A town
in the pines

In the spring of 1971 there was no Chimoubongo. There was a logging road, a bend in a creek, forty-one hectares of white pine nobody had bothered to cut, and a school bus with the seats torn out.

The bus belonged to Alphonse-Réal Bougie, who was thirty-four, from Trois-Rivières, and had been asked to leave four communes in two provinces. Not for anything criminal. People simply found that after a few months in his company they had started keeping a candle lit for reasons they could not articulate, and this made their spouses nervous.

He parked the bus at the bend in the creek because, he later said, the trees stopped talking over each other there. Eight other people were with him. Their names are on the stone by the post office: Ginette, Marcel, Big Yvon, Little Yvon, Suzanne, Dee, Pauline, and a man everybody called The Dentist who was not a dentist and had, in fact, never been to one.

There was also the dog. The dog was named Motion, because Alphonse-Réal insisted every vote needed one.

The Vote

On the night of June 2nd, 1971, they held what the town charter still calls The Vote. It lasted eleven hours. There were exactly two items on the agenda.

Item one: shall this be a town? Passed, nine to nothing. Motion abstained by falling asleep, which the charter records as a formal abstention and which is why abstaining in Chimoubongo is still called doing a Motion.

Item two: what shall it be called? This took the other ten and a half hours. Ginette wanted Saint-Quelque-Chose, on the grounds that everything in Québec is a saint and it would help with the mail. Big Yvon wanted Pineville, in English, to annoy Little Yvon. The Dentist wanted no name at all and argued for it with real feeling.

At around four in the morning Alphonse-Réal, who had not spoken for two hours, said the word Chimoubongo. Nobody asked what it meant. Everybody voted yes. When people ask him what it means he says the same thing he has said for fifty-five years, which is: "It means this." And then he gestures at everything.

Becoming Official-ish

Chimoubongo has been through eleven separate administrative processes and has emerged from all of them slightly less certain of its own legal status. It appears on hydro maps, forestry maps, and one 1978 tourism brochure. It does not appear on the provincial municipality register, an omission the town has stopped contesting and now considers a feature.

The mail comes. That was always the real test.

Chimoubongo sits in the Mauricie, in the pine country up the Saint-Maurice river, roughly between Grandes-Piles and Lac-Édouard, west of the Réserve faunique du Saint-Maurice and a long way from anything with a drive-thru. La Tuque is your last real town going north. Shawinigan is your last real town going south. In between, it's trees.

Start in Shawinigan. Everyone starts in Shawinigan. Take Route 155 north along the Saint-Maurice and settle in, because the pines close over the road around Grandes-Piles and they do not open again.

1. Follow the 155 north past Grandes-Piles. Keep the river on your left. If the river is on your right, you are going to La Tuque, which is a fine town, but it is not this one.
2. Somewhere past Saint-Roch-de-Mékinac the radio will lose the Trois-Rivières station and pick up something in the middle. Do not change it. That is the correct station. It only plays here.
3. Watch for a hand-painted sign that says NOT FAR. It has said NOT FAR since 1979 and it was not accurate then either. It is a promise, not a measurement.
4. Nine kilometres after the sign, there is a gravel road on the right with no marker and two boulders that are the same size. If the boulders are different sizes, keep going, that is the Bilodeau turnoff and it ends at a swamp.
5. Take the gravel road. Go slow. Roll the windows down even if it is cold. This is not a suggestion from us, it is a suggestion from the road.
6. You will cross a wooden bridge over a creek you cannot see. It is under there.
7. Six kilometres in, the pines get taller and closer and the sound of your own car changes. Some people describe this as the road going quiet. That is the town noticing you. Keep driving. It is friendly.
8. You will pass a mailbox with no house. Wave at it. Everyone does. Nobody remembers starting this.
9. The road forks. The left fork is beautiful, well-graded, freshly gravelled, and goes nowhere at all. Take the right fork, which looks worse in every measurable way.
10. When you see the pump organ on the porch, you are in Chimoubongo. Park anywhere. There is no wrong spot. Somebody will come out. It is usually Suzanne. If it is a very tall old man in black with one eye painted, that is Alphonse-Réal, and you should know that he will already know your first name.

Coming from Québec City: take the 40 to the 155 and do all of the above. Coming from Montréal: same, but you will be angrier by Shawinigan, and you should sit in the car an extra minute when you arrive. Coming by bus: there is no bus. There has never been a bus. In 1988 there was almost a bus and people still talk about it.