilometres they've rushed through during their lifetime, seeing it all out of the small window in their cabin. We've also met passengers on these forest trains, people who live in these faraway places, as well as young city people, canoe in hand, stepping off the train and right into some whitewater running along the tracks. But mostly, we will remember the rush of being in a luggage wagon, where we had sneaked in to film a bit of ultra-exhilarating footage, as we peeked through the open doors while the train was crossing some rivers.

Of course, VIA Rail representatives were particularly generous towards us, stopping the train here and there so that we might do our work and get the fantastic footage that we were now bringing back.

And once we got to the Upper Saint-Maurice region, we discovered a part of the country unlike any other. Among the numerous rivers, lakes and valleys, there were moments when we had the absolute certainty that if there is such a thing as heaven on Earth, it must not be too far from here.