I returned to Chicoutimi and my student life fully revitalized after four weeks of field work in the north. Revitalized in the sense of normalcy within the bleak year of 2020. The harsh lockdowns of the previous months had drained my willpower, but that stretch in the field rekindled something. A sense of momentum. Of purpose.
On a late-summer’s day, somewhere in Chicoutimi
September had arrived and the academic year had begun. The university was slightly more open now. Masks and distancing were still in place, but at least there were people in the halls again. Some recreational spaces reopened too, including the gym I had signed up for. Slowly, it felt like we were climbing out of the lockdown haze.
Back to the grind
With the amount of material Alexandre and I brought back, we had months of work ahead. All those rock samples needed processing. Cutting them down, preparing them for thin sections, and eventually for geochemical analysis.
We both had prior lab experience and felt confident going in. The lab manager walked us through the equipment. A couple of fixed rock saws, a discussion about blades. Alexandre asked David, the lab manager, for the best blades since our samples were granitic, quartz-rich, and extremely hard.
Coming back from the field with rock samples of different sizes
David gave us the “student treatment.” He didn’t trust us with the sharper blades and handed us the smoother ones instead, telling us to just take more time. Not a great start.
After a single day it became obvious those “safe” blades weren’t going to cut it. Literally. We were standing there for hours, barely making progress. Eventually David gave in, and from the next day on we were allowed to use the proper blades.
That solved one problem, but another quickly appeared. Even with the right blades, the machines kept shutting down under strain. David explained the fix involved flipping a breaker switch in an electrical box, but according to protocol, he was supposed to call an electrician to do it.
For us, this was next level. Calling an electrician just to flip a switch? How did anything get done? It was the complete opposite of the fix-it-yourself mentality we grew up with in Europe.
Outlaws in the lab
The work settled into a routine. Daily sessions of rock cutting. Alexandre had far more to process than I did, seventeen buckets compared to my five, so I helped where I could.
The breaker issue quickly became unbearable. It would trip multiple times a day, and David wasn’t always around. Sometimes we’d be stuck waiting hours just to continue working. Then came the day he wasn’t there at all.
The bridge to nowhere across nothing in northern Chicoutimi
Within the first hour, everything shut down again. That was it. Alexandre had had enough. The electrical box wasn’t locked, just braced. He opened it, flipped the switch, and closed it back up. We were back in business. Outlaws at work. And we got a lot done that day. No more waiting. No more interruptions. Just progress.
By late afternoon we were exhausted but satisfied. Then I noticed something that instantly killed the mood. A small ocean had formed in the lab. All the water from the saws hadn’t been draining properly. It was pooling in the center of the room and slowly creeping toward David’s office.
We were screwed.
The Great Flood scandal
The design of the room made no sense. The lowest point was where the water pooled, while the drainage grates sat slightly higher. It was absurd.
So we grabbed the wide navy brooms and started pushing the water uphill toward the drains. It took over an hour. By the end, most of it was gone, but the floor was still wet and muddy. We were completely drained ourselves, so we decided to leave it overnight and come back early to finish.
The slabs I ended up with after cutting the rocks, prior to sending them off for thin sectioning
The next morning was a disaster. David was furious. He wanted to ban us from the lab. Alexandre had already taken the initial hit before I arrived, and Lucie was there trying to mediate. We explained the drainage issue and what had happened, but there was another problem. He had found out about the breaker.
Illegal. Catastrophic. Students flipping a switch. Endangering everyone. You get the idea.
Lucie was more understanding. She had grown up in France and shared our mindset. Later she even told us she once got scolded for changing a light bulb herself instead of calling an electrician. Canada… what the hell?
Yes, it sounds ranty. But that’s exactly how it felt. The whole situation was absurd. We were put in time-out. Not for long though.
Once David ran the saws himself, he quickly realized the drains were clogged. That was the real cause of the flooding. Not us. We were eventually pardoned, with one condition: stay away from the electrical box.
Fair enough. Luckily, thanks to our “outlaw day,” we could afford to slow things down.
Better days
By October we were finally done cutting. The samples were sent off, and the next phase began. This was my favorite part.
