Silence has become a rare currency. Noise leads us everywhere. Through her recent paths, our collaborator Monique Durand draws us into the rustling of silence, a balm for our bodies and minds in these noisy times, a common good to cherish and protect. Third of eight articles.
He has eyes of the silence that surrounds him, eyes as clear as the northern rivers he rides. His cedar shingle house purrs like a big cat curled up around an enormous wood stove. It’s good at home. He’s Gabriel Rondeau, 25, pale hair pulled back in a bun that gives him a bushy head like the top of a black spruce. Raised on the Plateau Mont-Royal, Gabriel discovered the heart of a coureur des bois and an adventurer in a land of white water, stone and sand.
He lives in Magpie, yes, the Magpie of the river, this waterway on the North Shore that rises in Labrador and runs south for 290 kilometres to the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The famous Magpie River, whose reputation has transcended our borders since February 2021, when the Minganie MRC and the Ekuanitshit/Mingan Innu Council granted it legal personality status in order to protect it from Hydro-Québec’s appetite for hydroelectricity and to allow the waterway to take legal action. A world first. Comedian Roy Dupuis, co-founder of the Rivières Foundation, is the familiar face of those who oppose the harnessing of this powerful waterway.
Magpie is also a village, a microvillage, 50 inhabitants in winter, 100 in summer, a well-kept secret nestled between the arms of a large bay beaten by the winds of the gulf. You have to leave the main road, the 138, to discover this splendor far from the world and the noise. The word Magpie would be the English name for the chattering magpie… in the land of silence.
Besides, although he may inhabit silence, Gabriel is a verbomotor. Could this be a game of communicating vessels? “In life, yes, I speak, in the forest, no.” He offers me a tea. “Here I lead the life that goes with the view.” Where speech is to the winds, to the open sea and to the woods, “and space, a prolonged silence,” writes the Quebecer Pierre Perrault in All islands.
A village a little apart
Her neighbour, Lola Lebrasseur — “the priest made a mistake, I was supposed to be called Léona,” she tells me, laughing — is a native of Magpie. She made a career in Montreal as the director of immigrant francization at the FTQ, and decided to return to live out her retirement in the place where she was born. Not an inch of this beauty, not an ounce of the silence that reigns around her home that she does not enjoy. “The silence here is deafening, it forces us to stop, to listen to it, it imposes.” Lola has the sovereign bearing of the landscape that she has made her home. “But the silence is no longer the same as that of my childhood, which was punctuated by the joyful cries of children. The village has changed dramatically.” Today, robins have replaced the children.
It is little known that the cod empire dominated by the Robin in Gaspésie and New Brunswick—with Paspébiac in Chaleur Bay as its center—spread to the North Shore and, in particular, to Magpie, which became a small cod fishing capital. The Robin Company, whose owners came from the island of Jersey, controlled the fishermen’s existence through a credit system by which they were paid in kind—equipment, provisions, salt—which made them dependent and indebted. “It was a vicious and permanent circle, a form of slavery,” the late Gaspé historian Jules Bélanger described to me. “Exploiters,” Lola says simply.
“Magpie has always been a village a little apart,” she relates, inhabited by people with strong characters, made of hard wood. Abbot Victor Huard reports in his travel journal, Labrador and Anticostipublished in 1897, that those then called the Paspébiacs “have blood at a very high temperature.” Lola adds: “Magpie was distinguished by the often imposing stature of its residents, by their loud talk and their brains close to the skullcap.” I look at my interlocutor with big, questioning eyes. The brain near the skullcap? “They got on edge quickly!” I laugh.
A kind of rebirth
It tells a hilarious scene where, in 1895, Magpie, which at the time had 248 residents — to which were added 250 seasonal fishermen from the south of the Gaspé — received a grand visit from Mgr Michel-Thomas Labrecque, on a pastoral tour of the North Shore. The village is dressed in its finest finery, decorated everywhere. Men, women and children come down to the shore to welcome His Highness. Gunshots ring out—it was the custom—when the long-awaited prelate arrives in his boat. “On the shore, everyone was on the brush,” Lola guffaws. New bursts of laughter.
The fact remains that “Magpie’s story is a painful one,” she continues. It was a poor and isolated village, almost in serfdom, where life was hard. It remained for a long time without electricity, without television, without a road to connect it to the rest of Quebec, affected by the pain of having lost its splendor as the fishing capital of the North Shore. “The small dam on our Magpie River, built in 1961, lit up the surrounding villages, but not ours,” laments Lola. “We always felt abandoned.”
But in recent years, Magpie has experienced a kind of renaissance, “even a certain craze,” says Lola, with the arrival of those she calls the Nordic snowbirdswho buy houses, renovate them and breathe new life into the village. “They come here to spend the mild season, they love the place for its silence and calm.”
If the post office, the school, the general store have disappeared one after the other in the silence of History, the church, built in 1892, remains, not yet taken away. Lola, now a municipal councilor, and Gabriel, an expedition guide for Noryak Aventures, praising his corner of the country on all platforms, want to save it. Together with the municipality, they obtained a grant from Quebec to repair it and restore its luster. To turn it into a community hall where everyone could meet, which would host shows, events, and movies.
I enter while outside, daylight is falling. The silence is poignant like the smell of damp that permeates its walls. Here, it is not the dampness of the stone, as in the old countries, but the dampness of the wood. The statue of the Virgin is next to a microphone stand. A cleaning liquid is next to the holy water font. A small organ was donated by a lady from Havre-Saint-Pierre. A rood screen with a wooden and wrought iron balustrade overlooks the nave. I spend a long time looking at the sea through one of the long ogive windows, facing south. It enters in muffled sounds, eternal like time.
I close the door of the small temple offered to the immensity. Outside, two trash cans, split wood, a guardrail where a little boy of about ten years old is sitting, waiting for a friend, his eyes in the distance.
– What’s your name ?
— Noah.
—What are you dreaming about, sitting there, Noah? Of going around the world?
— I’ve done it before. We’ve been to Indonesia, the Czech Republic, Patagonia and we’ve sailed around Newfoundland.
I must look stunned.
— Hello! he said to me.
— Hello! I say.
When I look back one last time at the village, the half-moon perched up there, the bare bulb above the church gate and the lights on the houses make little lights in the evening.
Much has changed in Magpie and will change again. Except the rolling waves and the sky consumed by silence.