I’ve been working backwards since August 1977. And everything has come to this rarified moment – sitting, sipping ‘sachet cafe’ on the second floor balcony of the Motel Royal in Cabano. I never imagined such a place existed until yesterday morning. Cabano doesn’t sound like a quaint, resort-village nestled on a shimmering lake that straddles time zones in eastern Quebec. Cabano sounds like a desert pueblo in north-west Mexico – a place where one could get shot for mispronouncing the name of the local don’s chihuahua. Cabano, stronghold of the cartel, highest murder rate in North America. That’s what I think when I hear ‘Cabano’.
Which leads me to ask: How did you get your name, Cabano? Am I supposed to believe that French settlers in the 1700s arrived at this location and thought, now this place looks like a ‘Cabano’.
We have a room with a view over Lake Temiscouata, and of quasi-imposing Mount Lennox. Mount Lennox, not to be confused with Mount Lexter, which exists solely in my mind. The sun rose at around 4:00 am this morning, and it seemed like lifetimes, cycles of existence coloured by variant grades of consciousness, before I got out of bed. That was at roughly 9:30 am, but if it was the year 2087 and I was a morbidly obese Filipino toddler with webbed feet, I would have been only numbly surprised. That’s the kind of time-dancing town Cabano is. It’s so close to the Atlantic time zone you can taste it, and it tastes vaguely of coffee whitener and the edible seaweed known as dulse. And although the town is planted definitively in the Eastern time zone, it shares longitude with swathes of land and population centers that are entrenched in the Atlantic time zone. It’s real time, so to speak, is in fact New Brunswick time. And so as I sit, squinting at the diamond light of the lake and sipping my clinical cup of joe, the whole business of measuring time strikes me as arbitrary and farcical. I think of China, 5200 kilometres wide, the whole country lying in the same, government-delineated time zone – perhaps the finest example of political time trumping the sun.
Last night, arriving in Cabano with hunger and thirst, we made our way to a hybrid tourist dive – something between a family restaurant and a sports bar. It commanded a view of Lake Temiscouata that I knew would aid digestion and transform the simple act of eating into a decade or so of nostalgia. It was there that I ate perhaps the driest burger of my adult life. It was so lacking in moisture that at one point I stood up, pressed my nose against the window, and stared longingly at the lake while I masticated with the dumb persistence of a cow. And if it wasn’t for the poutine, the furry upper lip of the waitress, and the novelty of drinking Molson M, dinner would have sucked completely.
Yep, those frogs of old must have thought, doesn’t this terrain remind you of that village in north-west Mexico we stopped in en route to Quebec, that austere little silver mining town full of people worshipping the Angel of Death? What was the name of that place again? Oh yeah, Cabano.
I calculate the remaining hours of my vacation. I estimate how many of those hours will be spent conscious, how many unconscious or semi-conscious or in a liminal, transpersonal state. I do the existential math – I arrive at a fixed quantity, a phantom signaling that yes, I will experience substantial down time on this trip . If I was in a city I would begin counting down the minutes right now – the measurement tools, the incentives, the neurotic ether, would be ever-present.
Roughly sixty minutes pass, no one seems to be stirring, my fellow travelers are not waking up. That’s the two-hundred and fortieth hour, fucking done. And I’m going to lose another once I cross the Quebec/New Brunswick border. That’s the line, the superimposed abstraction dictating the loss or gain of time. Contemplating this, I have a sudden hankering for tacos el pastor.