Thin sections opened up an entirely new world. What looked simple in hand sample became incredibly complex under the microscope. Beyond quartz, feldspar, and amphibole, there were all these accessory minerals. Titanite, apatite, sulfides, magnetite, zircon and more. Zircon was of particular interest for us. Its resistance to alteration makes it ideal for dating. Tiny crystals carrying time itself. You could get a surprisingly accurate idea of when the host rock formed.
Microscopic image of one of my thin sections in natural light, with a colorful array of amphiboles and biotite in a dirty white sea of feldspar
I was equally interested in apatite and sulfides. Some for thermometry and barometry calculations, others just out of curiosity. This was the kind of research I loved. Digging into complex methods, trying to reconstruct pressure, temperature, even oxygen fugacity of ancient magmatic systems. From that, you could infer things like the potential of a magma to transport gold.
It was precise and logical, yet somehow felt like science fiction.
Remote science in a strange year
Restrictions still made things complicated. For laser ablation work, we used the LA-ICP-MS at Laurentian University in Sudbury. Their setup was more powerful than what we had at UQAC. The lab manager, Jeff, was fantastic. After a short introduction, he trusted me to book and operate the system remotely. It was a pleasure.
Another thin section image, under polarized light this time showcasing the vivid colors quartz and zonation in feldspar
However, not everyone was that flexible. The microprobe lab in Quebec City refused remote access entirely, despite my prior experience from the University of Copenhagen. In doing all of the work themselves, their schedule was very limited and it took a very long time for me to get my results. Everyone was adapting differently to the new world of restrictions.
Still, those final months of 2020 were good for me.
Another thin section, this time under cathodoluminescence, highlighting a bunch of apatite crystals in a fluorescent green
“Laser time” became something I genuinely looked forward to. I would spend entire days in Lucie’s lab, remotely running analyses on my samples in Sudbury. One of my favorite tools was the EDS system. Quick, on-the-spot chemical readings. Not as precise as the laser, but perfect for identifying minerals and satisfying curiosity.
I’ll never forget December 2020. That’s when I identified a rare fluoro-carbonate mineral as parisite. High in rare earth elements. My first and only truly exotic find using EDS. Another memorable moment was spotting thorite inclusions inside zircon grains that looked completely destroyed from within. A perfect example of metamictisation. Radiation slowly breaking down the crystal structure over time.
Magnetite (in the center) and three zircons in preparation for EDS analysis. The top and rightmost zircons retained their zonation, while the bottom-left one has a destroyed core, replaced with bright white inclusions of thorite
These were my small discoveries. Quiet victories in a microscopy lab, with avant-garde progressive metal playing in the background. Some of my best memories from UQAC.
A quiet, uneasy ending
But December also brought a tightening of restrictions again. A new COVID variant, renewed panic, and Quebec shut things down once more. Non-essential services closed. The gym, which had kept me active and sane, was gone again. A curfew was introduced. Christmas gatherings were effectively cancelled.
After nearly a year of this, we had enough. Restrictions or not, Alexandre, Pedro, and I decided to meet for a turkey dinner at Pedro’s place.
Christmas turkey dinner at Pedro’s
I remember how dead the streets were that evening. Even by Chicoutimi standards, it felt eerie. Snow-covered, silent. Curtains drawn everywhere, as if people were hiding how many guests they had inside. It felt like everyone was quietly rebelling, but also watching over their shoulder.
The idea that you had to hide a small gathering from the authorities was… surreal. Still, we had our evening. We caught up. We laughed. For a moment, things felt normal again. 2020 was coming to an end, and we allowed ourselves a bit of hope.
Surely 2021 would be better. How much worse could it get?
Following Christmas week in New York City, 2019 quietly came to an end with a relaxed New Year’s Eve dinner and drinks between two good friends. I was deep in my experimental cooking phase and had Alexandre over for a homemade, slightly burned, Greek moussaka.
A new year awaited. After the kind of year I’d just had, it was clear 2020 would probably be calmer. A step back. A year to build, not explode forward. As everyone now knows in hindsight, it would be far more than that — for all of us.
The New Semester Brought a New Victim to UQAC
With January came a new semester at UQAC. Alexandre and I registered for the two required PhD courses. Geology was always a small circle with barely a handful of students, most of them foreign. Among them was Pedro, a Brazilian PhD candidate who had just moved to Chicoutimi.
Welcome to the North. This is what you’ll see for half a year.
