An optical illusion makes my first sighting of Quebec’s Magdalen Islands, through a blur of blades, ethereal. The sky is the same shade of silvery blue as the utterly calm sea, so that Île Brion, an uninhabited island first charted by French explorer Jacques Cartier in 1534, appears to float in the atmosphere like a Shangri-La levitated from the earth’s surface. The impression fades as the twin-propeller plane banks toward a runway on the central landmass of the archipelago, which consists of a dozen islands in the middle of the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. Green meadows meticulously outlined in white sand conjure up an Ireland unmoored: emerald isles that somehow seem to have drifted to the other side of the Atlantic.
The plane touches down on the island of Havre aux Maisons, which is linked to Cap aux Meules, the island where the big car ferries dock, by the archipelago’s only highway. The following day, I drive my rental car to the island of Grande Entrée, where the pavement of Route 199 runs out in the parking lot of a small harbour. A couple dozen fishing boats bob behind concrete breakwaters. From the passenger seat, Catherine Leblanc-Jomphe, my guide for the day, tells me to pull over next to an abandoned lobster-processing plant.
