This summer, The duty crosses the waters of the St. Lawrence River, this giant “almost ocean, almost Atlantic” that Charlebois sings, and its surroundings in order to feed a series. Today: Mario Mercier, ex-lighthouse keeper, tells us about his life as a sentinel on the river.
At 17, he was already part of an endangered species on the St. Lawrence. A kind of beluga or porpoise in peril, canary in the mine of a time almost gone by.
He had neither a pipe, nor a beard, nor the profile of an old sea wolf when, as a CEGEP student, Mario Mercier was offered a job as a lighthouse keeper as a summer job, with only a few days off. prior notice.
Today, the retired professor is one of the few living “keepers of light” who have watched over the uncertain waters of an ocean-like river. If the lighthouses have gone out, the memories of these sentinels of another era have survived the wave that engulfed their refuges in the open sea.
Alone in the middle of the waves
One fine day in 1978, Mario was assigned to assist a watchman on Île Rouge, a rocky islet planted in the middle of the river 13 km off Baie-Sainte-Catherine. A capricious rock, often imprisoned in a thick fog and which has on its dashboard more than 160 shipwrecks.
“I had never been further than Baie-Saint-Paul and I found myself on the bus for Rivière-du-Loup, where a helicopter came to drop me off on the island for two weeks. »
His first summer, the youngster leaves with a backpack stuffed with enough slices of bacon and bread to last two weeks at large. “We had to provide the food and calculate everything, because there was nothing there. We had to make no mistake! he says.
With the keeper, he shares the night shifts, polishes the lighthouse equipment and the buildings like new. He mows the lawn of this rocky skiff without drinking water, the size of 10 soccer fields.
“We were lost in the middle of nowhere. When the hovercraft passed to supply us with drinking water, it was a day of celebration! »
On Île Rouge, before the era of cell phones, a single 10-minute telephone contact every two weeks was authorized, made using the VHS radio relay of the Quebec Coast Guard. “We knew everyone was listening on the line! With our blondes, it was very sober. When the taste of a good chat tormented him in the middle of the night shift, Mario tuned in to shortwave CB, hoping to catch a few lonely truckers on Highway 20.
“When I told them where I was, they went crazy! “Huh, are you in the middle of the river?!!” We also discussed between guards, each on our islands. I even missed my sister’s wedding because it was too expensive to bring the helicopter or the hovercraft. »
Nose in the wind and feather in the hat, it was the good life, he says. “One morning on Île Rouge, I woke up to two flaming naked women sunbathing on the rocks. I wondered if I was dreaming. They were the lighthouse keeper’s friends, who had landed in a pleasure boat. »
But in winter, paradise turned into an icy prison. At the start of the 1980s, Mario Mercier remembers having landed on this rock engulfed under the ice, battered by the wind and the waves by minus 30°C. “The nails were bursting into the walls it was so cold. We prayed that the generators would hold up. We went up to the lighthouse twice a day to defrost the skylight windows with a brush dipped in antifreeze. »
Life at the lighthouse, Mario recalls, was also about living with the famous “mist criers”, those overpowering sound signals that bellow and beat time in foggy weather.
“This noise is 100 times louder than what we hear offshore. We calculated our exits to avoid being next to the screamer when it went off every 50 seconds. Busy with tasks, it happened to me to forget it. I almost had a heart attack. »
For some colleagues, he recalls, the vagaries of the weather sometimes made hermit life more difficult. He remembers in particular a compulsive smoker, who came to the end of his supply of cigarettes. Pinned to the ground by a haze to cut with a knife, the helicopter could not land until two days after the scheduled date. “He smoked tea, herbs, he tried everything. When the helicopter was finally able to land, it sped towards the pilot, Mario said. He got in my place and I just stood there. He was on the verge of a nervous breakdown! »
Spinning top “
Among the most vivid memories of his short life as a lighthouse keeper are his stays in the famous “Toupie”. This mythical lighthouse, screwed on a funnel-shaped concrete base on the Haut-fond Prince, is 7 km from Tadoussac. On a cylinder 60 feet in diameter resembling a giant buoy rises the red and white striped lighthouse, visible 18 nautical miles away.
“On this, you are literally above the water. When the helicopter lands, it’s so narrow that the tail of the aircraft protrudes into the void. Several guards were terrified to go there, they were too claustrophobic. But for me, in the summer, it was magical to see belugas and whales circling around all day,” remembers Mario Mercier.
For days, he painted the lighthouse and its building, on scaffolding hanging from the walls above the void. From the “Toupie”, he even visited the entrails, by a staircase plunging towards the base in the shape of an anvil, which is used to break the ice in winter. In the belly of the beast are housed the fresh water and oil tanks. “Through a hatch, we descended even lower to access the only exit door located just above the water line at high tide. You could hear the waves crashing against the concrete walls. »
It was this door that gave way on December 24, 1964 under the blow of an illustrious storm whose waves invaded the engine room, shattered the windows, and flooded the guards’ quarters, refugees in extremis at the top of the lighthouse while waiting for help.
Stories of guardians in distress, he has heard myriads, told by his companions of a few summers. But also fabulous stories. “People think they were horrible lives, but the goalkeepers I knew were very happy people,” he said.
Also engraved in his memory are the idyllic days spent at the Île Corossol lighthouse, 12 km off the coast of Sept-Îles, named in memory of the French ship that sank there in 1693, carrying Canada’s first cartographer and a whole of the crew.
“When I arrived, the caretaker, Mr. Gallienne, said to me: ‘Come, we’ll go get some supper!’ We left in a rowboat to jig the cod. It was wonderful. Everyone in the area knew the keeper and his family, who had been there for generations. One day, a boat even made a detour to offer us five gallons of shrimp! It was a feast. »
“With the old timers, we had access to the stories of several generations. It fascinated me,” he says.
The end of an era
Five years ago, Mario Mercier returned to Île Corossol with his companion — the same as during his first stay on Île Rouge at 17 — proud to finally be able to show his beauty the lighthouse and what paradise, in which no one believed. “It was just as beautiful, just as fabulous, but so sad to see all these abandoned buildings. It brought me to tears. Imagine for families. It is the story of several generations that has flown away. »
In the early 1980s, the wardens sensed the worst of storms coming, he said. The one that was going to take them all. “Headlight automation was on. The guards hated the “little box” that relayed all the data to Quebec. They knew the end was coming for them,” he says, looking at the indelible memories of those happy days, immortalized in a thick photo album.
“When I was talking about my work, I had to show these photos, otherwise people wouldn’t believe me! he explains.
Even the “Toupie” lighthouse, now left to the elements and abandoned, will soon be nothing more than a rusty bad memory. But not for the former lighthouse keeper who will always hold in his precious album proof of this incredible page of history torn from time.