Pedro was one of those people who collects stories simply by existing. A guy who had never seen snow in his life moved to northern Canada in January, during a -40°C cold snap, with meters of snow and winter storms rolling in like clockwork. The story practically wrote itself.
After surviving the thermal shock, he endured months living with a questionable Québécois family. Among the gems he would retell: the time he opened the basement fridge to find his sandwich placed beside a box containing a dead cat. The owners were “waiting for spring to bury it” and didn’t want to leave it outside.
Pedro processed this information the way any rational person would — by moving out as soon as possible. With the amount of crazy stories he told us about his first months in Canada, he should honestly write his own blog.
The Rivière du Moulin during winter
He fit perfectly into our little circle of mildly disgruntled foreign PhD students trying to decode Quebec one snowstorm at a time.
The Quest for a Drivers License
For me, that winter felt like a tense calm before a summer storm. It was the first year of my PhD. That summer I was scheduled to do three months of fieldwork across Quebec and Ontario. Which meant one thing: I needed to renew my driver’s license.
The path ahead — Park du Rivière-du-Moulin
At the time I possesses an expired Romanian relic I hadn’t used since one lonely drive in Iceland in 2016. Naturally, it couldn’t be simple. Because my foreign license had expired, Quebec couldn’t simply exchange it. I had to redo the tests. Easy enough. Except I had barely driven in ten years.
Confidence low. Stress high. Instead of responsibly studying the driving manual, I decided to go in blindly. In contrast to my first driving exam when I passed both theory and practice on the first try, this time around I failed. Then failed again. The upside? Exam fees were cheap. Unlimited attempts.
The downside? A mandatory one-month wait between attempts. And of course, the regional SAAQ office was in Jonquière, not Chicoutimi. Which meant an hour-long bus ride each way through Saguenay’s bleak winter landscape every time I wanted to fail another exam. It was not a joyous era.
But with each attempt, I improved. Eventually I passed the theoretical. Then came the practical — rinse, repeat, stress, repeat. By summer, I finally had my Quebec driver’s license. Considering what was unfolding globally, this minor bureaucratic victory now feels oddly monumental.
My routine 10 km park walks to and from the supermarket and gym
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s rewind to winter.
Francisation
Another goal I had set at the start of the year was learning French properly. The university offered nothing useful in that regard. It was Pedro who pointed me toward Quebec’s government-funded francisation classes for newcomers. The Centre de formation générale des adultes was a ten-minute walk from campus.
When I went to register, the woman at the desk spoke exclusively French and had to evaluate my level. I stitched together broken sentences from memory. It didn’t come across as much. Beginner level it was.
But within a few weeks, something interesting happened. Fragments of childhood French combined with fluency in Romanian, a Latin language like French, roots began clicking into place. Vocabulary accelerated. Patterns emerged.
So I was bumped up a level or two. It felt like I was on the right path. Well on my way to adapt and integrate into my new life in French-Canada.
Routine into the Storm
Between language classes, Jonquière license expeditions, PhD coursework, and research work, I barely had time to breathe. But it was structured. Productive. Forward-moving. A couple times a week, Alexandre and I would make our “shopping expedition” — a half-hour walk through snow-covered streets to Place du Royaume, with a mandatory stop at Archambault along the way. Life was cold, busy, and routine. Until mid-March.
Sometimes the waterfall just completely froze
Another winter storm was forecast — strong winds, heavy snowfall. The university closed for the day. Nothing unusual. The next day I returned to find the campus in complete blackout. The storm had damaged major power lines. Parts of the town were without electricity. I made my way to our office using my phone flashlight. Inside, a few colleagues were sitting in pitch darkness, casually talking. Our office had no windows. This never bothered me much, but Alexandre hated it. We chatted in the dark for a while, laughed at the absurdity, then left. No work accomplished.
The following day was another write-off. I can’t even remember if it was still the outage, another storm, or just institutional confusion. The week was dissolving. At some point I joked to my friends: Just watch, Friday’s excuse is going to be a University shutdown because of that coronavirus thing. The news had been escalating into fear mongering. China. Italy. Numbers rising. Dramatic headlines.
Then Friday came. And with it, a state of emergency. The university closed. The province shut down. The world closed itself off. And just like that, routine evaporated. Me and my big mouth.
