Paradise in the Valley

The Madawaska River drains from majestic Lac Temiscouata in Quebec and flows through a mountain valley into New Brunswick, where it meets the St. John near Edmundston. It’s a glistening gem of a river, set in a gentle and verdant valley.

Nestled in the valley, near the river’s shore, is a highway rest stop that has it all. A cozy motel, a little diner, a convenience store, and a gas bar. All you could want for a thriving business along the TransCanada Highway.

Except it isn’t, at least any more. For decades the little service centre met the needs of travelers along the lonely stretch from the New Brunswick border to Riviere du Loup, and its owners did well by it. But then the new road was built.

Autoroute 85 was built, as is usually the case, on the higher ground farther from the river, four smooth, straighter lanes and gentle slopes engineered for modern traffic.

As you soar along Autoroute 85, high up on the hills, you can see the little service centre down in the valley, now boarded up and sad. If you took the time to leave the big road to see the old site, you’d see weeds growing in the parking lot and rust on the once-proud signs.

Life, you see, moves on. Today’s success will be tomorrow’s nostalgia, and then yesterday’s morality tale.

Can we look into the crystal ball and plan our futures with precision? No, but we do need to pay attention to trends, to the big picture. Autoroute 85 did not suddenly appear, poof!, on the hilltops. It was decades in the promise and years in the building.

I don’t know if the owners of the idyllic little service centre were able to see the writing on the wall and change their lives in an orderly way, or if they pretended that nothing was going to change, until one day expenses exceeded sales. I hope they were lucky.

But we all find ourselves in the same place, from time to time, knowing that tomorrow is going to be substantially different from today, and it’s our choice if we bury our heads or if we make ourselves ready as best we can.