lac Squatec is a lake beside the route over Touladi and the setting for a pivotal shift in Loïc’s flight from aerial view to intimate family memory. As the seaplane descends toward the lake and the cemetery overlooking it, the landscape becomes inseparable from the fear of being buried alive; moments later, the lake receives the plane and gives way to the children’s run through the surrounding countryside.

Setting and Approach

After passing Touladi, the seaplane banks close to the mountain that hides Lake Témiscouata, then passes just above the church steeple, its metal roof glinting in the sun. It dives toward lac Squatec and the cemetery on the rise above the water. The route connects the village’s visible landmarks with the graves below: from the air, Loïc has just imagined the houses as small boxes that could collapse in an earthquake, trapping their inhabitants like those already enclosed beneath the cemetery’s rows of tombstones.

The Cemetery and Its Buried History

The descent toward lac Squatec brings back a story Loïc learned by overhearing adults talk. During the cemetery’s relocation after the 1944 landslide, a child’s body was found turned over in its grave, its jaw clamped onto its forearm. The child had been buried too soon during the Spanish flu epidemic, which had devastated Touladi’s children. The thought of waking in the absolute confinement of a coffin, unable to cry out for lack of air, gives the lake’s approach a graveyard shadow: the water and the elevated cemetery occupy the same passage, while Loïc struggles to banish the image of a buried child.

Landing and Narrative Contrast

The seaplane settles gently onto the lake. Loïc then goes with his brother and cousins to run along the ponds and through the vividly colored autumn woods. The transition does not erase the earlier horror, but places it beside the children’s movement through the living landscape. lac Squatec is therefore both a landmark in the flight and the threshold between Loïc’s fearful imagining of the dead underground and the ordinary freedom of the excursion that follows.