Let me take one last look at summer, before I plunge into the maze of ripped open trash cans and orange cones of Montreal. Let me cling to the sublime for a moment, like dune hay clings to the Magdalen Islands, holding them in place for millennia.
Don’t look for the end of the world anymore, it’s here, in the middle of the estuary. And the end of the world is there too. As a child, Clermont Poirier played in the Havre de l’île du Havre Aubert, one of the most beautiful in the archipelago. The little Magdalen Islanders built rafts there, dug up lobsters under the rocks to cook them “in a canisse”. In the past, he says, you could reach Entry Island by car, on the frozen ocean from the Bout du Banc, the Sandy Hook dune, this immense sand jetty that protects, like a mother’s arm, the gravel of Le Havre, its café and its marina.
Today, Clermont Poirier takes advantage of the low tide to tow tourists to the very end of Sandy Hook. Like all Magdalen Islanders, he sees the islands crumbling, year after year, under the impact of the warming of the ocean. He drives his trailer at low tide, because otherwise, his wheels would damage the precious marram grass, which holds the dune in place, and therefore also the Havre that it preserves. Not everyone is as delicate. Every day, Clermont Poirier sees the tracks of SUVs and four-wheelers that ruin the dunes, and make furrows that will soon be conquered by the sea. And in June, the group Attention FragÎles mobilized citizens to plant 3,000 marram grass cuttings to hold the dunes in place.
The Magdalen Islands archipelago is, for me, one of the most beautiful places in the world. I set foot there for the first time at the age of 17, with the wind in my hair and pockets, blessed to have found islanders to shelter my candid rebellion, and thus devoting them eternal gratitude. From the top of the bald hills of the Demoiselles, you can contemplate the archipelago as if you were holding it in your hand, with its large threatened beaches that connect the islands together. Every year, the ocean, no longer calmed by the cold, tears away large sections of this reddish sandstone so typical of the landscape. At the foot of the hills, a road ends abruptly, plunging into the void. On the beach below, remains of cement blocks and pipes have washed up.
“We have to move the trail almost every year,” says Fabienne Michot, who is on the board of directors of the Société de conservation des Îles-de-la-Madeleine.
Having lived on the Islands for about ten years, painters Fabienne Michot and Doris Brasset sketch portraits of avian fauna. There is the rare piping plover, which only nests in this part of Quebec and of which there are about twenty pairs left on the islands, or the horned grebe, another endangered species, which is found at the other end of the archipelago, on Pointe-de-l’Est, near Grande-Entrée. Recently, they added protection to their windows, in case a future hurricane were to hit, after the surges of Dorian and of Fiona. And for the first time in his life, their Magdalen Islands neighbour, who has lived there his whole life, was unable to go ice fishing in the pond opposite, which was not frozen this year.
This summer, a group of researchers launched theSolastalgic Atlas of the Magdalen Islandswhich revolves around the notion of vanished landscapes and their cultural impact. In “solastalgic” there is sunshine and nostalgia. The term was coined by the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht. It refers to the feeling of distress and anguish felt by some individuals in the face of environmental changes.
Gabrielle Leblanc, now the general director of the Musée de la mer in Havre-Aubert, grew up an island away, in L’Étang-du-Nord. “The territory of my childhood, the place where I learned to swim, where we had our first boyfriends, it has disappeared. From one year to the next, it’s scary. There are big chunks of cliff that have taken off, it’s pretty catastrophic, I would say. I knew very high dunes, it was much more provided, furnished, with beautiful vegetation.”
To save these beloved islands that have been home to generations and generations of Magdalen Islanders, the Magdalen Islands city hall is proposing the creation of a regional park that would protect public spaces across the entire archipelago. The project has been in the works since at least 2014. But “a minority” of the 12,000 residents of the Islands are vigorously opposed to it. Like so many of us, they fear that the regulations will encroach too much on their freedom. In the meantime, come rain or shine, the wind carries away the memories of the Magdalen Islanders, which should be recorded in a big book before they disappear forever.