san juan/saint jean/solstice, hope of rain, nationalism

The twenty-fourth of June. For most of us, just another day...

Summer's a few days old now...

Here in Tucson a few clouds have begun to build up each afternoon, although the beginning of the monsoon is still a couple of weeks away. Until then, the days of 105 and higher keep piling up...

According to legend, on June 24th, 1540, the feast day of St John the Baptist in the Catholic calendar, Spanish explorer Francisco Vásquez de Coronado stood on the bank of a dry riverbed somewhere in Arizona and prayed for rain. And then the monsoon began. So, although the average beginning of the summer rains is July 7th, the 'traditional' beginning is associated with El Día de San Juan and it's even officially celebrated in the city of Tucson, a legacy of the Hispanic settlers...(click here for more info.)

Tomorrow, my wife and I are flying back east for a two-week stay in Québec and Maine.

(I won't lie--it will be nice to leave the oven for a couple of weeks...it's supposed to be in the 70's with occasional showers the entire time we're up there...)

Up there, today is known as "La Saint-Jean-Baptiste," or, more and more commonly, as "La fête nationale." Never mind that Québec is a province within the federal nation of Canada, whose official national holiday, "Canada Day," is on July 1st; le 24 juin is the party that begins summer for the one in five Canadians whose mother tongue is French. Instead of praying for rain, though, as in the Sonoran desert, the Catholics of the St.-Lawrence river valley probably used to pray for sun and a good growing season in the land where winter can last six months of the year...

I'm at home ironing this morning, getting ready to pack, so while ironing, I had the computer on, watching RDI, which is a Canadian French-language CNN of sorts...(if you want to watch it, streaming live, for yourself, here's the link.) And while I was ironing, coincidentally, a reportage came on, explaining how the 24th of June became Québec's provincial national holiday.

Here's a short version. (translated from the 'official' French: http://www.fetenationale.qc.ca/historique.html)

Go back a couple of millenia, to pre-christian Europe. The summer-solstice was a major pagan observance--
Stonehenge, bonfires, prayers to spirits for good crops, etc. etc...

The date eventually gets 'converted' by the medieval church to become the feast day for John the Baptist.

The first French settlers in the early 1600's bring the tradition, with bonfires, to the St.-Lawrence river valley.

In the 1830's, several decades after British governance, the idea comes up in Montreal to turn the 24th of June into a 'national' day of sorts, like St. Patrick's day had become for the Irish immigrants...

In 1908 Pope Pius X names St. John the Baptist the official patron saint for French-Canadians.

In the 1920's and the 1970's the day becomes an official 'day-off' for people in Québec, who during the 1960's adopted the moniker "Québecois" instead of "Canadien-français," and who went from being the most religious to the most secular society in North America.

For most people in Québec, then, today June 24th is like July 4th for people down in the U.S.

Some Anglo-Canadians find the term 'national' holiday abrasive, since it implies that Québec is a separate 'nation' from the rest of Canada. For a few radical Québecois, June 24th is indeed their day to promote nationalist separatism...but for most people in the province, it's a day off, with concerts, bonfires, fireworks...

...quite the evolution from pre-christian solstice celebrations...

...so, praying for rain down here in the desert, hoping for sun in the French-speaking north...
I just hope our luggage doesn't get lost tomorrow.
We're flying to Portland, Maine...from there we'll drive up to Québec city for several days...then to Montréal for several days...then to central Maine to visit some relatives before driving back to Portland for the flight back.


For me, Québec will always be 'my-first-trip-abroad-completely-on-my-own.'
My trips to visit relatives in Korea had always been, obviously, with family...the following year I would spend a summer in Switzerland, but this particular summer, after my sophomore year in college, I would have to see if I could truly be independently competent in a different language--my first 'immersion' in the language I'd been studying since the beginning of high school.

I flew up from Georgia to Montréal, the 2nd-biggest French-speaking city in the world outside of Paris, situated on an island with a 'mountain' in its midddle:
(view of downtown, from Mont-Royal park. The city caps its skyscrapers at about 45 stories, so that the buildings won't dwarf 'la montagne' that serves as its urban lung and playground)

From Montréal, I took the train to Québec city, arriving at its train station in pseudo-chateau style:
I arrived in the middle of a humid heat-wave; the entire city had all of its doors and windows open for several nights; "if the thieves want to come, let 'em come--it's too hot to close anything," the people said...No air-conditioning in this usually nordic city...and then a cold-front blew through and the temperature dropped almost 40 degrees.

Charles Dickens called the city, founded in 1608, "The Gibraltar of North America," perched on a cliff at the precise spot where the St.-Lawrence narrows from a veritable arm of the sea to a true river, controlling water-access to the interior of the continent. Whoever controlled Québec controlled North America. And so the British would fight the French for control of the spot. (During the War of 1812, the young U.S. wanted to gain control of the city as well.)

In 1759, after a century and a half of French rule, Québec finally fell to the British in a 20-minute battle on the Plains of Abraham. Canada would become British, but the language and religion of the settlers would be respected. And so Québec city remains a bastion for French-language culture in North America, and its Norman buildings within its walled old quarter make up a truly European enclave.

Forgive the tourist brochur-ese...but I'm excited about this trip; I've not been in 11 years, and I'm looking forward to introducing the place to my wife...

Perhaps a walk in the birch-forest on the north shore of the St.Lawrence...

...along with the Victorian architecture of central Montréal...

...We'll be back in Arizona on the 9th of July.