Off Island comes into focus
Satellite photos of three sites featured in The Atlantic magazine’s photo blog
Daniel Pilon, owner of the St- Polycarpe Golf Club, was at his office in St- Zotique when he noticed someone had tagged him in a post on Facebook.
“They mentioned your golf course in an American magazine,” it read.
Pilon was a little puzzled, but sure enough, it was true: In the middle of 36 photos posted to The Atlantic’s photography blog, In Focus, was an satellite shot of his golf course.
“Well that’s kind of neat,” he thought.
The photo essay, titled Human Landscapes of Canada, used Google Earth to illustrate the way people have impacted land in Canada. It was compiled by senior editor Alan Taylor, who’s in charge of the magazine’s photo department.
St- Polycarpe was one of three Off-Island regions to be featured in it, along with St- Lazare and Coteaudu- Lac.
Over the course of two or three days, Taylor says he scrolled across Canada on Google Earth, starting in Newfoundland and looking for “anything remotely interesting.”
Zoomed out enough that he could see a broad range of things, but close enough that he could notice a golf course or racetrack, he made his way west.
“Really what I was looking for was the juxtaposition of human artifacts and natural artifacts,” Taylor said over the phone from Boston, “where farm fields budded up against suburban tracks, or where the straight lines of canals interacted with the sinuous lines of a river.”
In St- Lazare, between St- Dominique Rd. and St-Féréol Rd., he found six trains sitting on rail sidings, the whole looking like a stretched- out pitchfork from above.
“I had never seen a set- aside or a siding in that configuration, in that shape,” he said. “It catches your eye from quite a distance out.”
Hovering over Coteau- du- Lac, it was red and orange cargo trucks — mostly from Canadian Tire — that made him pause.
“It looked almost like an abstract painting,” Taylor said. Parked in a Genco warehouse lot, the trucks’ colours clashed with the green and browns of neighbouring farmland. Then there was Pilon’s golf course. Despite golf clubs being “a dime a dozen,” Taylor said that when seen from high above, St- Polycarpe’s was an obvious inclusion.
“It stood out because it was exactly in the same shape as the fields and, visually, it was so completely obvious that somebody had taken a lot that they had, probably was a farm field originally, and converted it into a golf course without altering the shape of it at all,” Taylor said.
“How interesting,” he continued, “the human- imposed grid of lines from the farm fields and the roads, and then the human sort of faux- natural flow of the golf course embedded within a very perfect-looking rectangle.”
According to Pilon — whose family has owned golf courses in the region since the mid- 1950s — the course was indeed built that way in
1971, when the owner of the farmlands decided to combine two lots for golf, giving it the perfectly symmetrical look that caught Taylor’s eye.
Pilon said he had looked at the course from Google Earth before — “who hasn’t looked at their own land?” he asked — but didn’t think it was too unusual.
The Internet felt a little differently last week.
Piggybacking off of Taylor’s post, the photo of Pilon’s course started showing up on different websites and blogs after being uploaded to Reddit, a popular Internet forum.
It was pictured in Golf Digest: This golf course looks like it’s literally in the middle of nowhere.
Then featured on one of USA Today’s sports blogs, where it headlined a post titled “The 9 most secluded golf courses in the world.”
“This all kind of came out of nowhere,” Pilon said, laughing. “But it’s created a fun little buzz around the course.”
Or, as he posted online after discovering some of the articles: “The St- Polycarpe Golf Club has hit the big time.”