A Weekend Venture to Quebec

After five days in Italy and France, my Canadian soul was demanding a return to baseline—back to the familiar and the beloved. So when my dad texted me, asking if I wanted to spend two days in the fields of provincial Quebec at a paragliding club—surrounded by hills, farms, and aging, strictly francophone compatriots baked brown by decades spent too close to the sun—there was nothing to think about. I confidently replied: “Let me check my calendar.” Finding nothing in it but sleep reminders and a ringing emptiness, I agreed. We rolled out at four in the morning on Saturday.

I regained consciousness around seven. I woke up right as the audiobook of The Good Soldier Švejk introduced Otto Katz, the chaplain. For the next four hours, as we crossed into Quebec and wove through tiny provincial backroads to bypass a highway closure, we laughed non-stop. The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk is a book my dad and I quote daily. It is a brilliant novel with absolutely zero plot or character development—just a thousand pages of pure, post-ironic absurdism. I have never found the same level of comfort in any book, play, film, or piece of media that I find in Švejk’s confident, unwavering resolve while surrounded by a completely meaningless, stupid, and cruel world.

The fields of Quebec welcomed us with open arms. I ended up spending half the day immersed in the local paragliding scene. The wall of French didn’t deter my instinct for small talk, and I actually managed to make a few interesting conversations. I was particularly struck by a guy named Bernard—the head of the local club. He learned to fly at 18, but waited until he was 40 to buy his own wing because his mother told him he was only allowed to fly when he either turned 40 or grew up. The latter, he claims, never happened (Bernard just turned 65).

I should probably explain what a day of paragliding actually looks like. The whole affair starts in the morning. Everyone gathers to discuss wind speed, wind direction, the condition of the launch site, how to fly based on the presence or absence of thermals, landing zones, and a million other similar variables. Then—in our specific case—a retrofitted pickup truck hauls the pilots, and for that day, me, up to whichever launch site suits the current wind. From there, everyone takes off one by one. The entire process takes about three hours—and that’s in good weather. Afterward, when everyone makes it back down, the debate begins: do we drive up for another run, or has the weather turned? In short, the ratio of actual airtime to the time spent doing absolutely everything else was, in our albeit extreme case, exactly 1:31.

Afterward, we sampled some Quebecois wine and Ice Cider. We accepted the fact that we weren’t making it to Montreal and headed back to our field. By then, the wind had picked up, ruining my chance to do try myself at ground handling (trying to control the glider canopy above your head while standing on the ground). My dad, demonstrating exactly why the wind was too strong for me to have a go, promptly injured his shoulder.

We closed out the evening over a cup of tea, discussing the global socio-economic landscape. My left-wing ideals failed to gain much traction with a 40-year-old IT worker from a bourgeois neighborhood of Toronto.

By noon the next day—following an unsuccessful attempt to get my dad into Radiohead and a few more hours of uncontrollable laughter courtesy of Hašek’s writing—the CN Tower materialized in the car window. We were back in Toronto.