The Sugar Shack

We could only handle it for two and a half hours...

The Sugar Shack is a yearly Québec tradition, where you convene either family members or friends - or both if you're really courageous - to a far-out place no one can get to without a vehicle to go eat, essentially, breakfast at supper time drenched in maple syrup. And you conclude it with maple taffy - or sugar on snow, which is exactly what it sounds like, boiled maple syrup essence hardened when it collides with the cold from the snow. It is one case where eating the brown/yellow snow is actually encouraged.

These places are alike more and more - and they take on each other's defects rather than qualities, as evidenced by most of them no longer serving fucking bacon anymore. Eggs, ham, toast, cretons, marmelade, baked potatoes - all good. Fried, salted bacon fat (''oreilles de crisse''), too, yeah. But bacon? Oh-the-fuck-no!

I was even told ''Sugar Shacks don't serve bacon, why would they''? Then why the fuck do grocery stores sell maple-fucking-flavoured bacon, then, genius? Where did they get the fucking idea?

At $20 a pop, plus gas, plus the fact that you have to endure everybody else's fucking kids running around on sugar highs when you deliberately chose not to have any of your own with this precise moment in mind as to why, having no bacon is really not going to put you on my good side.

I don't eat eggs, I'd rather not eat ham but will here, entirely submerged in maple syrup; same goes for cocktail-sized hot dog sausages. Without bacon, basically, these are all things I'd rather avoid, at a ridiculous cost to boot.

What I do, basically, is fill up on cretons and test my blood-sugar's capacities to the extreme by over-indulging in maple, both in syrup form and taffy-on-snow, then I get sleepy at 7PM because my body's on the brink of shutting down from temporary diabetes. But I don't care. I won't let these fuckers take my twenty bucks without a fight. Although after an hour and a half of kids running around like chickens with their heads cut off, and screaming like a b-movie actress in a casting session for a Wes Craven flick, I was more than ready to raise the white flag.

That could have been the epilogue to my story, but it isn't.

This was organized by a friend-of-a-friend, a radio personality. 80 of her guests were there... 40 of whom got sick. Major gastroenteritis. I was fine but know many of the ill. Either I have the super-stomach of a rat and can digest anything, or it was in something I didn't eat (eggs), or ate very little of (ham, sausages). It sure wasn't the maple syrup, the bread or the cretons.

I know one thing for sure, though: we won't be going back to that hell-hole next year!