The Sea Is Slowly Consuming Quebec’s Magdalen Islands | Travel

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 St. 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 harbor. A couple of 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.

Today is a blue-sky idyll, with light winds from the southwest urging the warm saltwater breakers onto the shore. But the waters of the Gulf rarely remain calm for long. Almost three years ago, the Category 5 hurricane Dorian devastated the Bahamas with some of the strongest winds ever to make landfall in the Atlantic. By the time it tracked north to the Magdalens, Dorian was downgraded to a post-tropical cyclone, but winds gusting up to 120 kilometers per hour raised waves as high as five-story office buildings that tore apart summer cottages, collapsed coastal roads, and left sailboats heaped on the shoreface like plastic toys in a drained bathtub. Two weeks before my latest visit, the remains of another hurricane, Category 4 Ida, inundated the islands with 100 millimeters of rain, enough to cause sewers to overflow and temporarily turn the stretch of highway that runs through the community of Cap-aux-Meules, the commercial and administrative heart of the Magdalens,…