Volkswagen Blues

The sun is just rising over the Baie de Gaspé—in the Gulf of St. Lawrence—when “the meowing of a cat” awakens a man sleeping in an old Volkswagen minivan (1). Looking out his window, the man, who goes by the name Jack Waterman, sees “a tall thin girl in a white nightgown walking barefoot” through the campground with a black kitten trailing behind her (1). Jack dresses, eats, and drives off toward the town of Gaspé, his destination.

When he sees the tall girl hitchhiking, he stops. She settles into the passenger seat but doesn’t close the door until her cat has explored the van and seemingly signals that “[i]t’s all right” (3). She says, “People call me La Grande Sauterelle […] because my legs are way too long, like a grasshopper’s” (5). Like Jack, she is travelling to Gaspé, but she has no itinerary beyond going to the Gaspé museum. Jack, a francophone Quebecois, has just turned 40 and is looking for his brother, Théo, whom he hasn’t seen for 15 years. Some 10 years ago, Théo sent Jack his last postcard, bearing a picture of Gaspé on one side and an illegible inscription on the other. After Jack shows the girl the card, she remarks that Théo’s message is a reproduction of an old text and suggests Jack inquire about it at the museum.

An older woman cleaning the museum floor immediately recognizes the text on Jack’s postcard as identical to that on a placard hanging in the museum. An “[e]xcerpt from the original account of Jacques Cartier’s first voyage,” the text on the placard describes the raising, in 1534, of a 30-foot cross in the Baie de Gaspé by the French explorer and his men (9). Jack and the girl also find Théo’s name in an old volume of the museum’s visitors’ log. Théo recorded his address as St. Louis, Missouri. Before leaving the museum with Jack, the girl embraces the cleaning woman, who is her mother.

La Grande Sauterelle travels with Jack back to his apartment in Quebec City. As they drive along the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the girl marks the route from Gaspé to St. Louis on a map. Jack notes that the highlighted route resembles those he’s seen in Canadian history books “that showed the first French explorations in America” (15).

When Jack begins to talk about the fascination that he and Théo shared, as children, for “the discoverers and explorers of the New World: Champlain, Étienne Brûlé” (14) and others, “the girl’s face became impassive” (16). She explains that while her father is white, her mother is a Montagnais—an Indigenous person—and then insists, “I’ve got nothing in common with the people who came looking for gold and spices […]. I’m on the side of the people who were robbed of their lands” (17). She interrupts herself, however, to counter that, because her father is white, she cannot claim Indigenous identity. She concludes, “I’m a Métis” (17).

In response to the girl’s apparent dismay, Jack tells the story of El Dorado, which he read in Walker Chapman’s The Golden Dream. According to the legend, an Indigenous tribe inhabiting a remote South American location held an annual ceremony during which the chief would coat his naked body with resin, and then cover himself in gold dust. Shimmering in the sunshine, he canoed to the middle of the lake, where he dove in the water, transforming into a breathtaking, “luminous gleam.” The people in his tribe were “overcome with admiration, and word spread […] farther and farther, that somewhere in America there existed a rich, mysterious land that was the kingdom of gold, Eldorado” (17-18).

It’s evening when Jack and La Grande Sauterelle arrive in Quebec City. Sitting by his apartment window, which offers “a sweeping view of the river,” they talk (20). Jack reveals he’s a writer—he has published five novels—and the girl says she is an automobile mechanic. When she asks Jack to tell her more about Théo, “a wave of memories swept him back to the frame house by the river” where he and his brother grew up (21).

Jack remembers Théo as strong and bold, even reckless. In the wintertime, after an underground creek near their house froze, Théo would sled through the “dark, icy tunnel,” charting a course for others to follow, “and, if you deviated even slightly from the route […] [you] risk[ed] smashing your head against a rock” (21). Always a thrill-seeker, Théo would put on skis and hitch himself to the back of the local doctor’s snowmobile. Jack continues to reminisce until he notices that the girl is nodding off. They both retire for the night.

When Jack wakes the next morning, La Grande Sauterelle and her cat are gone. He goes out to visit his local bookstore, wondering if he will see the girl again. Upon returning home, he is pleased to find her in the kitchen. As for why she “couldn’t” leave a note before she left, she explains, “I never know ahead of time what I’m going to do” (24). Jack asks if he received any phone calls while he was out, and then, because “he felt very close to her,” he volunteers that he is ever-hopeful Sam Peckinpah will call (25). The filmmaker’s action movie Straw Dogs captivated Jack when he saw it. Since then, Jack “had maintained the insane hope that old Peckinpah would call to tell him that he’d read his latest novel and wanted to make a film of it” (25). This is an outlandish expectation, Jack concedes, not least of all because “he didn’t write action novels” (25).

While Jack prepares for a road trip to St. Louis, La Grande Sauterelle reads. To satisfy her voracious appetite for books, she has developed the practice of stealing from libraries, but she always mails the books back. She includes a note which she signs “Pitsémine,” because that is her “name in the Montagnais language” (27).

Whereas the girl consumes books indiscriminately, Jack Waterman (which is actually a pseudonym) is a “parsimonious reader.” He takes from his shelves a book about French Canadian explorers in America and, after reading aloud a passage praising these voyageurs, asks the girl her opinion. Much to his satisfaction, she agrees that “in general, they had treated the Indians better […] than their American counterparts” (30). Jack is also glad to hear she plans to go with him to St. Louis.

Jack admires the early French explorers, but he doesn’t “like himself very much,” nor “his way of working” (31). He does not measure up to his own model of an “ideal writer.” Where Jack is methodical and self-disciplined while working, his ideal writer is inspired and impulsive; where Jack must doggedly follow a schedule “to turn out his daily page” (31), his ideal writer produces a torrent of pages whenever the “words start coming” (33).

In Jack’s imagination, the ideal writer experiences this onslaught of words as follows: While the writer is dining out with friends, sentences begin arriving with such urgency that he must excuse himself. Once home, he writes with a “feverish pleasure. Words and sentences come easily, and the source seems inexhaustible” (33). It is as if “someone is dictating what he has to write” (33), and when his role as scribe finally ends, he collapses, unconscious. When he wakes in the hospital, a woman—“Maria”—is embracing his manuscript and exclaims, “It’s the most beautiful story I’ve ever read!” (34).

Several hours into their journey to St. Louis, Jack and La Grande Sauterelle stop to camp near a river broken by many islands—the “Thousand Islands.” The girl gazes at the river as they eat in silence. She finally abandons her reverie to explain she is “dreaming of the great birchbark canoes” and the fur traders who once navigated the river, delivering their goods to the trading posts at Detroit and Michilimackinac (37). Her pronunciation of “Michilimackinac” thrills Jack with its richness, because “the man had an inordinate passion for words” (38).

The mosquitoes and the chill drive them into the Volkswagen, where they huddle together with the cat under a blanket. When Jack says, “I thought Indians were never cold,” the girl replies, “I told you, I’m not a real Indian” (39). After removing the sheathed knife tied at her waist, which “she always carried […] since a misadventure she’d experienced on a trip,” the girl settles in to tell Jack a story (41).

La Grande Sauterelle’s account is set in Antarctica, during the coldest months of the year, when male penguins are valiantly sheltering their eggs while their mates go off fishing. The expectant fathers “form a big circle, with the weakest ones in the middle” to protect them from the wind (42). After they warm up, the penguins “in the middle give their places to the others, so that each one takes a turn at being exposed to the cold” as they continuously cycle between the margins and the center (42).