Transcription Embracing Rurality

Ok I’m selling dreams. Yes. Ok.

I came here for the first time about 5 or 6 years ago. I don’t know why, but I knew it was here. I really felt at home, I felt there was something to do with this city.

It’s between Rimouski and Rivière-Du-Loup. It’s not that far from Montreal, you can get there easily. It’s just a perfect place you know.

Why leave the city? In order not to live in constant pollution. To hope to one day not be a tenant in a shabby apartment in Montreal.

Because I’ve been around, I didn’t see myself growing old in the city. I didn’t see myself having my long-term projects in the city. The projects were always too complicated, too laborious, too expensive, too complex.

I left the city in 2015 for mental health, emotional and physical reasons. I was overwhelmed with everything happening in my life. I said to myself that I have to leave the city because it’s going to drive me crazy, the traffic and the pollution… And also I left Montréal because there are some wonderful people in the area.

Well Trois-Pistoles, I don’t know exactly why Trois-Pistoles, I came back here because I come from here, my adoptive parents are from Saint-Cyprien, for me it was natural to come back. All the possibilities that living in a rural area offers that sometimes we don’t imagine.

All this attracted me, accessibility to services, accessibility to property, accessibility to a rhythm of life that was more faithful to the artist that I wanted to be than in Montreal.

I arrived here in 1974, like I told you it was really a coincidence. I didn’t have the intention of settling here. I left, like many people at the time, as a part of a back to the land movement. But I fell under the charm and the vigour of the place, of the people that were here, the Saint-Lawrence River of course, once you get here and you walk on the waterfront and feel the salt sprays. The landscapes also impacted me.

We really see rural areas and villages offering solutions to the problems that face and will be facing in the future with the ecologic and economic challenges, climate change, the collapse of ecosystems.

It’s like in Trois-Pistoles, we have the possibility, because it is a small place, because of it’s history of steeple wars.

You know, it’s rich in the Trois-Pistoles underground, filled with legends, it’s like if here in Trois-Pistoles we have the right to be different, it’s like if we had the right to start crazy projects, while being judged and it doesn’t matter because you know that people will want to get involved.

It’s like a buffer zone where everything is possible.