My recent viewing of John Carpenter's film The Fog highlighted how the Islands influenced my love of mystery and the uncanny. In it, a small coastal community is cut off by a fog filled with threatening ghosts. One of the characters, played by Adrienne Barbeau, is a radio host whose studio is inside the local lighthouse, and whose voice announces the progress of the fog as unsettling events unfold.
This role of radio in people's daily lives naturally reminds me of island life. On stormy, snowy days or windy days, everyone turns on the radio to learn more. It is our point of reference, our bridge to the rest of the community. The omnipresent fog in The Fog also reminds me of the Islands. I have already said how much Madelinot fog inspires me: there is something hypnotic about watching people appear and disappear during a morning walk.
Ghost stories invariably bring me back to our nature as storytellers. The archipelago has the particularity of sometimes giving the impression of stepping out of time, of leaving the ordinary world to brush against the fantastic. After all, Madelinots are fond of stories of all kinds: it shows in our love of storytelling as well as in our literature. Writer Jean Lemieux, for example, often plays with the proximity of people and the insular atmosphere in his crime novels. The distance from the mainland forms a perfect climate for a closed-door intrigue, where suspects and victims are dangerously familiar.
As autumn settles in, I also think of those evenings when, as teenagers, my friends and I would gather in the darkness of someone's car to drive around aimlessly. At nightfall, stories would inevitably emerge of strange lights flashing at the windows of abandoned houses, tables that moved, mysterious knocks on doors, or apparitions in mirrors. There was something delicious about those stories that gave us chills, especially because they involved people and places we knew. Proximity, once again, created an aura of mystery around us.
Living on the Islands induces a unique relationship with the environment. Because the horizon is vast, because nature is both beneficent and threatening (we all carry at least one story of tragedy linked to the forces of the sea, wind, or snow), we maintain with it a relationship of intrigue and respect. The ghosts, we often carry them in our hearts and in our memory.
Carpenter's film opens with a group of children around a campfire, listening to an old sailor tell the legend of a shipwreck that occurred a hundred years earlier on their shores. I hope that like them, we will keep this attention to stories of the past, to those carriers who, for one night, light a glow of mystery deep within us.
