On being somewhere that doesn’t quite exist

“Ils sont de Québec,” said the woman who had been walking her bike across the Pont du Québec behind me. Like me, she had donned a mask as per regulations. The cyclists she was referring to had not. As well, they had been riding their road bikes on the bike and pedestrian portion of the world’s longest cantilever span. The path is less than two meters wide, being very much an afterthought to rail and car traffic. Consequently, one is supposed to walk one’s bike across, and, because of Covid-19, do so wearing a mask. I had no idea where she was from, but she attributed their stupidity to their being from Quebec City.

I had bid adieu to the others a half hour earlier this morning, my social bubble reduced to me, myself and I. Someone had sent a witty observation to Mummy the evening before which seemed à propos: “It started as a virus, but it has mutated into an intelligence test.”

I headed East on Route Verte 3 with the Saint-Lawrence sometimes visible on my right. The winds were blessedly either non-existent or favourable. The skies were generally cloudy as befitting the forecast. There were warnings about rainfall resulting from tropical storm I-something. However, I got a lot of kilometres done before it began to sprinkle lightly. I eventually pulled on my rain jacket, but it only began to pour when I pulled in for lunch, 70 kilometres under my belt, roughly two thirds of the way to Gentilly.

I had chosen Gentilly as my first night for two reasons. The first was that it was a reasonable day’s ride from Quebec City and had a place to stay as well as an obvious place to eat supper. The second reason, and a quite trivial one, was that since high school I had been aware that the province’s only nuclear power plant was Gentilly-2, now somewhere in the process of decommissioning.

However, there is something a bit weird about the place as despite being a substantial agglomeration (more so than many of the villages I have been through) it doesn’t really exist politically, having been merged with Bécancour, likely back around 2002 or so. One testament to this is that I am spending the night in the Motel Bécancour. Riding along in the rain, I saw no signs saying “Gentilly X km” or even “Gentilly (Bécancour ) X km”. I can’t help wondering if because of the association of the word “Gentilly” with nuclear power, that the bureaucrats in Bécancour have decided to make Gentilly an non-place.

Even if it doesn’t quite exist, I am there. I also reasonably dry.