The New World Order — Life during the COVID-19 lockdown
Early into the first lockdown, I have to admit I felt a selfish sense of vindication. A quiet, petty sort of justice. For months I had been navigating life in a place where I barely spoke the language and knew only a couple of people. Isolation had been my baseline. And now, suddenly, everyone else was getting a taste of it.
Welcome to my world.
Time stopped dripping here. The world held its breath, and winter simply kept sculpting what was already still
At the same time, I secretly welcomed the abrupt pause. My schedule had been escalating into overload — PhD work, language classes, driving exam shenanigans, constant self-imposed pressure. The world hitting pause felt… convenient. I expected it to last a week. Maybe two. And then it just kept going.
Mask mandates appeared. Supermarket floor arrows dictated which direction you could walk, as if we were items on a conveyor belt. Entire stores closed. Curfews were introduced. News cycles amplified panic daily. Then came the toilet paper crisis. One of the stranger collective breakdowns of modern civilization.
Meanwhile, my mom in Romania described increasingly rigid restrictions there. At one point, people had to fill out official declaration papers justifying why they were leaving their homes. It triggered flashbacks for her — memories of life under Ceaușescu’s communist regime, when movement and speech were tightly controlled.
The longer the restrictions lasted, the more frustration built. The virus itself wasn’t what weighed on me most. It was the scale of disruption. The sense that normal life had been switched off indefinitely.
Remote Everything
The lockdown halted my French learning completely. At first, the school closed. Weeks later they began discussing remote options. But by then something inside me had shifted. My motivation drained slowly, almost imperceptibly. What was the point?
The surface freezes while the current moves on. Stillness and Motion.
University research continued from home. At that stage, most of my work involved literature review, so technically it was manageable. Psychologically, it was another story. For some of us, the university environment was essential — a mental trigger that said: now we work. At home, especially in small studio apartments, the boundaries collapsed. The same room that was for sleeping and relaxing became the office, classroom, gym, cafeteria. It blurred everything.
The university experimented with remote courses. It was… rough. At first, everyone tried. Professors adapting to Zoom. Students attempting to focus. But attention spans eroded quickly. Small distractions became irresistible. Changing backgrounds. Flipping someone’s screen. Eventually most students logged in, turned off their cameras and microphones, and disappeared into parallel lives while the professor lectured into the void. I often used that time to cook or clean. Assignments replaced exams. Everyone passed. I retained very little.
The longer the lockdown dragged on, the more pointless everything began to feel. The one concrete achievement of that period was my driver’s license. After all the failures and bus rides through frozen Saguenay, finally passing felt disproportionately triumphant. A small win in a shrinking world.
A Dead Campus
Fighting persistently on our behalf, our supervisor managed to secure limited access to the university for our research group. Strict rules, of course. Masks at all times. Only certain rooms permitted. Not our windowless office, but Lucie’s windowless lab-office. It was something.
The branches held their shape. Everything else waited. Frost simply finished what pause had started
When I think of UQAC now, I mostly remember it as it was during that period: a silent, cold building where you had to ring a security guard to enter. Empty hallways. Fluorescent lighting humming over abandoned corridors. It felt like living a post-apocalypse survival video game.
Apart from each other and supermarket outings, Alexandre and I hadn’t seen people in months. The streets were dead. The first time we saw our supervisor in person again, we talked for hours. Complained. Reflected. Laughed. It felt strangely profound — as if we had all returned from separate planets. Human contact had become a novelty.
The Slow Summer Shift
Weeks passed. Then a month. Finally, our supervisor pulled off another small miracle: approval for one month of fieldwork in August up north for her entire research group of four. Alexandre was relieved. Energized. It felt like movement. Progress. Normalcy.
I felt… nothing. What had begun as quiet vindication had slowly dissolved into indifference. I remember preparing supplies at the university and running into an old colleague, Tague. He was genuinely excited for us. “You guys must be thrilled!” I shrugged. Meh.
The cold had pressed pause so long the world forgot warmth. Yet here, on sun-heated rock, life tests its wings once more, slow and deliberate
In hindsight, I think something subtle had been settling in. Not dramatic, nor cinematic. Just a quiet flattening of emotion. A kind of functional numbness. I went through the motions. I did what needed to be done. But the internal spark, the ambition and momentum I had carried into 2020, had dimmed.
It would take a long time to recognize it for what it probably was. A slow, quiet form of depression.
