Lady Byng – The Land of Grand Sunsets

Best-known today for the NHL trophy that takes her name, Lady Byng regularly frequented Metis. First visiting in the 1920s when her husband, Viscount Byng of Vimy, was Governor General, she returned in the 1940s after moving to Ottawa to escape the bombing of London during the Blitz.

She wrote eloquently about Metis in her 1945 autobiography Up the Stream of Time:

Grand Métis, lying at a point where the river is thirty-fives miles wide, has been one of my havens of refuge, and I am always amused at the little village with its white painted houses sprinkled over the bluff that dominates the great waterway. I have seen grander sunsets on that stretch of curving shore than anywhere else in the world, I think. Wild, stormy, blazing in crimson, gold, and orange and green, they stain the sky, while an unearthly stillness reins, through the rocks are crowded with gulls and cormorants…The sunsets glory flames arrogantly for a final moment when the Western sky spreads forth a fleecy bed of clouds for the sun’s escape from the pursuing globe of a full moon, rising apace in the eastern sky…At night comes the glory of Northern Lights sweeping ethereally across the sky, their rose and emerald tones staining the inshore waters of the great river. But these are forerunners of winter when snow will blanket the land, ice mute the chattering Métis River, leaving a thin skin on the edges of “Le Fleuve” itself, though the main channel of steel-grey waters will not halt but hastens seawards, indifferent to winter’s chill hand, for “Le Fleuve” bows to no conqueror.